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152 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
wealth, he deconstructed “high” culture and “popular” culture categories with the
same kind of vigor that the Rockefellers invested in upholding them. The place
where violinist Paderewski played classical music is where Liberace was
timekeeper for professional wrestling. The Liberace Museum where he had his
possessions enshrined, catalogued, and displayed was surely parodic of art
exhibitions that, in the words of Timothy W.Luke, “can be seen as intense
semiurgic courses of aesthetic legitimation, disciplined disinformation,
ideological containment, or mythological manipulation” (231). In its attack on
the status of taste, the Liberace Museum serves as a glaring expose of the
ideological functioning of art exhibitions in general.
The disruption of the hierarchies of “high” and “popular” culture, art and corn,
exposes taste and value as a social construction. Interrogating hierarchical
arrangements more broadly, this rupture stands metonymically in subterranean
conjunction with hierarchies of gender and sexual preference. Unmarked as
transvestites, Liberace and the Rockettes evade disclosure and maintain a kind of
overt sexual anonymity that is unthreatening to a heterosexual audience. The
subterranean constructions of sexuality through unmarked transvestism, however,
constitute a mode of resistance by which marginalized groups insinuate their own
voices, albeit in masked form, into official public discourse (Scott 136).
The hidden transcript contaminates and pollutes dominant discourse through
the contagious power of metonymic conjunction. As a gay signifying practice
Camp is by its very nature counterhegemonic; it confounds gender codes,
overrules compulsory heterosexuality, and undermines the very foundations on
which democratic capitalism was built. The signifying subject of Camp, then,
must be concealed when in the service of the corporate world lest capitalism
itself be called into question. Strangely ironic that dominant discourse should
appropriate Camp and turn it into a tamed expression of the American spirit.
Even so, the residue attached and stuck; the camp trace lingered on.
NOTES
I am indebted to Thomas Alan King, Moe Meyer, Terri Kapsalis, Avanthi
Meduri, Shannon Jackson, Gary Scott Thompson, and Henry John Drewal for
many enriching discussions on various aspects of this essay and the issues they
raise. Portions of this essay were published as “From Rocky’s Rockettes to
Liberace: The Politics of Representation in the Heart of Corporate Capitalism”
(1987).
1 Following Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, I use the term “homosexual” and “gay”
interchangeably.
2 As Thomas A.King pointed out to me, this identity is double-edged insofar as gay
men are often socialized as caregivers for their ageing mothers and, at the same time,
are viewed by society as “useless,” that is, non(re)productive, as “Mama’s boys.”