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2 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
applications. Two writers who have attempted to define this term, Teresa de
Lauretis (iii-vi) and Simon Watney, both do so by juxtaposing it with and in
opposition to the labels of “gay and lesbian.” I think that this logic is inadequate
to the task of clarifying the meaning of “queer”. Watney, in particular, identifies
the emergence of the label as a generational phenomenon, one used by younger
gay men and lesbians to differentiate themselves from what appears to be the
bourgeois assimilationism rampant among some segments of the gay and lesbian
community and to signify that those who have come out in the era of AIDS are
somehow different from those who have not. The flaws in this kind of argument
should be apparent: first, it indicates that what is at stake is a critique of class,
not of sex/gender; second, it conflates middle-class with middle-age and assumes
a unified understanding of the terms gay and lesbian and a singular lifestyle on
the part of those who have reached a certain age; and third, it reveals itself as
based in the ageism that has been so detrimental within the gay community. If
the term queer is indeed based within imagined generational difference, then I
would suggest that it signifies nothing more than a potentially destructive,
divisive, and ageist maneuver that, in the end, serves to interrupt the continuity
of political struggle through an ahistoricizing turn. But once the uncritiqued
ageism of current definitions has been revealed and discarded, what remains—
the critique of class—is of definite value and can be used to formulate what
might be at stake in both the terms “queer” and “Camp.”
What I would offer as a definition of queer is one based on an alternative
model of the constitution of subjectivity and of social identity. The emergence of
the queer label as an oppositional critique of gay and lesbian middle-class
assimilationism is, perhaps, its strongest and most valid aspect. In the sense that
the queer label emerges as a class critique, then what is opposed are bourgeois
models of identity. What “queer” signals is an ontological challenge that
displaces bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous while
substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational,
discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts.
Rather than some new kind of subject constitution that emerges as the result of a
generation-specific response to the AIDS crisis, queer identity is more accurately
identified as the praxical response to the emergence of social constructionist (sex/
gender as ideologically interpellated) models of identity and its, by now overly
rehearsed, oppositional stance to essentialist (sexual orientation as innate)
models, thus historically situating queer identity in an epistemological rift that
predates the advent of AIDS.
Queerness can be seen as an oppositional stance not simply to essentialist
formations of gay and lesbian identities, but to a much wider application of the
depth model of identity which underwrites the epistemology deployed by the
bourgeoisie in their ascendency to and maintenance of dominant power. As such,
the queer label contains a critique of a more vast and comprehensive system of
class-based practices of which sex/gender identity is only a part. The history of
queer practices, as Thomas A.King charts in chapter one of this volume, is a