Dodi, Simon (2021) Camp Can Be Such a Drag: Approaches to Understanding Camp and Drag. In: Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2. Methuen Drama.

Abstract

This chapter considers why drag performance is sometimes camp. It addresses how drag and camp have a closely related history, and when trying to unpick the modern development of these terms, it appears they are quite complicated. Following US-centric attitudes to analysing camp in drag performance, this chapter addresses further perspectives and new approaches to interpreting drag performance as camp.

Initially, this chapter reviews the complexities of camp as a culturally situated and nationally determined concept. Most of the early scholarship on camp emerges within the field of popular culture in the United States, addressed as a phenomenon that reveals itself through the aesthetics of artifice and exaggerated frivolity (Sontag, 1964). In Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972), Newton even draws a comparison to drag performance being camp alongside Susan Sontag’s (1964) early musings. Newton identifies that ‘The Camp’ is a performed role in drag performance that involves incongruity, theatricality and humour. However, the performers in this text reject Sontag as she omits the historical lineage of camp within the drag and queer community. Following this, the development of camp and drag alongside each other runs slim, until Moe Meyer reclaims camp as the process of queer parody (1994). By reading the use of drag by queer political groups in the late-1980s, Meyer develops a theory of camp as a strategy for political activism.

This chapter considers less recognised historical understandings of camp that can be used to address drag performance. Drawing on Matt Houlbrook's Queer London (2005), working-class effeminate men understood camp practice as a lived experience, which can be seen the work of live drag performance with its witty rhetoric and bitchy demeanour, such as Newton’s early scholarship on ‘The Camp’ role.

Overall, this chapter argues that there is a transmission of camp energy seen in the bodies and repertoire of drag performers embodying a queer (or camp) subjective experience. To address this dynamic by looking at the complex layers of pop cultural expressions happening in camp drag performance and the bodies of the performers channelling such spirit. Camp drag performance repeats and eschews dominant and normative images from mainstream popular culture. However, the recognition of this comes from a queer subjective viewpoint, where drag is the form and camp is the function (or strategy). Read as a queer performative palimpsest; camp drag performance functions through parody, reappropriation and excessive over-identification with low-brow forms of culture