Thurs. 2/24
First, I want to thank you all again for your patience as I rearranged everything for my family emergency and to thank you all for your condolences. I’m looking forward to getting us all back on track and to seeing you all in the classroom again this upcoming Tuesday!
For today, I’ve asked you to read a classic piece by Susan Sontag on the idea of campiness and to watch Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a classic example of a film that relies on camp-based humor. We’ve all confronted the idea of campiness at some point in time – probably through things like animated TV series or cheesey comedies. It’s hard to define (much like queer theory!) but we know it when we see it. Sontag’s examples are dated, but they still hold true, and if you compare t hem to some more recent examples from this Time article that came out in response to the Met Gala in 2019, you can see connections to the aesthetic – everything is purposefully outrageous and playful. (Here are some more great recent examples from a similar article in W Magazine, although I don’t necessarily agree with all the celebrity commentary.)
Camp in and of itself isn’t a queer concept. However, its ability to take the everyday and exaggerate it or suppress it ties it to the way drag performers play with the concept of gender. Sontag also draws connections between queerness and camp throughout her essay. “Camp is solvent of morality,” she says. “It neutralizes moral indignation and sponsors playfulness.” Camp offers an outlet for being loud, extreme, outrageous, joyful – all things that queerness is not always welcome to be, if we think about Butler’s idea of the heterosexual matrix and the way it controls so much of everyday expectations of us as gendered beings. Camp sometimes gets left off of queer theory syllabi because of its less-serious, less-theoretical connections to literature, music, philosophy, art, and film. But, like Halberstam (who we’ll be discussing on Tuesday) I think it’s really important to recognize the aspects of pop culture that are less serious as they often offer a more uplifting, positive representation of queerness. (Or, if not, at least it offers a more complete picture of queerness than the overly-serious/overly-academic ones painted in highly theoretical texts.)
Something particularly interesting to me about Rocky Horror Picture Show as an example of camp is the cult following its gathered since it came out as a stage play in London in 1973. The play is still performed across the globe, with audiences getting dressed up in costume, bringing props, and yelling out callbacks throughout performances. Here’s a great short video about the London fan experience, here’s one describing what to expect if you go to see your first RHPS live show, and here’s a guide to the props and callbacks, for anyone who might be interested in the future. (I believe Dana said there would be a live student performance on campus sometime soon!) It strikes me that a show dripping with camp, openly discussing non-heteronormative gender performance and bisexuality, that came out in the early 1970s (a time when people were much less accepting than today), became such an iconic part of pop culture.
For today’s writing, I’d like us to work on identifying some of the aspects of camp Sontag points out in RHPS as a way of pinning down our own definitions of the term. In 2-3 pages in your Google Drive folder, point to 3-5 of Sontag’s notes and explain how you see them manifesting in RHPS. For example, if you look at #18 in Sontag’s list, do you think RHPS exhibits unintentional camp? If so, how? If it’s deliberate, how is it done well? Or, for another example, if you choose #36, how do you see RHPS avoiding “identifying with extreme states of feeling”?
On Tuesday, we’ll discuss Halberstam, low theory, failure, and maybe some SpongeBob (or Finding Nemo – I haven’t decided yet). See you all then! 🙂
