Edited by Moe Meyer - Get a Free Blog

96 REVAMPING THE GAY SENSIBILITY
representation. In other words, the relations of “difference” that inscribe and
produce subjects of discourse and allow for the performance of language in the
dominant order are shattered. 11 However, since expression can only occur in
representation, the “articulation” of this blissful moment sutures the queer subject
back into the enunciative ties of the dominant order. This secondary discursive
phenomenon, this reinscription of the queer subject back into enunciation, is what
I will identify as “Camp.” Later in this essay I will situate a particular example
of lesbian Camp through a discussion of a lesbian subcultural form I will call
dyke noir, but first I must provide an explanation of the queer subject, dismantle
notions of Camp as ironic, and describe in more detail the occasion which
generates Camp discourse.
LACKING PRESENCE
As my brief discussion of “camp-as-masquerade” demonstrates, and as certain
queer theorists have shown, bringing queer subcultural discourses into debates
constructed within an economy informed by heterosexual investment in sexual
difference serves to untie these discourses from their homosexual contexts by
subjecting them to an un-queer ontology that characterizes itself as inevitable and
natural. 12 Indeed, the appropriation of Camp as a theoretical strategy for the
interests of postmodern and/or feminist deconstruction follows a troublesome
critical tradition of refashioning queer subculture into dominant culture’s
discursive metaphors. 13 In exiting the closet, all too often the queer discovers
herself to be wearing the inappropriate clothes of the heterosexual. As Sue-Ellen
Case notes:
Contemporary theory seems to open the closet door to invite the queer to
come out, transformed as a new, postmodern subject, or even to invite the
straights to come into the closet, out of the roar of dominant discourse. The
danger incurred in moving gay politics into such heterosexual contexts is in
slowly discovering that the strategies and perspectives of homosexual
realities and discourse may be locked inside a homophobic “concentration
camp.”
(1989:288)
Eschewing psychoanalytic sexual formation models altogether through a
discussion about lesbian vampires, Case accounts for the lack of specificity to
the conditions of homosexual discourse by observing that, while the “apparatus
of representation…belongs to the un-queer” (1991:9), the framework of dominant
representation prohibits the presence of queer desire. Accordingly, queer desire
can only become perceptible by recognizing its proscription, since its only
representation is through transgression against the essentialized ontology of the
dominant, the un-queer. In short, the vampire-like queer casts no reflection
because the mirror of dominant representation cannot reflect the presence of