# Camp [Wikipedia Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_(style)) ( 1964 – present ) ## Description Aesthetic sensibility prizing artifice, exaggeration, and theatrical excess — a way of loving what is extravagant, "off," or a failed attempt at seriousness rather than dismissing it. Canonically defined by Susan Sontag as "disengaged, depoliticized," camp has been reworked as a strategy for relating to dominant culture from a marginal position. ## Key Tags #camp #queer-theory #gender #epicene ## Essential Works - Sontag, Susan. "Notes on 'Camp.'" *Partisan Review* 31, no. 4 (1964). - foundational essay defining camp as a sensibility of artifice, exaggeration, and "failed seriousness" - Gillespie, Margaret. "'The Triumph of the Epicene Style': Nightwood and Camp." *Miranda*, no. 12 (2016). - close reading of camp style through Djuna Barnes's *Nightwood* - [[Cruising Utopia]] - Muñoz's theory of disidentification reworks camp's relation to dominant culture as a queer world-making strategy ## Details Sontag's 1964 essay remains the reference point later theorists argue against: where Sontag reads camp as an apolitical delight in exaggerated, theatrical, or "off" style, Muñoz and others read camp-adjacent practice — drag, exaggerated performance, monster aesthetics — as a disidentificatory strategy queer and queer-of-color subjects use to survive and rework a culture not built for them. ### Key theoretical turns: > **1. The queer repossession (1976–1994).** Sontag's move of severing camp from homosexuality while conceding a "peculiar affinity" was the first target. Richard Dyer and Jack Babuscio recast camp as a survival technology — irony, theatricality, aestheticism, and humor as competencies produced by the closet and by a life spent passing. Andrew Ross's "Uses of Camp" (1988) gave the materialist version, and it's probably the most useful one for your purposes: camp as the recuperation of obsolescent cultural capital, the reanimation of a prior regime of production whose labor has become visible precisely because it failed. Moe Meyer (1994) pushed to the maximalist end — camp _is_ queer discourse, full stop, and Sontag's essay was an act of expropriation that manufactured a bogus "pop camp." Nobody quite accepts the strong Meyer thesis but everybody cites it. > > **2. Feminist camp.** Esther Newton's _Mother Camp_ (1972) actually predates most of this and supplied the incongruity/theatricality/humor triad from ethnography rather than aphorism. Pamela Robertson's _Guilty Pleasures_ (1996) broke the male-gay monopoly by tracing a female camp lineage — the woman as female female impersonator, Mae West through Madonna. Butler's drag chapter got absorbed into camp discourse whether or not she wanted it there, and her own retraction in _Bodies That Matter_ (drag is not automatically subversive) chastened the whole celebratory apparatus. > > **3. Consolidation.** Fabio Cleto's 1999 reader canonized the field and simultaneously argued that camp's definitional instability is constitutive rather than a problem to be solved — the etymological muddle (_se camper_, the 1909 dictionary entry, Wildean aestheticism) is the object, not noise around it. > > **4. The race critique.** The decisive one. Muñoz's _Disidentifications_ (1999) showed that the parody/assimilation binary underwriting camp theory couldn't hold Vaginal Davis's terrorist drag, and that camp's presumed subject had been white the entire time. Downstream: Nyong'o's afro-fabulation, Uri McMillan on Black women's avatar-work, and the recognition that Black queer vernaculars like the snap had their own theorization that camp discourse kept trying to annex. This is the turn that most reorganized the field's citational base. > > **5. The reparative turn.** Sedgwick, in _Touching Feeling_, pulls camp away from parody entirely. Parody, in her reading, belongs to paranoid knowingness; camp-recognition is reparative — the question shifts from _what is this object exposing_ to _what if someone needed this object to survive_. That reframing has done more work in the last twenty years than the Meyer position ever did. Halberstam's failure and Ngai's zany/cute/interesting sit adjacent: Ngai arguably absorbs camp's old job of accounting for minor aesthetic judgment under late capitalism, which is one reason camp scholarship thinned out around 2012. > > **6. Death and institutionalization.** The commodification argument (already latent in Ross) hardened into a "camp is dead" position once irony became the default idiom of consumer address. The 2019 Met Gala, which used Sontag's notes as its curatorial spine, was widely read as the confirming event — camp fully absorbed into the museum and the brand. The counter-argument is that camp was never outside the commodity, so nothing was lost that camp ever had. > > **7. Trans and crip revisions.** Camp's drag paradigm has been challenged for underwriting the transphobic reading of gender-as-costume, prompting work that separates camp's excess from the impersonation frame. McRuer's crip camp reads camp excess as a disability aesthetic — dependency, prosthesis, and the theatricalized non-normative body. > > **8. Deprovincialization.