Queer and Camp
March 26th, 2008 by KathyWe didn’t spend much time discussing camp in class but I think its important to discuss that initially the word often refered to, and still refers to homosexual behavior. The word was certainly used in the 1920s to refer to a certain type of effiminate behavior from men. Sontag discusses this in her article, stating how gay men tend to be the biggest supporters and performers of camp.
So I want to know how much the word camp has moved beyond its association with gay men? The Wikipedia article on Mika uses his “campy” stage performanc as evidence that he is gay. My roomate says that camp and homosexuality are completely intertwined, and I think that the media definately associates the two. So to what extent should the gay connotations of camp impact its place in fandom? Can any discussion of camp occur without discussing the stereotypical “gay” aspect of it?
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I think in the public mind right now camp doesn’t seem to be only related to homosexuality. I would say it tends to be applied to very “stylistic” or “flamboyant” (using the term in the non-queer way) works. Regardless, I think an empirical argument here is most productive since we are talking about meaning of words. Go ask your friends to list some “camp” art and see what they suggest.
To say that this flamboyant style must relate to homosexuality is one of two things: (a) somehow essentialist or Freudian, by arguing that even when not explicit, or not intended by the user of the word “camp”, he “really” means to relate it to homosexuality, or (b) prejudicial by assuming all homosexuals are like this or all flamboyant acting is because one is homosexual.
I was not in any way trying to imply that all gay men are camp or vice versa. I’m sorry if it seemed like I was. I was trying to see how much people associate the two words, and whether it affects how communities form around camp. And every definition of camp I have seen refers to homosexuality, including the one in class yesterday. The two terms clearly have some link regardless of whether we think they should or not.
I would agree with Ben that camp and queer (or gay men) are not necessarily associated in all cases. A number of texts have been described as campy either without an explicitly or implicitly queer context or separate from it. One example I know of is the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer film (which Joss Whedon had little creative control over), which many have described as campy. While there were some vaguely homoerotic moments in the film, much of the discussion of camp had to do with the performanc of Kristy Swanson. I believe the series was also described as camp at times, though it did not shy away from addressing some queer issues in later seasons.
I agree– it definitely seems to me that homosexuality and camp aesthetic are related, and I don’t think Kathy was making an essentialist argument. But, more on that note:
It’s not a huge deal, and not super relevant to the ongoing conversation, so I didn’t bring it up in class. But I notice that in talking about this we generally reproduced the terms of Sontag’s article and said “homosexuality” or “homosexuals” where what we meant was something more specific: as Kathy acknowledges in the comment above me, we’re talking about “gay men”, not lesbians.
I think that a camp aesthetic is often visible these days in queer performance across the gender spectrum– I can’t imagine a drag king show not fueled by camp, e.g. But Sontag was writing before the advent of queer theory: she used the word “homosexual” because the concept of queer wasn’t available to her, I think. And the concept of pan-gender queerness was probably not available to her, either– my sketchy sense of queer history tells me that divisions between lesbians and gay men were more strongly felt then than now, and bisexual/trans/etc identity much less elaborated. For another class I’ve been reading some lesbian separatist writings [<3] from the ’70s; let me tell you, a lot of lesbians thought the camp aesthetic was horribly degrading.
Anyway, on behalf of those very very sincere women, I feel the need to point out that we’ve been saying “homosexuals” to mean “gay men”, and that kind of elision of women is problematic. (edit: I had a smiley face here so it could be clear I felt friendly, or whatever. but WordPress replaced it with an ugly graphic, so forget that, I’ll seem stern.)
Another question, regarding “produced” camp (which, as Sontag brings up, may or may not be truly camp)–What evidence of camp’s gay male history and/or community are visible in produced camp texts (or at least, texts that are appealing to the camp aesthetic, if not camp themselves)?
DISCLAIMER: I don’t know many “produced” camp texts (ie, whatever movie that Christopher Walken still is from), so maybe this question is off base, but I’m curious to know if this is an issue. Have producers upheld the historically gay male aspect of camp culture, or, in their attempt to draw an audience to “produced” camp, have they left out this “transgressive” element?
