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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 115
articulating a feminist subject position vis-à-vis the dynamics of butch-femme
gender play in lesbian theatre.
When asked to explain the significance of the title of her book, Newton
writes:” ‘Mother Camp’ as an honorific implies something about the relationship
of the female impersonator to his gay audience. A female impersonator will
sometimes refer to himself as ‘mother’, as in ‘Your mother’s gonna explain all
these dirty words to you’” (xx). She then describes the drag queen as “a magical
dream figure: the fusion of mother and son” (xx). Here Newton makes a gesture
toward reception, that is, the hold and effect the drag queen has on his audience.
The preponderance of female impersonation—across representational forms and
addressed to very different spectatorial communities—suggests that in the
intersection of representation and response, there is something both magical and
compelling about a cross-dressed male.
Of the cross-dressed female’s relationship to her counterpart in popular
nineteenth-century theatre, Peter Ackroyd writes:
The male impersonator, the actress in trousers, seems… to lack depth and
resonance…[and] is never anything more than what she pretends to be: a
feminine, noble mind in a boy’s body. It is a peculiarly sentimental and
therefore harmless reversal. The female impersonator, on the other hand,
has more dramatic presence—the idea of a male mind and body underneath
a female costume evokes memories and fears to which laughter is perhaps
the best reaction.
(102)
In 1928 Cocteau wrote an essay on “a magical dream figure,” an American
acrobat named Vander Clyde who performed an enormously effective and
popular drag act in Parisian music halls under the name “Barbette.” Ostensibly
writing about the virtues of skill and concentration using Barbette as a model of
professionalism, Cocteau produced instead a brief treatise on reception vis-à-vis
female impersonation. What Cocteau finds so compelling about Barbette’s turn
is his ability to seduce the eye of the beholder into believing he is a woman when
the empirical evidence suggests otherwise. He describes how Barbette’s gown
with its tulle shoulder-straps does not conceal the absence of breasts and how his
acrobatic act demands he use his body and muscles in such a way that “he
doesn’t look very feminine” (in Crosland 224).
Cocteau invites the reader to join him in the audience and then explains that:
When Barbette comes on, he throws dust in our eyes. He throws it all at
once, so violently that he can then concentrate only on his work as an
acrobat. From then on his male movements will serve him instead of giving
him away.
(in Crosland 223)