For at least the last fifty years, critics, commentators, and celebrity cognoscenti have repeatedly resounded the death knell of camp. First, facing the political crucibles of the queer civil rights and feminist protests of the 1960s and 1970s, gay men, lesbians, and trans folks were supposed to abandon the shameful practice and kill their darlings. Yet, twenty years later, they found camp coming gloriously back into vogue, striking a pose on the ironic drag stages of the queer 1990s. Now, come forward another twenty years, when self-conscious postmodern parody and biting double entendre are the fuel that makes meme culture go, and we are obliged to wonder at camp’s ubiquity and to question its possible utility. Indeed, the 2019 Met Gala, organized around the theme of “camp,” notoriously pressed these questions to the fore. Do younger generations have a use for camp or even know what it is, considering its ironies are so much in the air they breathe online? Can camp, seemingly now so familiar, still be relevant in our new media and political age? With The Handbook of Camp and Screen Cultures (under contract with Oxford University Press), we answer these questions with a resounding “yes.” As it has since its first obituary was written all those years ago, camp has defied the doomsayers once more and shimmered back to life just when our political situation seems to need it most.

It is a truism of camp scholarship that as a practice and way of reading the straight world, camp has traditionally been seen, and most often studied, as the province of gay men. At least since Sontag’s influential “Notes on Camp”, however, camp’s most obvious manifestations became well known to the straight world, too, where they transitioned to a more “pop” version seemingly stripped of political aims. Still, its association with gay men, drag performance, and queer communities has not been totally lost, and camp’s most recent appearances do suggest an evolution for it that reflects not only its relative mainstreaming in modern media cultures but also a new generation of practitioners and appreciators who have matured in a world (perhaps) less closeted and condemning of LGBTQIA+ identities and much more cognizant of intersectionality and racial injustices. Recent camp scholarship, therefore, reflects these changes and the inevitable expansion of camp and our understanding of it. Now, camp scholarship elevates a history of trans practitioners, centralizes the historical and current role of women—both straight and queer—as camp spectators, performers, and influencers, and documents the significance of racial minorities in past and present camp culture. In line with this recent scholarship, then, our aim is to reimagine camp theory for the twenty-first century.

Therefore, we invite contributions to the Handbook that locate camp in its familiar popular forms, as well as in its established anti-normative role: as a form of performance and celebrity, as a style and attitude in filmmaking, as a manner of producing and consuming television, and as a strategy for building and protecting marginalized communities. Yet, we also want to address the new forms of camp and camping that our changing media and social landscape have inspired—from memes and the content of streaming platforms to social media divas and shock tactics in contemporary politics and screen cultures. The Handbook aims to acknowledge the international currency which camp has developed, and the global scale at which most media operate today. We are therefore, particularly, seeking submissions that address camp’s uses beyond anglophone contexts.

Submission Guidelines:

To propose a chapter for the Handbook, please submit a title, a 300-word abstract (with 3-5 bibliographic entries), and contact information (including address) to the editors, Barbara Jane Brickman at bjbrickman@ua.edu and Katrin Horn at hornk@uni-greifswald.de,  by  July 31, 2025.

Full chapter drafts of 6,000-8,000 words will be due in August 2026.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!