Drag, Interperformance, and the Trouble with Queerness by Katie Horowitz

Author:Katie Horowitz [Horowitz, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780429830303
Google: V5a0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-10-08T04:59:03+00:00

Poetics of earnestness, poetics of camp: drag and genre

In his aptly titled book How To Be Gay (2012), queer theorist David Halperin attempts to locate a defining feature of gay male culture. In order to avoid the obvious problem that any generalization one makes about a culture will inevitably prove false when applied to the individuals who constitute it, Halperin takes the novel approach of framing culture as genre. Genre in this context refers not to “different branches of literature, different modes of representation, or different formal systems of discourse” but rather to “different horizons of expectation for speech and behavior” (134) or “the generic conventions that govern social interaction” in a specific context or culture (139). By way of example, he shares an anecdote about taking some Parisian visitors to a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, wherein his guests wrongly assume from the waitress’s familiar tone that she and Halperin are close friends (130). While it is false to generalize that Americans are friendly, whereas the French are cold and reserved, Halperin argues, it is true that American culture as a genre permits a less formal mode of address between server and patron than is acceptable by French cultural standards.

Halperin goes on to identify camp as gay male culture’s unifying discursive register or genre. Camp, for Halperin, is “the long-standing gay male cultural habit of refusing to exempt oneself from social condemnation, as well as the practice of laughing at situations that are horrifying or tragic” (201–2). In Halperin’s formulation, camp is a close relative of melodrama, which is, in turn, the product of “queer[ing] tragedy” (274). Whereas tragedy turns on the authenticity of feeling, melodrama (specifically, for Halperin, the variety that is self-conscious in and of its excess) hinges on the excessive performedness of sentiment. This emotional inauthenticity is the lynchpin of camp culture: it protects against the indignities of being queer in a heteronormative world. By rhetorically positioning gay male culture as always already outside the high seriousness of straight culture, camp limits the damage to one’s self-image.

Halperin’s conception of the poetics of camp provides critical insight into the fundamental distinction between queens and kings. The “self-lacerating irony” (141), excess of affect, and self-conscious hyper-constructedness of a drag queen persona is camp par excellence. Bound by the generic conventions of camp, we can read the drag queen practice of creating a fully developed, coherent alter ego—one who is above the fray of racial, economic, and sexual injustice—as a necessary function of camp’s emotional distanciation. By contrast, drag king performance as a genre is defined by what I would call a poetics of earnestness, a term Jack Halberstam uses to signify “the opposite of camp” (1998, 239). A poetics of earnestness is a discursive practice that, like tragedy in Halperin’s conception, depends on emotional authenticity. But while tragedy, for Halperin, is an essentially heterosexual discourse grounded in normative conventions and proprieties, earnestness values emotionally authentic performances across, in, and between a variety of non-normative genders and sexualities, and sometimes several at the same time.

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