Camp and the Politics of Style

When something is referred to as “campy,” what exactly does that mean? What is camp style, and why does it remain so culturally provocative? From the play with gender and sexuality in Rocky Horror Picture Show to the visual excess and exaggerated style of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and evident in art as varied as Oscar Wilde and Lady Gaga, camp is associated with excess, drama, irony, and artifice. It 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. It’s 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.

The tenets of camp were widely popularized by writer Susan Sontag in her influential 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” which described camp as a love of exaggeration, theatricality, and artifice. More recently, the 2019 Met Gala attempted to bring camp into mainstream popular culture, though many critics argued the event reduced camp to flashy costumes while stripping away its deeper queer and political roots. In reality, 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 has long functioned as a form of cultural critique; through humor, irony, and exaggeration, camp exposes the absurdities of rigid social expectations surrounding gender, sexuality, class, and taste. Located in the glamour of old Hollywood stars, the theatricality of disco and drag culture, the hyperfemininity of contemporary pop icons, or the cult pleasures of films and television, camp transforms style into both a source of pleasure and a challenge to cultural norms.

This lecture by Stephanie A. Graves, a scholar of queer Gothic and horror, will explore the history, politics, and pleasures of camp across film, television, fashion, music, and popular culture. Moving from Oscar Wilde to Trixie Mattel, from classic Hollywood melodrama to contemporary internet culture, this lecture examines why camp continues to resonate—and why exaggeration, artifice, and “bad taste” still carries surprising cultural power.