Livingston’s lexical approach is both a model and cautionary tale for our own approach to the house/ball scene’s repertoire. On the one hand, Livingston respectfully frames her respondents not as mere users of vernacular but rather as creative writers and scholars of their own discourse. Paris is Burning emphasizes that speech acts like slang and personal narrative are as important as embodied performance in this subculture, especially as the film shifts from stylish lexicon to a more standard documentary narrative of lived lives in its second half.
 
On the other hand, Paris is Burning’s intertitles give the impression that the film is made by an outsider for outsider audiences. As a white and relatively affluent cis-lesbian, Livingston’s involvement inevitably extended a long history of critiques about ethnography and documentary. Although Livingston herself claimed that “the documentary was truly written by the ball people themselves” and eventually paid the main respondents, she was nonetheless (unsuccessfully) sued by a number of the cast members when the film did unexpectedly well at the box office.[2] Questions about Livingston profiting from a form of cultural appropriation were no doubt compounded by the tragic fact that most of the primary cast died of HIV-related illnesses in the years after the film’s release.
 
While film critics broadly loved the movie, feminist and queer theorists immediately responded in more ambivalent terms. Indeed, the film’s legendary status may have been sealed as much by its capture of “golden era” of the ballroom legends before cultural mainstreaming of voguing as by its status as an emblem of the symbiotic nature of queer culture and academic theory in the 1990s.[3] While Lucas Hilderbrand provides a thorough outline of critical and scholarly debates about Paris up to 2013, we touch on some key moments here as they relate to the difference between documentary film and digital archiving and exhibition.
 
In 1992 bell hooks leveled a damning black feminist critique of the film, accusing Livingston of a white imperialist gaze that in turn supported what she saw as some of the casts’ own uncritical worship of white femininity.[4] According to Hilderbrand, “Unfortunately, her polemic has largely set the terms for much of the subsequent discussion.”[5] Robert Reid-Pharr, for example, claims that Paris’s failure to adequately interrogate systems of oppression placed its valuation of black spectacle in concert with minstrel shows.[6] Among more positive assessments, white queer theorist Judith Butler seized the ball scene portrayed in Paris as another example of how gay drag inherently deconstructs the essentialist ideologies grounding gender norms.[7] Butler herself and queer theory in general would go on to be critiqued by scholars like Jay Prosser and Viviane Namaste for appropriations of trans performances as “gender performativity” while disregarding actual trans lives. [8] An academic sub-industry of assessing Paris is Burning’s stance relative to its content and form has thrived since these early critiques.
 
For a low-budget feature made by an amateur filmmaker, Paris is Burning seems to have done at once too much and not enough. The most salient analyses of the film contextualize the material conditions of Paris’s content and production. Chandan Reddy links the invention of the ball “houses” to how a combination of actual housing policy and homophobic expulsion from heteronormative family units has created queer of color poverty.[9] Phillip Brian Harper reads how both the academic flurry the film provoked and the very lawsuits against Livingston have become part of Paris is Burning’s legend. Through dialectics of privacy and publicity, ballroom and courtroom, Livingston’s agency through funding access and legal knowledge plays out against the ball children’s agency over their live performance as both subjective expression and commodity.[10]