Table Of ContentThe Dark Side of Camp
Aesthetics
“This collection makes a compelling case for camp’s materiality and affin-
ity with the filthy and the queer. Engaging with and moving beyond previous
Anglo-American debates (What defines camp taste? Is camp queer?), the con-
tributors offer a more expansive range of examples of camp strategies, econo-
mies, and modalities than previously available, and demonstrate the urgency
of reparative queer ways of reading and attaching to popular cultural texts.”
—Nicholas de Villiers, University of North Florida and author
of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes,
and Warhol
“This collection of essays gives insight into interlocking complexities of
liminality of camp aesthetics and queer politics of bad taste. In the critical
and comprehensive discussions, the authors exhibit varied approaches from
literary studies to film studies, providing a valuable archive of camp’s per-
formative practices and its alliance with abjection. The book is an essential
contribution to cultural studies that explores the fascinating and open-
ended world of camp sensibility.”
—Justyna Stępień, Szczecin University, Poland
“Camp” is often associated with glamour, surfaces and an ostentatious display
of chic, but as these authors argue, there is an underside to it that has often gone
unnoticed: camp’s simultaneous investment in dirt, vulgarity, the discarded and
rejected, the abject. This book explores how camp challenges what is arguably
the single most important and foundational cultural division, that between the
dirty and the clean. In refocusing camp as a phenomenon of the dark underside
as much as of the glamorous surface, the collection hopes to offer an import-
ant contribution to our understanding of the cultural politics and aesthetics
of camp.
Ingrid Hotz-Davies is Professor of English Literature and Gender Studies and
co-director of the Centre for Gender and Diversity Research at the University of
Tübingen, Germany.
Georg Vogt is Lecturer at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at
the University of Vienna, Austria.
Franziska Bergmann is Junior Professor of Modern German Literature at the
University of Trier, Germany.
Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.
102 Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture
Edited by László Munteán, Liedeke Plate, and Anneke Smelik
103 The Trauma Graphic Novel
Andrés Romero-Jódar
104 Politics, Media and Democracy in Australia
Public and Producer Perceptions of the Political Public Sphere
Brian McNair, Terry Flew, Stephen Harrington, and Adam Swift
105 Spectral Spaces and Hauntings
Edited by Christina Lee
106 Affective Sexual Pedagogies in Film and Television
Kyra Clarke
107 Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television
Edited by Jorge Marí
108 Screen Comedy and Online Audiences
Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore
109 Media Representations of Anti-Austerity Protests in the EU
Grievances, Identities and Agency
Edited by Tao Papaioannou and Suman Gupta
110 Media Practices, Social Movements, and Performativity
Transdisciplinary Approaches
Edited by Susanne Foellmer, Margreth Lünenborg, and
Christoph Raetzsch
111 The Dark Side of Camp Aesthetics
Queer Economies of Dirt, Dust and Patina
Edited by Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Georg Vogt, and
Franziska Bergmann
The Dark Side of Camp
Aesthetics
Queer Economies of Dirt, Dust
and Patina
Edited by Ingrid Hotz-Davies,
Georg Vogt, and
Franziska Bergmann
First published 2018
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Contents
Introduction: “The dirt doesn’t get any worse”:
The Alliance of Camp and Dirt 1
INGRID HOTz-DAVIES, GEORG VOGT AND
FRANzISkA BERGMANN
PART I
Upside – Downside – Upside 13
Camp’s Dialectic of Dirt and Beauty
1 The Jewel in the Gutter: Camp and the Incorporation of Dirt 15
INGRID HOTz-DAVIES
2 Camp Conquests: Deconstructing the Sublime in The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 26
CHRISTIAN LASSEN
3 “The odd and gory things in life”: Roy Raz’ Music
Videos and Camp Aesthetics 41
GERO BAUER
4 Camp as a Critical Strategy in And the Spring Comes 56
zAIRONG XIANG
PART II
