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16 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
spirals out from the life and works of Wilde. I maintain that the collapse of
subject and object that produces a sign played out solely on the surfaces
constituted an act of serious transgression against the depth model of identity and
the reification of bourgeois dominance. I see Camp as inseparable from the
constitution of a homosexual social identity, and argue that both appeared
simultaneously as the result of Wilde’s juridico-legal inscription in his 1895
trials. Accordingly, both Camp and the homosexual social identity were the
result of the attempt to contain the transgression and threat of Wilde’s
oppositional political deployment of surfaces.
The four essays that follow deal with issues of contemporary queer Camp and
its un-queer appropriations. Drawing upon recent Queer Theory and antecedent
poststructuralist and psychoanalytic notions about subjectivity, language, desire,
and humor, Cynthia Morrill politicizes Camp as the queer subject’s affective
discursive response to the perils of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality in
her essay, “Revamping the Gay Sensibility: Queer Camp and Dyke Noir.” In
short, Morrill sees Camp as an effect of homophobia. Camp disrupts the
dominant order by serving as a marker for the queer subject’s uncanny
experience of the impossibility of representing his/her desire within the parameters
of the essentialized ontology of the un-queer. In order to examine the political
dimension of Camp discourse, Morrill turns to an analysis of Sarah Schulman’s
dyke noir novel After Delores, and discusses the particular relationship between
Camp and Freud’s concept of gallows humor.
Kate Davy’s “Fe/male Impersonation: The Discourse of Camp” examines
Camp as it is strategically deployed in lesbian theatre produced at the WOW
Cafe in New York City. Davy discusses the value of Camp as a strategy for
constructing a lesbian spectatorial community in which heterosexuality is
dropped from the performative address in order to bypass the erasure of the
lesbian in hegemonic representations. Davy’s essay investigates the subversive
potential of cross-dressing for gay male theatre as it is embedded in the discourse
of Camp, and delineates the dangers of the discourse for articulating a feminist
subject position vis-à-vis the dynamics of butch-femme gender play in lesbian
theatre in relationship to the issue of queer invisibility in representation.
The issue of the camp trace is explored by Margaret Thompson Drewal in
“The Camp Trace in Corporate America: Liberace and the Rockettes at Radio
City Music Hall.” Drewal analyzes what happens to representation when an unqueer
signified is attached to a queer signifier in the act of appropriation. In an
alternative reading of Liberace, Drewal demonstrates the subtle subversions of
which the invisible queer is capable when s/he floods the dominant discourse
with camp residues and traces. As Bredbeck identified, the Camp alternative is
the erosion of the hierarchy upon which the dominant order bases its power. In
that regard, Drewal shows how Liberace, through the camp trace, put dominant
codes to work in the service of the queer by harnessing the dominant order itself
to do the work of dismantling its own hierarchy of values.