Issue 4: Camp!
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From ballet dancers to toilet humour, Pink Flamingos to Douglas Sirk, summer camp to Mick Jagger... The spring 2007 issue of Forum engages with the topic of Camp! Covering a wide variety of media, the articles consider representations of camp, as well as exploring the potential of camp as a critical interpretative strategy. The edition opens with the classic camp of Carry On films, before moving on to an analysis of the politics of straight camp in hard rock. Personal anecdote is interwoven with a re-examination of Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" in our third article, followed by a consideration of the restorative potential of camp in a short story about a man living with HIV. The issue closes with a look at the classic melodrama of Douglas Sirk, interpreting his use of colour within a camp register. |
 Divine in John Waters's Pink Flamingos, 1972 |
Contents
Guest Articles
"The vanguard - and the most articulate audience": Queer Camp, Jack Smith and John Waters
Nicholas de Villiers, University of Minnesota
The Politics of Dancing: Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
Dr Selby Wynn Schwartz, University of California, Berkeley
Articles
Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, and Susan Sontag: Campaigners of Camp and the Carry On films.
John Bannister, University of Central Lancashire
Dude Looks Like A Lady: Straight Camp and the Homo-social World of Hard Rock
Jack Burton, University of Edinburgh
The Wide Camp Sea, or Notes on Sontag
Sholem Krishtalka
Camp Cures (the Stigma of Illness): Escaping the Tyranny of Caring, Charity, and Positive Thinking in Adam Mars-Jones' "Slim"
Christian Lassen, University of Tübingen, Germany
Putting on the Red Dress: Reading Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows
Ryan Powell, University of East Anglia
Guest Articles
"The vanguard - and the most articulate audience": Queer Camp, Jack Smith and John Waters
Nicholas de Villiers, University of Minnesota
Against Susan Sontag's focus on "camp" objects, I take her notion of the "Camp eye" as a point of departure for an examination of camp as a way of seeing, and an effective mode of critique. I tentatively suggest not a "canon" but a tradition, a distinctly queer avant-garde tradition full of intertextual cross-referencing and mutual admiration. The two figures I choose to illustrate this more contingent concept of camp are John Waters and Jack Smith. My essay involves a reading of two re-released films: Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1962) and Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972). Both films have earned great notoriety in terms of efforts to censor their distribution due to "obscene" (explicit, homoerotic, transvestite) content, and an equally avid following with circulation ranging from East Village midnight screenings to Congressional hearings. I argue that John Waters’s Pink Flamingos suggests an evaluation of camp value that renders it much less easily commodified, and a deployment of camp strategy which in fact ironically comments on the process of commodity fetishism and proper economic circulation. Likewise, Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures has a unique history of circulation and criticism which involves Sontag herself in a way that illuminates her own critical bias.
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The Politics of Dancing: Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
Dr Selby Wynn Schwartz, University of California, Berkeley
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, a drag ballet company formed in New York in 1974, currently perform the pinkest, most tulle-and-toe-shoe of classical ballets to international acclaim. The company's unique double heritage - derived in part from Charles Ludlam's edgy gay performance tactics, and in part from channeling the spirit of iconic Russian prima ballerinas - has sparked a highly conscious, very camp version of self-performed identity. On their nearly constant worldwide tours, the Ballets Trockadero continue to be preservationists of historic ballets as well as revolutionary advocates of diversity in dance.
This paper theorizes lines of gender staging in dance, as well as the cultural politics of performing several levels of identity simultaneously through drag ballet. By exploring the dancers' adopted personae and the production decisions involved in re-mounting historic ballets, I seek to contextualize the development of the company as embedded in other histories, especially through queer re-readings of history, as political art in America, and within narratives of 20th century dance. I am interested in showing how camp aesthetics contribute to the creation of performance strategies of 'tender' irony that are, for the Ballets Trockadero, historically and culturally rooted.
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Articles
Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, and Susan Sontag: Campaigners of Camp and the Carry On films.
John Bannister, University of Central Lancashire
For twenty years from 1958-1978 the Camp characters played by Charles Hawtrey and Kenneth Williams in the Carry On films represented the homosexual stereotype. Famous or infamous for its particular brand of toilet humour these characters were the butt of this humour. The toilet in the Carry on films, quite literally, was the totem of the camp homosexual. And yet, of the two actors, it was Kenneth Williams's characters which reminded audiences throughout the 60s and 70s of the unpleasant smell of the homosexual lingering in the WC. In Carry On Spying (1964) Desmond Simkins/Williams warns off a man following him into the toilet: "I'd give it a minute if I where you?" while Hawtrey's flamboyant characters such as Duc de Pommfrit in Carry On Don't Lose Your Head (1966) wafts away the smell of prejudice that surrounds him with a scented kerchief and an air of aristocratic concupiscence. And audiences loved him for it.
