A Performative Presidency

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things-being-what-they-are-not. Camp sees everything in quotation marks—understand “Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”

—Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964)

In her oft-cited 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag proffers a set of nimble axioms for understanding a sensibility at once esoteric and unnatural, “a way of looking at things” that is “something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”¹ Artifice, aestheticism, stylization, texture, sensuousness, and extravagance are some of the expressive qualities of this sensibility predicated on taste and cultivation. This sensibility is not, however, ostensibly gay: “Even though homosexuals have been its vanguard, Camp taste is much more than homosexual taste.”² For casting such an unforgivable aspersion, Sontag was dragged out for phobically dehomosexualizing camp by outraged queens and critics. This forty-year-old debate and its urbane contours, I might add, provide a historical context to the fuzzy crossings of homo/faux-mo and gay/metrosexual, and indicate that the discourse of camp has for many years been male-dominated. But the open secret is that dyke camp, ethnic camp, transgender and queer of color camp are all out there being “off,” seeing “everything in quotation marks,” and like Lisa Duggan’s presidential address, doing “something extraordinary . . . in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous.”³

And so we must begin with some sapphic slasher stylization: Duggan’s fierce killer heels from Chie Mihara. Have they got some moves to make on her Miharally heightened six-foot-two. If these shoes with black retro-velvet straps and sweet polka dots are made for walking, they sure are going to be walking all over the false orthodoxies, affects, and charges of a masculinist triptych—new liberalspeak, heteropatriarchal nonchalance, and executive ease—trying to prevail over progressive movements. Moreover, as good tone and civility become the new planetary vulgate of neoliberal, administrative regimes, a pernicious cover for protecting institutionally validated information over all other forms of knowledge, what would a radical, leftist, and queer response look like? How might this response be organized so as to expose the violence of the code of civility, the absurdity of its execution, and its blatant collusion in administrative capitalism, state racism, and neocolonial rule?

The answer-in-progress came in the form of a wonderfully unconventional presidential address (and dress—a red Betty Page!) by Duggan that relinquished earnest erudition or ego overload for style as critique and sentiment as analytic. This queer and feminist epistemology was retooled with color, wildness, and fabulosity. Sartorial gossip had been circulating for months on social media—what will she wear? A Vera Wang wedding gown? A Ted Talk power suit? The outfit and the speech provided a gleeful break in presidential propriety and took on the contours of a critical response as queer performance. High-femme dyke camp, a radical queer hermeneutic, a shifting proxemics of fun, and a sense of the collective were thus all brought to bear as elements of transformational Americanist critique in her address. In the spirit of engaging Duggan’s indecorous performance and her call to think and do otherwise, my pithy and performative response will try to extend the teeth of her analysis with a bit more tongue, no holds barred.

Fun, Camp, Hermeneutics, Collective

On first blush, Duggan’s high-femme dyke performance and her radical queer hermeneutic appear to participate in the camp sensibility Sontag speaks of with a performance of failed seriousness and extravagant sincerity. Duggan has, after all, called on “[her] most vigorous and vivid correspondents to send [her] more” insults so as to build a “silly archive” of BDS love letters. Her practice, however, could not be farther from the “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical” tendencies of camp intrinsic to white, middle-class, gay male subculture.⁴ Rather, it is aligned more closely with José Muñoz’s formulation of cubana dyke camp, drawn primarily from the work of sister artists Ela...