Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative by Bisbey and Brandon P

Abstract

Reviewed by: Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative by Bisbey and Brandon P Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes Keywords Mexico, Camp, Cursi, Humor, Parody, Homosexuality, Literature, Narrative, Lgbtq, Queer, Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian, Travesti, Transgender, Homophobia, Brandon P. Bisbey, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes bisbey, brandon p. Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative. SUNY Press, 2022, 252 pp. What is the relationship between humor and homosexuality in contemporary Mexican narrative, and how has it changed, given the notable transformations [End Page 143] in Mexican society regarding LGBTQ rights over the last decades? Brandon P. Bisbey tackles this question with great gusto and critical acumen, discussing a wide range of short stories and novels from the 1940s to the present. He shows a rather complex and at times contradictory panorama, in a social context historically dominated by “the association of male homosexuality with gender nonconformity, which contributed to the reification of a stereotype of homosexual men as effeminate” (1), frequently through the figure of the loca, and the association of “lesbian sexuality with traditionally masculine behaviors” (2), with popular representations and cultural productions in which “the homosexual characters are comic figures who are the targets of satire and ridicule” (1). Engaging scholars as diverse as Robert McKee Irwin, Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Emilio Bejel, Vinodh Venkatesh, and Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Bisbey analyzes a rich archive. He examines how writers, some better known, others less, challenge these homophobic and misogynist stereotypes and envision myriad possibilities, subverting humor and transforming it to diverse ends. These can be seen particularly through queer practices such as camp (a type of minoritarian cultural viewpoint that privileges insider knowledge, seen as a postmodern gay sensibility and critical practice) and cursilería (an affectation and at times an ironic nostalgia that is particular to Hispanic contexts). As the author indicates, “In the texts that I read below, I find that the humor used to signal and talk about queerness includes camp (gender-based humor expressing queerness) that is also always cursi (expressing a postcolonial marginality from discourses of modernity)” (8). The critical readings of the literary texts are engaging and sometimes more convincing than others, as at times Bisbey errs on the side of excessive generosity. Nevertheless, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Mexican and Latin American literature and to readers interested in humor as a social practice and in how queer topics are dealt with in Mexico, with important parallels in other Latin American and Caribbean contexts. Between Camp and Cursi has an introduction, five substantive chapters, a conclusion, notes, a list of works cited, and an index. It also includes four images. The straightforward and highly accessible introduction richly engages the scholarly bibliography and provides summaries of the five chapters, which are organized by themes and not in strictly chronological order. All five focus on literary representations of camp and cursilería, mostly by cisgender men but also including some women authors. Bisbey highlights the context of heteronormativity and violence against women in Mexico and the toxic persistence [End Page 144] of bias, stating that “in the interest of challenging these uses of humor that uphold the dominant social structure, the goal of this book is to interrogate how literature uses humor as a queer, decolonial practice” (4). He also identifies the four main scholars he engages: “José Esteban Muñoz’s reading of camp performance as a strategy of disidentification for queers of color in the United States”; “Eve Sedgwick’s call to read camp texts and practices in a way that balances ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ approaches”; and “Lidia Santos and Carlos Monsiváis’s theorizing of cursilería in Latin America, which also balances paranoid social critique with a reparative emphasis on the creative, decolonial possibilities of lo cursi as an aesthetic practice” (4). The key critical move in this book is to read each literary text “in a way that looks to balance paranoid (critical) and reparative (celebratory) approaches” (8), an approach that at times becomes somewhat mechanical but which nonetheless generates very productive interpretations of texts that at times do not seem particularly progressive or that are marked by...