Music & Camp by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2018-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

FRANCESCA T. ROYSTER

8. “The Booty Don’t Lie” and Other Camp Truths in the Performances of Janelle Monáe

In Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), she insists that camp as a sensibility is necessarily distanced, disengaged, and nonpolitical, even as it has become a tool of creativity for marginalized gay cultures.1 More recently, filmmaker and writer Bruce LaBruce has provided a rebuttal to Sontag, suggesting that “Camp was always a kind of signifying practice invented out of necessity (both for survival and for sheer pleasure) by ‘queer’ (in the classic sense) outsiders—fags, drag queens, transsexuals, deviants, sexual renegades—and that it was always by its very nature deeply politically committed.”2 Indeed, Christopher Isherwood’s evocation of camp’s seriousness in The World in the Evening confirms the deep investment that many subjects (here, gay male subjects) have in their camp. He writes, “You can’t camp about something that you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.”3

For African-American alt-diva Janelle Monáe, the extravagance, artifice, outsized theatricality, and especially the serious fun of camp become tools for the political critique of racism, sexism, and social engagement, even while negotiating conventional ways of performing “sincerity” and authenticity encoded in much commercial soul and R&B musical performance associated with African-American femininity. In my analysis of Janelle Monáe’s negotiations of so-called authentic performances of black femininity, I’d like to turn to the formulation of “realness” offered up in Jennie Livingston’s powerful if controversial documentary of black and Latino gay and transgender ballroom culture and identity, Paris Is Burning (1990). In the film’s voguing competitions, subjects compete under categories such as “Banjee Girl Realness,” a performance of black working-class feminine authenticity (“She’s on the bus stop on the way to pick up her baby brother at school, that kind of realness,” one of the judges explains) and “executive realness,” meaning the ability to pass as employed at a white-collar job. In these competitions, careful attention is paid to clothing brands, makeup and accessories, hair, posture, and hand gestures. This very work both exposes the lie of the truth of realness, and the deep desire and skill put into its convincing production. As the film illustrates, in ballroom culture, “realness” is about passing, about capturing powerful performances of gender, race, and also class, in order to “make it.” House mother Pepper LaBeija puts it bluntly: “To be able to blend, that’s what realness is…. It’s really a case of going back into the closet … Give the society what they want to see.”4

In her response that followed the film, critic bell hooks accused Livingston of treating these struggles as camp in its most distanced and disengaged sense.5 Yet I’d argue that the film leaves room for our understanding of the struggle for “realness” as a resistant, creative, and imaginative act. As Livingston exposes the work that it takes to produce the “real” and gestures toward the potential of its commodification (particularly in her treatment of model Octavia St.

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