Mae West’s Maids: Race, “Authenticity,” and the Discourse of Camp Pamela Robertson Wojcik In recent years, subcultural studies have merged increasingly with academic identity politics. But while much work has been done on queer and camp representation and also on racial stereo- types, subcultural studies have unwittingly ad- vanced artificial barriers between audiences and between subcultures. We tend to talk about only one audience, one subculture, one difference at a time, and only in relation to the in-that-instance Other, dominant culture. Most analyses of camp do not, therefore, remark upon the relation be- tween camp’s sexual politics and race discourse. Moe Meyer, for instance, discusses the contro- versy over African American drag queen Joan Jett Blak’s 1991 bid for mayor of Chicago as Queer Nation candidate exclusively in terms of gay debates about the effectiveness of camp; Meyer never mentions Blak’s race as potentially affect- ing the debate nor examines Queer Nation’s polit- ical stakes in running an African American drag queen. 1 Alternately, in discussions of Paris Is Burning — a film that foregrounds the links between queer- ness, camp, and racial discourse — critics tend to treat the African American and Hispanic use of camp to gain access to fantasies of whiteness as a special case. Such critiques never fully acknowl- edge the degree to which the film’s invocation of “realness” testifies to inextricable links between race and sex and never consider whether or how race discourse operates in camp generally. An im- portant exception is bell hooks’s essay “Is Paris Burning?” hooks views the film as a graphic documentary of the way in which colo- nized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship de- mands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in pursuit. 2 However, hooks claims that rather than interro- gating whiteness, the entertainment value of the film obscures its “more serious critical narrative,” a narrative of the pain and sadness behind the camp spectacles. For hooks, the white filmmaker and white audience both evade the race politics of Paris Is Burning in their focus on and pleasure in the film’s camp effect. But, by mapping the relation- ship between the film’s race politics and its camp effect onto a narrative vs. spectacle paradigm, hooks similarly masks the link between race and camp in the film. She suggests that the film is really about race and not camp. She therefore maintains the barrier between race discourse and camp dis- course by viewing camp spectacle as being in the service of white pleasure and at a remove from “the more serious narrative” about blackness. Most discussions of camp, whether about gay men, lesbians, or heterosexuals, assume the adjec- tive “white.” Because whiteness, as Richard Dyer says, “secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular,” representations of norma- tive whiteness foreground race and ethnicity as categories of difference. 3 Queer and camp Western representations, though nonnormative in terms of sex and gender, are still consistently defined through categories of racial difference and espe- cially blackness. This racial specificity becomes clear in the fre- quent analogies made between camp and black- ness. Dennis Altman, for instance, says, “Camp is to gay what soul is to black.” 4 Describing post- Stonewall attitudes toward camp, Andrew Ross refers to camp falling into disrepute “as a kind of blackface,” and George Melly dubs camp “the Stepin Fetchit of the leather bars, the Auntie Tom of the denim discos.” 5 We could ask why Uncle Tom and blackface haven’t been recuperated as camp clearly has (by queer identity politics and in