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3
UNDER THE SIGN OF WILDE
An archaeology of posing
Moe Meyer
“Camp” was a new word when it first appeared in J.Redding Ware’s 1909
dictionary of Victorian slang, Passing English of the Victorian Era. Ware’s book,
considered extremely competent for its day, was written both as a companion for
and an extension of the foremost English slang dictionary of the nineteenth
century, John S.Farmer’s Slang and Its Analogues, published between 1890 and
1904. Ware was concerned with documenting the jargon of his decade. New
slang words came and went so fast (he called it “passing English” to describe its
fleeting nature) that many had escaped even Farmer’s masterwork and were lost
forever. Ware’s project was to produce a contemporary supplement to Slang and
Its Analogues, documenting only new slang that had emerged since its
publication (Partridge 114). Because the term “Camp” is not found in Farmer’s
dictionary, a conclusion is that it was a new word that entered the English
language only during the first decade of this century.
Ware defined Camp as “Actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis.
Probably from the French. Used chiefly by persons of exceptional want of
character” (61). The conventional and accepted interpretation of Ware’s
definition concludes that the word “Camp” has a French etymology (see for
example Booth 33, 39–40; Brien 873– 874; Goodwin 39; Rodgers 40; and Ross
145). Against this, I will propose an alternative reading of Ware’s definition
informed by Thomas A.King’s study of the politics of Camp gestures in chapter
one of this volume. King has argued that Camp gesture signals an ontological
challenge that displaces bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and
continuous, while substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative,
improvisational, discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and
stylized acts. He proposes that bourgeois identification of Camp (homosexual)
gesture is based upon a logic that is recognizable for its unique contradictions:
first, the gesture must be judged as excessive according to the standards of
acceptable and conventional bourgeois male deportment; and second, that the
gestural excess signifies a lack of Self (and thus lack of membership in the social
body).
Accordingly, I read Ware’s definition not as suggesting that the word “Camp”
is from the French, but that the actual and specific gestures he describes have
been imported from France. If, as King proposes, specific gestures identified