It Is Often Said That Feminists, Especially Radical Lesbian Feminists, Are Not Funny

JUDY GRAHN’S VIOLENT FEMINIST CAMP HONNI VAN RIJSWIJK It is often said that feminists, especially radical lesbian feminists, are not funny. Conservatives have levelled lack of humour at feminists as a political weapon, as a sort of baseline attack: the claims of feminists, they have argued, are a bit of a joke, whereas they themselves are not funny. With Judy Grahn, we see this weapon being wielded figuratively in retaliation: not only is her work funny, it is violently funny and both funny and violent. In my reading of two of her poems, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke’ and ‘I have come to claim’, I argue that Grahn’s humour plays on elements of camp and violence as a site of political subversion. At the time of writing both poems, during the 1960s, Grahn was very concerned with working-class, feminist, lesbian politics. These concerns arise thematically in her work of the 1960s, where she deals with sexual violence, homosexuality, racism and class politics. My focus here is not so much on thematics but on the aesthetics of Grahn’s poetry. How do camp humour and violent imagery articulate her concerns? In each poem, women’s bodies are the subject of extreme violence: what is signified as being worked through these bodies and what does this reveal about the historical moment of their writing? How is humour effective in conveying these points, as opposed to a more earnest treatment? In her re-writing of the history of lesbian feminist poetics and politics, Linda Garber argues that the starting-point chosen for a study of lesbian feminist poetry determines the themes of study: a genealogy based on the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Garber argues, produces a white, middle-class bias, whereas a shift to a focus on poets such as 320 Honni van Rijswijk Judy Grahn introduces a story of the development of feminist poetics and politics arising out of working-class, materialist concerns.1 Garber emphasizes the ‘central role of lesbian poets as theorists of lesbian identity and activism’,2 and positions Grahn as a key ‘poet-theorist’ in her supplementation of the white, cultural feminism of the 1970s and 1980s with an investigation of working-class and anti-racist feminisms originating in the 1960s. Grahn herself said of ‘Edward the Dyke’ that she chose the title so that ‘people had to say the word dyke’.3 This was as much about challenging a class aesthetic as it was about sexuality. Grahn’s work mobilizes camp in its interrogation of class and sexuality. Camp first began to be theorized in Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on Camp’, which was written in 1964 and is roughly contemporary with Grahn’s poem ‘Edward the Dyke’. The ‘Notes’ consist of a number of Wildean aphorisms such as: ‘the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural’; ‘the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical’; and ‘Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the “off” ….’4 Overall, Sontag’s approach has largely been left behind: her formulation of camp as an ‘apolitical’ aesthetic movement only, for instance, over trivializes camp and fails to recognize its subversive potential. While camp can be about ‘Tiffany lamps’ and ‘old Flash Gordon Comics’, it does serve larger political and theoretical functions, especially in relation to demonstrations of the performativity or contingency of gender and sexuality.5 An important function of camp is the way that it enables a critical re-seeing or transformation. It is also potentially subversive because of the ways in which it ‘asserts an opposition between the absurd and the serious’.6 Camp humour relies on an incongruity between an 1 Linda Garber, Identity Poetics: Race, Class and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory, New York, 2001, 32-33. 2 Ibid., 9. 3 Judy Grahn, The Work of a Common Woman, New York, 1978, 37. 4 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Against Interpretation, 3rd edn, New York, 1967, 275-92, 275, 277 and 275. 5 Ibid., 277 and 278 6 Scott Long, ‘The Loneliness of Camp’, in Camp Grounds, ed. David Bergman, Amherst: MA, 1993, 79. .

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