Spectacle and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop and Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning Anonymous College

In this essay, I will be following the idea of spectacle as considered by Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), which has clearly influenced Jonathon Crary’s notion of the spectacle. That is, the postmodern idea that in the age of late capitalism the image mediates social relations, where everything is considered in terms of its sign-value (17). Both Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) and Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1981)participate in a conversation about what it means to have to navigate through the dominant discourse of the gendered body and its sign-value, as determined within a heteronormative, white, patriarchal society. The intertextuality in Carter’s TheMagic Toyshopappropriates the art and literature which presents female sexuality as imagined and determined by the male gaze to explore the restrictions on adolescent female sexuality and identity within a patriarchal structure. Similarly, In Paris is Burning, the body is used within the countercultural ball scene to transgress heteronormative definitions of gender through performativity. By drawing attention to the external accessibility of the imaginings of the gendered body, that is, its sign-value, and thus presenting it as a readable text...