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Message: <blockquote data-quote="roguerouge" data-source="post: 3646432" data-attributes="member: 13855">I think we're not fully exploring what the original poster may mean. I'm a film professor, so I take this kind of thing seriously. Fortunately, I despise camp, so I can be lazy and just quote from wikipedia:"Though the rise of Postmodernism has made camp a common take on aesthetics, not identified with any specific group, the attitude was originally a distinctive factor in pre-Stonewall gay male communities, where it was the dominant cultural pattern. Altman (ibid) argues that it originated from the acceptance of gayness as effeminacy. Two key components of camp were originally feminine performances: swish and drag. With swish featuring extensive use of superlatives, and drag being (often outrageous) female impersonation, camp became extended to all things "over the top", including female female impersonators, as in the exaggerated Hollywood version of Carmen Miranda. It was this version of the concept that was adopted by literary and art critics and became a part of the conceptual array of 'sixties culture. Moe Meyer still defines camp as "queer parody.""Camp has been from the start an ironic attitude, embraced by anti-Academic theorists for its explicit defense of clearly marginalized forms. As such, its claims to legitimacy are dependent on its opposition to the status quo; camp has no aspiration to timelessness, but rather lives on the hypocrisy of the dominant culture. It doesn't present basic values, but precisely confronts culture with what it perceives as its inconsistencies, to show how any norm is socially constructed.""Camp is a critical analysis and at the same time a big joke. Camp takes “something” (normally a social norm, object, phrase, or style), does a very acute analysis of what the “something” is, then takes the “something” and presents it humorously. As a performance, camp is meant to be an illusion. A person being campy has a generalization they are intentionally making fun of or manipulating. Though camp is a joke it's also a very serious analysis done by people who are willing to make a joke out of themselves to prove a point. It's about being pretentious and contentious...""Camp, however, as Susan Sontag observed, is always a way of consuming or performing culture "in quotation marks.""As a cultural challenge, camp can also receive a political meaning, when minorities appropriate and ridicule the images of the dominant group, the kind of activism associated with multiculturalism and the New Left. The best known instance of this is the gay liberation movement, which used camp to confront society with its own preconceptions and their historicity. Female camp actresses such as Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford also had an important influence on the development of feminist consciousness: by exaggerating certain stereotyped features of femininity, such as fragility, open emotionality or moodiness, they attempted to undermine the credibility of those preconceptions. The multiculturalist stance in cultural studies therefore presents camp as political and critical.""Conversely, political theorists like Theodor Adorno saw camp as a means of maintaining the status quo by misdirecting the workers away from the cause of their oppression: the capitalist system. Also, camp's ephemerality was deemed to engender unthinking consumerism, which relies on novelty and frivolity."</blockquote>

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