Poking fun: dildo play and camp aesthetics

Abstract

The dildo—capaciously conceived—offers a material site through which artists play out camp aesthetics, a mode of literally and figuratively poking fun at institutionalized theory, genre, and gender and racial codes. This article traces a genealogy of dildonic female body art to situate the dildo in a context of cultural production that foregrounds both its racialization and its tactical use by artists to play and poke—through Nao Bustamante's performance Indigurrito, Xandra Ibarra and Amber Hawk Swanson's collaborative video Untitled Fucking, and Lynda Benglis's Artforum advertisement. Each iteration of the dildo—as burrito, hot sauce bottle, and plastic penis—offers a rubric for understanding its aesthetic work, which this quartet of artists draws out through their critical engagement with camp, messiness, and mockery. Taking up the ways in which whiteness is always produced and naturalized through other modes of racialization, I offer both an addendum to existing scholarship about Benglis's tactical use of the dildo and an elaboration of how the artists theorize and contest hegemonic logics, deconstruct whiteness, and explore new configurations of relationality at the site of the pelvis.