Camp is an aesthetic and sensibility that regards something as appealing or amusing because of its heightened level of artifice, affectation, and exaggeration, especially when there is also a playful or ironic element."Camp, Adj., Sense 3." Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1024137863. Camp aesthetics often disrupted modernist understandings of high art by inverting traditional aesthetic judgements of beauty, value, and taste, and inviting a different kind of aesthetic engagement.
Camp art is distinct from but often confused with kitsch. The big difference between camp and kitsch is mainly that camp is aware of its artificiality and pretense."Der grosse Unterschied zwischen Camp und Kitsch liegt vor allem darin, dass sich Camp seiner Künstlichkeit und Aufgesetztheit bewusst ist." (Noah Pilloud, What's Camp got to do with Kitsch? (bärner studizytig, Studentischer Presseverein an der Universität Bern, 2022-12-22)
The American writer Susan Sontag emphasized camp's key elements as embracing frivolity, excess, and artifice. Art historian David Carrier notes that, despite these qualities, it is also subversive and political. Camp may be sophisticated, but subjects deemed camp may also be perceived as being dated, offensive, or in bad taste.Babuscio (1993, 20), Feil (2005, 478), Morrill (1994, 110), Shugart and Waggoner (2008, 33), and Van Leer (1995) Camp may also be divided into high and low camp (i.e., camp arising from serious versus unserious matters), or alternatively into naive and deliberate camp (i.e., accidental versus intentional camp).Dansky, Steven F. "On the persistence of camp." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 20, no. 2 (2013): 15-19. While author and academic Moe Meyer defines camp as a form of "queer parody", journalist Jack Babuscio argues it is a specific "gay sensibility" which has often been "misused to signify the trivial, superficial, and 'queer'".Babuscio, J., 1999. The cinema of camp (aka camp and the gay sensibility). Camp: Queer aesthetics and the performing subject: A reader, pp.117-35.
Camp, as a particular style or set of mannerisms, may serve as a marker of identity, such as in camp talk, which expresses a gay male identity. This camp style is associated with incongruity or juxtaposition, theatricality, and humour, and has appeared in film, cabaret, and pantomime. Both high and low forms of culture may be camp, but where high art incorporates beauty and value, camp often strives to be lively, audacious, and dynamic. Camp can also be tragic, sentimental, and ironic, finding beauty or black comedy even in suffering. The humour of camp, as well as its frivolity, may serve as a coping mechanism to deal with intolerance and marginalization in society.
Origins and development The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word camp was used as a verb since at least the 1500s. Writer Bruce Rodgers also traces the term camp to the 16th century, specifically to British theatre, where it referred to men dressed as women (drag). Camp may have derived from the gay slang Polari,"camp". Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. which borrowed the term from the Italian campare, "to live, to get by", or from the French term se camper, meaning "to pose in an exaggerated fashion".Entry "camper" , in: Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, ninth edition (1992). "2. Fam: Placer avec fermeté, avec insolence ou selon ses aises.] Il me parlait, le chapeau campé sur la tête. Surtout pron. Se camper solidement dans son fauteuil. Se camper à la meilleure place. Il se campa devant son adversaire. 3. En parlant d'un acteur, d'un artiste: Figurer avec force et relief. Camper son personage sur la scène. Camper une figure dans un tableau, des caractères dans un roman." (Familiar: To assume a defiant, insolent or devil-may-care attitude. Theatre: To perform with forcefulness and exaggeration; to overact; To impose one's character assertively into a scene; to upstage.) A similar sense is also found in French theatre in Molière's 1671 play Les Fourberies de Scapin.
Writer Susan Sontag and linguist Paul Baker place the "soundest starting point" for the modern sense of camp, meaning flamboyant, as the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Writer Anthony Burgess theorized it may have emerged from the primary sense of the word, as in a military encampment, where gay men would subtly advertise their sexuality in all-male company through a particular style and affectation.
By 1870, British crossdresser Frederick Park referred to his "campish undertakings" in a letter produced in evidence at his examination before a magistrate at Bow Street, London, on suspicion of illegal homosexual acts; the letter does not make clear what these were.'My "campish undertakings" are not meeting with the success they deserve. Whatever I do seems to get me into hot water somewhere;...':The Times(London), 30 May 1870, p. 13, 'The Men in Women's Clothes'
In 1874, the Manchester Courier printed the description of a ticket for a Salford drag ball, called the "Queen of Camp" ball.Rictor Norton (Ed.), "Queen of Camp, 1874", Homosexuality in Nineteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, 4 December 2018; expanded 30 October 2019 http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1874camp.htm According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definitive use of camp as an adjective in print occurred in the writing of J. R. Ware in 1909.Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "camp (adj. & n.5)", December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7181450905. In the UK's pre-liberation gay culture, the term was used as a general description of the aesthetic choices and behavior of working-class gay men.Esther Newton (1978): Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America, University of Chicago Press. . The term camp is still sometimes used in the UK to describe a gay man who is perceived as outwardly garish or eccentric, such as Matt Lucas's character Daffyd Thomas in the English comedy skit show Little Britain.
