'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun': Feminist Camp Gothic

This chapter sets out to define Gothic camp and to examine its feminist potential and its relation to Comic Gothic. It concludes that Camp provides a means of understanding moments of humour in the Gothic characterised by a queer form of self-reflexivity. This, in its turn, modulates the affective responses to pleasurable fear and interrogates Comic Gothic with a fresh critical eye. The feminist possibilities of such a formulation of Comic Gothic as feminist camp Gothic are therefore a continuation of those additive and accretive qualities which characterise camp as a loving reclamation of the detritus left on the Gothic cusp.