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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