ABSTRACT
Some recent postmodernist cultural theories have claimed subcultural lesbian and gay Camp as a model for a particular type of gender performance analyzed through the tropics of masquerade theory.1 Critics link the material performative practices of lesbian and gay “role playing” (i.e. lesbian butch-femme relations, gay leathermen and drag queens) with the feminist description of psychoanalytic theories about female masquerade and its twisted sister, female mimicry.2 This effort to circumscribe Camp as a type of masquerade has elided earlier critiques which sought to define Camp as a particular activity or strategy that signaled the material form of a twentieth-century “gay sensibility.”3 To some extent, these earlier discussions were intended to mark the specificity of lesbian and gay identity for the purposes of unifying the then emergent lesbian and gay civil rights movement. By contrast, the current discussion tends to focus upon Camp as a type of performance. Questions about what defines Camp have been reformulated into questions regarding the execution of Camp. In large part, the feminist critique of Camp has answered the question of “how Camp is done” through an analysis that combines psychoanalytic theory with a discussion of the operations of parody, pastiche, and irony.4 As a consequence of similar discussions about the operations of postmodernism, Camp has become appreciated as an eminently postmodern form. Indeed, Camp has become recognized as an example par excellence of a postmodern denaturalization of gender categories.
