Beschreibung:
This collection uses Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” as a foundation from which to explore current topics related to camp. It recognizes Sontag’s work as significant in spurring examination of the phenomenon but also limited in its descriptive rather than philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual nature.
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.
Contents
Introduction: Some Notes on “Notes”
Brian M. Peters and Bruce E. Drushel
Part I: Camp in Literature
Chapter 1: Voyage to Camp Lesbos: Pulp Fiction and the Shameful Lesbian “Sicko”
Barbara Jane Brickman
Chapter 2: Queer Ideology in the Novels of Joe Keenan
Robert Kellerman
Part II: Camp and Celebrity
Chapter 3: Authentic Artifice: Dolly Parton’s Negotiations of Sontag’s Camp
Emily Deering Crosby and Hannah Lynn
Chapter 4: Diva Worship as a Queer Poetics of Waste in D. Gilson’s Brit Lit
Chris Philpot
Chapter 5: Camping in the Closet: Susan Sontag and the Construction of the Celebrity Persona
Tim Cusack
Part III: Camp on Television
Chapter 6: Vicious Camp: Performance, Artifice, and Incongruity
Bruce E. Drushel
Chapter 7: “Excuse My Beauty!”: Camp Referencing and Memory Activation on RuPaul’s Drag Race”
Carl Schottmiller
Part IV: Camp and Place
Chapter 8: Everything is Bigger in Texas: Camp and the Queerly Normal in Greater Tuna
Elizabeth M. Melton
Chapter 9: “I’s Got to Get Me Some Edu-cation!”: Class and the Camp-Horror Nexus in House of 1000 Corpses
Olivia Oliver-Hopkins
Part V: Camp and Aesthetics
Chapter 10: Batman and the Aesthetics of Camp
Lauren Levitt
Chapter 11: Prison Camp: Aesthetic Style as Social Practice in Orange Is the New Black
Thomas Piontek
Chapter 12: Camp, Androgyny, and 1990: The Post-Gendered Spaces of Vogue
Brian M. Peters
Chapter 13: Pretty is Not Enough: Notes for a Grotesque Camp
Michael V. Perez
About the Editors and Contributors