Conservative Camp

Edited by Darin DeWitt and Nicole Seymour

We invite contributions for an edited volume titled Conservative Camp, on which we are working with the University of Minnesota Press’ Humanities Editor Leah Pennywark. This volume seeks to explain how camp aesthetics, long associated with the progressive Left and with queer communities in particular, have recently been appropriated by conservative movements, particularly by homophobic and transphobic figures on the Right. 

In her landmark 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag categorized camp as “apolitical.” Queer historians and theorists, however, have subsequently insisted that camp is a uniquely queer survival strategy, one that is “not only political, but progressive” (Bronski 1984; see also Newton 1972). The latter views have largely dominated for the last several decades. But as camp sensibilities and aesthetics have increasingly cropped up on the far Right in the U.S. and elsewhere—think, for example, of Twinks for Trump or the “QAnon Shaman” at the January 6th insurrection, wearing his gaudy fur headdress and flamboyant facepaint—we believe it is time to reopen discussion on this topic.  

Conservative Camp will build on relevant recent claims from cultural commentators, such as that “Trump is America’s first camp president” (Goins 2019), and someone who “hijacked camp” (Kornhaber 2020). We will also return to Canadian director Bruce LaBruce (2012) and U.S. writer-curator Emily Colucci’s (2017) related arguments that conservative camp began to emerge in the 2000s thanks to the likes of Governor Sarah Palin and political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos. Academics did not pick up on these provocative arguments at the time, but as a particular brand of radical right-wing populism continues to sweep Europe and the U.S., it is more crucial than ever that we do so.

Key to our approach will be holding open the possibility that conservatives might engage in “deliberate” rather than just “naive” camp, to employ Sontag’s famous distinction. Indeed, in the instances when cultural commentators have recognized the campiness of conservative discourse and action—whether it be Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s clownish behavior or U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s wild hair or Donald Trump’s verbal gaffes—they have tended to assume ignorance on the part of those actors, and to therefore take a stance of laughing-at rather than laughing-with. While such an approach may be understandable from a moral standpoint, it forecloses the possibility that conservative audiences genuinely enjoy, even revel in, campy performance. After all, what else could explain the spectacle, repeated across the campaign trail in 2020, of thousands of supporters laughing and clapping along as Donald Trump pumped his fists and moved his hips to the Village People’s 1978 gay anthem “Y.M.C.A.”?

We are looking to assemble a set of essays that engage with these developments in historical, national, and/or comparative contexts. 

Questions our contributors might consider include:

• How could styles and affects so tightly tied to LGBTQ+ communities be co-opted by anti-LGBTQ+ communities, not to mention white supremacists and neo-Nazis? 
• How does one “hijack” an aesthetic sensibility? What cultural or other conditions make such a maneuver possible?
• If Ann Pellegrini is right that “[c]amp response … is not isolable from the experiences or histories of larger communities of interpretation”—and that one therefore “has to learn to ‘read’ and ‘get’ camp” (2007)—how should one “read” and “get” camp today, in an era of political polarization and media fragmentation? 
• What “communities of interpretation” currently exist around conservative camp and how do they work?
• Shifting to more pragmatic questions about the effects of camp on contemporary politics: To what ends do conservatives use camp? How do campy spectacles build identity and community?
• How might analyzing political actors through this framework of camp help us resist forces such as white supremacy and ethnonationalism?  

Possible chapter topics include: 

• Minstrelsy and other camp spectacles in the 19th century
• Nazi (anti-)kitsch 
• Television sitcoms and conservative comedy of the mid-20th century
• Playfulness as an insurgent strategy
• Right-wing camp masculinities or femininities 
• Conservative tech and spectacle (Cybertrucks, “rolling coal,” etc.)
• Media infrastructures and the spread of conservative humor
• Digital culture (e.g. memes) and the creation of alt-right communities 
• Populism and camp in Western Europe 
• Anti-woke comedy and the normalization of the far Right
• Humor as a tool of respectability politics
• Conservative camp targeting progressivism 

The editors invite proposals for consideration to be submitted to Darin DeWitt at darin.dewitt@csulb.edu and Nicole Seymour at nseymour@fullerton.edu by December 10, 2024. (Collaborative proposals are welcome.) We will respond by January 10, 2025. 

Proposals should include:

1. Full name of author(s)
2. Proposed chapter title
3. 300-word abstract
4. A short (100–150 word) professional biography

Please feel free to reach out to us ahead of December 10, 2024 if you have any questions.