Trash, Dirt and Leftovers: The Oscillations of Matter 71
5 The “Available” Joe Brainard 73
DAVID BERGMAN
vi Contents
6 Dirty Sound: The Camp Materialism of Blood Orgy of
the Leather Girls 88
kRISTINA PIA HOFER
7 Camping Out in the Detritus of the 1960s
Queer Underground: The “Moldy” Fantasies of Jack Smith 101
RONALD GREGG
8 A Camp Fairy Tale: The Dirty Class of John Waters’
Desperate Living 115
GIULIA PALLADINI
9 Malapropos Desires: The Cinematic Oikos of Grey Gardens 127
GEORG VOGT
PART III
Debris of the Past 145
10 Camp Patina: Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Transvestism
and Gründerzeit Furniture 147
FRANzISkA BERGMANN
11 Camping Indigeneity: The Queer Politics of Kent Monkman 156
ASTRID M. FELLNER
12 Innocence Unprotected: Camp in Yugoslavian Cinema 177
MILISAVA PETkOVIć
Notes on Contributors 193
Index 197
Introduction
“The dirt doesn’t get any worse”:
The Alliance of Camp and Dirt
Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Georg Vogt
and Franziska Bergmann
Quentin Crisp dedicated his life, often enough in the face of open and
potentially violent opposition, to the public display of his sense of self as
a feminine homosexual male, and this meant, in his own words, wearing
“makeup at a time when even on women wearing eye-shadow was sin-
ful” (Crisp 1), dyeing and growing his hair long, aiming for the smallest
shoe-size that he found still supportable, and in general devising and
sticking to a very carefully worked out sartorial style that can only be
described as camp even though Crisp himself distanced himself from the
term because he saw “camp” as a week-end masquerade in contrast to
his own identity-based notion of his own gender performance (Crisp 86).
At the same time, he is well known for his attitude to hygiene: “There
is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt
doesn’t get any worse” (Crisp 110). Lest we think that this is just talk,
in a 1970 documentary we see Crisp at home (Crisp and Mitchel 1970)
and indeed, the place is grimy enough to suggest that nothing has been
cleaned there well past the first four years (or that he is right, that after
four years the dirt can’t get any worse). Now it would be easy to read
this programmatic refusal to do any housework misogynistically, assum-
ing that even the effeminate Quentin Crisp found he needed to distance
himself from a thing he thought even more abject than his own place on
the gender scale: women and the work they do. He might be feminine in
the kinds of sartorial and possibly sexual tastes he professed, but at least
he was no mere hausfrau slaving over the toilet bowl with a brush. Such
an understanding would place Crisp’s beliefs on dirt in opposition to his
camp performativity, an incongruous element in an otherwise faultless
display of Crisp elegance.
Against this assumption, it is the contention of this volume that we
should see Crisp’s insistence on the presence of dirt in his life, and es-
pecially his public display of this fact, as an integral part of his camp
performativity: not the opposite of camp but rather one of its constituent
parts. In such a reading, the (in)famous scatological excesses of, for ex-
ample, the films of John Waters (which will also feature in this volume)
would not be seen as exceptions where camp’s reach is being extended
to hitherto unexplored regions. Rather, they would find their place in
2 Ingrid Hotz-Davies et al.
a continuum where camp is and always has been invested in a counter-
intuitive and culturally, in fact, prohibited fusion of the flamboyantly
pretty with everything that should be excluded from it as “dirt”: coarse
renderings of sexual acts and organs, the bodily functions of ingestion
and excretion and bodily fluids ubiquitously smeared around, but also
discarded layers of the past, embarrassingly “low” regions of popular
culture, remnants, left-overs, in general material to be signed over to the
dust-heap or the sewer.1 It is camp’s rather unexpected simultaneity of
glitter and grime, a conjunction that has been noted critically but hardly
ever pursued in detail, practically making it one of camp’s very own
open secrets, that is at the heart of the essays brought together in this
collection.
