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PERFORMING “AKIMBO”
Queer pride and epistemological prejudice
Thomas A.King
Aristocracy is a position vis-à-vis culture (as well as vis-à-vis
power), and the history of Camp taste is part of the history of snob
taste. But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today
to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of taste? Answer: an
improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute
themselves as aristocrats of taste.
…the soundest starting point seems to be the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth century, because of that period’s extraordinary
feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry…
Susan Sontag (117, 109)
I begin with Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” not because Sontag’s
influential description of Camp as apolitical has not already been sufficiently
criticized as inadequate, but because I want to play out the epistemological
prejudices upon which her notes depend. 1 In this essay, I situate the development
of modern male homosexual identity within early modern debates about the
nature of self and the validity of the visual as the basis of knowledge about
identity. Sontag placed the origin of Camp in late-seventeenth- and earlyeighteenth-century
Europe. I will attempt to show, in the case of England, why
this might be so. During this period, a model of the self as unique and continuous
in the identity of its actions across time and space displaced earlier notions of the
self as performative, improvisational, and discontinuous. Residual elements of
this performative self were transcoded as markers of homosexuality, making
them available for appropriation by an early homosexual subculture like the
mollies, which became visible in London around 1700. Sontag took for granted
the eighteenth century’s polarization of surface and content, artifice and nature,
frivolity and sincerity. Her description of the basic Camp maneuver as the
blocking out or emptying a thing of its content (110) depends on a differentiation
of surface and depth that was subject to a great deal of hostile interrogation in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The proto-camp gestures developed by
men like the mollies may have actually worked to displace the epistemological
clarity of dominant codes of identity. The early modern origins of English Camp