| Dec. 28th, 2004 @ 07:15 pm sweet cynicism |
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50,000 humans died in south Asian this weekend. And, somehow it seems wrong to focus on the death of just one person….
Susan Sontag died today. Her essay Notes on Camp, published 40 years ago, defined an aesthetic, sensibility and attitude. Camp came to define in many ways the oppositional culture of the queer community. Camp wasn’t a political statement but it was resistant and subversive. As Sontage said camp is a solvent of morality.
It glorified the vernacular and artifice not the stodgy, sterile, homogenized, modernist aesthetic of the middle class. Camp praised what was marginal, loud, passionate, ostentatious and honest. It was the sensibility of the urban and working class gay liberation movement. As Sontag noted, camp was epicene. It challenged normative assumption not only of style but of masculinity and even femininity. Camp was an unconscious quality. It couldn’t be contrived or self-conscious. Camp laughed at a hetero-normative culture that was dishonest. Camp was not a negation it was an alternative. It was not taste as distaste.
Camp leaves us lessons of how an oppositional sensibility can develop and thrive. This is not to unduly praise camp or the queer aesthetic. It is to take a moment and remember a woman that believed in human dignity and liberation. Something that is very important in the context of this weekend’s events.
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.
Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character." . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a camp," they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling. |
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