I’m honestly not sure. It seems to be part of the queer cultural narrative, campiness that is. But at the same time, it seems to have evolved beyond its roots. I certainly have heard camp in a queer context, but at the same time, I’ve heard it in regards to something mostly straight (ie: Star Trek or Batman the TV show)
I’ve heard it in regards to something mostly straight (ie: Star Trek or Batman the TV show)
but, pupkin, where are your slash x-ray goggles? my (non-fan) roommate said, trying to explain slash to someone else: “I never really understood the point, and then I actually watched a couple episodes of the original Star Trek. That was some of the CAMPIEST SHIT I’ve ever SEEN. The two guys were eyeing each other constantly.”
in her framework, the campy part that came from low production values and silly plots and the campy part that came from its homoerotic subtext were logically equated. maybe part of the campy aesthetic is being able to read queer (or otherwise subversive) content into ostensibly straight texts.
Ah! Crap! I knew I was forgetting something! *a snap of goggles getting put on* hehe, oh homo erotic relationships ^_^
From what I understand of camp, it seems that the indiscriminate mingling of once-disjoint and contradictory symbols and themes constitutes new meanings in their reapplication. As such, camp may act as a devise whose consequences strip these symbols of their accepted denotations and connotations.
Having said that, I do agree that camp is invariably associated with gay male culture. But, while I tend to look questionably towards any blanket assumption, I think that this relationship has been a productive one, as many camp texts have appropriated the archetype of the effeminate man and presented him as a figure to be accepted and appreciated.
Also, like David said, the transformative capacities of camp do not ONLY apply to gay male culture. For example, director Chris Cunningham’s music video for Aphex Twin, “Windowlicker,” is very campy in its shameless and crude collage of prevalent symbols in hip-hop and rap. However, the result is an exemplar of short filmmaking entirely disjunct of its origins.
The Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P3Wc-37pC4
I didn’t mean to imply that the original post was homophobic. I was talking about people who equate flamboyance only with homosexuality.
I definitely agree that camp is related to homosexuality and in most cases is used with this intention.
I think today many people collapse the distinction between camp and cult, calling cult objects like Night of the Living Dead camp, without referring to anything homosexual.
I think it’s also important to note that Sontag doesn’t actually explicitly connect camp with queerness/homosexuality until very near the end of the article, beginning with note #50 (out of 57 total notes, that’s pretty far back). Even during her discussion of the queer community’s connection to camp, she undercuts that link by asserting that “if homosexuals hadn’t more or less invented Camp, someone else would”.
As for a non-Sontag source of a definition for “camp”, OED defines it as “Ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to or characteristic of homosexuals”. The queer reference is there, although appearing as an almost secondary definition.
I don’t mean to say that camp isn’t related to homosexuality. Just wanted to point out that the queer aspect seems to be taking a backseat role in some academic definitions and understandings of “camp” (or, at least, in those two sources). I guess what I’m wondering now is whether this is a deliberate distancing on the part of academics or a reflection of the evolving popular usage of camp expanding to include the “cheesy” along with the flamboyant? Or am I reading too much into this (a valid possibility, I’m not going to lie…)?
I don’t think that the homosexual aspect of camp plays a secondary role in any way, given that “ostentatious exaggerated, affected, theatrical and effeminate” are all VERY pervasive stereotypes of gay men. The OED definition includes, “pertaining to or characteristic of homosexuals”, so while a camp text may not be explicitly queer, camp and homosexuality are inextricably linked.
As Illy notes, Sontag doesn’t talk very much about the gay aspect of this genre. But when we look at the OED definition and the contributors to this post’s understanding of camp, the author seems to be overlooking a major part of the topic she’s writing about. This may reflect a fear of creating an academic backlash (just think Swarthmore) or a desire to move past the public equation of camp with homosexuality, but Sontag erroneously downplays this connection.
I’d like to revise what I asked today. Our conversation was focusing specifically on the use of the term “camp” or “campy” to describe ultra-femme behavior in males. I asked a question about campy women, but in retrospect, that’s not really the point I meant to bring up.
While I think Kathy brings up an interesting point that media and society views the term “camp” as code for “homosexual,” I think camp is a performance of an extreme. It is not limited to men behaving in “non-masculine” ways. As Diana brought up with “The Forbidden Zone” and Alex with the “Showgirls” character, camp is just an extreme.
