UCLA

This multi-sited ethnographic study explores U.S. gay men's interactional usages of camp, a queer aesthetic and sociopolitical mode of expressivity that reframes and transforms dominant, heterosexual-constrained communicative conventions and reality through queer forms of experience. Differing from earlier work on camp, which primarily explored the subject from the perspective of cultural studies, the current analyses are premised upon the examination of camp as a product of talk-in-interaction, looking specifically at its role as an interactive resource with the capacity to aid in the construction of queer personhood and community, while also challenging the heteronormative communities that render this queer coalescence subjugated within larger social structures and hierarchies. Drawing from audio-video ethnographic data collected over a one and one half year period in four different U.S. cities (New York, New York; Atlanta, Georgia, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and Los Angeles, California), the talk is analyzed from a methodologically conversation analytic perspective, wherein detailed transcriptions are used to explore the systematic and sequential nature of talk. In this way, participants themselves, and by extension the talk of said participants, are taken as the primary sources for understanding social structures and courses of interactional action. As the research is conducted from a participant-observer perspective, follow up interview and survey materials are also used as an additional means for substantiating and grounding the analyses, and in some cases, adding layers of in-group understanding that might be overlooked using etic observational approaches alone. With regard to the analyses, the usage of camp as an interactive practice within queer friendship groups is explored not only for its ability to transform mundane everyday life events into discursively queer interactional spaces, but also for its ability to act as a type of covert code through which queer identity is systematically recognized and performed, to varying degrees. This code, which emerges as a product of explicit usages of queer-identified forms of camp humor, queer associative fields of imagery and pop cultural iconicity, and referential invocations of camp identified media and texts, is shown to in turn discursively reconstruct heterosexual normalcy, resulting in a form of critical subversion of the concept of heteronormative behavior. As a result, the study, in addition, explores both the usage of camp within micro-level social contexts that comprise the daily lives of queer social actors, and within the macro-level contexts wherein resides an ever-present interface between marginalized sexual identities and heterosexually defined institutions and hegemony. This critical subversion, in turn, is argued for as a means to understand queer subjectivity by way of understanding what it is not (as seen through a backdrop of heterosexual conventions that constrain interactive practices). The research culminates in a call for further explorations of camp as an interactive practice, and for alternative forms of queer expressivity as potential loci for understanding queer experience and social organization.