Katrin Horn

The Great Dyke Rewrite: Lesbian Camp on the Big Screen

Chapter 3 reads But I’m a Cheerleader (1999, Dir. Jamie Babbit) and D.E.B.S. (2004, Dir. Angela Robinson) as critical amalgams of New Queer Cinema’s historiographic project and the hyper-visibility of desexualized femme identity established in lesbian chic. Horn shows how both films offer camp assessments of lesbian representation and queer the heteronormative romantic comedy via forms of narrative and stylistic excess, to open new avenues of emotional attachment. Close analyses of soundtrack, mise en scene, and uses of cinematic stereotypes position the films within the history of lesbian representability in Hollywood cinema and minor lesbian cinema’s “unpleasure.” As a result, Horn’s readings establish both films as crucial examples of popular culture’s ongoing “Great Dyke Rewrite,” which B. Ruby Rich attested to New Queer Cinema’s lesbian contributions.

Beyond Gay Men and After the Closet: Camp’s New Politics and Pleasures

Using reviews of the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest as its point of entry, Chapter 1 criticizes recent uses of camp that have neglected its serious component and largely ignored female agents, while foregrounding its “frivolous” aesthetics and gay male audiences. To re-establish camp’s critical edge, this introduction draws on foundational texts of camp scholarship from Sontag and Isherwood and connects them to recent theoretical interventions in queer media scholarship. Katrin Horn then proposes a new definition of camp as “detached attachment” to grasp its singular capability to engage with popular culture in a manner that allows for emotional investment and critical distance simultaneously. The chapter ends with overviews of subsequent readings of post-New Queer Cinema films, 30 Rock, and Lady Gaga as examples of camp in contemporary popular culture.

Taking Pop Seriously: Lady Gaga as Camp

This chapter examines how Lady Gaga’s early work combines the critical distance and emotional intensity typical for camp and thus serves as a prime example of Judith Butler’s notion of “serious play,” which exposes heteronormative categorizations as laughable. Through analyses of award show performances, music videos, and a concert tour, Horn relates Gaga’s strategies to earlier “pop divas,” such as Madonna, Cher, and Annie Lennox, and illustrates how intertextuality and transmedial storytelling are used for queer effect. Horn’s reading thus clarifies how visual, vocal, and musical style feature in Gaga’s construction of critique. Her in-depth analysis of The Monster Ball demonstrates the sincere quality of the artist’s extreme theatricality, and explains how Gaga eventually transforms camp into grotesque to disrupt normative modes of representation.

TV in/vs. Postfeminism: Feminist Camp in 30 Rock

This chapter argues for 30 Rock (2006–2013, Creat. Tina Fey) as camp’s answer to postfeminism’s inner contradictions, such as an anti-feminist backlash and notions of sexualization as empowerment. Horn reads the series as a hybrid of feminist sitcom (e.g., Murphy Brown, The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and variety show (e.g., Saturday Night Live) to account for 30 Rock’s infusion with slapstick elements. Fey’s show thereby creates a carnivalesque environment for its criticism and deliberately reverses the sidekick–lead dynamic, through which the liminal (concerning sitcoms’ representation of gender) is brought to the fore. 30 Rock thus effectively combines elements of critical distance and affective involvement to foster the audience’s detached attachment to its central female characters, which enables the show’s intervention in postfeminist sensibility.

Camp: A New, More Complex Relation to the Serious

The conclusion summarizes the book’s central arguments by returning to Sontag’s seminal “Notes on Camp,” which states that camp “involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’.” In contrast to Sontag, who emphatically uses quotation marks, Women, Camp, and Popular Culture insists on taking the serious literally, appropriating it as a technique for Sedgwick’s reparative queer critiques. As detached attachment, camp empowers a participatory critique, which is capable of disrupting the cultural consensus and creates new webs of affinity. The conclusion thus crystallizes Horn’s central claim that camp results from a “more complex” relation to popular culture; it generates critical awareness for its incongruities and questionable normativity, yet gives room to celebrate its affective powers of pleasurable enjoyment.