Edited by Moe Meyer - Get a Free Blog

THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 95
what has largely remained uncritiqued in this discussion is the bringing to bear
of psychoanalytic theory upon lesbian and gay subcultures. Given the historically
contentious relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the material lives of
lesbians and gay men, the current acquiescence to the model of “camp-asmasquerade”
is surprising.
The dilemma inherent in the discussion of Camp in this particular
psychoanalytic context is its debt to the specific sexual symbolic posited by
psychoanalysis. Feminist masquerade and mimicry theory share with “orthodox”
psychoanalytic inquiry the reduction of same-sex eroticism to an order delimited
by structures pertaining to heterosexual desire. 6 The common argument follows
from the presumption that all desire organizes itself around a single signifier that
psychoanalytic theory identifies as the phallus. The homology drawn between
Joan Riviere’s 1929 theory about womanly masquerade, as read through the
Lacanian theory of the phallus, combined with the material practice of latetwentieth-century
gay male drag (and occasionally lesbian butch-femme
performance), springs from feminist critics’ perception of gay men and
(heterosexual) women’s similar stakes against the heterosexual male hegemony. 7
Unfortunately, defining Camp as a type of ironic gender play through notions
about mimicry and masquerade, and aligning its performance with a political
critique of phallocentric ideology, often displaces the specificity of the queer
subject, for this feminist operation requires the queer to desire phallocentrically.
In contrast, radical poststructuralists Guy Hocquenghem and Luce Irigaray
have reconfigured the symbolic order to account for other sites of desire and
other signifiers. 8 Hocquenghem’s theorization of the anus and Irigaray’s
theorization of the plurality of women’s (both lesbian and heterosexual
women’s) “lips” demonstrate an alternative order for the symbolic. Their ideas
regarding non-heterosexual-specific structures of desire complicate the Freudian-
Lacanian paradigm of desire and sexual difference that is restricted to concerns
about “being” or “having” the phallus. 9 However, with few exceptions, the
contemporary psychoanalytic critique of Camp generally ignores these
alternative theories and overlooks the possibility that the development of a theory
of the phallus might retard a theorization of a lesbian and gay subcultural
practice. 10 Indeed, the continuing perception of homosexuality itself as a variant
or arrest in a normalizing system of heterosexual development displays an
amazing persistence of (mis)vision.
In order to constitute a sense of Camp from the perspective of the queer
subject, the historical construction of Camp as ironic masquerade needs to be
reconfigured, and the specific conditions of homosexual subjectivity need to be
addressed. For that purpose, I envision Camp as the aftermath of the discursive
experience of the shattering of representation that occurs when the queer subject
encounters his or her contradiction to the dominant order, that is, when the queer
discerns the impossibility of representing his or her desire in a discourse
predicated upon compulsory reproductive heterosexuality, the enunciative ties of
dominant-order discourse collapse, and the queer is conditionally hurled out of