http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFjGJIHnH7w
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_NZePWVaWy0

Pamela Robertson
“The kind of comedy that imitates me”: Mae West’s identification with feminist camp

In her article, Pamela Robertson presents camp as a feminist practice by positioning women as producers and consumers of camp, using Mae West’s star text as an example. Robertson suggests that debates on camp—or at least in terms of its political function—usually center on two things; one, it equates camp “with gay male taste and then proceed to explore camp’s effectiveness as a form of opposition for a gay subculture,” and two, it looses its cutting edge when “taken over by straights” (156). In an attempt to extend camp to women, both lesbian and straight, she bases her argument on camp’s relationship—or affinity—with feminist discussions of gender (as socially constructed) and gender performance, as well as camp’s so-called identification with the “gay experience” and “distance from the straight world view” (156). Within a feminist framework, however, camp is sometimes read as misogynistic in its representations of female excess—though as Robertson claims, it can also be an opening for critiquing sex and gender roles.

To counter common uses of camp, Robertson defines camp as a “structural activity” (156), equates gender to stereotypes, and proposes that camp/masquerade exaggerates and strips gender of its currency. In reclaiming camp for a female audience, she argues more generally for how texts get taken up in certain ways by certain groups, and how camp is valued in these contexts, and more specifically, what exclusion from this discourse entails. Robertson writes, “I reclaim a female form of aestheticism, related to female masquerade, which articulates and subverts the image and culture-making processes to which women have traditionally been given access (157).

As exemplified in the article, camp exists somewhere between performance and audience (though this position is constantly shifting), and involves the process of “identification”, a recurring theme for Robertson. Furthermore, camp requires a reading/viewing practice, which, by definition, is not available to all spectators. In other words, there is a presumed or hypothetical audience who will read or view the “object” (gender) as normal (censors?).

However difficult to pin down and define, camp can be a useful term for questioning the ways in which particular people have access to determining the boundaries of parody and irony, and also the underlying context from which this kind of humourous criticism draws, or in other words, camp’s inherent intertextuality. As Ethan Mordden suggests, West’s camp is the “gay style exposed to the outsider,” which implies in the first place, a distinct gay male culture, and more generally, that sexuality determines the parameters of irony around gender. In this sense, camp is both an embodied experience and an intellectual exercise—it relates what one is to one’s access to what one is, through a particular reading of a text.

This particular camp sensibility is connected to various aspects of cultural analysis that we have looked at in class so far, and in particular, Sconce’s claim that paracinema challenges the mainstream (however loose and vague by definition); this suggests that like camp, paracinema functions as a set of sensibilities rather than texts. As such, sensibility can be understood as a concept that reflects the desires, concerns and anxieties of its audience. In her attempt to define a feminist camp sensibility, Robertson proposes that camp, and in particular female masquerade, allow for simultaneous pleasure and criticism—for both performer and audience. This is, arguably, an important contribution to theories of spectatorship and reception, which guide the audience towards particular interpretations and emotional responses, or as the title for this week’s readings suggest, a “knowingness”.

The recurring theme of “identifying with” wherein actors, the characters they play and portray, both reinstates the division between reality and representation by becoming an personified ideal with who the audience relates, and brings into question the ways in which certain people are said to have access to a way of reading these “characterizations.” However, grounding camp in this way is rooted in a social constructivist approach to gender. Using Mae West’s self-reflexive and self-aware camp disposition, Robertson proposes that West’s camp highlights the distinction between a so-called genuine/essential womanliness and the masquerade, wherein the masquerade is always social, and gender always socially constructed.

In this way, masquerade’s built-in self-reflexivity—knowing that you are knowing—links back to Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus. i.e. how people feel at home in a cultural environment, have certain familiarities, and know how to act, etc. However, Bourdieu’s habitus is arguably less self-aware or intentional.

According to Robertson, West produced two kinds of camp, in the 10 films she made between 1932 and 1943, and in her earlier career. While West’s late camp was more about a shared acknowledgement of West being outmoded—a “has-been”—it relies on her having been a recognizable character, “the May West character” (158). Andrew Ross uses the term “camp effect” to describe things that appear outmoded in their current aesthetic form and no longer dominate cultural meaning (stating that they are often appropriated and redefined.) In this instance, it is West’s age that becomes the pivotal point of analysis and her desire to remain youthful, though fully acknowledged, is what outmodes her and renders her obsolete (eg. At 85 she played a 28 yr old – the eternal Mae West character). West’s late camp was attributed in part to her decline as a film star, while feminist critiques of this so-called decline assume this to be an oversight of the irony involved in the masquerade. According to Robertson then, West modeled herself on contemporary female impersonators and “explicitly understood their style as camp” (159). West’s early camp was based on her plays and feature a powerful female figure, but as comic relief, without West’s now infamous word plays. In a sense, Robertson’s analysis of West’s earlier camp persona is more complicated—she proposes that rather than copying gay style, West “lined certain aspects of gay culture to aspects of female sensibility” (161), as both gay men and women, according to West, are/were oppressed by straight men. Rather than exposing the gay style, as some propose camp does, West exaggerates and exposes “stereotypical female styles as impersonations” (162). Said to be addressing her female viewers, West’s plays also commented on the emergence of a female audience by “manipulating her place in the public sphere”, namely by playing with censorship and pushing the boundaries of freedom of expression (of femininity).
Robertson’s version of camp, then, is a comment on the idea of a feminine identity that exists prior to its representation. Or, as Ann Doane explains in the article, masquerade functions as a “double mimesis”: drag relies on the notion that the person underneath is really another gender, or, in other words, drag implies that the performer is performing the gender they are not “in reality.” (Though both formations suggest that gender does, in fact, exist.) In West’s case, her embodiment of so-called masculine characteristics challenges the notion “that an essential feminine identity exists prior to the image” or as Robertson puts it, “reveals that feminine identity is always a masquerade or impersonation” in the first place.

