Abstract
The presentation will conceptualize the realizations of camp sensibility in queer internet culture. It presents internet memes as material traces of nonconventional reading of mainstream cultural texts which are directly appropriated and remixed. Memes can therefore be used as evidence of specific sensibilities and interests of subcultural groups. Queer memes can provide a basis for analysis of non-identitarian queer culture. They often remix cultural texts that are not directly representing the LGBTQ+ identities but rather offer a site for queer sensibilities and identification to take place.
I will use the notion of camp to analyze one kind of non-identitarian queer culture. Famously described by Susan Sontag as "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration" (Sontag 1999, p. 53), camp sees everything in quotation marks, embeds everything with social meaning and then subverts it. David Halperin connects the development of such sensibility to the distanced queer experience of the heteronormative culture. (Halperin 2012) The "Being-as-Playing-a-Role" (Sontag, p. 56) is obvious to those who need to "get into straight drag" (Halperin, p. 196) at some point, who do not conform the roles of heteronormative society. Halperin focuses his analysis on gay male culture. Though the presentation will follow this constraint, it endeavors to initiate discussion about experiences of other queer groups. Halperin explains the double irony of camp as a result of gay subjectivity that stems from identification with women's roles in heteronormative narratives. The gay subjects use the women's personas as a proxy identity - they are like them (in liking men) and unlike them (being men). This results in simultaneously engaged and disengaged ironical stance of camp that takes delight in over-the-top melodramatic people, things, and cultural texts.
Sontag distinguishes between naïve and deliberate camp, favoring the former: "pure examples of camp are unintentional; they are dead serious" (Sontag, p. 58). Halperin offers complex analysis of gay interest in naïve camp texts such as the Mommie Dearest movie or grand operas by Verdi, considering them to be exemplary of non-identitarian gay culture that stems from emotional identification of the subject rather than the representation of an identity. Although being offered identitarian cultural texts, "gay male culture still operates through (...) a metaphorical or figural reading of straight culture: a reappropriation of it that is also a resistance to it" (Halperin, p. 122). Campy readings of naïve texts are in-group jokes - one must be "in the know" to understand them. Codified readings are kept by various social institutions such as references or catchphrases but are still rather ephemeral and defy proper theoretical description, as evidenced by lack of academic interest in this kind of non-identitarian queer culture.
I propose that the new participatory cultures of internet (Jenkins, Itō, boyd 2016) can provide traces of such creative reading of naïve camp texts. With the rise of user-generated content (Bruns 2007; Eichhorn 2022), the formerly metaphorical poaching of unruly readers (de Certeau 2010) became literal material remixing due to digital duplicability (Voigst 2017): "A significant part of UGC available online is produced by users who directly remix media material produced by professionals" (Manovich 2015, p. 144). One of the new cultural forms of the internet culture are memes, intertextual digital texts circulated, imitated, and transformed by users (Shifman 2013, p. 8). Ryan Milner understands memes as an intersection of five fundamental logics of internet culture: multimodality, resonance, spread, reappropriation, and collectivism (Milner 2016, p. 5).
As noted above, the principles of reappropriation and collectivism are essential to the gay camp culture too. It is without surprise, then, that queer internet subcultures spread remixes of appropriated naïve campy texts. Yet it is hardly reflected by the academic discourse, the papers on queer internet culture are often centered around identity-based media (Griffin 2016; O'Riordan 2020; Pain 2022). There are few theoretical reflections on realization of camp sensibility in internet culture (Christian 2010; Mercer and Sarson 2020), however, they are focused on deliberate campy behavior of influencers and other public personas. By using internet memes as evidence, I present a novel way to analyze queer reading of heteronormative mainstream texts and by that, the non-identitarian queer culture in general.
The presentation will provide theoretical background to the endeavor and analysis of selected memes. It will analyze given internet content through the lenses of Ryan Milner's five logics, focusing especially on logic of resonance that is connected to the camp sensibility. It will use examples of posts from Czech meme accounts such as Přiznání gayů (Gay Confessions) which often remixes older Czechoslovakian movies and other audio visual material or Co obléká Saskia (What Saskia Wears), following the campy outfits of legendary Czech TV hostess. Examples in English will use posts from accounts such as how ironicq or its lit gay shit.