Notes On "Camp"

December 23, 2011

sl33pcr33p:

saltmarshhag:

sonofapritch:

chikuwaq:

By Susan Sontag, 1964.

I don’t have any particular affinity or strong feeling for Sontag one way or the other, but because it’s a seminal text I feel compelled to reblog this. I think #23 is my favorite.

55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn’t propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

dasfdkfdsk i love this essayyy

Even though this essay isn’t perfect it’s obviously seminal* and everything. Besides, it’s apparently Open Access Week at feminist film. Our holiday gift to you! Now do your homework.

*”seminal” is my favorite antifeminist academic word and even though all our women’s studies professors tell us that when we say something like “seminal feminist text” we are submitting to a patriarchal and sexist notion of male origin/authorship and genius (which is true) but I like to think of “seminal feminism” as a pretty poetically ironic** phrase/an act of radical feminist semiotic/lexical theft and also semen is hilarious

**”Blasphemy is not apostasy.*** Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method.” - Donna Haraway

***I can’t remember where “stealing from/destroying the father” falls between blasphemy and apostasy, between faithful denial, disaffiliation, and absolute fucking patricide; but I know that this is a useful framework for discussing why we like bad television even though it is Patriarchy.

Looks like y’all have your feminist theory work cut out for you. Merry Xmas.