Camp

Camp celebrates the stylistic and emotional excesses of mainstream popular culture as they are interpreted and redefined by homosexual subcultures. Camp emphasizes that all comportment is artifice; to camp it up is both to behave artificially and to celebrate and call attention to artificiality in everyday life. The word camp is associated with excessive displays of gesture and emotion; it was used in J. Redding Ware's 1909 Passing English of the Victorian Era, a dictionary of Victorian slang, to describe the showy, theatrical behaviors, affectations, and gestures associated with persons of so-called low character. This exaggerated comportment, or campiness, in which theatricality calls attention to the artificiality of all behavioral conventions, constituted a specifically homosexual set of codes, styles, and gestures in the early and middle twentieth century.

Those codes have been used by gay subcultures since that time to accentuate the distance that exists for queer people between what most people insist are natural behaviors and what gay men and lesbians traditionally have seen as little more than cultural norms. Aspects of camp that play up effeminacy and drag in particular are thought to have been favored by homosexual subcultures because their emphasis on role playing resonated with those for whom acting heterosexual meant playing a role.

THE INFLUENCE OF OSCAR WILDE

Oscar Wilde is considered one of the modern fathers of camp sensibility; his effete comportment and witticisms helped revive the cult of the dandy in the late nineteenth century. His 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, a bible of aestheticism, constantly undercuts the moral tale of a superficial sociopath with passages celebrating the protagonist's devotion to surface beauty and individual style. His stage comedies, especially the 1895 The Importance of Being Earnest, are rife with campy epigrams and double entendres.

Wilde's epigrams, in which conventional sentiments are read backward, adapted, or tweaked slightly so that they are both familiar and strange, are examples of a camp take on mainstream culture in which audiences are forced to reread normative practices through the eyes of a skeptical, if affectionate, outsider. The aphorisms "Divorces are made in heaven" and "In marriage, three is company, two is none," from The Importance of Being Earnest, make fun of the sanctity of marriage. The first alters the conventional description of the ideal heterosexual union as "a match made in heaven," and the second alters the cliché that celebrates the couple form as preferable to any other social arrangement: "Two's company; three's a crowd." By flipping these sayings over to suggest that the opposite is true, that divorce is far more heavenly than marriage and that any company at all is a welcome relief from the everyday tedium of married life, Wilde declares that contrary to Victorian popular sentiment, traditional marriage is both hellish and boring. The fact that Victorian audiences found those observations hilarious when they were made in Wilde's plays signifies that they not only appreciated Wilde's wit but relished his send-up of institutionalized heterosexuality.

LATER CAMP

Later examples of camp favored excess as an expressive mode, whether it was the maniacal choreography and extraordinary overhead camera shots signifying a point of view that no audience of a supposed stage musical would ever have of a Busby Berkeley musical, the lurid color palette and tragic melodrama of a Douglas Sirk tearjerker, or the menacing, bitchy femininity of Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. Divas who cultivated a monumental stage presence, such as Maria Callas and Diana Ross, or a histrionic theatricality, such as Bette Midler and Liza Minelli, are camp figures, as are feminine personalities whose extreme artificiality shows that they are aping versions of themselves, such as Marilyn Monroe, Paul Lynde, and Barbra Streisand. The diva's camp artificiality can encompass physical excessiveness as well; Dolly Parton's and Jane Russell's breasts are camp, as is Phyllis Diller's or Michael Jackson's face and the porn star Ron Jeremy's comically hairy and chubby physique.

SONTAG'S ANALYSIS OF CAMP

Although camp remained a homosexual subcultural language and style for decades, it achieved mainstream recognition as a theory of culture, or interpretive lens, with the publication of Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp,'" which remains the best-known essay on the subject. Sontag (1983) argues that camp is a mode of aestheticism, a sensibility and a badge of identity, and a way of seeing that emphasizes texture, decorative surface, style, and frivolity. Among the objects she lists as camp, ostensibly because their design and execution epitomize an over-the-top excessiveness, are Tiffany lamps, Bellini operas, flapper costumes of the 1920s, Flash Gordon comics, the movie King Kong, and all things art nouveau. She differentiates naïve camp from intentional camp, insisting that only naïve camp—camp that is trying to be serious and meaningful but fails—can be considered real or pure camp. She discusses the camp sensibility that recognizes objects of value gleaming among the detritus of popular culture, stating that in its appropriation of the low, vulgar, tasteless, and extravagantly tacky as beautiful, camp challenges the hegemony of high culture, setting itself up as a more urban, sophisticated, and generous sensibility.

