Feminist Camp

Abstract

Feminist camp is a term coined by Pamela Robertson in the mid‐1990s in order to understand how women, regardless of their sexuality, have produced and consumed female representations found in mass culture. Even if some scholars reclaimed it as a performative strategy exclusively available for the queer community, some other tendencies recognized its appeal for women as an oppositional discourse to the heteropatriarchal regime. Camp has been largely related to a sense of frivolity, irony, and parody that can be used as a disruptive practice that laughs with and also at binary and essentialist notions on gender. Therefore, studies on feminist camp regard theatrical and parodic representations of femininity and masculinity as a form to reduce gender roles to mere representations. Feminist camp's gender parody can be traced in representation and performances of some camp icons and texts that self‐consciously exaggerate the old gender stereotypes to the limit of rendering them artificial. Audiences, as well as their social and historical context, are pivotal in order to understand how women have historically engaged in feminist camp as a reception strategy that enables them to read against the grain those cultural texts that were and are produced within dominant ideologies.