Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives marks 50 years of writing and cultural production on the phenomenon of camp since Susan Sontag's 1964 cornerstone essay "Notes on `Camp'." It provides cutting-edge theory and understanding on ways to read and interpret camp through a collection of essays from historical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives. It includes varied subject areas including camp icons, stylistics periods, and important and representative texts from television, film, and literature. These essays create a scholarly conversation that understands camp as not only signifier or aesthetic but also a language, mode, and style that goes beyond its initial linguistic and semiotic guise. The contributors, representing a diverse group of established and rising scholars, explore camp as a largely queer genre that includes varying modes of understanding of desire and of the self outside a hegemonic model of heteronormativity.
Contents Introduction: Some Notes on "Notes" Brian M. Peters and Bruce E. Drushel Part I: Camp in Literature Chapter 1: Voyage to Camp Lesbos: Pulp Fiction and the Shameful Lesbian "Sicko" Barbara Jane Brickman Chapter 2: Queer Ideology in the Novels of Joe Keenan Robert Kellerman Part II: Camp and Celebrity Chapter 3: Authentic Artifice: Dolly Parton's Negotiations of Sontag's Camp Emily Deering Crosby and Hannah Lynn Chapter 4: Diva Worship as a Queer Poetics of Waste in D. Gilson's Brit Lit Chris Philpot Chapter 5: Camping in the Closet: Susan Sontag and the Construction of the Celebrity Persona Tim Cusack Part III: Camp on Television Chapter 6: Vicious Camp: Performance, Artifice, and Incongruity Bruce E. Drushel Chapter 7: "Excuse My Beauty!": Camp Referencing and Memory Activation on RuPaul's Drag Race" Carl Schottmiller Part IV: Camp and Place Chapter 8: Everything is Bigger in Texas: Camp and the Queerly Normal in Greater Tuna Elizabeth M. Melton Chapter 9: "I's Got to Get Me Some Edu-cation!": Class and the Camp-Horror Nexus in House of 1000 Corpses Olivia Oliver-Hopkins Part V: Camp and Aesthetics Chapter 10: Batman and the Aesthetics of Camp Lauren Levitt Chapter 11: Prison Camp: Aesthetic Style as Social Practice in Orange Is the New Black Thomas Piontek Chapter 12: Camp, Androgyny, and 1990: The Post-Gendered Spaces of Vogue Brian M. Peters Chapter 13: Pretty is Not Enough: Notes for a Grotesque Camp Michael V. Perez About the Editors and Contributors
