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10 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP THE QUEER AS HISTORICAL WASTE The queer’s invisibility in representation and his/her dependence upon dominant structures of signification are not so much a negative condition to be overcome, but rather, the very strength to exploit. Michel Foucault, in pointing out that power is not monolithic, but multidimensional, argues that there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real, nor is it inexorably frustrated through being the compatriot of power. It exists all the more by being in the same place as power. (142) Working from this premise in order to advance a proposal of Camp-as-critique, I want to explore how this can be deployed to reread the literature on Camp and to explain the role of queer visibility production in subversive transformations of dominant culture. Terry Lovell has pointed out that there are key areas of experience and practical activity which are suppressed, denied, and distorted within dominant ideology. While their suppression makes it difficult to give them a name, and to understand their significance, they are essential to knowledge production and to the critique of ideology. (50) The invisible queer subject is an example of such a suppressed and denied area. This suppression and denial are founded on the distortion and discreditation of the language of that subject, the language that carries an oppositional critique and the means by which the subject may be constituted. This discredited language is what I identify as Camp. Often considered frivolous, aestheticized, and apolitical, the discourse of Camp can be reclaimed through a rereading of the phenomenon as a signifying practice that not only processually constitutes the subject, but is actually the vehicle for an already existent—though obscured—cultural critique. The first move in uncovering and revealing the queer is the removal of the objectivist bias from interpretations of Camp. Sontag and her imitators are quick to define Camp as an attribute of objects. Even when Camp is applied as a description to the actions of persons, that person is described as a camp. This objectivist bias that reduces people to thinglike status is used to label Camp as extreme aestheticization and therefore apolitical. The arguments that defuse Camp, that deny it power as a cultural critique, are based, then, on a denial of agency. Yet Sontag herself cannot entirely escape from the human activity that
INTRODUCTION 11 forms the basis of Camp. After giving the reader a list of objects that are considered “Camp,” she reminds us that “the Camp eye has the power to transform experience” (107). Therefore Camp cannot be said to reside in objects, but is clearly a way of reading, of writing, and of doing that originates in the “Camp eye,” the “eye” being nothing less than the agent of Camp. By this I do not mean to deny the existence of the object of Camp. Instead, by applying a performance paradigm to the study, the visible lines of a ghostlike queer agent manifest themselves in a shift of focus away from the conventional fixation with the object surface to the process with which the object is handled. When a concept of performance is used to establish the existence of a knowledgeable social agent who signifies through Camp, then the conventional interpretation of Camp—as a tool used to facilitate the bourgeois appropriation characteristic of consumer culture—can be overturned. Andrew Ross’s extremely influential essay, “Uses of Camp” (1989), is a noteworthy example of the dehumanizing results achieved by applying an objectivist methodology to the study of Camp. 7 Ross brilliantly described the techniques and motives of appropriation that underlie the formation of Pop camp. But when we cease to define queer Camp and Pop camp as two different kinds of Camp, seeing instead two halves of a single phenomenon, then Ross’s essay is helpful in explaining the relationship of queer signifying practices to the dominant order. Because objectivist methodologies overwhelm and obscure the processual signifying practices through which the queer articulates the discourse of Camp, the queer is erased in representation at the very moment that Camp is subjected to a dominant interpretation. Pop camp emerges, then, as the product of a visually biased dominant reading of queer praxis interpreted through the object residue that remains after the queer agent has been rendered invisible. Consequently, the bourgeois subject of Pop camp must assume a queer position in order to account for these dispossessed objects and becomes, in fact, queer himself. As I will explain, Pop camp becomes the unwitting vehicle of a subversive operation that introduces queer signifying codes into dominant discourse. Ross defines the camp effect as created “when the products…of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to dominate cultural meanings, become available in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste” (139). Subjecting his definition to a theory of queer agency (entailing a focal shift away from the object) reveals a much different narrative. Remembering that Anthony Giddens has defined dominance as the power to control the construction of cultural meanings, then what Ross calls a “mode of production” is actually a mode of discursive value production, not industrial object production. Accordingly, what he calls “contemporary codes of taste” is nothing less than the dominant ideology that controls the establishment of signifying codes. When Camp is defined as a specifically queer discourse, it follows that what Ross calls the redefinition of meanings is the appropriation, through the application of unequal power, of queer discourse by the dominant
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126 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION Case, Sue
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Plate 9 Claire Moed as Sir Oliver S
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Plate 16 Liberace was Count Dracula
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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA
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The key value, however, among these
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eternal youthfulness; and the way h
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7 TAKING OUT THE TRASH Camp and the
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homosocialism 35-6, 43-4 Hutcheon,
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