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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 123
suggests for De Lauretis “a more complex image of the psycho-socio-sexual
subject…which does not deny gender or sex but transcends them” (1988:164).
This is the challenge Case takes on and meets in theorizing her “dynamic duo,” as
she refers to the butchfemme couple, out of and within recent feminist theories
of the psychoanalytic notion of “womanliness as masquerade.” Case’s dynamic
duo “play on the phallic economy rather than to it” (1989: 291), foregrounding
its fictions as fiction by negotiating its “realities” between two lesbian women.
I have argued that the iconography of butch-femme culture present in
performances at WOW is not about cross-dressing (1989:156). Wearing the
gender of the “other” sex is not the point. Nor is it about drag in the sense of
simulation. No attempt is made to hide the lesbian beneath a mask of male or
female gender identity; to fool the audience, even momentarily, is not the
objective. As a dimension of erotic identity, butch-femme is about sexuality and
its myriad nuances. It is also about gender in that it appropriates gender in its
social articulation and representational construction. In butch-femme
inconography, attributes which in dominant culture are associated with strict
gender roles are not sex-class specific. Worn by lesbians, these attributes have
meanings for lesbians in a same-sex lesbian culture that do not necessarily
symbolize conformity to rules of gender behavior and the oppositional dynamics
of polarized gender roles.
The articulation of desire in the dynamics of butch-femme gender play in
lesbian performance positions this performance outside heterosexuality both as a
social institution and representational model, by realigning what Jill Dolan
describes as the “dynamics of desire” between a performance and its spectators.
Dolan writes: “When the locus of desire changes, the demonstration of sexuality
and gender roles also changes” (1987:173). Butch-femme as a signifying practice
in lesbian theatre differs from male drag performance in that it dismantles the
construction “woman” and challenges male sexuality as the universal norm. It
challenges the heterosexual contract that De Lauretis identifies as “the site in
which the social relations of gender and thus gender ideology are re-produced in
everyday life” (1987:17).
Case’s butch-femme subject position is successfully articulated outside the hom
(m)osexual frame of reference, where it could have broader play if it were not
encumbered by Camp. Positioned inside a lesbian discourse that is every bit as
artificial as Camp in its gender play of phallocratic fictions, the butch-femme
subject position, like its original referent in the butch-femme couple, is more
lethal to hegemonic discourses than Charles Ludlam’s Marguerite and Charles
Busch’s “lesbians of Sodom.”
Butch-femme gender roles played in the streets and on the stage signify,
through lesbian desire, Irigaray’s “goods that refuse to go to market” (110) and
Wittig’s lesbian subject who is not man/not woman (1981:47–50). As such,
butch-femme artifice is so much more a part of lesbian discourse than Camp
discourse that it not only resists assimilation, because it is too dangerous, but it
allows for the play of other differences as well.