15 The World in the Evening’s Charles Kennedy claims that camp is “terri- bly hard to defne” (Isherwood 111), while Susan Sontag insists that to “talk about Camp is […] to betray it” (275). Like many early scholarly texts on camp, these quotes emphasize how the concept is (supposedly) “notoriously evasive” (Medhurst 276) and defned by “its indefnability, its elusiveness, and its changeability” (Bergman 123). Some of the more recent texts, on the other hand, change the tenor to stress how camp “is so dead. Its ghost whispers can be heard beyond the creaking stairs leading to the attic” (Gaines and Segade). Similarly to Malik Gaines and Alex Segade, who preface this statement with the subheading “Further Notes on the Death of Camp,” David and Harold Galef get their most important point across before their introduction by simply but provoca- tively using the title “What was Camp” (emphasis added) in their study of the phenomenon and its psychological effects in the early 1990s. Running counter to these extreme positions of certainty about camp’s obsolescence, yet uncertainty about its specifc qualities, queer and femi- nist theory’s re-evaluation of strategies like mimicry, appropriation, and parody has led to a proliferation of productive inquiry into the ongoing relevance of camp. This strand of scholarship constitutes the basis for my own understanding of camp’s form and function as an excessively styl- ized parody and in-group humor, capable of intervening in naturalized and naturalizing discourses of gender and sexuality, while granting access to otherwise oppressive systems of meaning- and pleasure-making. This chapter therefore introduces the basic arguments of this re-evaluation of CHAPTER 2 The History and Theory of Camp © The Author(s) 2017 K. Horn, Women, Camp, and Popular Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64846-0_2 Horn, K. (2017). Women, camp, and popular culture : Serious excess. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2019-04-17 11:43:10. Copyright © 2017. Palgrave Macmillan US. All rights reserved.