Niall Richardson

As Kamp as Bree: the politics of camp reconsidered by 'Desperate Housewives'

In the episode entitled “Love is in the Air” in the hit drama series Desperate Housewives, Bree Van de Kamp attends her weekly session with her marriage counsellor and remarks that she would be content with a loveless, hollow marriage provided she could always have fabulous dinner parties. Such campy remarks, in which style and appearance are valued over substance, have been characteristic of Bree throughout the series. Mrs. Van de Kamp—the supreme Stepford wife who, according to her husband, has hair that never moves—can simply be read as yet another example in popular culture’s tradition of camp women, ranging from Mae West, to Raquel Welch to Joan Collins. Whether for comic relief, or an attempt to cater for gay male spectatorship, camp women have been a staple part of American popular media. However, in this paper I want to argue that the camp representation of Bree is more than simply fun or comic relief. Instead, I will attempt to reconsider the politics of camp and suggest that Desperate Housewives can be read as employing camp for both a feminist politics and also a queer agenda. Desperate Housewives continues the current stream of “quality” American television dramas which have focused on women’s issues in a post-feminist era. Following Ally McBeal (1997 –2003), Sex and the City (1998–2004), Charmed (1998 –), Family Law (1999 –), and Judging Amy (1999 –), Desperate Housewives represents “feminist characters who are ‘new, new women’” (Amanda Lotz 2001, p. 106). Yet unlike Sex and the City, which represented a “postpatriarchal world” (Sue Thornham & Tony Purvis 2004, p. 126), Desperate Housewives offers a darker image and is one of the first mainstream dramas to criticise, in a very savage fashion, the institutions of heterosexual monogamy. Focusing on the lives of four different

Flex-rated! Female bodybuilding: feminist resistance or erotic spectacle?

This paper aims to develop the already extensive writing on female bodybuilding by speculating on the ‘possible’ eroticism of the hyper-muscular female body. Most of the existing academic literature on female bodybuilding has either praised the built female body as feminist resistance to traditional ideas of femininity or else dismissed it as a strange form of erotic spectacle. Indeed, one of the fastest growing forms of erotic representation is the newly christened form of sexual fetishism termed ‘muscle-worship’ which has only recently reached public awareness through the new found availability of videos/DVDs and, most importantly, the Internet. This paper seeks to problematize readings of female bodybuilding which view it simply as feminist resistance or erotic spectacle. It argues that interpreting the image of the hyper-muscular female body is dependent upon its context and how it is coded within the representation. While mainstream bodybuilding representations attempt to create a sense of erotic numbness, asking the spectator to appraise the body like living sculpture, muscle-worship erotica contextualizes and eroticizes the body in a very different way.

The queer activity of extreme male bodybuilding: gender dissidence, auto‐eroticism and hysteria

The paper seeks to expose the incoherencies within the activity of bodybuilding, suggesting that both the bodybuilders body and the activity of bodybuilding can be regarded as ‘queer’. However, the paper will not use ‘queer’ as a trendy synonym for ‘gay’ but will focus on queers potential to describe mismatches of sex, gender and sexuality. ‘Queer’ draws its subversive potential from being in opposition with ‘normal’ rather than ‘heterosexual’. The paper will argue that the extreme, competition standard, male bodybuilders body is a gender dissident body which simultaneously affirms masculine and feminine characteristics: muscles and angularity are combined with curvaceousness, hairlessness and made‐up skin. A body which offers a haemorrhaging of meaning. The second part of the paper will focus on the activity of training in the gym. It will suggest that the experience of pumping up, which has famously been described as a sexual experience, is a form of dissonant sexuality. The auto‐eroticism of pumping up in the gym can even be described in the archaic term of ‘onanism’. The paper will conclude by asking why someone would want to push his body to such an extreme degree of freakiness and will suggest that the condition of hysteria may be useful in understanding the obsessive activity. Although hysteria has been culturally connected to the female body, Lacan described hysteria as gender confusion. The hysteric is confused as to his/her gendered subjectivity in relation to the phallic order. The bodybuilder, like the hysteric, seeks a complete rejection of the body, owing to a lack, in his history, of symbolization of the body. Therefore the bodybuilder dreams of an autotelic body and this causes erotogenic zone displacements and the resulting auto‐eroticism of extreme, male bodybuilding.

The Queer Performance of Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s Edward II: Gay Male Misogyny Reconsidered

Gay male misogyny has become a cliché. From the novels of Alan Hollinghurst and David Leavitt to recent gay themed films such as Trick and Broadway Damage, woman’s abject presence is used as a defining other for the gay male bodies. Myopic critics have cited Jarman’s films in the same league. This article will argue that Jarman does not represent his favourite actor - Tilda Swinton - as an abject sponge. Instead, Swinton’s performance evokes an interrogation of the assumed stable continuum of the sexed body and gender. Through a camp performance, Queen Isabella (Swinton) offers the Butlerian potential of exposing the performativity of gender. The film continually stresses a Brechtian distanciation between Swinton’s gender performance and her famously androgynous body.

‘Whether you are gay or straight, I don’t like to see effeminate dancing’: effeminophobia in performance-level ballroom dance

Abstract This article discusses recent responses to performances of same-sex male ballroom dancing in order to consider the subtle difference which can exist between homophobia and effeminophobia. Given that the world of performance-level ballroom dancing is a gay-friendly environment, in which many participants are openly gay identified, this article will argue that a discourse of effeminophobia, rather than homophobia, underpins the world of performance-level ballroom dance. Performance-level ballroom dance is often read as camp not only because it represents exaggerated gender roles but because its official technique requires that the male dancer synthesise codes of masculinity and femininity in his dancing. What protects the gender-dissident male ballroom dancer from being read as effeminate is that he is paired with a female body performing excessive femininity. Without the foil of the hyper-feminine female partner, the same-sex couple draws attention to the fact that the male ballroom dancer is not dancing as a man but in accordance with ballroom’s queer construction of masculinity. Given that performance-level dance has struggled for so many years to be viewed as masculine sport, practitioners may, quite understandably, be anxious about any representation which suggests that ballroom dance may be an effeminate activity.