What is Camp?
What is camp? Before diving into the website, a definition of the term feels necessary to define Lady Gaga and Chappell Roan's music and social media posts. Camp revolves around a sort of stylized exaggeration, whether through theatricality, irony, and/or humour. A level of artifice is taken into account through camp, considering the three elements mentioned previously all involve a sort of poking fun at the real, material world. Overall, the style is clearly inspired by the LGBTQ+ community—drag queens in specific—but the style could be illustrated by the work of straight, cisgender people. ​
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Camp has been discussed by many scholars throughout history, but Susan Sontag popularized the word in contemporary culture. In this section, I will dive into Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” but I will also complement it with a framework set out by Jack Babuscio in his modern essay “Camp and the Gay Sensibility.” Both of these scholars have inspired my own above definition of camp.
Susan Sontag
In 1964, Susan Sontag wrote an incredibly influential essay titled “Notes on Camp,” which will form the theoretical basis for this argument. In the essay, Sontag begins by claiming that “camp is a certain mode of aestheticism” with a certain “degree of artifice, of stylization.” Aesthetics and style therefore define camp, but Sontag more specifically defines the style as “the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off.’” The whole point of camp is to go beyond seriousness and mock it: its inherent nature is playful and anti-serious.
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With Sontag’s definition of camp in mind, I now want to briefly connect her arguments to popular music. As a sort of aestheticism and style, camp fits well into popular music and can be conveyed through many different musical elements. For example, an artists’ voice can be used to convey a sort of artifice and exaggeration through some sort of vocal engineering or modification (i.e. glitch, which is discussed in the “Calculating Voice” section.”). Thus, Sontag’s point about exaggeration and artifice within the camp style feels quite relevant in defining the style. All in the meantime, however, her argument might feel vague and unconvincing at certain points. She lacks a thorough investigation into the definition of exaggeration and artifice, perhaps gleaning over the fact that those two words need unpacking as well.
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Thus, I decided to bring in another article from another camp scholar, Jack Babuscio, in order to supplement her work and frame camp in a more contemporary context.
Jack Babuscio
In his essay “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” scholar Jack Babuscio grounds camp within the LGBTQ+ community. He claims that queer people are most commonly associated with camp, making them an important part of forming a working definition of the term. Through combining Sontag’s definition and the queer community’s sentiment, Babuscio claims that camp can be defined through four frameworks: aestheticism, irony, humour, and theatricality. I will briefly unpack these terms below.
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Babuscio claims that aestheticism revolves around subversion of traditional style. In camp, style becomes a “conveyor of meaning” (122). Meanwhile, irony focuses on “incongruent contrasts;” camp often blurs binaries, such as man/woman and gay/straight (119). Theatricality involves camp’s focus as life-as-theatre, meaning that camp media often involves a sort of role-playing and impersonation. Lastly, humour often includes a sort of comedy that roots in contradiction (i.e. the gay community not fitting in but being told that they have to be like everyone else), similar to irony.
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With these definitions of irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humour in mind, Babuscio’s framework feels more definitive than Sontag’s. Thus, my own working definition of camp combines Babuscio and Sontag's frameworks into one.