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“Camp,” Mae West told Playboy, “is the kinda comedy where they imitate me.” But what was West doing, if not camp itself? Guilty Pleasures puts women back into the history of camp, a story long confined to gay male practice. Emphasizing the distinctive roles women have played as producers and consumers of camp, Pamela Robertson links her subject to feminist discussions of gender parody, performance, and spectatorship. Her book offers a heady tour of social and cultural criticism at its most interesting, and American culture at its most flamboyant.
Robertson grounds her theoretical discussion of female performance and spectatorship in detailed studies of figures such as Mae West, Joan Crawford, and Madonna. She locates these figures in turn within a tradition of feminist camp—a female form of aestheticism related to masquerade and rooted in burlesque, parallel to but different from gay male camp. Through analyses of films from Gold Diggers of 1933 to Johnny Guitar, as well as video and television, Robertson shows how the gold digger is to feminist camp what the dandy is to gay male camp—its original personification and defining voice. Set against a backdrop of social history, her analysis demonstrates that feminist camp flourishes during periods of antifeminist backlash in America, and that it reflects a working-class sensibility particularly attuned to changing attitudes toward women’s work and sexuality.
Appealing to a wide range of scholars spanning the fields of film and mass culture, feminism, gay/lesbian/queer studies, and cultural studies, Guilty Pleasures will also attract an audience of general readers interested in camp and popular culture.

With their lavish costumes and sets, ebullient song and dance numbers, and iconic movie stars, the musicals that mgm produced in the 1940s seem today to epitomize camp. Yet they were originally made to appeal to broad, mainstream audiences. In this lively, nuanced, and provocative reassessment of the mgm musical, Steven Cohan argues that this seeming incongruity—between the camp value and popular appreciation of these musicals—is not as contradictory as it seems. He demonstrates that the films’ extravagance and queerness were deliberate elements and keys to their popular success.

In addition to examining the spectatorship of the mgm musical, Cohan investigates the genre’s production and marketing, paying particular attention to the studio’s employment of a largely gay workforce of artists and craftspeople. He reflects on the role of the female stars—including Judy Garland, Debbie Reynolds, Esther Williams, and Lena Horne—and he explores the complex relationship between Gene Kelley’s dancing and his masculine persona. Cohan looks at how, in the decades since the 1950s, the marketing and reception of the mgm musical have negotiated the more publicly recognized camp value attached to the films. He considers the status of Singin’ in the Rain as perhaps the first film to be widely embraced as camp; the repackaging of the musicals as nostalgia and camp in the That’s Entertainment! series as well as on home video and cable; and the debates about Garland’s legendary gay appeal among her fans on the Internet. By establishing camp as central to the genre, Incongruous Entertainment provides a new way of looking at the musical.

The rhetorical power of camp in American popular culture

Making Camp examines the rhetoric and conventions of “camp” in contemporary popular culture and the ways it both subverts and is co-opted by mainstream ideology and discourse, especially as it pertains to issues of gender and sexuality.

 

Camp has long been aligned with gay male culture and performance. Helene Shugart and Catherine Waggoner contend that camp in the popular media—whether visual, dramatic, or musical—is equally pervasive. While aesthetic and performative in nature, the authors argue that camp—female camp in particular—is also highly political and that conventions of femininity and female sexuality are negotiated, if not always resisted, in female camp performances. 

 

The authors draw on a wide range of references and figures representative of camp, both historical and contemporary, in presenting the evolution of female camp and its negotiation of gender, political, and identity issues. Antecedents such as Joan Crawford, Wonder Woman, Marilyn Monroe, and Pam Grier are discussed as archetypes for contemporary popular culture figures—Macy Gray, Gwen Stefani, and the characters of Xena from Xena: Warrior Princess and Karen Walker from Will & Grace.

 

Shugart and Waggoner find that these and other female camp performances are liminal, occupying a space between conformity and resistance. The result is a study that demonstrates the prevalence of camp as a historical and evolving phenomenon in popular culture, its role as a site for the rupture of conventional notions of gender and sexuality, and how camp is configured in mainstream culture and in ways that resist its being reduced to merely a style.

What does camp have to do with capitalism? How have queer men created a philosophy of commodity culture? Why is cinema central to camp? With chapters on the films of Vincente Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and John Waters, Working Like a Homosexual responds to these questions by arguing that post–World War II gay male subcultures have fostered their own ways not only of consuming mass culture but of producing it as well.

With a special emphasis on the tensions between high and low forms of culture and between good and bad taste, Matthew Tinkcom offers a new vision of queer politics and aesthetics that is critically engaged with Marxist theories of capitalist production. He argues that camp—while embracing the cheap, the scorned, the gaudy, the tasteless, and what Warhol called “the leftovers” of artistic production—is a mode of intellectual production and a critical philosophy of modernity as much as it is an expression of a dissident sex/gender difference. From Minnelli’s musicals and the “everyday glamour” of Warhol’s films to Anger’s experimental films and Waters’s “trash aesthetic,” Tinkcom demonstrates how camp allowed these gay men to design their own relationship to labor and to history in a way that protected them from censure even as they struggled to forge a role for themselves within a system of “value” that failed to recognize them.