Abstract
Amidst heightened mainstreaming, are there factors that dampen camp enjoyment or engagement for fairly receptive, more or less camp-versed audiences? Even viewers responsive to camp subculture can be susceptible to a tendentious, contrary impulse: prescriptive sobriety regarding heteronormative totems, rituals and topics that a prevailing model of medicalized subjectivity enjoins one to take seriously by default. Building on established queer interventions in camp studies, this article proposes the term ‘therapeutic reflex’ for this normative, mockery-reluctant influence – distinct from heteronormativity but frequently collaborating with it. In wilfully camp fashion, this article looks at five mid-century American films – Now, Voyager (1942), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Bad Seed (1956), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and Psycho (1960) – as specimens of camp resignification’s knack for exposing lingering therapeutic bias, its paradigm of subcultural conservancy and its affordance of normative scrutiny and counternormative dissidence.
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