erg, 2022

camp prescriptions: how to not turn into a teapot

is my masther’s thesis from erg - école de recherche graphique. 

Through its pages, I attempt to highlight how certain social, cultural and artistic practices produce a Camp effect, and how Camp becomes a practice in itself; one that holds the potential to creatively transform contemporary neoliberal queerness, whose return to essentialism, property, security and over-consumption marks at best, a semantic emptying of the word, and at worse, a growing state of complicity with capitalist politics. Instead of focusing on coming up with a clear definition of Camp (a task which, in any case, seems doomed to fail: “Trying to define camp is like attempting to sit in the corner of a circular room”, Finch), it proposes to ask two more important question: what does Camp do, and what can we do with it? I dive into this inquiry in four chapters:

The first, “gay subjectivity”, is a historiography of camp that contradicts both of Sontag’s claims that Camp’s relation to homosexuals is unimportant and merely coincidental, and that Camp is apolitical. It engages with different conceptions of Camp: as an aesthetic and a sensibility (Sontag), as a gay sensibility (Babuscio), and, extrapolating from Halperin’s thesis in How To Be Gay arguing that homosexuality is a set of cultural behaviors and references that can be learned, proposes to view Camp as a practice. 

The second chapter, “camp economy”, considers associations between Camp and excess, extravagance, and fame, echoing between the 2019 Camp-themed Met Gala and Camp, Capital and Cinema (Tinkcom), a marxist analysis of Camp as a philosophy of homosexual work. 

The third chapter, “tragicomic gestures and traces” takes a closer look at homosexual work that produces Camp effects, namely the art of drag as well as several examples of artistic responses to the Aids crisis.

The fourth chapter, “Camp as political tool against dysfunctional queer praxis”, criticises various components of neoliberal queerness: the growing exclusion of cis homosexual men from queer spaces, the concept of safe spaces (as spaces without cis gay men), the contemporary construction of non-binarity based of essentialist anti-masculinity, the focus on visibility rather than solidarity. 

The conclusion looks back at these chapters and proposes to take the example of Camp, as an undefinable object, as creative practice, as a comic response to queer tragedy, as something that flirts with but eludes those in power positions, that refuses fixity, that integrates the absurdity of life, that complicates cisness, that achieves extravagant results with a poverty of means, that reminds us of the immense richness of a queer ecosystem that welcomes faggotry and its cultures, that is never what it seems, to invite us queers to keep practicing new modes of relating to each others; modes that are anchored in solidarity, instability, renewal, and a dose of creativity and fun.

This these was written in French. I will begin to translate it to English and revise it during a residency at RezGauche (Brussels) in 2026.