Queer as Camp

Description

Named the #1 Bestselling Non-Fiction Title by the Calgary HeraldTo camp means to occupy a place and/or time provisionally or under special circumstances. To camp can also mean to queer. And for many children and young adults, summer camp is a formative experience mixed with homosocial structure and homoerotic longing. In Queer as Camp, editors Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason curate a collection of essays and critical memoirs exploring the intersections of "queer" and "camp," focusing especially on camp as an alternative and potentially nonnormative place and/or time. Exploring questions of identity, desire, and social formation, Queer as Camp delves into the diverse and queer-enabling dimensions of particular camp/sites, from traditional iterations of camp to camp-like ventures, literary and filmic texts about camp across a range of genres (fantasy, horror, realistic fiction, graphic novels), as well as the notorious appropriation of Indigenous life and the consequences of "playing Indian." These accessible, engaging essays examine, variously, camp as a queer place and/or the experiences of queers at camp, including Vermont's Indian Brook, a single-sex girls' camp that has struggled with the inclusion of nonbinary and transgender campers and staff; the role of Jewish summer camp as a complicated site of sexuality, social bonding, and citizen-making as well as a potentially if not routinely queer-affirming place. They also attend to cinematic and literary representations of camp, such as the Eisner award-winning comic series Lumberjanes, which revitalizes and revises the century-old Girl Scout story; Disney's Paul Bunyan, a short film that plays up male homosociality and cross-species bonding while inviting queer identification in the process; Sleepaway Camp, a horror film that exposes and deconstructs anxieties about the gendered body; and Wes Anderson's critically acclaimed Moonrise Kingdom, which evokes dreams of escape, transformation, and other ways of being in the world. Highly interdisciplinary in scope, Queer as Camp reflects on camp and Camp with candor, insight, and often humor. Contributors: Kyle Eveleth, D. Gilson, Charlie Hailey, Ana M. Jimenez-Moreno, Kathryn R. Kent, Mark Lipton, Kerry Mallan, Chris McGee, Roderick McGillis, Tammy Mielke, Alexis Mitchell, Flavia Musinsky, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Annebella Pollen, Andrew J. Trevarrow, Paul Venzo, Joshua Whitehead

Sujets

• Acampada
• Camping

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 21 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823283637
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

Q u e e r a s C a m p

Queer as Camp Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality

Kenneth B. Kidd andDerritt Mason Editors

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2019

Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America

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First edition

Preface charlie hailey

c o n t e n t s

Camping Out: An Introduction kenneth b. kidd and derritt mason

Notes Home from Camp, by Susan Sontag daniel mallory ortberg

Part Icamspites

“The most curious” of all “queer societies”? Sexuality and Gender in British Woodcraft Camps, 1916 –2016 annebella pollen

Queer Pedagogy at Indian Brook Camp flavia musinsky

“No Trespassing”: Girl Scout Camp and the Limits of the Counterpublic Sphere kathryn r. kent

Nation-Bonding: Sexuality and the State in the Jewish Summer Camp alexis mitchell

Notes on Church Camp d. gilson

Queer at Camp: A Selected Assemblage of Resistance and Hope mark lipton

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The Camping Ground “Down Under”: Queer Interpretations of the Australian Summer Holiday paul venzo

Part IIcamsptories

Camping with Walt Disney’sPaul Bunyan: An Essay Short tammy l. mielke and andrew trevarrow

Illegal Citizen: The Japanese-American Internment Camp in Soon-Teck Oh’sTondemonai—Never Happen! ana m. jimenez-moreno

Why Angela Won’t Go Swimming:Sleepaway Camp, Slasher Films, and Summer Camp Horrors chris mcgee

Striking Camp: Empowerment and Re-Presentation inLumberjanes kyle eveleth

Escape to Moonrise Kingdom: Let’s Go Camping! kerry mallan and roderick mcgillis

“Finding We’Wha”: Indigenous Idylls in Queer Young Adult Literature joshua whitehead

Acknowledgments Works Cited List of Contributors Index

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p r e f a c e

Charlie Hailey

Twenty-five years ago, I lived in a 1964 Bambi with an autographed portrait of Divine. Barely six by thirteen feet on the inside, the trailer was Air- stream’s smallest model, and the headshot, a standard 8×10 glossy, held court in this cocoon of space from its perch at the top of the bed. It was a gift to the trailer’s owner who had camped across North America, designing and constructing projects, and mentored me in the art of building that year after Hurricane Andrew. Lodged in the post-disaster jungle near Home- stead, my wife and I showered outside, cooked on a hibachi in the driveway, and slept on an already crowded sofa bed with a dog and cat displaced by the hurricane. The trailer was a shell in and out of which we made room for living. We were camping, not necessarily thinking about the meaning of camp, but living its paradox as well as its potential. And we did have a few pink flamingoes around the trailer hitch. According to legend, or at least the company’s advertising copy, Wally Byam, the founder of Airstream, named the Bambi model in 1961 on one of his global caravan tours to support the company brand, transporting at great expense his polished aluminum trailers across oceans, rivers, and deserts, as he also promoted “international goodwill and understanding 1 among the peoples of the world through person-to-person contact.” Nearing the end of his African Caravan in Angola, Byam heard about a small deer celebrated asO’Mbambifor its stability and strength. You have to wonder at Byam’s intention, already tinged with colonialism, and there is a degree of shrewdness at finding in the Umbundu dialect a naming convention that might temper his appropriation of one of Disney’s most beloved characters. Long associated with camps and camping, nostalgia sells trailers as well as movies. And Wally and Walt, even if only one was an avid camper, fashioned themselves as dreamers whose visions moved unnervingly between hegemony and happiness, but it was Michael Eisner, Disney’s former CEO, who articulated a corporate zeitgeist of camp when he wrote how summer camp defined not only ways of living but also ways of working. His recollections convey longing for his time at Keewaydin in

