Thank you for your comment, Alfred. My application of the aesthetic designation "camp" to this poem is essential to a larger argument that I make elsewhere, but I have not foregrounded that argument in this essay. The larger argument has to do with reassessing the role of homophobic invective in Roman poetry. Twentieth-century scholars routinely claimed poems like Catullus 16 as evidence for the uniformity and universality of Roman views regarding normative masculine comportment. My argument is that the invective on display here deploys theatricality, incongruity, and humor in solidarity with the deviant, which is my definition of camp. As I assert at the end of the essay, when we as queer readers approach this poetry as camp, we are reclaiming it for ourselves, making it a part of our history, and reinscribing ourselves in a part of the Western literary tradition from which we have long been excluded. Over time, I intend to post more of my theoretical writing on this issue here on my Substack.
I find your arguments entirely convincing except when you call these moves "camp," a term superfluous to those arguments, especially when you limit the definition of "camp" to what Professor Newman says about it. The are countless cultural incidents describable as "camp" that have no direct connection to same-sex experience and attitudes. Sontag's "Notes on Camp" is still the best introduction to the concept. She says, for example, that Sara Lee cheesecake is camp. I say the conclusion to the Garland movie =A Star Is Born= is camp when the Vickie Lester character says she accepts the award as "Mrs. Norman Maine!" Or when Norma Desmond in =Sunset Boulevard= retorts, "I =am= big, it's the movie that got small." When Wystan Auden objects to something someone does by saying "You have ruined Mother's day," that is camp, even though no sex of any description is involved.
Thank you for your comment, Alfred. My application of the aesthetic designation "camp" to this poem is essential to a larger argument that I make elsewhere, but I have not foregrounded that argument in this essay. The larger argument has to do with reassessing the role of homophobic invective in Roman poetry. Twentieth-century scholars routinely claimed poems like Catullus 16 as evidence for the uniformity and universality of Roman views regarding normative masculine comportment. My argument is that the invective on display here deploys theatricality, incongruity, and humor in solidarity with the deviant, which is my definition of camp. As I assert at the end of the essay, when we as queer readers approach this poetry as camp, we are reclaiming it for ourselves, making it a part of our history, and reinscribing ourselves in a part of the Western literary tradition from which we have long been excluded. Over time, I intend to post more of my theoretical writing on this issue here on my Substack.
I find your arguments entirely convincing except when you call these moves "camp," a term superfluous to those arguments, especially when you limit the definition of "camp" to what Professor Newman says about it. The are countless cultural incidents describable as "camp" that have no direct connection to same-sex experience and attitudes. Sontag's "Notes on Camp" is still the best introduction to the concept. She says, for example, that Sara Lee cheesecake is camp. I say the conclusion to the Garland movie =A Star Is Born= is camp when the Vickie Lester character says she accepts the award as "Mrs. Norman Maine!" Or when Norma Desmond in =Sunset Boulevard= retorts, "I =am= big, it's the movie that got small." When Wystan Auden objects to something someone does by saying "You have ruined Mother's day," that is camp, even though no sex of any description is involved.