Upcoming Talk: Camp as a Style

I’ll be giving a talk for Profs & Pints in Nashville on June 24th on the origins and endurance of Camp as a style. From the P&P website:

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “A Campy Summer Evening,” on a distinct style and its history, politics, and pleasures, with Stephanie A. Graves, lecturer in English at Middle Tennessee State University and scholar of film, television, and media.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7.]

When something is called “campy,” what does that mean? What exactly is camp style, and why does it remain so culturally provocative?

Throw on something outlandish and come to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom to hear answers delivered by Stephanie Graves, whose past talks have earned her a loyal following among Profs and Pints fans.

She’ll look at camp in film, television, fashion, music, and popular culture, moving from Oscar Wilde to Trixie Mattel, from classic Hollywood melodrama to contemporary internet memes.

In defining camp, she’ll describe its association with excess, drama, irony, and artifice. She’ll discuss how it’s evoked in the play with gender and sexuality in Rocky Horror Picture Show, in the visual excess and exaggerated style of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and in art as varied as Wilde’s plays and Lady Gaga’s concerts.

We’ll look at how camp thrives in the spaces where “good” and “bad” taste and “high” and “low” art collapse into one another, such as in John Waters’s Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, in RuPaul’s Drag Race, and in the films of Baz Luhrmann. More than just an aesthetic of flamboyance or kitsch, camp emphasizes stylization, performance, and spectacle in ways that deliberately provoke cultural norms of respectability and decorum.

You’ll learn how the tenets of camp were widely popularized by writer Susan Sontag in her influential 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” In reality, however, camp’s history stretches back much further, emerging from queer subcultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and flourishing in spaces where humor, performance, parody, and coded self-expression became tools of survival for marginalized communities. It was carried forward in the glamour of old Hollywood stars, the theatricality of disco and drag culture, the hyper-femininity of contemporary pop icons, and in the pleasures of cult films and television.

We’ll consider why camp continues to resonate—and why exaggeration, artifice, and “bad taste” still carries surprising cultural power. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Tickets are available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/campy-summer-evening if you want to know more!