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2 Vermont: “The world is not camp, and that’s too bad.” But there is more to this conflation of world and camp: Camps are worlds unto themselves and two decades into the twenty-first century the world is full of camps. You might recall the Storm of the Century in March 1993. If you were in Florida, particularly at the peninsula’s southern end where we were, you didn’t have much warning, and it came at night in what seemed a craven affront to Hurricane Andrew’s lingering damage. It blew up the east coast as a so-called hundred-year storm that now appears commonplace. We already felt vulnerable in this bristling landscape amid the Everglades’ relentless humidity, legions of tradespeople camping next to bars, wary homeowners living alongside gutted houses, and a fi rst attempt at making our own home as a couple. In a short time, the trailer had become our memory theatre, a place we could navigate —had to navigate — in complete darkness. It was a microcosm of what we came to know as home, a mini- mum dwelling with few amenities but many freedoms. It was also one of many thousands of trailers scattered across Dade County. And for us —I’m not sure we realized it at the time — this camp carried all the contradictions that you might expect from a road-weary capsule assembled in America’s heartland, polished so that it reflected its sub-tropical context, named after a Disney character, decked with a drag queen’s headshot, driven around the country for decades by a counterculture architect, and now occupied by two twentysomethings voluntarily living in a landscape of catastrophe. Like a postmodern camper’s kit. Camp is multivalent. It is noun, verb, and adjective. It houses both indi- vidual and community. Carried along by this semantic range, its practices cover wide geographic territories as well as multi-disciplinary fields. Camp connotes desire and freedom, privation and need, fear and power. It is idea and practice — a way of thinking as well as doing. It is why pragmatist and transcendentalist alike convened at the Philosopher’s Camp in the Adiron- dack Mountains. It is how Christopher Isherwood melds philosophical 3 demonstration with intuition. The praxis of camp is performative and self-reflective, and its inflections range from summer camp to protest camp, from Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” to Agamben’s “What Is a Camp?” And camps readily move between the political and the personal. When Occupy Wall Street set up camp in the quasi-public space of Zuccotti Park, its simple directive was to “occupy public space” and “to let 4 these facts be known.” Occupy camps were scenes of disclosure that revealed the sometimes messy — at times ambiguous — process of consen- sus and, more broadly, being in the world. Camping in public spaces is unavoidably theatrical, and the occupy meme camps that sprang up from

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OWS’s genetic code were also exercises in applied aesthetics, combining self-expression with the practicalities of self-organizing and day-to-day living. Though criticized for what was perceived as a lack of tangible results, the camp itself was the goal all along. It demonstrated a vision of everyday life where coexistence was the norm. The camping collectives cut across class, race, gender, orientation, and those with homes and those without. Occupy camps drew as much attention to their diverse commu- nity and to the agility of camp as they did to their declared goals. Which is to say the camp’s the thing, and camping is about discovering who we are, who you are. Camp is method. Though at times highly subjective and individualized, it is a repeatable process, whether the outcome is actual place-making — like pitching a tent, parking a trailer, or participating in communal events — or more conceptual constructions of identity, style, or philosophy. More than that, it is consistently repeated: We keep going back to summer camp, we return to campgrounds year after year, we even reuse the same fire pits, and along the way we refi ne our individual awareness of things —what Sontag called sensibilities, which reside supplemental to culture and apart from normative society alike. Camp occurs outside daily life. Camping is a kind of play-acting, a dramatic — sometimes radical— departure from home, even if your tent is pitched in the backyard. And camp, as a sensibil- ity, operates in a similarly differential space between stable meaning and 5 “pure artifice.” Both camping and camp work within paradox — imperma- nence and stability, mobility and fixity, displacement and place,unheimlich and home. The “necessary paradox” that Sontag introduced to define camp is already inherently at work in practices of camp, and camping and camp share more than linguistic similitude and reach a deeper methodological affinity in Isherwood’s camp, Sontag’s camp, Byam’s campers, and Charles Eliot’s summer camp. Eliot, Harvard’s longest-serving president, saw camp as an educational opportunity without equal: “I have the conviction that a few weeks in a well-organized summer camp may be of more value educa- 6 tionally than a whole year of formal school work.” Whether in pedagogy, research, or simply setting up a temporary home, camp as method is rigor- ous without being rigid — adapting procedure to situation, tweaking tem- plates based on patterns we discover, fashioning new methods out of old, crafting identity and making a place for ourselves. In 1964, when Susan Sontag sat down to write her notes, our Bambi rolled off the assembly line in Jackson Center, Ohio. She didn’t go camping or climb into an Airstream trailer to write, but when she set the fifty-eight pegs that held up the tent of her jottings, Sontag created her own critical