| "The Wild(e) Body" is a theorization of "Camp," or what has often been called gay parody. Against existing writings which define Camp as an apolitical, acritical, and aestheticized gay "sensibility," I argue that Camp is a specifically gay discourse, an embodied and performative mode of being-in-the-world by which one "knows" oneself as gay.; Accordingly, I argue that: (1) Camp is the total body of performative practices used to enact gay identity, with enactment defined as the production of social visibility. (2) Gay identity is performative, discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts marked by the deployment of specific signifying codes. Because the identity is constituted processually, then visibility always accompanies constitution. Because Camp is the production of gay visibility, then all gay identity performative expressions are circulated within the signifying system that is Camp. (3) Because gay identity is performative, the identity exists only as long as it is performed. In other words, gay identity is inseparable and indistinguishable from its processual enactment, Camp. (4) This model of identity constitution means that gay identity does not produce Camp, but rather the opposite, that Camp, not sexual activity, is the central point in gay identity production. (5) And because Camp signifies a performative and discontinuous Self, it constitutes an ontological challenge to and cultural critique of dominant epistemology by displacing bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, innate, and continuous.; The key foci of this argument are: the cultural narrative of the Homosexual "type" in the literature of nineteenth-century sexology; homoerotic representational strategies in the literary works and dandyism of Oscar Wilde (including a detailed analysis of his 1895 sex scandal trials); the social changes accompanying the refiguration of homosexual social identity instigated by the Kinsey report on male sexuality in the 1950s; and the Pop culture appropriation of Camp by Susan Sontag in the 1960s. In conclusion, I offer a gay cultural critique of the phenomenon of heterosexuality. Treating homosexuality and heterosexuality as dependent terms, I argue that it is homosexuality (through the process of Camp) that undergirds contemporary society as both sustenance and subversion. |
