Making Camp: Rhetorics of Transgression in U.S. Popular Culture (Albma Rhetoric Cult & Soc Crit)

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Making Camp: Rhetorics of Transgression in U.S. Popular Culture (Albma Rhetoric Cult & Soc Crit)

Helene A. Shugart

Language: English

Pages: 200

ISBN: B00SWPKS8E

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Making Camp examines the rhetoric and conventions of “camp” in contemporary popular culture and the ways it both subverts and is co-opted by mainstream ideology and discourse, especially as it pertains to issues of gender and sexuality.

 

Camp has long been aligned with gay male culture and performance. Helene Shugart and Catherine Waggoner contend that camp in the popular media—whether visual, dramatic, or musical—is equally pervasive. While aesthetic and performative in nature, the authors argue that camp—female camp in particular—is also highly political and that conventions of femininity and female sexuality are negotiated, if not always resisted, in female camp performances. 

 

The authors draw on a wide range of references and figures representative of camp, both historical and contemporary, in presenting the evolution of female camp and its negotiation of gender, political, and identity issues. Antecedents such as Joan Crawford, Wonder Woman, Marilyn Monroe, and Pam Grier are discussed as archetypes for contemporary popular culture figures—Macy Gray, Gwen Stefani, and the characters of Xena from Xena: Warrior Princess and Karen Walker from Will & Grace.

 

Shugart and Waggoner find that these and other female camp performances are liminal, occupying a space between conformity and resistance. The result is a study that demonstrates the prevalence of camp as a historical and evolving phenomenon in popular culture, its role as a site for the rupture of conventional notions of gender and sexuality, and how camp is configured in mainstream culture and in ways that resist its being reduced to merely a style.

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That camp is the gay sensibility; camp is an invasion and subversion of other sensibilities” (pp. 224–225). Because camp is so closely aligned with gay male subculture(s), often manifest in those contexts as drag—and several critics, as noted above, assert that its predilection for taking the feminine as its object reflects misogynist attitudes—the relationship between women as subjects, camp, and performance has not received extensive scholarly treatment. Although she does not utilize camp as a.

Camp irony with a specifically gay sensibility: “At the core of this perception of incongruity is the idea of gayness as a moral deviation. . . . The inner knowledge of our unique social situation has produced in us a heightened awareness of the discrepancies that lie between appearance and reality, expression and meaning” (p. 120). In terms of its function, camp, asserts Flinn (1999), turns on the “reconYou are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any.

Scholars have noted, and as we have reiterated in this study, irony is a critical, defining feature of camp (Babuscio, 1999; Case, 1999; Flinn, 1999; Newton, 1972; Sontag, 1964). That is, camp turns on “incongruous juxtapositions” (Newton, 1972, p. 103) and the “recontextualization of signs” (Flinn, 1999, p. 440), inviting and arguably prompting the audience to engage the incongruity in a way that demands participation to secure the camp sensibility. What distinguishes camp from conventional.

Artifacts, as they may well be more nuanced than cultural critics might presume, on all sides of the debate. In the case of these camp performances, the very rhetorical devices that define the context of constraint in which these performances occur constitute the premises for the resistance available in those texts: they are merely configured in distinctive ways so as to articulate a contrary discursive logic. This suggests that, at least in conjoined texts but perhaps in a contemporary mediated.

To reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press. 15 16 INTRODUCTION of performance, Butler offers perhaps the most extensive examination of gender and performance, noting that gender is not just an act or performance but is materially performative. Butler’s distinction describes the manner in which gender is a fictionalized rather than fixed ontology. Gender, she asserts, is “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects it names” (1993, p. 2).

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