Paris is Burning, a documentary by Jennie Livingston focuses on the lives of New York City drag queens by providing insight into their unique culture by the use of an untraditional aspect of a documentary. She breaks the fourth wall. Livingston interacts with her subjects to draw out more specific information by asking personal questions regarding aspirations and particular events, and to grasp an emotional response from her audience by publicizing the subjects’ perspectives in an effort to make her work more meaningful. By including the interviews with the members in the documentary, Livingston allows her audience to view this phenomenon from a different perspective, the perspective of the people directly involved in the struggle to be accepted as whom they see themselves as. In the series of short, casual interviews throughout the documentary, Livingston breaks the fourth wall by questioning her subjects in regard to their most private personal values and aspirations. Livingston intentionally involves herself in this engagement to increase the comfort and relations between the audience and the interviewees. In present-day society, cultural assumptions often dictate that sexuality and gender are mutually dependent categories and that one posits the other. Societal norms imply that gender is divided into men and women, and that appropriate sexual behavior is thus determined through innate biology. This notion suggests right and wrong ways of being male and female, and postulates that their interaction stems in heterosexual attraction. The play Cloud 9 and documentary Paris is Burning call into question of the notion of codependence of gender and sexuality by demonstrating a lack of coherence between identity, sexual expression, and innate biology. In this way, the works demonstrate that sexuality does not pigeonhole associated gender based on tropes of hypermasculinity or effeminacy, but instead allows both to exist on a spectrum. Furthermore, in these creative pieces, the personas identified utilize gender performance and unique expressions of their perceived identities to demonstrate that gender exists on a spectrum and is independent of both assigned sex at birth and sexuality. The implications of this extend to the ideology conceptions of what constitutes gender and its relation to inherent sexuality, suggesting that societally.

The Combahee River Collective was a Black Feminist Lesbian organization that was active between 1974 and 1980. This intersectional group was created because there was a sense that both the feminist movement or civil rights movement didn’t reflect the particular needs of Black women and lesbians. The collective joined together to develop the Combahee River Collective Statement, which was a key document in developing contemporary Black Feminism. 

My classmate Patience Ocran posted a snapshot of Michelle Obama who I look up to a lot. I believe that she’s one of the feminists which is what the reading was about for this week. I thought it was well connected with the reading. My classmate Sandra Mohammed posted a snapshot that says The Myth of Race and I thought it was the right snapshot to post as it makes sense with this week’s reading.