Dodi, Simon (2024) Lip-synching for (some) life: researching queer/camp bodies through practice-based methods. In: Researching Popular Entertainment. Routledge.

Abstract

This chapter addresses how the queer method of lip-synch performance has been utilised as an embodied practice-as-research method for researching popular camp bodies of the past; such as Kenneth Williams, Larry Grayson and Frankie Howerd. As a self-reflective approach to embodied queer historiography, the lip-synch method enables a way to articulate complex queer subjectivities, such as camp, that are often expressed as an aesthetic of artifice and subject of frivolity (Sontag, 1964). By resisting such phobic tropes that view camp as insipid and artificial, this chapter address how I used lip-synching as a form of reenactment by way of three bodily markers: the mouth, gesture and interaction with objects. This chapter presents an overview of these markers and discusses how such a fragmentary approach to embodiment and historiography builds upon established approaches to theories cross-historical connections of queerness (Dinshaw, 1999; Freeman, 2010).