** The most active current strand: camp before Sontag (Polari, molly houses, Edwardian subculture) and camp outside the Anglophone frame — _loca_ traditions, bakla performance, camp under censorship regimes — which tends to dissolve camp back into a set of local tactics rather than a single sensibility. ### Key Theorists - Susan Sontag - defined camp as a "disengaged, depoliticized" sensibility of artifice and exaggeration in "Notes on 'Camp'" - [[José Esteban Muñoz]] - reworks camp's political disengagement into disidentification, a queer-of-color survival strategy - [[Judith Butler]] - gender performativity theory frequently read alongside camp's exaggerated, denaturalizing gender styles - Margaret Gillespie - close literary reading of camp style via Djuna Barnes's *Nightwood* ### Exemplary Practitioners - James Bidgood - director of *Pink Narcissus* (1971), a defining work of camp visual style - [[Jack Smith]] - *Flaming Creatures* (1963), analyzed as camp/queer performance in [[Cruising Utopia]] - [[Kenneth Anger]] - occultist, homoerotic mythological films read within camp and underground queer film traditions ### Related Concepts - [[Queer Theory]] - camp is a core stylistic and strategic mode within queer theory's account of identification and style - [[Monster Studies]] - shares an interest in gothic excess and the reclamation of "failed" or exaggerated bodies - [[Performance Art]] - camp's theatrical excess and artifice overlap with body- and performance-based practice ### Creative and Technical Practices %% none yet %% ### Associated Movements or Institutions %% none yet %% ## References ### Primary Sources Bibliography - Sontag, Susan. "Notes on 'Camp.'" *Partisan Review* 31, no. 4 (1964). #### 1. Queer Camp - Andrew Ross. "Uses of Camp" (1988) - Moe Meyer. "The Politics and Poetics of Camp" - Jack Babuscio, "Camp and the Gay Sensibility," in Dyer, ed., _Gays and Film_ (1977). (The four-part definition — irony, aestheticism, theatricality, humor.) - Philip Core, _Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth_ (1984). - Richard Dyer, "It's Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going" (1977), in _Only Entertainment_ (1992). #### 2. Feminist Camp - Pamela Robertson, _Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna_ (1996). The female female impersonator. - Esther Newton, _Mother Camp_ (1972). Ethnography, and the source of the incongruity/theatricality/humor triad everyone else formalizes. - Judith Butler, _Gender Trouble_ (1990), ch. 3, then retraction in "Gender Is Burning" in _Bodies That Matter_ (1993). - Carole-Anne Tyler, "Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag," in Fuss, ed., _Inside/Out_ (1991). #### 3. Consolidation - Fabio Cleto, ed., _Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject — A Reader_ (1999). introduction provides historical overview of the concept - David Bergman, ed., _Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality_ (1993). #### 4. Race critique - José Esteban Muñoz, _Disidentifications_ (1999), esp. the Vaginal Davis chapter. Terrorist drag breaks the parody/assimilation binary camp theory had been running on. - Marlon Riggs, "Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a SNAP! Queen" (1991), _Tongues Untied_ (1989). - Uri McMillan, _Embodied Avatars_ (2015). - Tavia Nyong'o, _Afro-Fabulations_ (2018). - E. Patrick Johnson, _Appropriating Blackness_ (2003). **5. Reparative turn** - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," in _Touching Feeling_ (2003). reassigns camp from parody to repair - Sianne Ngai, _Our Aesthetic Categories_ (2012). Zany/cute/interesting as camp's functional replacement. - Jack Halberstam, _The Queer Art of Failure_ (2011). **6. Death and institutionalization** - ★ Caryl Flinn, "The Deaths of Camp," _Camera Obscura_ (1995); also in Cleto. - Daniel Harris, _The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture_ (1997). - Andrew Bolton et al., _Camp: Notes on Fashion_ (2019). **7. Trans and crip revisions** - Robert McRuer, _Crip Theory_ (2006). Excess as disability aesthetic; dependency and prosthesis rather than impersonation. - Viviane Namaste, _Invisible Lives_ (2000), and Jay Prosser, _Second Skins_ (1998), ch. on Venus Xtravaganza. - Cáel Keegan, _Lana and Lilly Wachowski_ (2018) **8. Deprovincialization** - Martin Manalansan, _Global Divas_ (2003). Bakla and swardspeak; "camp" as a local tactic misrecognized as a universal sensibility. - Matt Houlbrook, _Queer London_ (2005), and Paul Baker, _Fabulosa!_ (2019), for camp before Sontag — Polari, the molly-house genealogy. - Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, _Translocas_ (2021). - Alan Sinfield, _The Wilde Century_ (1994), how the Wildean effeminate got retroactively made the origin. ### Secondary Sources Bibliography Basciano, Oliver. "'Addicted to Dreaming': James Bidgood, the *Pink Narcissus* Director Who Defined Camp." *The Guardian*, February 2, 2022. [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/feb/02/james-bidgood-pink-narcissus-defined-camp](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/feb/02/james-bidgood-pink-narcissus-defined-camp). Gillespie, Margaret. "'The Triumph of the Epicene Style': Nightwood and Camp." *Miranda*, no. 12 (February 2016). [https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.8634](https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.8634).