Camp, Parody, Stereotype: Research Notes and References

Working with the cliches in Mixed Bag with Shy has been fun and provoked a lot of discussion between the two of us regarding the pleasure involved in embodying cliches on our own terms, the complicity of women in imposing stereotypes on other women, etc. Neither of us usually work in this over-the-top mode, yet camp is a huge performance genre, often associated with queer culture, with an accompanying body of scholarly texts. So I've been wanting to read texts and look at the work of artists who use camp and parody further. Here's a start at some references and notes (with Carol McDowell's help):

ARTIST WORK SAMPLES:

Carmelita Tropicana:

Reel (Samples)

Pingalito

Kristina Wong:

Shelarious audition reel

http://bigbadchinesemama.com/

La Pocha Nostra (Guillermo Gomez Pena):

Photo Portfolios (some great costume ideas here)

Museum of Fetishized Identities

Kate Rigg/Slanty-Eyed Mama (music): http://www.slantyeyedmama.com/

TEXTUAL RESEARCH REFERENCES:

http://www.jrank.org/cultures/pages/3719/Choteo.html

Gomez Pena:

Performing Against the Cultural Backdrop of the Mainstream Bizarre

Imagining a New Way of Presenting Art
Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here:

• "In a war in which you have no weapons, you must take those of your enemy and use them for something better -- like throwing them back at him" - Elia Suleiman (33)
• "reversal, recycling and subversive montage" 20th c. avant-gardes, also syncretism as a way for disempowered groups to maintain outlawed traditions
• "resistance within a colonial context is rarely direct, overt, or literal; rather, it articulates itself through semantic reversals, and through the process of infusing icons, objects, and symbols with different meanings" (35) (ie signifyin')
• "Parody, satire, and carnivalesque unsettling of established orders continue to thrive as creative strategies for temporarily subverting authority...those who identify with the established order of things respond in a literal-minded way to the playfulness and double entendres of subaltern creative expression by reading only at face value. They insist that art should not 'offend,' that sophisticated appreciation must be distanced and reverent, and that serious criticism be dispassionate and 'objective.' What these dismissive attitudes cannot understand is that the irreverence and exuberant energy of these aesthetic strategies are evidence of the survival of subaltern practices that have created the conditions for spiritual and cultural renewal, as well as critical reinterpretations of the world in which we live" (36)

Tina Landau, from Anne Bogart's Viewpoints
"The first things that came up were often the most obvious, but Anne encouraged the actors to lean into the cliches and stereotypes rather than try to ignore them. By going through them, she explained, they would come out on the other side with something that used, but transformed them" (19)

David Gere on Joe Goode: "29 Effeminate Gestures," in Dancing Desire

strategy: lec-dem choreography making audience aware of how bodies are gender-policed through gestural sanction, based on his own autobiographical experience

· Susan Sontag: camp’s “ability to subvert standard notions of gender and amplify elements of the individual personality, as opposed to facilitating quiet acquiescence to gender roles...Beauty lies in going against the grain” (360)

· gender as performance: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp,’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’” (360)

· “The task of camp, then, is to take the measure of societal limitations on gender and sexuality, to shine a light on the space beyond the horizon line of acceptability” (361)

· “Who, me?” – hands on chest. “This is a classic gesture of the femme fatale, the dark and dangerous woman who appears, on the surface, to be weak and insipid but who in fact packs enormous backstage power. This is weakness standing in for manipulative control. In Gay parlance the exercise of power from a place of supposed weakness has a special name: it is called ‘topping from the bottom’” (371)

· “Seduction, a power that oppressed women have long harnessed for their own means (371)

· “to perform against the grain is to exist in a state of radical self-consciousness” (371)

· “the gestures were laden with inordinate potential, with untapped strength...he counseled against interpreting any of them as the mere reaffirmation of a cliche or stereotype. ‘I think there is an element of comment – which is the power of camp – that exists in all of the gestures’” (373)

· Butler in “Critically Queer” – the embodying of gender norms is compulsory, a forced production. Yet these norms aren’t fully determining because the addressee never completely inhabits the ideal (|| Bhabha’s colonial mimicry)

· “effeminacy is primarily corporeal...whereas drag is determined by a choreography of fashion. The effeminate man does not ‘cross-dress’ but rather ‘cross-gestures’”

o In Mixed Bag, how are our costumes, bodily movements/gestures, and voice related? How might they be further scrambled (eg, dressing femme but acting butch) and/or clarified? The last call-and-response could be clarified vocally in gendered character terms, for instance.