The notion of West’s “reality” also plays out in how she is perceived in her day-to-day life; like Steve Cohan’s Judy on the Net does for Judy Garland, Robertson interrogates the ways in which West’s fans obsessed over whether or not West was like the characters she played. However, Roberston provides little information about West’s life outside of acting. Instead, she focuses on the fact that West’s character changed very little from one film to another, and states that that made her a star personality… this meant that people went to see her films many times. She writes “imitating West gave women imaginary access to her autonomy, transgression, and humour, and it enabled them to create an ironic distance from their own roles.” As such, her female audience identify with her and her masquerade. According to Jackie Stacey, however, models of identification assumed in psychoanalytic theory are limited; she offers instead a model of conscious social identification wherein she situates fantasies both in a cinematic context to understand the relationship between the star and spectator, and outside this context, accounting for the audience’s self-transformation to become more like the star.

Robertson leans on this second point to make her own about camp practices. Using fan magazine discourse, promotional materials and production statements, she relies on materials that mediate fans’ understanding of West. This is where her argument weakens, in my opinion, in that she inadvertently reasserts a unified female audience, making no distinction between how lesbians and straight women might differently identify with West. For example, Robertson makes claims about how West’s audience related to her; she writes “although West was a sex symbol, and potential rival, she appealed to women as a friend who understands them,” which tends to speak more to and of a straight female audience. So while the article’s argument is built around the idea that camp practices allow distance from, if not resist, sex and gender stereotypes, the article is also premised on a somewhat unified female reception of camp, that is presumably heterosexual. Similarly, masculinity seems to be locked in time, a static category against which femininity is pitted.

“The kind of comedy that imitates me”: Mae West’s identification with feminist camp

- what does identifying with something mean?

What is her meth: review of the lit, biography, etc??

Defining camp:
- gay male taste (link to “taste” articles!!)
- positions gay as a “subculture”
- camp’s political function is dependent on its articulation within a gay male subculture
- defines camp in relation to the distance one has to the culture-making process
- camp is cutting edge, linked to a gay experience and female excess
- fem critique – it reproduce patriarchal oppression and reinforces stereotypes (though this is just one articulation, no? like butch fem dynamics understood as recreating hetness?)
- camp is therefore misogynist and gay

Camp offers a model for critiques of sex and gender roles
- TS: argues for the role of women as producers and consumers of camp, using Mae West’s star text as an example.
- Tries to extend camp to women, lesbian and straight
- Camp as a structural activity has an affinity with feminist discussions of gender construction, performance and enactment
- Camp as a feminist practice
- Reclaiming female for of aestheticism related to female masquerade (see Joan Rivieres)
- Subverting the image and culture making processes to which women have been given access

Mae West
- Self-reflexive def of camp
- Camp object
- Susan Sontag’s notes on camp

Andrew Ross
- “the camp effect” - when cultural products of an earlier era have lost their “power to dominate cultural meanings and become available for redefinition”
- West as outmoded and obsolete – remaining youthful (made to be a joke)
- (link to pastiche? Parody?)

West produced two kinds of camp, in the 10 films she made b/w 1932 and 1943, and her earlier career
- earlier career
- set in the gay nineties
- instead of being nostalgic, her work set in the 1890s exposed women’s roles of the 1930s – re-appropriated burlesque and female impersonation (ironic and challenging the general ideas of camp)

Robert Allen
- argues that 19t c burlesque was encoded as a subversive form of female representation and the relationship of women onstage to women in the real world
- burlesque as most feminized form of entertainment in the hist of American stage
- complicity with her own sexual objectification (compare to tiller girls??)
- compared to a female impersonator – equated camp effect with her decline as a film star
- west seems like a female impersonator b/c she appears to be grotesque (a man in drag, a joke on women, not a woman)
- whereas feminist argue that it is an instance of deliberate and ironic female masquerade
- modeled her self on other female impersonators (Bert Savoy and Eva Tangay)

Wildean aestheticism and verbal activity
- asserts the primacy of style over sincerity in “matters of grave importance” 161 (tiller girls?)

