ABSTRACT
I begin with Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” not because Sontag’s influential description of Camp as apolitical has not already been sufficiently criticized as inadequate, but because I want to play out the epistemological prejudices upon which her notes depend.1 In this essay, I situate the development of modern male homosexual identity within early modern debates about the nature of self and the validity of the visual as the basis of knowledge about identity. Sontag placed the origin of Camp in late-seventeenth-and earlyeighteenth-century Europe. I will attempt to show, in the case of England, why this might be so. During this period, a model of the self as unique and continuous in the identity of its actions across time and space displaced earlier notions of the self as performative, improvisational, and discontinuous. Residual elements of this performative self were transcoded as markers of homosexuality, making them available for appropriation by an early homosexual subculture like the mollies, which became visible in London around 1700. Sontag took for granted the eighteenth century’s polarization of surface and content, artifice and nature, frivolity and sincerity. Her description of the basic Camp maneuver as the blocking out or emptying a thing of its content (110) depends on a differentiation of surface and depth that was subject to a great deal of hostile interrogation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The proto-camp gestures developed by men like the mollies may have actually worked to displace the epistemological clarity of dominant codes of identity. The early modern origins of English Camp
may actually have been well-informed political practices deploying the surfaces of the body oppositionally against the accruing bourgeois capacity for shaping and controlling the subject through his or her interiority.
