Editing Camp (style) (section)

== Origins and development ==
The ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'' notes that the word ''camp'' was used as a verb since at least the 1500s.<ref name="OED camp adj" /> Writer Bruce Rodgers also traces the term ''camp'' to the 16th century, specifically to British theatre, where it referred to men dressed as women ([[Drag (entertainment)|drag]]).<ref name=":10" /><ref>{{Cite book |last=Rodgers |first=Bruce |title=Gay Talk: a (sometimes outrageous) dictionary of gay slang |date=1979 |publisher=Paragon books |isbn=978-0-399-50392-4 |edition=Reprint |series=A Paragon book |location=New York}}</ref> ''Camp'' may have derived from the gay slang [[Polari]],<ref>"camp". ''Oxford English Dictionary'', Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.</ref> which borrowed the term from the Italian ''campare,''<ref name=":11">{{Cite web |last=Luu |first=Chi |date=2018-06-06 |title=The Unspeakable Linguistics of Camp |url=https://daily.jstor.org/unspeakable-linguistics-camp/ |access-date=2024-08-09 |website=JSTOR Daily |language=en-US}}</ref><ref name=":8" /> or from the French term ''se camper'', meaning "to pose in an exaggerated fashion".<ref>{{cite web |last1=Harper |first1=Douglas |title=camp (adj.) |url=http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=camp |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160914223354/http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=camp |archive-date=14 September 2016 |access-date=21 August 2016 |website=Online Etymology Dictionary}}</ref><ref>[http://atilf.atilf.fr/academie9.htm Entry "camper"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110514222153/http://atilf.atilf.fr/academie9.htm|date=14 May 2011}}, in: ''[[Dictionnaire de l'Académie française]]'', ninth edition (1992). "'''2.''' Fam: Placer avec fermeté, avec insolence ou selon ses aises.] ''Il me parlait, le chapeau campé sur la tête.'' Surtout pron. ''Se camper solidement dans son fauteuil. Se camper à la meilleure place. Il se campa devant son adversaire.'' '''3.''' En parlant d'un acteur, d'un artiste: Figurer avec force et relief. ''Camper son personage sur la scène. Camper une figure dans un tableau, des caractères dans un roman''." ('''Familiar:''' To assume a defiant, insolent or [[wikt:devil-may-care|devil-may-care]] attitude. '''Theatre:''' To perform with forcefulness and [[wikt:exaggeration|exaggeration]]; [[wikt:overact|to overact]]; To impose one's character assertively into a scene; [[wikt:upstage|to upstage]].)</ref> A similar sense is also found in French theatre in [[Molière]]'s 1671 play ''[[Les Fourberies de Scapin]]''.<ref name=":6" />

Writer [[Susan Sontag]] and linguist [[Paul Baker (linguist)|Paul Baker]] place the "soundest starting point" for the modern sense of ''camp'', meaning ''flamboyant'', as the late 17th and early 18th centuries.<ref name="Sontag2009" /><ref name=":23">{{Cite book |last=Baker |first=Paul |title=Camp! |date=2023 |publisher=Footnote Press |isbn=978-1-80444-032-2 |location=London Stockholm |pages=15}}</ref> Writer [[Anthony Burgess]] theorized it may have emerged from the primary sense of the word'','' as in a military encampment, where gay men would subtly advertize their sexuality in all-male company through a particular style and affectation.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Camp |url=http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa-cam1.html |access-date=2024-08-10 |website=www.worldwidewords.org |language=en-gb}}</ref>

