OTHER CAMP: RETHINKING CAMP, the 1990S, and the POLITICS of VISIBILITY
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OTHER CAMP: RETHINKING CAMP, THE 1990s, AND THE POLITICS OF VISIBILITY By Sarah Margaret Panuska A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English—Doctor of Philosophy 2019 ABSTRACT Other Camp: Rethinking Camp, the 1990s, and the Politics of Visibility By Sarah Margaret Panuska Other Camp pairs 1990s experimental media produced by lesbian, bi, and queer women with queer theory to rethink the boundaries of one of cinema’s most beloved and despised genres, camp. I argue that camp is a creative and political practice that helps communities of women reckon with representational voids. This project shows how primarily-lesbian communities, whether black or white, working in the 1990s employed appropriation and practices of curation in their camp projects to represent their identities and communities, where camp is the effect of juxtaposition, incongruity, and the friction between an object’s original and appropriated contexts. Central to Other Camp are the curation-centered approaches to camp in the art of LGBTQ women in the 1990s. I argue that curation— producing art through an assembly of different objects, texts, or artifacts and letting the resonances and tensions between them foster camp effects—is a practice that not only has roots within experimental approaches camp but deep roots in camp scholarship. Relationality is vital to the work that curation does as an artistic practice. I link the relationality in the practice of camp curation to the relation-based approaches of queer theory, Black Studies, and Decolonial theory. My work cultivates the curational roots at the heart of camp and different theoretical approaches to relationality in order to foreground the emergence of curational camp methodologies and approaches to art as they manifest in the work of Sadie Benning, G.B Jones, Kaucyila Brooke and Jane Cottis, Cheryl Dunye, and Vaginal Davis. My first chapter rethinks Sadie Benning’s It Wasn’t Love (1992) and G.B Jones’s Tom Girls drawings as works that question the relationship between butch, masculinity, and camp in order to show how butch and camp are not always oppositional. Both Benning and Jones playfully navigate the fractional distances and proximities in their forms of camp, blurring lines between masculinity and maleness and past and present, respectively. My second chapter demonstrates how Kaucylia Brooke and Jane Cottis use camp to illustrate the pitfalls of lesbian representation within classical Hollywood cinema throughout their news-documentary spoof, Dry Kisses Only (1990). I argue that Brooke and Cottis’s film and the camp produced within it, are as messy (in the best and queerest sense of that word) as the lesbian representational bind. I read a strange scene near the film’s end as staging the conundrum of lesbian representation, where some lesbian’s resolute visibility shatters verisimilitude. While my first two chapters focus on how white lesbian artists utilize an impulse to curate as they complicate and counteract the stereotypical images of their identities, my third and fourth chapters shift the focus to curators of color and their own efforts to highlight the lack of representations and archives of their communities and their histories. Chapter 3 examines Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1997) and the photographs of Zoe Leonard as one means of camping history through the interrogation of communities, intersectional histories, and archives. I chart Dunye’s protagonist’s failures to find information within traditional archives in order to demonstrate how Dunye literally and figurative hones “the outside” as a theoretical camp edge. Chapter 4 rewrites the history of camp to center Vaginal Davis as a pivotal and under recognized figure in the historical trajectory of camp and queerness. I argue that throughout her 40- year career as curator and artist, Davis has used camp to call attention to the uneven ways humanity is ascribed to people of color. What starts out in her zines as a critique of racializing forces through her own objectification, develops into a representational strategy in That Fertile Feeling (1982). Davis’s video zines mark a shift in medium and focus to the compromised notions of humanity that cohere around those living at the gender and sexual margins of society. Camp and marginality are harnessed by Davis to show the vitality at work amidst oppression. Copyright by SARAH MARGARET PANUSKA 2019 This dissertation is dedicated to my mother and father. Mom, Your courage, support, and smarts are a constant inspiration to me. Thank you for your unflinching acceptance of my life and the way I am in the world. I couldn’t do any of this without you. Dad, The ending of this journey is bittersweet without you here to see me complete it. Yet, just as I never doubted your unconditional love for me when you walked this earth, I know you are here with me—now and always. If nothing else comes of this project, I hope I’ve at least made you both proud. