Camp: Aesthetics and Politics

Catalog description

Camp is one of the predominant, organizing aesthetic structures of the twentieth century and continues to make important impacts in the twenty-first. With attention to a range of historical, philosophical, and theoretical texts, coupled with a range of artistic artifacts and phenomena, we will develop a clustered set of working definitions of camp as we also challenge some truisms about the concept: that it is or has been apolitical; that its comprehension can be disarticulated from queer cultures and experiences; that it has died and is dead. Paying close attention to systems of sex, gender, and sexuality, we will also explore their inextricable intersection with such categories of identity, relationality, and sociality as (dis)ability, age, class, ethnicity, and race.