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Queer and Camp Readings

04:32 / 14.10.04

I just attended a lecture on a camp reading of Chronicles (a book of the Old Testament for those of you having an off day), and it got me thinking about a few things.

Mainly, other than just as a deconstructionesque (hooray for fake words) method for looking at a information in a new way, how can a person benefit from a queer reading or camp reading of biblical text, or any text for that matter? Essentially, other than a small personal feeling of subverting the dominant view, what is gained by this? How does it help the non-hetero community further itself?
I mean, it is very fun to read the descriptions of huge biblical armies and palaces as being full of flamboyantly gay men, but what is the purpose other than enjoyment?

Someone please clue me into whatever it is I'm missing here!

For reference, here is a definition of 'camp':
1. "A satirical or amusing quality present in an extravagant gesture, style, or form, esp. when inappropriate or out of proportion to the content that is expressed."
2. "Delight in artificiality, exaggeration and affectation, esp. when used in conjunction with banality and outlandish trivia."
And leave Steve out of it please...

Regrettable Juvenilia

09:15 / 14.10.04

What is gained by this? That may be an odd way to put it, because I'm not sure what the 'function' is of any reading of a text... On some level, it is about enjoyment, which can often be presented as a trivial or shallow motivation, but I think secretly is the only real reason most people would ever both to engage in something like literary criticism.

Another way to look at it would be to say: what is wrong with it? How is this reading not valid? And if there's no reason why it isn't valid, then why not read it that way? You never know, it may just turn out to be the most 'true' or 'accurate' reading...

Which is to say: if we accept that heteronormativity exists - ie, that heterosexual readings of a text may often be given priority (sometimes sole priority) for reasons that have nothing to do with the text - then to apply queer readings is not subversion for its own sake (with all the possibilities of adolescent rebellion that the word 'subversion' sadly now entails), but rather a method for trying to redress the balance and produce the most honest, fair reading of the text possible.

15:25 / 15.10.04

Well it could be argued that the *point* of any particular interpretation of a given text is to try and get as close as possible to the author's intentions, the stuff that's implied but not stated. So in the case of say the Oedipus Complex theory as regards Hamlet, it's worth discussing because there's ( arguably ) a possibility that's what Shakespeare was getting at, even if he wasn't aware of the precise terminology at the time. Whereas with the Book Of Chronicles, it seems a bit unlikely that a high camp reading was ever really something that occurred to the author, back in his place in Damascus or wherever.

On the other hand though, if a text's been used as rod for the back of any particular community, as the Bible pretty clearly has been, then it's maybe perfectly legitimate for the community involved to then round and deliberately misinterpret it, as a means towards disempowering it's general effects. The Bible's as much a political document as it is a literary one, so in that respect it's entirely open to calculated subversion, arguably.

Either way, a high camp reading of the Book of Chronicles does sound pretty funny, IMHO.

10:38 / 17.10.04

what is the purpose other than enjoyment?

I want to get back to this in more detail later, but just to start off with: as has been said in many other threads, 'straightening' a text is just as active an intervention into it as 'queering' it. Nowhere in Gone with the Wind, for example, is it ever stated that Rhett Butler is a purely heterosexual man who has never been attracted to or had sex with other men. Choosing to read him as such is as tendentious, controversial and actively selective interpretation of the text as choosing to read him as bisexual, and only slightly less tendentious than reading him as monohomosexual (with a one-off kink for Scarlett).

Derrida says that reading is always "adding a thread" to the text - it is impossible to read, even on a purely informational basis, without activating a set of cultural expectations and personal biases. The 'author's intentions' are only known to us insofar as they have been transmitted, along with the text, through (constructions of) cultural continuity. Queer and camp readings, among other things, make visible the constructedness of those continuities, the selective nature of 'tradition', and the non-natural status of heteronormativity as a limit to interpretations of a text. All of that is very important stuff. Or at least I think so.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:21 / 20.10.04

In Invisibles 1 KM breaks into Harmony House to free Dane. In 1.12 he's a monster from Bobby Murray's past to confront and be killed by. Both are valid readings of that one scene. At least, that's my reading.

X-Men is often read as an insert minority here parable.

11:38 / 20.10.04

How does it help the non-hetero community further itself?

Should it? If you're asking, what's the point in looking at a text from a "gay" or "camp" point of view, I guess it provides points of recognition for individuals who see themselves as "gay" or "camp" - and, if they accord the Bible any particular authority, this may help them structure their worldview. Y'know, just as individuals virulently opposed to the "non-hetero community" can read other parts of the Bible in such a way as to bolster their own ways of approaching the world.

Ex

09:03 / 21.10.04

I'm struggling with this at the moment as I'm writing something on Lord of the Rings as a big old gayfest.
I agree with most of the points so far, but in addition: I too have doubts about the overall effectiveness of a transgressive reading of a text as anything other than a personal and possibly community experience - I don't think you can always change the world or get things to 'stick', especially to a vast marketing franchise like the LotR film adaptations have spawned.
But: I know that heteronormativity is shored up by 'readings' of texts. I believe this not only because it would be handy for me as a lit student to believe that books affect the world, but from my own experience - for example, last week, a workmate told me I was 'reading too much into' the X-Men. I wasn't (trust me I can really read too much into things if I try) - I was making a very simple and not terribly controversial, observation, but it was all queer. It only took as much interpretative work as a straight reading, but it was off-kilter, so it was 'reading too much in'.
I suppose this leads neatly into my disagreement, that one is always trying to produce a fair reading or one that is close to authorial intention or the 'truth' of the text. I think with that argument, with the assumption that there is a reading which provides 'just enough' interpretation, a queer or camp reading is always going to be too much, a bit too far.