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is beyond my comprehension how I could be so fortunate as to have stumbled into the boon of love, support, and friendship that has bolstered this effort of mine. This period of my life has not been the smoothest, personally or professionally. And as I look at this project that hatched from my brain, I am reminded of the journey. In all of the forms it took over the course of this degree, my guidance committee has been a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. Ellen McCallum, Scott Michaelsen, David Bering-Porter, and Justus Nieland have all in their individual ways have made me a better writer, thinker, and scholar. To Ellen, your grace, honesty, and generosity have made the dissertation process a treasure. Thank you for always being straight with me, so to speak. Scott, neither this project or what I hope to make of my career would have been possible without your commitment to me years ago. I will never forget it. David, your interest and enthusiasm for this project has been so valued and so appreciated. Justus, the way you think about and approach media studies continues to be an inspiration to me. Yours are intellectual shoes that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fill, but I’m damned well going to try. Eight years, for me, is a long time to be in one place. I have been so blessed and honored to have close friends through every stage of this process. Anna, Laura, Steven, and Jennifer, I would never have made it through the first two years without ya’ll and our Olive Garden dinners. Hannah, Kate, and Malia were also valued sanctuaries during this time. Andrew and Cody, my Michigan brother and sister, thank you for loving and nerding out with me. Briona, thank you for your always- sage advice and friendship. To all of my dear MSU English colleagues, including, Hanan, Bria, Asif, and Sooh, this time would not have been the same without ya’ll in it. Jessica and Garth, the patience and generosity that you both have shown me are beyond my wildest hopes. I would not have been able to push through the final years without our writing group. vi To my favorite bisexuals: Cosette, your love and support have made every day a better one. I’ll be thankful for that always. Rebecca, since the day you snuck up on me in the frozen food section of Walgreens, I’ve been better off than I was before. I don’t always make it easy (I know, I know, it’s my Pisces), but thank you for loving me. Last, but certainly not least, thank you to my family—the Bonds and the Panusksas. The love and support that I’ve received from ya’ll means more to me than I can express here. To my grandmothers, Margie and Vivian, you both have a piece of my heart. Finally, there is no way to express how grateful I am to have the parents that I do. Their care and understanding are only matched by the sacrifices they’ve made so that I can do what I love. This also extends to my brother, who keeps an eye on things while I am away and, thankfully, never asks me how my work is going. Thank you, everyone, for making this all possible. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ix Introduction 1 Genealogies: Camp, Queerness, and Curation 8 Curation and (inter)Relations, or Curation, Camp and Queerness Curation 13 Chapter Summaries 19 Conclusion 22 WORKS CITED 24 Chapter 1: Camp, Un-drag, and Conceptual Intimacies in Sadie Benning’s It Wasn’t Love (1992) and G.B. Jones’s Tom Girls 27 Rethinking The Opposition Between Masculinity and Camp 31 “It Wasn’t Love , But It Was …” Camp?: Reading Sadie Benning’s It Wasn’t Love As A Work of Butch Camp 36 The Butch’s New Clothes: Butch Play and Un-drag 44 G.B. Jones’s Tom Girls 55 WORKS CITED 74 Chapter 2: Lesbian Camp and Representational Binds 78 All the News That Fits Their Bit: The L.E.S. News Broadcast in Dry Kisses Only 85 Representational Re-imaginings in Dry Kisses Only 100 Conclusion 106 WORKS CITED 115 Chapter 3: Sometimes You Have to Curate Your History: The Watermelon Woman (1997) as a Work of Camp 118 Cultivating Realness in A Fake Documentary 130 Archive Trouble 137 Dunye’s Curational Quirks 143 WORKS CITED 156 Chapter 4: “Who do they think I am—Judy Garland?”: Vaginal Créme Davis and Her Camp (R)evolutions 158 Evil Taco: An Unauthorized Biography 166 Fertile La Toyah 186 Fertile La Toyah Jackson Video Zines 198 Platinum Oasis 209 WORKS CITED 215 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Benning begins the shot with the young butch on the left side of the frame.