By 1870, British [[crossdresser]] [[Boulton and Park|Frederick Park]] referred to his "campish undertakings" in a letter produced in evidence at his examination before a magistrate at [[Bow Street]], London, on suspicion of illegal homosexual acts; the letter does not make clear what these were.<ref>
'My "campish undertakings" are not meeting with the success they deserve. Whatever I do seems to get me into hot water somewhere;...':''The Times''(London), 30 May 1870, p. 13, 'The Men in Women's Clothes'</ref> In 1874, the ''Manchester Courier'' printed the description of a ticket for a Salford [[drag ball]], called the "Queen of Camp" ball.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Maidment |first=Adam |date=2021-06-06 |title=How Salford's Victorian drag queens led to Manchester 21st century scene |url=https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/how-camp-masquerade-ball-nearly-20729624 |access-date=2025-02-26 |website=Manchester Evening News |language=en}}</ref><ref>Rictor Norton (Ed.), "Queen of Camp, 1874", ''Homosexuality in Nineteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook'', 4 December 2018; expanded 30 October 2019 http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1874camp.htm</ref>{{efn|The paper, reporting on the arrest of a man attending the event in drag, said: "Upon searching Mack, he found upon him...a ticket upon which was printed—'Her Majesty Queen of Camp will hold a levee and grand bal-masque on Wednesday, Oct 21st, 1874. Dancing to commence at ten o'clock'".<ref name="OED camp adj" />}} According to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', the first definitive use of ''camp'' as an adjective in print occurred in the writing of J. R. Ware in 1909.<ref name="OED camp adj">''Oxford English Dictionary'', s.v. "camp (adj. & n.5)", December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7181450905.</ref> In the UK's pre-[[gay liberation|liberation]] [[gay culture]], the term was used as a general description of the aesthetic choices and behavior of working-class [[gay men]].<ref name="newton">Esther Newton (1978): ''Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America'', University of Chicago Press. {{worldcat|name=''Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America''|oclc=257048012}}.</ref><ref>{{Citation |last=Leslie |first=Esther |title=Schlock, Kitsch, and Camp |date=2022 |work=The Cambridge Companion to American Horror |pages=91–104 (95) |editor-last=Storey |editor-first=Mark |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-american-horror/schlock-kitsch-and-camp/AFE723D2952473D1887BF2BB9487F771 |access-date=2024-08-09 |series=Cambridge Companions to Literature |place=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |doi=10.1017/9781009071550.008 |isbn=978-1-316-51300-2 |editor2-last=Shapiro |editor2-first=Stephen}}</ref> The term ''camp'' is still sometimes used in the UK to describe a gay man who is perceived as outwardly garish or eccentric, such as [[Matt Lucas]]' character [[Daffyd Thomas]] in the English comedy skit show ''[[Little Britain (sketch show)|Little Britain]]''.<ref>{{Citation |last=Lindner |first=Oliver |title=The Comic Nation: Little Britain and the Politics of Representation |date=2016 |work=British TV Comedies: Cultural Concepts, Contexts and Controversies |pages=326–340 |editor-last=Kamm |editor-first=Jürgen |url=https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137552952_22 |access-date=2024-08-09 |place=London |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan UK |language=en |doi=10.1057/9781137552952_22 |isbn=978-1-137-55295-2 |editor2-last=Neumann |editor2-first=Birgit}}</ref>

From the mid-1940s, numerous representations of ''camp speech'' or ''camp'' ''talk'', as used by gay men, began to appear in print in America, France and the United Kingdom.<ref name=":17">{{Cite journal |last=Harvey |first=Keith |date=1998-01-31 |title=Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer |url=http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13556509.1998.10799024 |journal=The Translator |language=en |volume=4 |issue=2 |pages=295–320 |doi=10.1080/13556509.1998.10799024 |issn=1355-6509}}</ref> By the mid-1970s, camp was defined by the college edition of ''[[Webster's New World Dictionary]]'' as "banality, mediocrity, artifice, [and] ostentation ... so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appeal".<ref>Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, 1976 edition, sense 6, [Slang, orig., homosexual jargon, Americanism] banality, mediocrity, artifice, ostentation, etc. so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appeal</ref>[[File:Carmen Miranda in The Gang's All Here trailer.jpg|thumb|[[Carmen Miranda]] in the trailer for ''[[The Gang's All Here (1943 film)|The Gang's All Here]]'' (1943)]]In America, the concept of camp was also described by [[Christopher Isherwood]] in 1954 in his novel ''[[The World in the Evening]]'', and later by [[Susan Sontag]] in her 1964 essay '[[Notes on "Camp"]]'.<ref name="Sontag2019">{{cite book |author=Susan Sontag |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gcqcDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT4 |title=Notes on "Camp" |date=14 June 2019 |publisher=Picador |isbn=978-1-250-62134-4 |page=4}}</ref> Two key components of the "radical spectacle of camp" were originally feminine performances: [[Swish (slang)|swish]] and [[Drag (entertainment)|drag]].<ref name=":11" /> With swish's extensive use of superlatives and drag's exaggerated female impersonation, camp occasionally became extended to all things "over the top", including women posing as female impersonators ([[AFAB queen|faux queens]]) such as [[Carmen Miranda]], while also retaining its meaning as "queer parody".<ref name=":2">Moe Meyer (2010): ''An Archaeology of Posing: Essays on Camp, Drag, and Sexuality'', Macater Press, {{ISBN|978-0-9814924-5-2}}.</ref><ref name=":3">Moe Meyer (2011): ''The Politics and Poetics of Camp'', Routledge, {{ISBN|978-0-415-51489-7}}.</ref><ref name=":92">Cohan, Steven. ''Incongruous entertainment: Camp, cultural value, and the MGM musical''. Duke University Press, 2005. p.11, 274.</ref>

