Abstract
This article examines the outtakes and supplemental footage of Paris Is Burning (dir. Jennie Livingston, US, 1990), tracking across these seconds and sound bites the various glimpses of trans Puerto Rican performer Angie Xtravaganza. Through a conceptual schema the author terms critical otiosity, a process through which to vitalize with trans Latinx liberatory possibilities the seemingly superfluous, unproductive, irrelevant, and other pilloried and/or overlooked affective comportments found in the filmic outtakes, this article mounts a rereading of Paris Is Burning against the grain of neoliberal, cissexist capitalist regimes, which valorize above all else narratives and displays of spectacle, bootstrapping, tragedy, assimilation, uplift, and premature death. Glimpses of Angie across the extra footage casually chitchatting in Spanish or lethargically dancing in pink rollers on a road trip, the author contends, durationally slow down and stall cisheteronormative temporalities, obviating from the showy and profitable trans and queer of color performance-labor crucial to the filmic gaze and capitalist drives and scrambling representational coherence and historical linearity. Retooling the means of how we understand the filmic and historical lives of trans of color and Latinx people, distinct from the cisnormative, capitalist-driven productivity of spectacle, is eminently crucial for enacting trans of color counter-histories and counter-discourses about popular films like Paris Is Burning. The nature of the outtakes and supplemental footage is precisely what instantiates their critical merit, a critical otiosity giving conceptual heft to these seconds and scenes of quotidian trans Latinx existing while imagining alternative trans of color histories and liberatory lifeworlds.