From the mid-1940s, numerous representations of camp speech or camp talk, as used by gay men, began to appear in print in America, France and the United Kingdom. By the mid-1970s, camp was defined by the college edition of Webster's New World Dictionary as "banality, mediocrity, artifice, [and] ostentation ... so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appeal".Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, 1976 edition, sense 6, [Slang, orig., homosexual jargon, Americanism] banality, mediocrity, artifice, ostentation, etc. so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appealIn America, the concept of camp was also described by Christopher Isherwood in 1954 in his novel The World in the Evening, and later by Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay 'Notes on "Camp"'. Two key components of the "radical spectacle of camp" were originally feminine performances: swish and drag. With swish's extensive use of superlatives and drag's exaggerated female impersonation, camp occasionally became extended to all things "over the top", including women posing as female impersonators (faux queens) such as Carmen Miranda, while also retaining its meaning as "queer parody".Moe Meyer (2010): An Archaeology of Posing: Essays on Camp, Drag, and Sexuality, Macater Press, .Moe Meyer (2011): The Politics and Poetics of Camp, Routledge, .Cohan, Steven. Incongruous entertainment: Camp, cultural value, and the MGM musical. Duke University Press, 2005. p.11, 274.
In her study of drag, cultural anthropologist Esther Newton argued that camp has three major features: incongruity, theatricality, and humour. In his 1984, writer George Melly argued that the camp sensibility allowed almost anything to be seen as a camp, and that this was a way of projecting one's own queer sensibility upon the world to therefore reclaim it. Conversely, he argued, the biggest threat to camp wasn't heterosexuals ("who tend to accept it, although usually at a fairly broad and superficial level"), but "a neo-puritanism, a received conformism" emerging among gay people at the time.
The rise of postmodernism and queer theory has made camp a common perspective on aesthetics, not solely identified with gay men.Morrill, Cynthia. "Revamping the Gay Sensibility: Queer Camp and dyke noir." In Moe Meyer (ed). The Politics and Poetics of Camp. Routledge, 2005. p.94. Women (especially lesbians), trans people, and people of colour have described new forms of camp, such as dyke camp (including subcategories such as cubana and high-femme dyke camp) and queer of color camp.
Camp has also been a subject of psychoanalytic theory, where it has been portrayed as a form of performance or masquerade. Scholar Cynthia Morrill has argued that the conception of "camp-as-masquerade" ignores the specifically queer sensibility of camp by interrogating queerness through a heteronormative lens (i.e., solely in relation to the symbol of the phallus).
Camp has become prevalent in mainstream popular entertainment such as theatre, cinema, TV and music. In reaction to its popularisation, critics such as Jack Babuscio and Jeanette Cooperman have argued that camp requires the alienation of LGBTQ+ people from the mainstream to maintain its edge. Poet and scholar Chris Philpot, like Cooperman, nevertheless argues that camp can still be a viable "survival strategy" for marginalized queer people, so long as it evolves with them. Curator Andrew Bolton, after his show Camp: Notes on Fashion at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, explains that context is also important for understanding the power and relevance of camp: "Camp tends to come to the fore through moments of social and political instability, when our society is deeply polarized. The 1960s is one such moment, as were the 1980s, so, too, are the times in which we're living."
Camp in contemporary culture Fashion Patrick Kelly's designs have been described as camp and "Radical Cheek" for his ironic use of bold colours, antiquated or incongruous styles, and reclaimed racist symbols. He designed a banana dress in reference to Josephine Baker and dedicated a whole collection to her. He used mismatched buttons when creating his own take on a Chanel suit. By the time he died in 1990, he had dressed noted queer icons such as Grace Jones and Isabella Rossellini. His grave is marked with a stylized golliwog—a reclaimed symbol for his label—featuring big gold earrings and bright red lips.The 2019 Met Gala's theme was Camp: Notes on Fashion, co-chaired by Anna Wintour, Serena Williams, Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, and Alessandro Michele. The show featured tributes to queer and camp figures, including a bronze statue of the Vatican's Belvedere Antinous, portraits of Louis XIV and Oscar Wilde, and celebrations of Black and Latinx ball culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Dapper Dan—whose luxurious fashion has been credited with camping up the hip-hop genre—designed seven camp outfits for Gucci, worn at the gala by 21 Savage, Omari Hardwick, Regina Hall, Bevy Smith, Ashley Graham and Karlie Kloss (he wore the seventh).
Lady Gaga's entrance took 16 minutes, as she arrived to the gala alongside an entourage of five dancers carrying umbrellas, a make up artist, and a personal photographer to snap pictures of Gaga's poses. Gaga arrived in a hot pink Brandon Maxwell gown with a 25-foot train and went through a series of four "reveals," paying homage to drag culture, debuting a new outfit each time, until reaching her final look: a bra and underwear with fishnets and platform heels. Other notable ensembles included Katy Perry wearing a gown that looked like a chandelier, designed by Moschino; and Kacey Musgraves appearing as a life-size Barbie, also by Moschino.
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