Content area
Full Text
Moe Meyer, ed. The Politics and Poetics of Camp. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. xiii + 203. $59.95 (casebound); $16.95 (paperbound).
The Politics and Poetics of Camp presents itself as an "intervention" in an emerging debate within gay and lesbian studies. Although focusing on subjects ranging from late-seventeenth-century gestural codes to "dyke noir" fiction of the late 1980's, the essays in this collection center on shared theoretical and political questions. Deriving from feminist theory, cultural criticism, and post-structuralist accounts of the subject, these essays set out to investigate the relationship between performativity and sexual and social identity. Their theoretical analyses are supplemented throughout by detailed considerations of various theatrical and textual practices and the historical and cultural contexts of their performance.
The essays in The Politics and Poetics of Camp are united by
number of shared premises that are explicated in Moe Meyer's polemical introduction, which also lays the foundation for the model of performativity developed throughout the book. A redefinition of 'camp' is central to this project. Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp"(1964) popularized the notion that camp was both a sensibility and a quality inhering in particular objects or gestures. In subsequent years, 'camp' has been alternately dissociated from gay culture and conflated with it. The term has been employed dismissively to connote frivolity, decadence, or cooptation and applied to works and aesthetics characterized as politically radical and culturally subversive. Among other matters, this volume attempts to clarify the uses of 'camp' and to distinguish between "queer" camp and "unqueer" uses or "appropriations" of camp.
Meyer defines camp "as the total body of performative practices and strategies used to enact a queer identity" (p. 5). "Queer," it must be noted, is not used simply as a hip synonym for "gay, lesbian, and bisexual" but as an alternative to normative or essentialist definitions of gay and lesbian identity--and more broadly in opposition to "the depth model of identity" (p. 3). Where the self is traditionally seen as a stable core of identity, "unique, abiding, and continuous," the "queer self' is "performative, improvisational, discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts" (p. 3)....