Edited by Moe Meyer - Get a Free Blog

66 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
simultaneously by exterior excess (Ware’s “exaggerated emphasis”) and interior
lack (Ware’s “exceptional want of character”) are constitutive markers of
homosexual identity, then the first text reference to Camp in 1909 already
encodes a homosexual subject. This coding is noticeable both by its definition
based on excess/lack and through its attribution of these gestures to the French:
the discourse of English Francophobia included the assumption that
homosexuality was a French import (see Crompton 4–5, 37–38, 52ff.).
My goals in this essay, then, are:
1 to identify a system of gestures, perhaps actually originating in France,
which was coherent enough to be stored, transmitted, reproduced,
manipulated, and exported, and to suggest that such a gestuary is precisely
what Ware was calling “Camp” in 1909. I identify the nineteenth-century
French system of actor training, known as Delsarte, as this gesture scheme;
2 to explain why the word “Camp” appeared only in the first decade of this
century, and how its appearance signals the successful transcoding of this
system of gestures to serve as a constitutive marker of homosexual social
identity;
3 and, finally, to explore how the transcoding of this gesture scheme was
accomplished. I will argue that it was an applied Delsartean semiotic that
Oscar Wilde used to undergird his gradual formulation of homoerotic
representational strategies both in text and in the performance of everyday
life.
My point of departure will be Oscar Wilde’s pedagogical contact with the
Delsarte system in 1882. From that contact I will identify the Delsartean method
for constructing a performative and discontinuous Self by manipulating the
surface codes of gesture, posture, speech, and costume and show how this
semiotic was developmentally deployed by Wilde in what appears to be a series
of experimental attempts to construct a homosexual social identity. I conclude
with an analysis of his sex scandal trials of 1895, arguing that the trials represent
the collision of Wilde’s experiments in Delsartean identity formation with the
State legal apparatus, and how Camp emerges as the result of this head-on
ontological crash.
The central organizing image for the Delsarte system—for purposes of both
abstraction and physical praxis—was the “pose.” My interpretation is based on
tracking this concept of the “pose” as it enters and is developed in the life and
works of Oscar Wilde. I will offer an archaeology of posing that is, perhaps,
more useful than another unsubstantiated etymology of “Camp”. I use the term
“archaeology” in the Foucaultian sense, that is, not a search for origins, but an
investigation of ideas that can provide the descriptive foundation for establishing
Camp as a discourse (Foucault 1972:140).