ABSTRACT
Genitals are prominently exposed in the realm of the bejewelled and festive, the crassly material in the vicinity of the sacred, and the vulgar in the midst of cultural refinement. The cover illustration of Gary McMahon's Camp in Literature shows an exceedingly thin young man with very elongated legs, no crotch to speak of, and flowing hair. Critics of camp have long been troubled by the presence of a seamy underside to it in that they have acknowledged that while it is frivolous, stylized, aestheticised and all that, there is simultaneously a presence of the low, the bitchy, the downright nasty, the vulgar, the blasphemous, the decidedly polluted rather than the pure. The name of Mary Douglas is most closely associated with the idea that human communities are structured by foundational distinctions between dirt and non-dirt. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.
