Camp Studies, and Queer Theory, and drag queens, oh my! camping the academy, queer methods, and the potentiality of camp

Abstract

In all seriousness, camp is not dead. But since Susan Sontag's Notes of 'Camp', academic attention to, and interest in the often recognisable (but painfully ineffable) Camp/camp has never been sustained. Each moment marked by a camp death. The focus of this dissertation is returning to these dead-ends and cul-de-sacs of thought, to map camp's enduring potential in straightie-time. Recuperating Sontag's capping of camp as apolitical, unserious, and unintentional, to recognise its affective world-making and technologies of survival by alternative existence. Not a 'revolutionary' full circle returning to where we started, or a 'cultural turn' that's turning, turning, turning towards progress. More like camp has turned/curdled, and in true camp fashion we're throwing some cheap perfume and glitter over it so we can keep partying on and performing. In mapping camp's deaths and reconfigurations, I offer camp's doubleness, resourcefulness, and its unburdening of liveness. Theorising what camp is, can be, and does. In doing so, this thesis unpacks camp's critical utility, while demonstrating its utility as method and critical lens. Researching camp, while doing camp research. Drawing on interviews with draggers (drag artists), not as empirical data to be analysed, but as a vanguard community of camp and street professionals; on Cultural, Performance, Art, and Queer Studies literature, materials, and mediums; and other silly texts, like children's animated programme Pinky Malinky, drag competition RuPaul's Drag Race, and les-bi-trans-queer BDSM practices. This thesis, as a generative and recuperative reconfiguration of camp, is an interdisciplinary pitching of tents across camp sites that demonstrates camp's potential to be and do social, political, and pedagogical work in Camp Studies.