It generally is acknowledged that Sontag appropriated camp from homosexual subcultures in the essay only to dismiss those subcultures, though that gesture itself is part of the cultural and historical closeting of homosexuality among the 1960s avant-garde. Much of Sontag's essay rests on the work of homosexual and lesbian writers, artists, filmmakers, and actors. She sets herself the task of expanding what she terms a "lazy" definition published ten years earlier in Christopher Isherwood's The World in the Evening, she dedicates the essay to Oscar Wilde, and her examples of camp include Noel Coward plays, Aubrey Beardsley drawings, Jean Cocteau films, Oscar Wilde epigrams, Greta Garbo's beauty and lack of dramatic depth, Barbara Stanwyk's and Tallulah Bankhead's mannish acting style, Caravaggio's paintings, Genet's ideas, and the dandyism of Wilde and the aesthetes, to which she dedicates four of her fifty-eight "notes." Though all these figures are gay or lesbian, she never infers, except in her insistence on the camp sensibility of those artists, that their sexual identities place them within the homosexual vanguard.

Sontag was not open about her lesbianism, and this helps explain some of the distance from and ambivalence toward homosexuality the essay expresses as well as its substitution of a Jewish interpretive standpoint for a homosexual one. She does not mention homosexuals or homosexuality until note fifty; in note fifty-one she concedes that homosexuals are in the "vanguard" of camp sensibility; in note fifty-two she equates that sensibility with the Jewish moral sensibility; and by note fifty-three the parallel to a more moral Jewish sensibility allows her to declare camp an oppositional "solvent of morality" (Sontag 1983, p. 118) in which style always trumps content and politics.

OTHER CRITICAL ANALYSES

Sontag's interest in the "mere" surface politics of camp has been contested by cultural critics. Many gay critics have accused her of appropriating a queer style of resistance and neutralizing its politics through her definition of camp as an aesthetic sensibility and moral solvent. Andrew Ross (1989), for example, has countered that camp is political in a Marxist sense in that it registers historical shifts in modes of production. He defines camp as an "effect" created when outmoded products recirculate in contemporary culture and become available for new value and new meaning. Thus, mid-twentieth-century films such as Sunset Boulevard are campy because they use aging film stars from the silent era to create melodramatic metanarratives about aging film stars from the silent era. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is similarly campy in its use of the over-the-hill leading ladies, rivals, and icons of the big studio era Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, pitted against each other in a gothic scenario shaped by sibling rivalry. Moe Meyer (1994) is even more literal than Ross about the politics of camp, defining it as "queer parody," arguing that it played a crucial role in the theatrics of gay activist groups such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation, and insisting that any attempts to define camp as merely aesthetic undermine its political force as a strategy of queer resistance to normative models of identity, respectability, gender, sexuality, and class.

Noting that most of the leading lights in the pantheon of camp figures are women, recent feminist critics such as Pamela Robertson (1996) have questioned the notion of a one-way exchange in camp in which gay men supposedly appropriate female stars and female styles but women do not appropriate a gay male aesthetic. To see exchanges between women and gay men is to imagine, Robertson argues, that feminism can have a similar critical distance from and opposition to mainstream popular cultural forms. Thus, Mae West's camping could parody 1890s traditions of burlesque and female impersonation to contest contemporary female stereotypes in the 1930s.

