Ademir Corrêa’s Cinema Queerité: Gêneros e Identidades no Documentário “Paris is Burning” is an insightful exploration of one of the most powerful and culturally charged documentaries of the late twentieth century. Corrêa’s book takes Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning as both a cinematic and social landmark, dissecting its layers of meaning to reveal how film can function as a living archive of marginalized lives. The documentary, filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, captures the dazzling yet precarious world of New York City’s ballroom scene, a world built and sustained by Black and Latino gay men, transgender women, and drag performers who found in it a stage for self-definition and survival. Corrêa’s analysis situates this film not merely as a record of a vanished era but as a complex commentary on gender, identity, and resistance.
The author begins by examining the importance of the queer balls that form the heart of the documentary. These events, which took place in Harlem and other parts of New York, served as both performance and refuge. In an America still struggling with racism, homophobia, and the AIDS crisis, the ballroom became a sanctuary for those cast out by mainstream society. Through vivid close readings of Livingston’s film, Corrêa reveals how the balls functioned as acts of resistance and as laboratories for identity experimentation. Every strut, spin, and pose was both performance and political gesture. Contestants competed in categories that mimicked or subverted mainstream ideals of beauty and power, business executives, movie stars, soldiers, and high-fashion models, thereby exposing how gender and class themselves are forms of drag.
Corrêa shows deep sensitivity to the lived experiences of the film’s subjects. Figures like Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Angie Xtravaganza, and Willi Ninja appear not as mere characters but as living theorists of queerness, performing philosophies of gender long before academia caught up. Their words, captured in Livingston’s interviews, carry a raw and reflective power that Corrêa highlights throughout his analysis. When Corey speaks about “shade” and “reading,” or when Ninja explains the elegance of voguing, Corrêa sees not only the development of a unique aesthetic vocabulary but also the articulation of survival strategies in a world designed to erase them. For him, these linguistic inventions, “realness,” “legendary,” “house,” “mother”, are proof that marginalized communities construct entire semantic universes to make meaning where mainstream culture refuses to provide it.
In exploring the structure of Livingston’s film, Corrêa pays particular attention to its interplay between spectacle and intimacy. The dazzling competitions are juxtaposed with quiet, sometimes devastating interviews that expose the fragility behind the glamour. Venus Xtravaganza’s tragic story, for instance, becomes a focal point for Corrêa’s reflection on the intersection of gender identity, class, and violence. He does not treat her merely as a victim but as a figure of courage who dared to dream of freedom and authenticity in a hostile world. Corrêa argues that her life and death embody the cruel paradox of visibility for trans women of color: to be seen is both to exist and to be endangered.
The book also situates Paris is Burning within a broader theoretical framework that includes discussions of race, performativity, and cultural appropriation. Corrêa recognizes that the film has generated debate over the ethics of representation, particularly the question of whether a white filmmaker can authentically portray Black and Latino queer life. Instead of dismissing the film for this reason, he approaches it as a text that exposes these tensions. Livingston’s outsider position, he suggests, mirrors the contradictions of the very culture she documents: a culture obsessed with the illusion of belonging, with “passing,” and with performing identities that one is denied in daily life. Corrêa uses this paradox to invite readers to question how cinema itself participates in these acts of representation and misrepresentation.
Another dimension of Corrêa’s study is his exploration of the film’s influence on contemporary queer culture. He traces how the language and gestures of the ballroom scene have moved from underground spaces to mainstream media, through artists like Madonna and later through television shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race and Pose. Yet he reminds readers that this cultural visibility often comes at a cost. The glamour that once belonged to marginalized performers has been commodified, stripped of its political charge, and marketed to audiences unaware of its origins. Corrêa calls for a renewed recognition of the pioneers who shaped this culture in times of adversity, many of whom, like Venus and Dorian, did not live to see the world they helped to create.
Throughout the book, Corrêa maintains a clear commitment to connecting the documentary’s themes to ongoing struggles for recognition and equality. He situates the Harlem balls as precursors to today’s queer activism and emphasizes their continuing relevance for understanding how communities resist erasure through art, style, and collective imagination. In his reading, drag becomes more than entertainment, it becomes a method of reimagining the world. By performing different versions of femininity, masculinity, and success, the ball participants were not merely imitating society’s ideals but rewriting them, transforming shame into beauty and exclusion into belonging.
Corrêa’s prose blends academic rigor with emotional resonance. He writes not as a distant observer but as someone moved by the courage and creativity of the people whose stories Paris is Burning preserves. His book is both an homage to those figures and a meditation on cinema’s ability to make their lives visible. He acknowledges the film’s imperfections but insists on its enduring power to inspire empathy and reflection. The author also highlights that the documentary’s inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2016 affirms its cultural and historical importance. For him, this recognition is not only a triumph of documentary art but a testament to the lives of those who dared to dance in defiance of the world’s indifference.
Cinema Queerité: Gêneros e Identidades no Documentário “Paris is Burning” ultimately serves as both analysis and celebration. It is a book that bridges theory and emotion, academia and activism, past and present. Through it, Ademir Corrêa honors a film that, more than three decades after its release, continues to speak to the dreams and struggles of queer people everywhere. His work reminds us that to watch Paris is Burning is not merely to look at history but to encounter an ongoing conversation about who we are, how we perform ourselves into being, and how cinema can hold a mirror to the beauty and pain of those who have always danced at the margins.
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