· “an insult absorbed and reconfigured as a badge of honor” (376)

· Butler – “it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses” – Gere – “an act of resistance, a reversal of conventions, a refusal to obey the law” (376)

· the need to embody the cliches FULLY: David performing this paper at a job talk -“A test session with scholar friends...proved a dismal failure...I found myself too shy to perform the gestures full force. My limp wrist was halfhearted, my eyes more furtive than coy. I was sweating. Somehow the academic situation seemed to intensify the citational force of masculinist gestural injunctions, and I was supremely aware of their gender normative weight bearing down upon me. But then, on the day of the talk, anger rose in me like a clean-burning flame...My limp wrist became unpredictably tricky, an icon of flamboyance, a disorienting beacon. A swivel turn became a whirl of energetic subversion, devilishly unapologetic. While enumerating a list of basic bodily injunctions, I began to interpolate impromptu commentary on the manner in which members of the audience were sitting in their chairs. With particular relish I teased a prominent member of the selection committee about the way he was crossing his legs...I spared no one” (376)

Jose Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications (choreographic comments in italics)

• "Camp and choteo are both styles of performance and reception that rely on humor to examine social and cultural forms...Comedic disidentification accomplishes important cultural critique while at the same time providing cover from, and enabling the avoidance itself of, scenarios of direct confrontation with phobic and reactionary ideologies." (119)
• camp generally tied to queer (white male gay upper/middle class) culture - Sontag
• For Munoz "'camp' is understood not only as a strategy of representation, but also as a mode of enacting self against the pressures of the dominant culture's identity-denying protocols" (120)
• on Olalquiaga: 3 degrees of kitsch re: Latino religious objects - (1) fascination with spirituality of the other (2) empty icon - gaudy bauble (3) "postmodern hybrid, the recycling of a past cultural construct for a present tense" (120)
• camp as the way "a minority culture reappropriates the dominant culture" (121)
• Robertson: camp's affinity with feminist ideas of gender as constructed, performed, and enacted.
• On a scene where a bodega clerk mistakes a character as being Afr-Am: "Latinas come in all colors, nena." "humorously challenges racist depictions of Latinas within and outside of the Latino/a community" (125)
• spoof on women-in-prison B movies: "What is also relevant about the recycling of this site is the juxtaposition of seeing these particular Latinas, characters who are quirkier and more complicated than any image that Hollywood has been able to invent when trying to represent Latinas within this standardized backdrop" (125)
• overdubbing text from Audre Lorde and Monique Wittig (lesbian theorists) over actual women's prison movie (125)
• overdubbing to attach new meaning could be a musical/sound technique
• drag: "register both outside of and inside of the erotics of butch/femme" (127)
• Eve Sedgwick: Cross-identification as a standard procedure for queers. "queer is a moment of perpetual flux, a movement that is eddying and turbulent." Queer derived from "across" (hey, like abhinaya!) - "understood as a mode of identifications that is as relational as it is oblique"
• Carol McD - have the stereotypes talk to each other (as in Round 3, transitions)
• If identity is relational - what is our relationship to the audience? How might we rope them in, make them understand their complicity with perpetuating or exploding certain stereotypes? What of the diss-embodied soundtrack with the lascivious audience members?
• a historical condition (pre-cuban revolution) - "'always the same story...violencia y amor' that unites the four women across their differences"
• same exact words as in the SUNOH chakradar! What unites the four of us across our differences? What unites the different characters in the show across their differences? How do we pull this out in the show?
• musical genre: "The choice of a Mexican ranchera [for a Hollywood musical number] is indicative of Latina camp's ability to index and reclaim cliched and sentimental moments and tropes across latinidad."
• "Troyano's strategic use of camp allows her film and its characters to reinhabit these stereotypes, both calling attention to the inaccuracy of these representations and 'fixing' such representation from the inside by filling in these representational husks with complicated, antiessentialist, emotionally compelling characters" (127)
• "Camp is a form of artificial respiration; it breathes new life into old situations. Camp, then, is more than a worldview; it is a strategic response to the breakdown of representation that occurs when a queer, ethnically marked, or other subject encounters his or her inability to fit within the majoritarian representational regime...Camp is a practice of suturing different lives, of reanimating, through repetition with a difference, a lost country or moment that is relished and loved. Although not innately politically valenced, it is a strategy that can do positive identity- and community-affirming work" (128)
• repetition (butler), reclaiming (jack smith), recycling (olalquiaga)
• ref: Sue Ellen Case, "Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic"
• Camp strategies include "artifice, wit, irony, and exaggeration" "parody and pastiche" (130)
• Kate Davy, paraphrasing Wayne Dynes: "Camp is always represented with an invisible wink. But instead of realizing the promise and threat of its subversive potential for imagining and inscribing an 'elsewhere' for alternative social and sexual realities, the wink of Camp (re)assures its audiences of the ultimate harmlessness of its play, its palatability for bourgeois sensibilities...Camp is neither good nor bad, it is just more or less effectively deployed." (130)
• on Carmelita Tropicana's Milk of Amnesia: "Carmelita's drag performance...is calibrated also to represent and parody identities across class, national, and generational lines" (131)
• "No one is let off the hook; the ironic and sharp attacks on Cuban and Cuban-American racism, sexism, and general hypocrisy are not retracted" (133)
• "When Pingalito warns the audience not to believe everything they read, he signifies upon the condition of second-generation Cuban Americans who have to juggle, decipher, and translate propaganda and anecdotal evidence in order to 'know' their native land" (133)
• || our relationship to the courtesans
• Homi Bhabha: "colonial mimicry as a form of imitation that resembles, but never quite succeeds in reproducing, the colonizer's image." Can be used strategically: "a fascimile that misses because it is 'not quite/not white'" and thus menaces the dominant paradigm (133)
• choteo: as "tearing, talking, throwing, maligning, spying, and playing" (135)
• Performance artist adopts the mantra, 'Your Kunst is your Waffen' (Art is your Weapon), then does "a trilingual medley that weaves German and Cuban songs together. Her repertoire includes the folk classic 'Guantanamera,' 'Que sera, sera,' and 'Oh, Tannenbaum.' This musical number is a choteo of multiculturalism, internationalism, and hybridity" (138)
• Choteo revels in the chaotic, the ambivalent, the 'untidy.' (138)
• Carmelita's "mode of hybridity" is "a survivalist strain of self-production...not a celebration of a fixed identity...not a style of internationalism or cosmopolitanism" (139)
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam: "The Hybrid diasporic subject is confronted with the 'theatrical' challenge of moving, as it were, among the diverse performative modes of sharply contrasting cultural and ideological worlds" (139)
• undoing the "traditional political notion of identity politics grounded in a totalized, stable, fixed subject" (139)
• the fragmented shifting of character in Mixed Bag undermines authenticity, fixed identity
• our onstage costume changes also show the constructedness and performativity of identity, the process of fabricating the self
• "dominant culture is mimicked, mocked, and finally worked until its raw material can be recycled to ends that are female, Latina, and queer-affirmative. Popular forms are disidentified with, which means parodied with campy extravagance or heckled by this mode of dissidence for majoritarian culture" (141)