This paper explains why. Exclusively drawing on Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" (1964) and sifting through the ordure of the lavatory humour of the Carry On films Hawtrey's genuine camp sensibility emerges like a purgative against prejudicial attitudes towards homosexuality while Williams's dishonest camp acting consigns his characters to the "muck pit" forever. Hawtrey's characters provided a defensive alliance with their adolescent male audience and washed away forever the stain of defecating humour that had contaminated the gay stereotype. "Camp taste [was], above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgment ... a kind of love, love for human nature" observed Sontag (291). Hawtrey's Campaign of comic cleansing was complete.
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Dude Looks Like A Lady: Straight Camp and the Homo-social World of Hard Rock
Jack Burton, University of Edinburgh
How does the brand of gender ambiguity expressed through the image of the androgynous rock frontman correspond to the common classification of hard rock as a typically masculine musical genre? Through an analysis of the roots, music and image of The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, this essay explores the relationship between androgyny and misogyny in hard rock, arguing that the brand of straight camp exhibited by musicians such as Mick Jagger and Robert Plant provides the double function of demonstrating the constructed nature of gender roles, while simultaneously imbuing men with the ability to dominate women through impersonation. It goes on to argue that the apparent flexibility of gender roles exhibited in the star image of the traditional rock frontman presents a promise of gender liberation while simultaneously excluding women, and, thus, creating a homo-social context in which a coherent, dominant masculinity can be maintained through the usurpation of the feminine role.
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The Wide Camp Sea, or Notes on Sontag
Sholem Krishtalka
"The Wide Camp Sea, or Notes on Sontag" is an exploration of camp through arch anecdote and shameless self-revelation. Thus, I feel it necessary and conceptually appropriate to follow suit in this abstract:
When I declared my artistic (I am a painter by profession) interest in camp, I was asked, over and over again, if I had read "Notes on Camp"; I hadn't. So I did. And I felt betrayed. Camp is the spark of my identity, and I wanted Susan Sontag, forty-some-odd years previous, to have explicated me. How could She of the White Forelock have missed the point?
What follows is my promenade through camp: my (temeritous) desire to correct Sontag, as well as come to terms with her centrality in this theoretical discourse; my desire, with the help of any number of fellow theorists, to affirm camp as an ontology; my desire to claim author, poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, through his writing, as my camp confrere, and to acknowledge the centrality of this discourse to his theory; and, most importantly, to reclaim camp as something active, alive and dangerous.
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Camp Cures (the Stigma of Illness): Escaping the Tyranny of Caring, Charity, and Positive Thinking in Adam Mars-Jones' "Slim"
Christian Lassen, University of Tübingen
In Adam Mars-Jones' short story "Slim," camp imagination emerges as a psychic resource, both paranoid, in the sense that it strives to anticipate the intrusive workings of regulatory power, and reparative, in the sense that it moves towards amelioration, comfort and healing. On the one hand, therefore, camp enables the narrator of the short story, an AIDS-patient, to expose the underpinnings of a tyranny of caring whose allegedly benevolent manifestations, such as the caring professions, charity or the appeals to positive thinking, nevertheless frequently aim at the subjection of the sick rather than their wellbeing. On the other hand, camp imagination provides the narrator with a surplus consolatory impulse, misleadingly light-hearted and yet intensely comforting, that attempts to cure the stigma of (this) illness. And indeed, "Slim" shows that the tyranny of caring in effect incessantly reproduces this stigma, precisely because stigmatisation conceals the reasonable fear that the tyranny of caring is itself ill-equipped to confront the virus. Put differently, the tyranny of caring exploits stigmatisation to conceal its own subjection to AIDS. As a result, it does not primarily signify a support of the sick, but an odd reassurance of the healthy and, above all, a staging of the allegedly unbridgeable gap between them.
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Putting on the Red Dress: Reading Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows
Ryan Powell, University of East Anglia
The melodramas of Douglas Sirk have been widely regarded as highly nuanced critiques of the oppressive conditions perpetuated by bourgeois values in 1950's America. While many of Sirk's films have received a great deal of consideration as 'women's pictures,' particularly in feminist discourse, little attention has been given to the figure of gay male representation. Looking at the 1955 film All That Heaven Allows (starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson), this paper traces the ways in which the film can be productively read within a matrix of camp performance, ultimately illuminating relations between women and gay men as similarly oppressed subjects within the heteronormative imperatives of bourgeois ideology during the period. Through a semiotic analysis of Sirk's sophisticated use of color in the Âmise-en-scene (most notably through costuming, set design and lighting), this paper considers how color may be used to signify the presence of non-normative subjective positions, foregrounding ambivalencies towards naturalizing constructions of gender and sexuality as posited by mainstream Hollywood cinema. Further, the paper considers how Sirk's use of the color red may be interpreted within a camp register, employing what Richard Dyer describes as camp's ability to invoke "irony," "trivialization" and "theatricalization" with regards to societal norms.
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Editors
Clare Bielby
Sally Henderson
