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Camp is defined by incongruity, “something so bad, it's good,” as Susan Sontag has claimed in “Notes on Camp” in 1954. Camp is also a common buzzword in breezy essays about popular culture, at the same time as its histories and theories are fiercely debated among queer scholars. These scholars discuss whether camp is purely a matter of over-the-top aesthetics or a form of political intervention, whether it is exclusively the purview of gay men or whether it is a strategy open to all sexual minorities, whether camp requires the closet and repression or can thrive in progressive political and media contexts, too.
In this seminar, we will focus on camp’s incarnation on various screens – movie, television, digital – to address these questions. Tracing the development of camp scholarship from the 1960s onwards and camp’s rise to prominence in US popular culture from film musicals to pop divas and RuPaul’s Drag Race, students will acquire the necessary scholarly terminology and develop the analytical skills to make informed arguments about camp’s role in US American screen media.
By actively participating in this seminar, students have the opportunity to engage with current scholarship in cultural studies and hone their competencies in formulating ideas about the intersections of the aesthetics and politics of representation. |
