ABSTRACT
A camp is an integral component of cult films, and some well-loved cult film favorites contain campy character behaviors and camp imagery, including King Kong, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Big Lebowski, and Black Swan. Cult movie fans often have a taste for camp, and they are the tastemakers who make camp films into cult favorites. The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Many “camp cult films” are indeed politically subversive. These films often use their camp characters and iconography tacitly or overtly to endorse gender and sexual minorities and to oppose compulsory heterosexuality. One of the main critiques of Susan Sontag’s article is that she changed camp, a “basically homosexual mode of self-performance into a de-gayified taste”. A camp film harnesses the political, subversive power of camp for a project of self-affirmation and self-determination.