CREATIVE IDEAS/APPLYING THEORY:

Rewriting coaching helpless victim scene to complicate the stereotype, bringing in race and class: Reveal that the plastic mannikin is from Costco. "Do you like it? It looks designer, but I got it from Costco! China makes such good imitations these days" (I'll be in my Chinese shirt as I say this.)

What if in addition to asking her to be sexy I tell her to be more ethnic (put on a big snakey bindi made of cardboard?), play up the exotic helpless flower thing ("But don't talk with an Indian accent! People find that threatening or weird. You have to look ethnic and American at the same time.")
Also, maybe I speak in Chinese instead of English during the judgmental valley girl part.

Ways to implicate the audience:

Scream in the audience's face/ears as little girl so that they become complicit with Shy's silencing of me. Use gross audience comments during the end of Shy's helpless victim section, when she sticks out her chest? Weave audience commentary (the Indian classical traditionalist, the exoticizing white gaze, the sexualizing gaze, the skeptical feminist, the gender conservative) throughout the soundscore? Do so in rhythm?

Music/soundscore:

Weave in more musical cliches in a more obvious way? (For example, make the surmandal obnoxiously repeat 5 times instead of 2.) Reference more musical styles (Bollywood, hip hop, pop/bad fusion, children's songs) to reflect the hybridity of identity being performed.

Identity: who performs what (and why?)

Does Shy ever perform butch? Does Cyn ever perform female-sexualized? Does each of us portray the characters that we will later do in the show, or are we more fluid in how we occupy identity? Can we put in the widow character from Ranri?