With that said, I would like to continue in the vein of Brandon’s comment. I think the performance of race is camp as well. I don’t mean our everyday performances, but performance onstage and on screen. I think a good example is “Bamboozled,” a Spike Lee joint in which a black man working for a television company named Pierre Delacroix has his proposals for TV shows involving intelligent black characters routinely rejected. He decides to propose a minstrel show, thinking that he will be fired for something so outdated and crass. The company loves the show and it becomes a huge success. In the movie, there’s also a revolutionary hip-hop group called the Mau-Maus. For a better synopsis from our friends at Wikipedia, go here. Here are three clips: one of the minstrel show, one of the Mau-Maus, and one of a fake commercial of a white man “acting black.” Now whether or not the movie itself is campy is a discussion I’m not going to try to take a side on. However, what I DO think is campy is that fact that the entire movie is focused on the extreme performance of race: the “white-acting” Pierre Delacroix who is only successful when he “acts black” to the extreme, the minstrel characters, the Mau-Maus, who try so hard not to fit in with white categories, and a white TV exec who thinks he has the right to “act black” (in very stereotypical terms, e.g. using the word n*gger) because he’s married to a black woman. There is definitely a camp element to the ways in which these performances are done to the extreme, but the movie itself is self-aware and critical, so perhaps is not a camp object in itself.
I think these are great points!
I want to bring up a point that is tangentially related to Kathy’s point. I disagree with Sontag’s point that “it goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized–or at least apolitical.”
This disavows a lot of the political possibilities of transgression. Perhaps some “camp objects” are in themselves not political (in the way of not being aware that they’re Camp, or if they are one of the things Sontag lists as Camp, like Tiffany lamps), but camp objects, through use and performance, become camp. For example, voguing, something that used to be very important in the (predominantly) black and Latino/a drag community could definitely be considered camp in the way that it is “artifice and exaggeration,” (276) “love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things-being-what-they-are not,” (279) “the androgyne” and “going against the grain of one’s sex,” (279) “Being-as-Playing-a-role,” (280), etc. Here is a clip from “Paris is Burning” (a documentary about vogue), and you may have also seen Benny Ninja from the House of Ninja (a very famous house of vogue) co-opted on America’s Next Top Model (skip forward to 3:30). You probably have also seen Madonna’s co-opting of vogue-ing in her famous hit entitled (surprise, surprise) “Vogue.” (clip 1 and 2)
As Judith Butler points out that drag is an incredibly valuable way to transgress gender boundaries and bring into question the notion of fixed gender, which is very political:
“This perpetual displacement [of gender identities through gender parody] constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic rexontextualization…In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of construction.” (Butler via Jackson and Scott 2002, 50—sorry about the reader reference… I don’t have a copy of Gender Trouble handy)
The primary politics behind it are identity politics, however there are implications of institutionalized politics as well (laws about gendered bodies, etc.). These gender transgressions contradict hegemonic power structures formally and informally instituted in society. Also, vogue-ing is also political in that it is a subculture of oppressed peoples (race, class and sexuality-wise) that perform in a camp way. How is Camp not political?
On another note of camp and politics, it seems that offensive things are retroactively (or maybe at the time) considered camp. In the young Asian American community, it has become trendy to take things that are extremely offensive to Asians but appreciate them in the same ways that Sontag says that Camp should be appreciated. My queer male Asian friends joke about being exotic lotuses and use the extremeness of race in a very Campy way. Therefore, Camp, through its vulgarity and offensiveness, has many possibilities for political use.
I am wodering whether or not Sontag would agree with the sentiments you have brought up. I certainly agree that the idea of parody is most certainly political and that the performance of drag is, and is at the same time campy. However, I do think that drag (which Butler herself acknowledges to be troublesome) is not a perfect form of transgression. It does seem to me that when is considered campy it becomes its most political because it becomes easier to perceive it as gender performance. I am not sure when drag becomes something more, as is presented in Paris is Burning, how it is to be interpreted. It is certainly political, but is it still camp? I haven’t seen the whole film, so I may be adding my own meaning.