Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic

Bruce E. Drushel is associate professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University.Brian M. Peters is tenured in the English Department at Champlain College St. Lambert.

Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives marks 50 years of writing and cultural production on the phenomenon of camp since Susan Sontag's 1964 cornerstone essay "Notes on 'Camp'." It provides cutting-edge theory and understanding on ways to read and interpret camp through a collection of essays from historical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives. It includes varied subject areas including camp icons, stylistics periods, and important and representative texts from television, film, and literature. These essays create a scholarly conversation that understands camp as not only signifier or aesthetic but also a language, mode, and style that goes beyond its initial linguistic and semiotic guise. The contributors, representing a diverse group of established and rising scholars, explore camp as a largely queer genre that includes varying modes of understanding of desire and of the self outside a hegemonic model of heteronormativity.

ContentsIntroduction: Some Notes on "Notes"Brian M. Peters and Bruce E. DrushelPart I: Camp in LiteratureChapter 1: Voyage to Camp Lesbos: Pulp Fiction and the Shameful Lesbian "Sicko"Barbara Jane BrickmanChapter 2: Queer Ideology in the Novels of Joe KeenanRobert KellermanPart II: Camp and CelebrityChapter 3: Authentic Artifice: Dolly Parton's Negotiations of Sontag's CampEmily Deering Crosby and Hannah LynnChapter 4: Diva Worship as a Queer Poetics of Waste in D. Gilson's Brit LitChris PhilpotChapter 5: Camping in the Closet: Susan Sontag and the Construction of the Celebrity PersonaTim CusackPart III: Camp on TelevisionChapter 6: Vicious Camp: Performance, Artifice, and IncongruityBruce E. DrushelChapter 7: "Excuse My Beauty!": Camp Referencing and Memory Activation on RuPaul's Drag Race"Carl SchottmillerPart IV: Camp and PlaceChapter 8: Everything is Bigger in Texas: Camp and the Queerly Normal in Greater TunaElizabeth M. MeltonChapter 9: "I's Got to Get Me Some Edu-cation!": Class and the Camp-Horror Nexus in House of 1000 CorpsesOlivia Oliver-HopkinsPart V: Camp and AestheticsChapter 10: Batman and the Aesthetics of CampLauren LevittChapter 11: Prison Camp: Aesthetic Style as Social Practice in Orange Is the New BlackThomas PiontekChapter 12: Camp, Androgyny, and 1990: The Post-Gendered Spaces of VogueBrian M. PetersChapter 13: Pretty is Not Enough: Notes for a Grotesque CampMichael V. PerezAbout the Editors and Contributors