DRAG QUEENS AND KITSCH

One of the most recognizable forms of camp has long been the female impersonator, or drag queen. The drag queen performs a reading of culture by invoking the femininity of certain film stars and famous singers and performers past and present and parodying those traits by exaggerating them. Thus, Judy Garland's overly painted face might be parodied to the point of clownishness by huge red lips and gigantic false eyelashes, her need to be loved by her audience reduced to a grotesque and sexualized begging by the drag performer down on his knees in front of the audience, and her signature vibrato amplified to the point of quavery croaking, all of it suggesting both the hardness and the pathos of an over-the-hill performer unwilling to relinquish the limelight. Although such impersonation was read in the past as making fun of women, it is possible to interpret the masquerade of femininity as the butt of the impersonator's joke; indeed, one of the things camp drag emphasizes is the enormous effort it takes to be a woman and a performer. Female drag impersonators are usually effeminate gay men whose femininity has served as a source of both oppression and pride for them, and their camp take on the dignity and burden of femininity is often profoundly sympathetic and identificatory as well as parodic.

That type of drag was even more political and oppositional in the days when it was illegal to dress in the clothes of the opposite sex. In the era when police could arrest men or women who did not have on at least three items of gender-appropriate clothing, the theatricality of drag protected gay female impersonators from the violence meted out to effeminate men who were not in costume and makeup. Other forms of camp, such as the arch enthusiasm for kitschy, sentimental items such as Hummel statues, velvet paintings, onion-head children with huge eyes, and baby animal figurines, signify other kinds of opposition, the cultivation of an aesthetic that rejects the institutionalization of "high" art and instead celebrates the lowbrow, the ugly, and the general trashiness of mass-manufactured collectibles. This type of camp is political insofar as it rejects the self-improving class politics of bourgeois aesthetics. At the same time it takes a certain level of sophistication to appreciate the lowbrow as lowbrow; thus, the camp appreciation for kitsch risks accusations of condescension in its appropriation of lowbrow sentimentality as something that is interesting mostly because it is bizarre.

Whether camp remains a specifically gay aesthetic is debatable only because camp has permeated mainstream culture to such a profound degree since Sontag's essay. Camp has transformed itself dramatically from the camp of an earlier era. The secret language of camp melodrama and emotional excess, in which a group of homosexual insiders and their friends once read Mae West's suggestiveness as nelly effeminacy, Joan Crawford's hard femininity as drag queen hauteur, or Judy Garland's brave vulnerability as the broken-hearted optimism of the gay romantic heart, has become ubiquitous in popular culture. The distinction between naïve and intentional camp Sontag insisted on has disappeared as mainstream audiences have grown more sophisticated.

The best examples of camp from the latter decades of the twentieth century were usually intentional products rather than naïve accidents, whether the invitation to subcultural revelry of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which makes fun of the straightest characters and rewards the naughty ones; the B-movie vulgarity of Showgirls, with its cheesy dialogue and over-the-top bad acting; the sissy boys and drag queens playing heterosexual men and women in a John Waters film; or the tongue-in-cheek retro style of But I'm a Cheerleader, much of it taken from Waters, in which heterosexual normativity is portrayed as cultish and bizarre. Television series such as the night-time soap opera Desperate Housewives deliberately cultivated a camp critical distance between viewers and the characters, encouraging audiences to judge the everyday pursuits of suburban families as bizarre, excessive, and highly entertaining. Reality television became adept at exploiting the camp effect of contestants frantically trying to become famous, its judges acting as critics who ridiculed talentless people who were willing to do anything for money and attention. By recognizing and creating a market of viewers who would tune in week after week to watch people embarrass themselves, reality television read the excessive desire for fame on the part of everyday people as ubiquitous, excessive, outrageous, queer, kitschy, ridiculous, and touching, creating a new take on an old culture of spectacular display in which everyone and anyone, regardless of identity, can imitate the performing style of his or her favorite star and be queen for a day. If camp has become the hip sensibility of contemporary popular culture, it remains to be seen whether the camp gesture or way of reading culture can continue to operate as oppositional or subversive. It is uncertain whether camp has been assimilated to the degree that if everything is camp, nothing is, or whether, instead, if everything is camp, everything is.

see also Dandyism; Drag Kings; Drag Queens; Garland, Judy; Wilde, Oscar.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Meyer, Moe. 1994. "Introduction" and "Under the Sign of Wilde: An Archaeology of Posing." In The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer New York and London: Routledge.

Robertson, Pamela. 1996. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ross, Andrew, 1989. "The Uses of Camp." In No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.

Sontag, Susan. 1983. "Notes on 'Camp.'" In A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Vintage.

                                          Jaime Hovey