On The Two Forms Of Camp In The Context Of Consumer Culture And Its Development In China

Camp is a comparatively new cultural phenomenon in social culture field,with its origins associated with impersonation of homosexual men.As time changes and cultural environment develops,it gains more implications.In the 1960 s,camp underwent two conversions: the first conversion derives from the rise of consuming culture and pop culture.Camp aesthetics,once little known,has been incorporated into popular entertainment under the dual influence of consuming culture and pop culture,gaining increasingly popularity;the other conversion attributes to the upsurge of gay liberation movement which has helped form the coming camp culture with a political meaning while making the current camp more radically political and cool.Though displaying various images in different eras,camp has been keeping its symbolic features of being exaggerated,ostentatious,affected and so on.When entering consuming era,camp,as other marginalized subcultures,projected itself as an avant-garde one within mainstream culture,not only in the field of arts and feminist politics but also in its attitudes towards mass culture.Camp opposes conventional aesthetics and hopes to maintain the independence of art with sensibility;it is against heterosexual hegemony,attempting to deconstruct conventional gender political system via impersonation.Camp does not oppose mass culture,nor does it cater for mass culture.Instead,camp turns itself into a coxcomb,being obscure with mass culture,which makes it excluded from mass culture and also keeps its pride.However,camp is doomed to surrender to mainstream culture,resulting from its own cultural nature.As a subculture,the rebellious feature of camp is likely to pose a threat to mainstream culture in the ideological sense.To maintain its dominant status,mainstream culture disciplines camp through ideological and commercial suppression.In the process of inclusion into mainstream culture,the rebellious force within camp gradually dissolves,ultimately turning camp from a ‘rebel’ into a ‘leader’,to some extent,even promoting the economic growth.Though camp theory was introduced till the 1990 s,camp has already made its appearance earlier in the domains of film,Internet and literature,in the forms of comedies,Internet spoof,Internet parody,writing in the game tone and so on so forth.Nowadays,popular culture and commodity economy are at the booming stage,mass culture encompasses goodness or evil.To analyze camp in the context of domestic consuming culture helps create our own mass culture being liked by our people.The thesis aims to make contributions to the theoretic study of camp as well as the cultural development in China.