Their attempt to refashion this space into the ball-room reveals the extent to which that space fails at activating resistive agency.

It is easy enough to identify the constituent factors in the reputed subversiveness of ball culture. Jim Farber's own formulation makes it quite clear that it is the demonstration of the "mutability of identity"-effected in particular through ball contestants' achievement of Realness-that provides the requisite "edge" to the culture's sociopolitical significance. According to John Howell, that demonstration inevitably raises the questions:" [W]hat is authentic in social roles? Who does our culture reward and who does it exclude, and how different are they? What is male, what is female? Can our chromosomal hard-wiring be reprogrammed?"[11]. Howell's identification of these as "bottom-line questions" implies that the mere posing of them is a radical political act; and since, according to Howell, it is "voguing" itself that thus "leads us to deep issues," ball practice emerges, in his rendering, as the clear agent of subversive critique. But, of course, however critically efficacious it may be, Realness styling itself appears as the effect of a motivated regimen undertaken by specific identifiable agents, namely, the "voguers" who, in Farber's terms, achieve "personality overhauls" by actively" construct[ing] their identities." These formulations manifest a curious conflation. By way of indicating the intentionality of their efforts to make themselves over as recognizable types-to "overhaul" their attitudes and appearances, as they indisputably do-Farber concomitantly suggests that the ball contestants enact an equally voluntaristic transformation in their very selves, figured here as their" personalities" and "identities." The positing of such an accomplishment is potentially appealing for at least two closely related reasons: (1) it imputes to denizens of the ball milieu an expanded agency whereby they seem able to alter apparently fundamental elements of social experience; and (2) it thus recuperates those same personages as active producers not only of political critique but of significant social-structural change. Thus the attractiveness of this scenario is easy to understand. After all, a (if not the) primary challenge of contemporary culture is the achievement of some degree of resistant political agency that isn't immediately undercut by any of the various infrastructural mechanisms through which it is registered and disseminated; and for such agency to be achieved by persons who are profoundly socially and politically marginalized as poor gay blacks and latino/as would be particularly heartening. Whatever the desirability of that achievement, though, it is by no means clear that it actually occurs in the drag-ball context-that, in other words, the effective subjectivity exercised by the ball queens in the overhauling of their appearances constitutes such sociopolitical agency as would be entailed in the "constructing of their identities." For this latter agency implies a capacity not only to style one's aspect but to exercise some control over the conditions of its general reception. However much they might enjoy such a capacity in the ballroom, the subjects of Paris Is Burning were definitively shown to lack it beyond the ball context when they attempted to redefine the terms of the film's success.