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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! 🙂

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Thurs. 2/10

As some of you noted at the end of class on Tuesday: So much fruit in this book!! But hopefully that wasn’t too distracting and you were able to enjoy the complex story that unfurled throughout Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry. The dual narratives of Jordan’s and the Dog Woman’s perspectives combined with the multiple timelines and re-told fairytales mean that there is a lot to unpack in a book that isn’t very long at all.

I chose to read this at this after finishing up our Butler readings because of the way Winterson plays with gender, the passage of time, and other heteronormative constructs. This is also a book about, among many other things, rebirth and renewal (hence the title, if anyone knows what it means to “sex” a plant in gardening terminology), and I think there’s a lot there that can be connected to drag culture and gender performativity.

For your asynchronous work today, I’d like you to do some reflective writing about the book’s connections to Butler. In 2-3 pages in a document in your Google Drive folder, reflect upon where we see Winterson playing with heteronormative concepts (gender roles, gendered stereotypes, etc.) in the book. How do we see characters living subversively and not adhering to heteronormative frameworks? How does the book itself push against norms – could we say that Winterson was “queering” the typical novel in some way as she put this book together? If so, how?

For Tuesday, we’ll be reading Halberstam on “low theory” and failure as we move into a section of the course on playfulness, humor, and campiness in queer theory. There’s some campiness in Sexing the Cherry, too, which we’ll discuss.

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Thurs. 2/3

Phew! We made it through the first half of Judith Butler, and by the time you’re reading this, you’ve hopefully read through the second selection from her. Butler’s work is challenging, as we said in class, but her ideas really give us different perspectives on gender and sex and what it means to perform identity in the world. (You’ll also be pleased to hear that, while these are not the last two readings that will make your head hurt, they are the last two that feature such dense sentence structures. So yay! We’ve made it through what I would consider to be some of the most difficult readings. 🙂 )

In class Tuesday we watched a few clips of Paris is Burning (1987), the documentary by Jennie Livingston which Butler writes about directly in one of the chapters of Bodies that Matter we read for today as part of her discussion of gender performance and heteronormativity. We also watched clips from the FX show Pose (2018-2021), which is set in 1987 and is based off of Paris is Burning. In case you’d like to rewatch some of those clips, here’s what we watched and where to find them, along with a couple clips we didn’t have time to watch together that go along with Butler’s discussion of bodies, realness, heteronormativity, and gender performance:

  • You can find the PiB in its entirety on AppleTV. (I highly recommend it!)
  • PiB: What is a Ball? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbv6OR1Fzpk
  • PiB: What is a House? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qWaAS3olWQ
  • PiB: What is a Category? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wITnguCPHBI
  • PiB: What is Realness? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHpt37S3wL8
  • Pose is on Netflix, the FX streaming platform, and can be paid for per episode on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play, and AppleTV. (Content warning: sex and nudity.)
    1. Pose Season 1: Episode 1, up to opening title sequence – “mopping” the museum and walking the royalty category; Blanca is called a “cross dresser” by her sisters
    2. Pose Season 1: Episode 4, up to opening title sequence – Candy walks a luscious body category; Candy’s realness is called into question; heteronormative body standards
    3. Pose Season 1: Episode 4, 15:40-21:23 – Elektra confronts her boyfriend/benefactor about wanting a transition operation in order to be her true self; Candy stays true to her perception of who she wants to be; misogyny and heteronormativity abound!
    4. Pose Season 1: Episode 8, 37:25-43:13 – battle between House of Ferocity and House of Evangelista; categories that include different types of gender performance and levels of realness; Pray Tell’s commentary on realness and femininity/masculinity

In Bodies that Matter, Butler writes:

The compulsion to repeat an injury is not necessarily the compulsion to repeat the injury in the same way or to stay fully within the traumatic orbit of that injury. The force of repetition in language may be the paradoxical condition by which a certain agency—not linked to a fiction of the ego as master of circumstance—is derived from the impossibility of choice. It is in this sense that Irigaray’s critical mime of Plato, the fiction of the lesbian phallus, and the rearticulation of kinship in Paris Is Burning might be understood as repetitions of hegemonic forms of power which fail to repeat loyally and, in that failure, open possibilities for resignifying the terms of violation against their violating aims…. There is no subject prior to its constructions, and neither is the subject determined by those constructions; it is always the nexus, the non-space of cultural collision, in which the demand to resignify or repeat the very terms which constitute the “we” cannot be summarily refused, but neither can they be followed in strict obedience. It is the space of this ambivalence which opens up the possibility of a reworking of the very terms by which subjectivation proceeds — and fails to proceed. (84)

I want us to think more about Butler’s idea drag and of “repeating” gender norms as a subversive act that sometimes goes wrong as happened with Venus Extravaganza in Paris is Burning (sorry – Butler gave a major spoiler there, folks). Let’s consider this in terms of what we watched on Tuesday as well as other instances of drag and subversive gender performance we see in pop culture.

For our Moodle discussion board post today, please find one (or two, if you’d like) music videos, scenes from TV or films, or other performances where performers have used drag subversively. So we’re not talking about the kind of non-subversive drag Butler discusses from straight performers like we see in Mrs. Doubtfire or White Girls or Madea’s Family Reunion. Think more along the lines of David Bowie in “Boys Keep Swinging” (1979) or Lil Nas X in “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” (2021) or Janelle Monae feat. Erykah Badu in “Q.U.E.E.N.” (2012). Respond to the following questions in your post: Where do you see connections between the music videos, scenes, etc. and Butler’s argument about drag as a subversive act? What is remarkable about the way the artist or actor is performing gender in the piece? What makes the gender performance subversive? How is the artist or actor messing with heteronormative ideas of gender? If possible, try to include links to the video or scene so others can watch it as they reply to your post. We’ll talk about your posts and watch some of these videos in class on Tuesday.

Remember that for Tuesday, we’ll be discussing your annotations on Gayle Rubin’s “Of Catamites and Kings” after listening to Maria’s presentation on Rubin, and will be discussing the first section up to p. 44, stopping before “The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses,” of Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Sexing the Cherry. I’m looking forward to our conversation! 🙂