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Course Description

Summary

Sometimes seen as gaudy, perverse or excessive, camp is a sophisticated and consummately theatrical style, doubly viewing life as theater and gender as performance. Camp’s essence “is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” as Susan Sontag argued in her epochal and controversial 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” Developing historically as a language of the closet, the camp aesthetic has long since migrated from homosexual communities to the mainstream, even as it remains rooted in gay sensibilities (and is channeled by modern pop queens like Lady Gaga and Janelle Monáe). Starting in the late nineteenth century and traversing into our current “extreme camp moment” (as described by Andrew Bolton), this course will explore a varied canon of theater and film stemming from the camp imagination: florid, baroque, irreverent, and absurd, and often intersecting with drag performance. We will study theatrical work by playwrights such as Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, and Charles Busch; influential theaters like the Caffe Cino, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and Split Britches; and creator-performers of feminist camp such as Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, and Eartha Kitt. We also examine films by Jean Cocteau, Douglas Sirk, John Waters, Ken Russell, Pedro Almodóvar, and Anna Biller, among others. As students explore these theatrical and cinematic works, they will learn about camp’s shifting dualities of meaning: as a sensibility of both irony and affection; as object and gaze; as both art-for-art's-sake style and subversive political tool that—in the words of Charles Ludlam—“turns values upside down.”