Whioch is why, I suppose, I really think camp readings and deconstruction go nicely together, as the very campness of the reading highlights the limiting normative nature of most methods of criticism.

More later - must go and attend to some books.

Regrettable Juvenilia

10:14 / 21.10.04

I suppose this leads neatly into my disagreement, that one is always trying to produce a fair reading or one that is close to authorial intention or the 'truth' of the text.

Agreed to a large extent - looking back at my first post in this thread, the scare quotes that crop up in the second paragraph should have reoccurred in the third, and I still think "why NOT?" is the better response. Read for pleasure, kids, and let that include reading critically and queerly and deconstrutively...

Although I do have a nasty habit of imagining possible future utopias, and so I'd like to think that queer readings might not always be a bridge too far...

10:15 / 21.10.04

I too have doubts about the overall effectiveness of a transgressive reading of a text as anything other than a personal and possibly community experience

Yes - I think there's a problem when people assume that queer reading is political activism in a simplistic way. I mean, I don't want to suggest that what you do in your head/house is private and therefore apolitical, and what you do in the street is political and therefore not intellectual, but, you know, same-sex partnership rights (for example) are not advanced in any simple causal way by me perving over Harry and Coop in Twin Peaks. I think this debate tends to get framed in quite an old-fashioned and not very helpful way - it gets caught up/stuck in the argument over whether consumers of popular culture are 'cultural dupes', passively accepting the program of the dominant ideology, or 'active audiences' - and since the 'active audience' model is to some extent a response to Marxist theories of popular culture (think Adorno 'On Popular Music'*), it tends to ascribe too much specifically Marxist-political agency to audiences, as if not being a passive consumer necessarily meant that your mode of consumption/production furthered the dictatorship of the proletariat.

I've just taught a good Stuart Hall piece on this, actually - he doesn't mention queer readings but he talks about pop culture as a place where shared culture/language can be given a 'socialist accent', and how this is one of the places/practices through which classes [ie, communities with political agency] are constituted - that is, in struggling over the meanings/interpretations of cultural artefacts and practices, an interpretative community, which is also (at least potentially) an agent of social change, comes into being. So that would be one way of connecting queer readings with political effectivity which doesn't fall into the trap of simply equating them.

*for those who haven't read it, it's (arguably) Adorno's worst moment: it's an essay he wrote in response to Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in which he goes on about how everyone should listen to Beethoven instead of dancing to jazz.

Regrettable Juvenilia

10:29 / 21.10.04

This may be off-topic, but... Am I wrong to see Adorno's thoughts on dancing and popular music as reminiscent is not actively influence by a certain kind of Puritanism when it comes to ideas about pleasure (and maybe the body, too?)? This seems to come up again and again in discussions of progressive/radical/activisty stuff: the idea that doing things for pleasure is either not enough or even actively bad. So you're not supposed to enjoy yourself on a demo, and you should listen to and read things that are edifying, not fun...

12:02 / 21.10.04

(Note to self: add to the fetish/kink thread: "Deva talking theory")

There is a kind of latent Puritanism (or--better word? I sometimes want to change Foucault's first Hist of Sexuality chapter title to "We Other Puritans", but be that as it may...) in much Marxism, clearly--and esp. what little Marxism, even just progressive politics, as we have over here in the US. I think this is in part (today, here) because pleasure has been so intertwined with an increasingly (and grossly) consumer-oriented capitalism. The scale of consumption in the U.S. is so, well, obscene, that it's entangled in everything.

And since campiness is often deeply related to consumer culture, it gets tainted by this. But, have you ever hung out with Quakers before? I love them, but, seriously, no fashion sense whatsoever...Get an Aesthetician here, stat! A couple of friends of mine have managed to be both minimalistic and aesthetically interesting in their consumption patterns, but it is hard hard hard.

It's hard to be both politically vibrant and entertaining; edifying and amusing, but it feels like it gets people to pay attention. Why not give people pleasure? I think we're convinced it will make them lazy, passive, politically inactive: if you are happy and giggly, you won't act, you'll just play with yourself. Is there some truth in that or is it just latent puritanism?

I think it may assume that we can't hold in our minds two contradicting ideas and emotions at once: that the world and humanity itself are simultaneously permeated by hideous suffering, much of it unnecessary, AND also impossibly rich, beautiful, and deeply funny.

I love The Daily Show in the US because I think it gets closer to that perspective than almost anything else I've seen. Spiritually speaking, although perhaps not materially speaking, that's important, I think.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

15:29 / 21.10.04

Ex-President Bush Loses I agree with most of the points so far, but in addition: I too have doubts about the overall effectiveness of a transgressive reading of a text as anything other than a personal and possibly community experience - I don't think you can always change the world or get things to 'stick', especially to a vast marketing franchise like the LotR film adaptations have spawned.

And is there no point to doing it if it doesn't 'stick'? And the films are themselves readings of the original story, just not especially queer, despite all that hugging Aragorn and Boromir were doing at the end of Fellowship. And the texts themselves are readings of the thoughts Tolkien had in his mind as to the story...