In her study of [[Drag queen|drag]], cultural anthropologist [[Esther Newton]] argued that ''camp'' has three major features: incongruity, theatricality, and humour.<ref name=":16" /> In his 1984, writer George Melly argued that the camp sensibility allowed almost anything to be seen as a ''camp'', and that this was a way of projecting one's own queer sensibility upon the world to therefore reclaim it. Conversely, he argued, the biggest threat to camp wasn't heterosexuals ("who tend to accept it, although usually at a fairly broad and superficial level"), but "a neo-puritanism, a received conformism" emerging among gay people at the time.<ref name=":19">{{Cite book |last=Core |first=Philip |title=Camp: the lie that tells the truth |date=1984 |publisher=Delilah Books |isbn=978-0-933328-83-9 |location=New York |pages=5}}</ref>

The rise of [[postmodernism]] and [[queer theory]] has made ''camp'' a common perspective on aesthetics, not solely identified with gay men.<ref name="MallaMcGillis2005" /><ref name=":12">Morrill, Cynthia. "Revamping the Gay Sensibility: Queer Camp and ''dyke noir''." In Moe Meyer (ed). ''The Politics and Poetics of Camp''. Routledge, 2005. p.94.</ref> Women (especially [[lesbian]]s), trans people, and people of colour have described new forms of ''camp'', such as ''dyke camp'' (including subcategories such as ''cubana'' and ''high-femme dyke camp'')<ref>{{Cite web |last=Clements |first=Mikaella |author-link= |date=2016-11-25 |title=Notes on dyke camp |url=https://theoutline.com/post/4556/notes-on-dyke-camp |access-date=2024-08-09 |website=The Outline |language=en}}</ref><ref name=":13" /> and ''queer of color camp''.<ref name=":13">{{Cite journal |last=Lim |first=Eng-Beng |date=2015 |title=A Performative Presidency |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/583613 |journal=American Quarterly |volume=67 |issue=2 |pages=301–307 |doi=10.1353/aq.2015.0021 |issn=1080-6490}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Dominguez |first=Alessa |date=2015-05-01 |title="I'm Very Rich, Bitch!": The Melodramatic Money Shot and the Excess of Racialized Gendered Affect in the Real Housewives Docusoaps |url=https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article/30/1%20(88)/155/97575/I-m-Very-Rich-Bitch-The-Melodramatic-Money-Shot |journal=Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies |language=en |volume=30 |issue=1 |pages=155–183 |doi=10.1215/02705346-2885486 |issn=0270-5346}}</ref>

''Camp'' has also been a subject of [[psychoanalytic theory]], where it has been portrayed as a form of performance or ''masquerade''. Scholar Cynthia Morrill has argued that the conception of "camp-as-masquerade" ignores the specifically queer sensibility of ''camp'' by interrogating queerness through a [[Heteronormativity|heteronormative]] lens (i.e., solely in relation to the [[Phallogocentrism|symbol of the phallus]]).<ref name=":12" />

''Camp'' has become prevalent in mainstream [[Popular culture|popular entertainment]] such as theatre, cinema, TV and music.<ref name="MallaMcGillis20052">{{cite journal |author1=Kerry Malla |date=January 2005 |editor1-last=Roderick McGillis |title=Between a Frock and a Hard Place: Camp Aesthetics and Children's Culture |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27477842 |journal=Canadian Review of American Studies |volume=35 |issue=1 |pages=1–3 |access-date=10 October 2019}}</ref><ref name=":92"/> In reaction to its popularisation, critics such as [[Jack Babuscio]] and Jeanette Cooperman have argued that ''camp'' requires the [[Social alienation|alienation]] of LGBTQ+ people from the mainstream to maintain its edge.<ref name=":212">{{Cite book |last=Philpot |first=Chris |title=Sontag and the camp aesthetic: advancing new perspectives |date=2017 |publisher=Lexington Books |isbn=978-1-4985-3777-3 |editor-last=Drushel |editor-first=Bruce E. |series=Media, culture, and the arts |location=Lanham |pages=66 |chapter=Diva Worship in a Queer Poetic of Waste in D. Gilson's ''Brit Lit'' |editor-last2=Peters |editor-first2=Brian M.}}</ref><ref name=":222">{{Cite web |last=Cooperman |first=Jeannette |date=2020-01-30 |title=Is Camp Still "Camp"? |url=https://commonreader.wustl.edu/c/is-camp-still-camp/ |access-date=2024-08-10 |website=Common Reader |language=en-US}}</ref> Poet and scholar Chris Philpot, like Cooperman, nevertheless argues that ''camp'' can still be a viable "survival strategy" for [[Social exclusion|marginalized]] queer people, so long as it evolves with them.<ref name=":212"/> Curator Andrew Bolton, after his show ''Camp: Notes on Fashion'' at the New York [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]], explains that context is also important for understanding the power and relevance of camp: "Camp tends to come to the fore through moments of social and political instability, when our society is deeply polarized. The 1960s is one such moment, as were the 1980s, so, too, are the times in which we're living."<ref name=":222"/>