'Tarting up Ideas in Costume Jewellery': Contemporary Gothic Camp

Gothic has always been campy. Its penchant for melodrama, affinity with superficial expressions of extreme emotion, and preferred locales, set dress-ings and costumes all collude to craft a camp way of imagining the world. Susan Sontag argued this in 1964, noting that ‘the origins of Camp taste are to be found’ in eighteenth-century artefacts, with ‘Gothic novels’ being one of Sontag’s many examples. Subsequent criticism further indicates the tremendous tendency of Gothic and horror to be campy. For example, Jack Babuscio argues that horror cinema’s camp qualities emerge from the genre’s tendency to ‘make the most of stylish conventions for expressing instant feeling, thrills, sharply defined personality, outrageous and “unac-ceptable” sentiments, and so on’. Likewise, Gothic scholars obliquely suggest a contact point between Gothic and camp. Despite this, critical work on Gothic camp is scant. This critical lacuna is even more noticeable within Queer Gothic studies. Considering that the predominant approach that queer Gothicists take when analysing the mode involves a fixation on forms of queer representation and expressions of queer politics interpret-able within Gothic work, this gap is arguably understandable – camp is often perceived as light and frothy, and hence at odds with ‘serious’ crea-tive political endeavours. That said, camp criticism has staged numerous interventions that demonstrate its capacity as a tool for historical, cultural and political critique. For example, Fabio Cleto’s fantastic reader Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject (1999) and Moe Meyer’s edited collection The Politics and Poetics of Camp (1994) both expertly outline camp’s queer politics.