Reviews

[This is not so much a review of the book as it is a collection of ideas & references & for future reading.]

Despite its blind spots, this essay remains one of the cornerstone works on the topic. It is impossible to start a discussion on camp without reading or referencing “Notes on Camp”.
That being said, I do not find myself entirely agreeing with Ms. Sontag when it comes to the apolitical and/or unintentional nature of camp, nor am I alone in this. Camp certainly exists and can be perceived as both those things, but, equally, camp can also be intentionally adopted as an aesthetic and very much as an expression of political sentiment. At this point, whether the latter is merely ‘campy’ and not ‘true camp’ veers towards negligible linguistic distinction. Is drag camp then? I would think so, but it is simultaneously intentional and political, which seemingly contradicts Sontag’s definition. Brian M. Peters and Bruce E. Drushel argue in the introductory chapter of “Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives” (2017) that

“Sontag’s writing is therefore both seminal and dated, given that it predated the Stonewall uprising and thus lacks the comparative pre-gay liberation/post-gay liberation perspective of later critics and scholars. [...] decades. Sontag’s general position of an absence of political underpinnings in camp easily could be linked to preliberation understandings of the construct. However, as Andrew Ross and other queer theorists have argued, once the late-1960s became a cultural moment and turning point, everything became political. Not going to school, for example, could be understood as opposition to a particular system and thus an act of initial ennui could be read further as a reaction to institutional systems of hegemony. Similarly, camp responds to systems of normalcy, gay and straight, and its aesthetic of excess allows it to be in some ways political without being dreadful, as evidenced in coded queer camp of the 1960s and the “out” gay camp of the 1970s (especially the disco years.) However, what was once understood as awful or tasteless also can be read as reactionary, constructed, and often incredible.” (pp. viii – ix)

In any case, I will include a few ideas I found to be particularly useful in understanding the subject:

-“ the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”
1. “To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.”
7. “All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy … Rural Camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban.”
8. “Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’, of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in Art Nouveau, the most typical and fully developed Camp style. Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto.”
18. “One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (‘camping’) is usually less satisfying.”
19. “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! […]”
23. “In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate and the naïve.”
27. “[…] What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp. Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility. Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp – what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic.”
28. “Again, Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous. (The curved line, the extravagant gesture.) Not extraordinary merely in the sense of effort.” ---- i.e. Products of immense labour that lack visual extravagance, glamour, theatricality are not camp.
31. “This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It’s not a love of the old as such. It’s simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment – or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility … Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.”
40. “Style is everything. Genet’s ideas, for instance, are very Camp. Genet’s statement that ‘the only criterion of an act is its elegance’fn2 is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde’s ‘in matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.’”
41. “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”
43. “[…] Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.”

In “Politics and Poetics of Camp” (1994), Moe Meyer’s Introduction serves as a response to Susan Sontag in that he highlights how queer organizations or movements practice camp in a way that is “both political and critical” and defy “existing interpretations that continue to define Camp as apolitical, aestheticized, and frivolous”. Therefore, “Camp is political; Camp is solely a queer (and/or sometimes gay and lesbian) discourse; and Camp embodies a specifically queer cultural critique.”:

- „all un-queer activities that have been previously accepted as “camp,” such as Pop culture expressions, have been redefined as examples of the appropriation of queer praxis. Because un-queer appropriations interpret Camp within the context of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality, they no longer qualify as Camp as it is defined here. In other words, the un-queer do not have access to the discourse of Camp, only to derivatives constructed through the act of appropriation.” (p. 1)
- “In the sense that queer identity is performative, it is by the deployment of specific signifying codes that social visibility is produced. Because the function of Camp, as I will argue, is the production of queer social visibility, then the relationship between Camp and queer identity can be posited. Thus I define Camp as the total body of performative practices and strategies used to enact a queer identity, with enactment defined as the production of social visibility.” (p. 2)
- “Because the process of Camp has for its purpose the production of queer social visibility, the same performative gestures executed independently of queer self-reflexivity are unavoidably transformed and no longer qualify as Camp. Instead, what emerges from Sontag’s essay is the birth of the camp trace, or residual camp, a strategy of un-queer appropriation of queer praxis whose purpose, as I will demonstrate, is the enfusement of the un-queer with the queer aura, acting to stabilize the ontological challenge of Camp through a dominant gesture of reincorporation. Thus there are not different kinds of Camp. There is only one. And it is queer. It can be engaged directly by the queer to produce social visibility in the praxis of everyday life, or it can be manifested as the camp trace by the un-queer in order, as I will argue, to provide queer access to the apparatus of representation.” (p. 2)
- “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.” (p. 16)
- “The issue of appropriation is again taken up by Chuck Kleinhans in “Taking Out the Trash: Camp and the Politics of Parody.” Through comparative readings of kitsch, trash, and camp films, Kleinhans looks at the ways queer discourse has infiltrated contemporary art production by providing lures for the un-queer spectator to assume queer spectating positions, as well as providing clever spaces for the accommodation of subtextual gay readers. Kleinhans’s view of Camp borders on the utopian because of the promise it holds for effecting change and transformation in the dominant discourse. Yet, his is an almost eco-Camp in that the alternative that the queer proposes to consumer culture is a vast representational recycling program. According to Kleinhans, this recycling of representation constitutes the radical politics of Camp: if you cannot invent the game, then you can certainly reshuffle the deck.” (p. 17)

More ideas from the aforementioned “Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic”:

- “As Scott Long argues, the “spectator” is responsible for the actual creation of camp.” (p. ix)
- “[...] Emily Deering Crosby and Hannah Lynn avowedly reject what they consider the specious ownership of camp by white gay men and argue for its recognition as a more inclusive performative strategy for self-representation. They note that Dolly Parton, who is widely acknowledged as a camp icon for her excessive performances of traditional markers of femininity, nevertheless has strategically managed elements of those performances and, in doing so, has created an appeal that transcended boundaries between conservative Christian and LGBTQ communities and that contests the use of so-called “female grotesques” by conventional media as cautionary tales aimed at the moral standing of middle-class white women.” (p. xii)
- “Another example of camp being very much alive is provided by Tom Piontek in his essay, “Prison Camp: Aesthetic Style as Social Practice in Orange Is the New Black.” As Piontek notes, camp has been interpreted as a strategy available to marginalized groups in reaction to attempts at their subjugation. In the case of the denizens of the women’s prison that is the setting for the wildly popular television series, camp is a highly politicized and subversive strategy by which they reinvent and represent themselves in a quest for the social visibility denied them by the dominant order.” (pp. xii – xiii)