Current State of the Debate
Ever since Susan Sontag’s seminal essay – one that many of our contrib-
utors will also be drawing on – scholarship and criticism on camp has
been circling the question of what exactly it is and what it does. And also,
ever since that essay, especially in Sontag’s intuition that camp involves
some form of “failed seriousness,” there has been a sense that it hovers
uneasily between mutually incompatible registers: the serious and the
bathetic, the ironic and the naïve, the precious and the kitsch, and many
more. In this sense, our claim that it consists of components that meld
the precious to the filthy is not new. In fact, one may argue that much
of the heated debate over the political intent and relevance of camp2 is
intimately concerned with the question of how and to what end it in-
stalls and uses its key characteristic, the “incongruous juxtaposition”
of otherwise incompatible components of systems of binary opposition,
“for instance, juxtapositions of high and low status, youth and old age,
profane and sacred functions or symbols, cheap and expensive articles,
[etc.]” (Newton 103). At the heart of this “philosophy of transforma-
tions and incongruity” (Newton 102) certainly lies the transgression of
those divisions that are most heavily guarded, especially those between
masculinity and femininity and those between what is considered to be
clean and what impure, what safe and what dirty. In fact, camp’s trou-
bling of the male-female divide can itself be seen as part of that much
larger category of the dirty and the clean insofar as camp tends to draw
on and even embrace, much to the dismay of some feminist critics, a gro-
tesquely overstated, officially debased and disavowed version of feminin-
ity, thereby drawing attention to femininity’s generally troubling status
as, on the one hand, the necessary second part of a hierarchical binary,
and on the other hand, as that symbolic system’s always already abjected
or abjectable “other.”3
All this is well documented. And yet, in the critical discussion of
camp, we find a lot more of its glamour than its filth. Newton’s own
Introduction 3
exploration, for example, from which the above quotations were taken,
immediately turns to the example of an anecdote where “a homosexual
clothes designer made himself a beautiful Halloween ball gown” which,
when he wore it, was “very campy” while on a “wealthy society lady” to
whom he had sold it “it was just an expensive gown” (Newton 103–104).
Clearly, camp resides in the context rather than the gown, but also
clearly, this gown at least has no fringes of the imperfect about it. This
is, we contend, very much typical for most criticism of camp. There is an
acknowledgment that camp somehow breaches the unbreachable bound-
aries between the clean and the unclean, but on the other hand, it is only
sporadically that we find an engagement with the dirty side of it, most
notably, of course, in relation to the work of John Waters4 and Divine,
who bring the point home with unequivocal directness, and in relation
to less messy forms of dirtiness, for example in the shape of discarded
cultural models or layers of history. Both of these will also feature in this
volume, of course, but in focussing expressly on the dirty side of camp,
we want to considerably extend the horizon of how camp can be seen as
the privileged site of the glamorously dirty, the dirtily precious.
One example of how this was addressed earlier is Caryl Flinn’s highly
suggestive essay on “The Deaths of Camp” (1995), which does move
from an investigation of the merely nostalgic to the camp exhibition and
edgy celebration of the physicality of the decaying body of the (female)
camp icon. Here we find an exploration of “the aggression, ridicule,
and cruelty of camp practice and commentary” (Flinn 438) that does
not shy away from either camp’s troubling embrace of abjected forms
of femininity, or from its gleeful dwelling on figures of decay and the
(Bakhtinian) grotesque body. At the same time, however, the essay is
mainly theoretically angled and we look in vain for anything like a
“close” reading of these manifestations. But this is precisely what is at
stake: not dirt in the abstract, but dirt in the specific form in which it is
deployed in concrete articulations of camp. This is where the strength of
the contributions in this volume lies: in the painstakingly close readings
they afford the issue of camp’s precious dirtiness, readings that taken
together do provide a fuller account of a variety of uses both past and
present. At the same time, the contributors to this volume considerably
extend the horizon of the national contexts within which one may suit-
ably speak of camp. The essays collected here range from traditional
landmarks of camp like Ronald Firbank’s novels, Priscillia, Queen of
the Desert, and the films of John Waters, to filmic work by Chinese and
Serbian practitioners of the art, works that we contend can only be fully
understood if we take camp’s dialectic of the dirty and the precious as
the key to their understanding.
While this volume’s focus on the filthy side of camp’s glamorous ex-
cesses and its alliance with the filthy, abject and obsolete has not yet
received the systematic and close attention it deserves, camp itself has
