was not camp, but her wearing it and thinking it embodied camp was itself camp). The confusion as a marker of quality runs rampant on the Internet, where every cultural artifact can be declared one or the other, and I confess it drives me absolutely up the wall when something that is sowith me that at least “distinctions must be made,” as “the contemporary tendency of the gay sensibility to allow itself to be thoroughly co-opted, its mystery, and therefore its power, hopelessly diffused.
There is some real irritation here, insofar as I often feel the reflex to bandy the word about but not really think about its implications or history, which is reflective of a contemporary tendency to not think about a broader history of queer culture and art, especially in juxtaposition to heteronormative culture.
Everything is so serious on the Internet, so even debating about the frivolity of camp loses that exact thrill. At least, so says my therapist. Twitter, which is a prime example of philosopher and media theorist Theodor Adorno’s nightmare and a peek into a world subsumed by an economic paradigm that makes everything and nothing exaggerated and subversive, is not the most useful apparatus to debate the semiotics of camp.
Then again, all this hand wringing I’m doing about calling things camp, or not calling them camp…could that be the most camp thing of all? Does it matter who calls what camp and if they’re right? If camp is a term rooted in excess, artifice, and too muchness, does that mean its misuse and conflation with other terms to articulate style or performance makes the Ouroboros-esque loop-de-loop back to being camp...
Or maybe the most camp thing, which is to say the most heightened, unfit, mawkishly tasteless, frivolous thing, is to care about how people use camp in the first place—especially in a cultural landscape where everything and nothing can be said to be everything and nothing at once.
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