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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank especially Martin Worman and Thomas A. King for our many discussions of Camp that inspired this project. Special thanks to the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (CIRA), Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, for sponsoring our Camp Theory Symposium, April 1992. I thank the University of Michigan Press for permission to reprint Kate Davy’s “Fe/male Impersonation: The Discourse of Camp,” from Janelle G.Reinelt and Joseph R.Roach, eds, Critical Theory and Performance (1992). I also thank the Athletic Model Guild for the generous permission to use Robert Mizer’s “Curry and Rightmire” on the cover. As well, I thank the following for their permission to use the photographs in this collection (in order of appearance): Genyphyr Novak, Chicago; Special Collections Department, Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Illinois; National Portrait Gallery, London; Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Newberry Library, Chicago; Donna Ann McAdams, New York; John Stern, New York; Mark Avery, Milwaukee; and the Liberace Foundation for the Performing Arts, Los Angeles.
INTRODUCTION Reclaiming the discourse of Camp Moe Meyer In the last decade, Camp, or queer parody, has become an activist strategy for organizations such as ACT UP and Queer Nation, as well as a focus in utopian movements like the Radical Faeries. As practiced by these contemporary groups, Camp is both political and critical. Defying existing interpretations that continue to define Camp as apolitical, aestheticized, and frivolous, the contributors to this volume, prompted by its recently foregrounded political usages, attempt a reappraisal of the phenomenon. These writers suggest that Camp is not simply a “style” or “sensibility” as is conventionally accepted. Rather, what emerges is a suppressed and denied oppositional critique embodied in the signifying practices that processually constitute queer identities. Accordingly, the contributors to this volume operate from shared beliefs concerning the construction of Camp. These are: Camp is political; Camp is solely a queer (and/or sometimes gay and lesbian) discourse; and Camp embodies a specifically queer cultural critique. 1 Additionally, because Camp is defined as a solely queer discourse, all un-queer activities that have been previously accepted as “camp,” such as Pop culture expressions, have been redefined as examples of the appropriation of queer praxis. Because un-queer appropriations interpret Camp within the context of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality, they no longer qualify as Camp as it is defined here. In other words, the un-queer do not have access to the discourse of Camp, only to derivatives constructed through the act of appropriation. 2 The use of the word “queer” to designate what is usually referred to as “gay and lesbian” marks a subtle, ongoing, and not yet stabilized renomination. It is used by some of the writers in this volume for various reasons. “Queer” does not indicate the biological sex or gender of the subject. More importantly, the term indicates an ontological challenge to dominant labeling philosophies, especially the medicalization of the subject implied by the word “homosexual,” as well as a challenge to discrete gender categories embedded in the divided phrase “gay and lesbian.” Because Camp, as we are defining it in this volume, gains its political validity as an ontological critique, and because its reconceptualization was initiated by observations of queer activist practices, the term “queer” may be the best descriptor of this parodic operation. The reappropriation of the once derogatory term “queer,” and its contemporary use as an affirmative self-nominated identity label, is far from clear in its current
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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA
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eternal youthfulness; and the way h
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7 TAKING OUT THE TRASH Camp and the
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homosocialism 35-6, 43-4 Hutcheon,
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