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4 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
self-reflexively constituted by the performances themselves. Whether one
subscribes to an essentialist or constructionist theory of gay and lesbian identity,
it comes down to the fact that, at some time, the actor must do something in
order to produce the social visibility by which the identity is manifested.
Postures, gestures, costume and dress, and speech acts become the elements that
constitute both the identity and the identity performance. When we shift the
study of gay and lesbian identity into a performance paradigm, then every
enactment of that identity depends, ultimately, upon extrasexual performative
gestures. Even the act of “coming out,” that is, the public proclamation of one’s
self-nomination as gay or lesbian, is constituted by an institutionalized speech
act. I suggest that queer identity emerges as self-consciousness of one’s gay and
lesbian performativity sets in.
In the sense that queer identity is performative, it is by the deployment of
specific signifying codes that social visibility is produced. Because the function
of Camp, as I will argue, is the production of queer social visibility, then the
relationship between Camp and queer identity can be posited. Thus I define
Camp as the total body of performative practices and strategies used to enact a
queer identity, with enactment defined as the production of social visibility. This
expanded definition of Camp, one based on identity performance and not solely
in some kind of unspecified cognitive identification of an ironic moment, may
come as a bit of a jolt to many readers. It means that all queer identity
performative expressions are circulated within the signifying system that is
Camp. In other words, queer identity is inseparable and indistinguishable from
its processual enactment, or Camp. The historical and material evidence
demonstrates that this was clearly the case until Sontag’s 1964 essay, “Notes On
Camp,” complicated the interpretations by detaching the signifying codes from
their queer signified.
This definition of Camp can facilitate a rereading of Sontag and the subsequent
appearance of Pop camp that emerged from her interpretation. By holding to a
definition of Camp as the total body of queer identity performance practices,
then, Sontag’s essay does not signal the availability of Camp as an un-queer
practice, nor does it signal the birth of multiple forms of Camp. Because the
process of Camp has for its purpose the production of queer social visibility, the
same performative gestures executed independently of queer self-reflexivity are
unavoidably transformed and no longer qualify as Camp. Instead, what emerges
from Sontag’s essay is the birth of the camp trace, or residual camp, a strategy of
un-queer appropriation of queer praxis whose purpose, as I will demonstrate, is
the enfusement of the un-queer with the queer aura, acting to stabilize the
ontological challenge of Camp through a dominant gesture of reincorporation.
Thus there are not different kinds of Camp. There is only one. And it is queer. It
can be engaged directly by the queer to produce social visibility in the praxis of
everyday life, or it can be manifested as the camp trace by the un-queer in order,
as I will argue, to provide queer access to the apparatus of representation.