Ethan Mordden
- the gay style exposed to the outsider
but article suggests that that West does not simply copy gay style, but links to female sensibility
- rather exposes stereotypes of gender
- ornamental costumes,
- Joan Rivieres’ – “the feminist utopian possibility of masquerade
Ann Doane – masquerade as “double mimesis” – drag relies on the notion that the person underneath is really another gender
West embodies masculine characteristics

Concept of masquerade ***
- author frames gender as stereotypes – masquerage exaggerates and strips its currency
- provides a useful preliminary model for feminist camp (what is beyond preliminary?)
- but we must realign the concept of masquerade with the activities of drag and cross-dressing
(link to Butler and to Barthes be/do)
- drag implies that the performer is performing the gender they are not “in reality”
- need to understand west within gay discourse on feminity and gay practices of drag and cross-dressing
- west represent an instance of deliberate female masquerade through her embodiment of masculine characteristics
- feminist analysis: “her masquerade parodies drag by REPLACING and DISPLACING it with the hyperbolization of the feminine through the masquerade- and not because West represents masculine characteristics behind female masquerade”
- so in other words, its inherent critique of that femininity exists outside of its representation, or as Robertson puts it “the idea that an essential feminine identity exists prior to the image; she reveals hat feminine identity is always a masquerade or impersonation”
- Roberston then moves on to say that beyond her parody of female stereotypes and images, she EMBODIES and IDENTIFIES (what does identify with mean?) with them
- to read her as wholly ironic, we must ignore her status as a sex symbol
- functioned both as sex object and sex subject
-

West was identified with the 1890s – the gay nineties – the Mauve decade (dye used in fashion), no reference to homosexuality
1) She done him wrong (1933)
- multiple music styles and traditions remixed (blues, jazz, period song, 30s flavour)
- this creates distance b/w viewer and the 30s
2) Belle of the Nineties (1934)
- parodies burlesque entertainment – performer morph into many animals, flower, insect until she becomes the statue of liberty – representing American beauty (according to the song)
- isn’t actually performing anything but female stereotypes but gets a great reception from the audience
- intended to contrast “talent” from her previous numbers where she more than proves herself as a singer, with the reception of just “being” ridiculously feminine

3) Goin’ to Town (1935)
– associated with modernity
- evokes nostalgia but outmodes it
- her attitudes were decidedly modern
4) Klondike Annie (1936)
- juxtapose her attitude with the fin de siecle setting
- like Kaucauser – the surface reflects the politics of the time, in this case the very importance of binaries, the contrast, difference to reinforce and critique difference
- eg. Sex and humour, modern mores and old setting, masculine and feminine

who had access to entertainment in the 1890s to 1930s? slow shift to allow mid-class women to be part of the audience – though performers were culturally coded as prostitutes

- the Mae West character is always covertly a prostitute
- manipulates her place in the public sphere (how??)
- offered new endings for women in film – i.e. not get married, die or does not take the rd to exile – this is so similar to queer representation by mainstream – the normalizing effect of being represented
- pressure from the Production Code Administration meant that her characters had to get married!!!!!! (spelled out what was morally acceptable and morally unacceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the U.S.A.)
- constant battle with censors – West was said to “play a unique iconographic role in the public discourse of the period about movie morality and censorship”
- used camp to deflect censors
- censors feared her independence and freedom – this speaks to the power of representation

Was West like the character she played? (if all femininity performative, than what is it not to perform??, to not be acting? To be real?)
- publicist tried to paint her as having a clean lifestyle
- fan discourse around acting/reality – would they ask this of a man actor? West also wrote many of the plays she appeared in so probably her politics came through – platform
- fans identify with her characters – the identification becomes a real source of power
- Robertson argues that fans identifying with West is a camp practice
- according to Jackie Stacey – models of identification assumed in psychoanalytic theory are limited; she offers instead a model of conscious social identification 1) fantasies in a cinematic context about the relationship between the star and spectator 2) outside of cinematic context in which consists of audience self-transformation to become more like tha star
- Robertson borrows Stacey’s second point to make her own about camp practices
- using fan magazine discourse, promo materials and production statements – materials that mediate fan’s understanding of West
- West’s female audience – Robertson states “although West was a sex symbol, and potential rival, she appealed to women as a friend who understands them” – this is only about feminine straight women? What about women who identified with the masculinity?
- because of her body type, she did not constitute a real threat because physically she was not “the modern woman of today” and so not serious competition
- but apparently women kind of wanted to be curvy too
- her body was seen as a return to normal, the depression is over body, a boon to motherhood – are men’s bodies so surveilled?
- her star personality meant that people returned to see her films many times, while audiences who like a story don’t see a film twice
- her character changed little from film to film – her star personality was the attraction
- fans imitate (rather than copy) West: “imitating west gave women imaginary access to her autonomy, transgression, and humour; and it enabled them to create an ironic distance from their own roles”
- double mimesis – identifying with her and with her masquerade
- while the article’s whole point is that camp practices allows distance from sex and gender stereotypes, yet the whole article is premised, more or less, on a unified female reception of camp

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