Camp is one of those concepts that everyone has an intuitive sense of and almost no one can define precisely, which is part of what makes it so interesting and so specifically queer. It lives in the space between sincerity and irony, between the overwrought and the exquisite, between taking something absolutely seriously and knowing perfectly well that it is ridiculous. It is both the sensibility and the joke about the sensibility, simultaneously.

Susan Sontag and the Problem of Definition

The canonical starting point is Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," which introduced the concept to a broader intellectual audience while also, in ways that queer scholars have spent decades unpacking, detaching it from its queer origins. Sontag described camp as a sensibility that "converts the serious into the frivolous" and located it in aesthetics of exaggeration, artifice, and failed seriousness that becomes its own kind of success. What she underemphasized, or actively obscured depending on who you ask, was that this sensibility was developed within and by gay male culture specifically. The philosopher Alexander Doty later argued that Sontag's neutralization of camp's sexuality was itself a kind of appropriation — taking a queer technology of survival and repackaging it as a universal aesthetic mode available to everyone. The argument is not resolved; it is not the kind of argument that resolves. But it matters for understanding what camp is and why it works.

Camp as Survival Technology

Here is the thing about camp that gets lost when it is discussed purely as aesthetics: it is a way of surviving contempt. If the world tells you that your existence is ridiculous, one response is shame, and another is to take "ridiculous" and make it into something magnificent. Camp is the latter response. It is the elaboration of the supposedly absurd into something so committed, so detailed, so technically accomplished that the absurdity becomes a kind of triumph. Drag queens performing elaborate parodies of femininity — or glamorous exaggerations of it — were doing something politically sophisticated before anyone called it politics. The exaggeration reveals the construction. If femininity is a performance, and the drag queen performs it at a higher pitch than most women feel safe doing, that excess makes the mechanism visible. Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity owes a significant debt to what camp had been demonstrating in practice for decades before Gender Trouble was published. Research from the Cultural Analytics Lab at Northwestern University analyzing LGBTQ+ cultural production found that camp aesthetics functioned most prominently in communities with the highest social stigma, suggesting that the sensibility develops as a response to external pressure rather than as a purely autonomous aesthetic choice. Camp is what happens when the margin makes meaning from what the center uses to dismiss it.

High Camp and Low Camp

There are gradations, and they matter. High camp is Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall, is Maria Callas recordings played at ear-splitting volume in small apartments, is the collected films of Pedro Almodóvar. Low camp is the inflatable lawn flamingo, the velvet Elvis, the gift shop version of everything. Both are camp, but they are doing different things. Here is a tangent that actually illuminates the concept: the American tradition of county fairs is deeply camp-adjacent in ways that are rarely acknowledged. The competitive earnestness of the canning and quilting competitions, the spectacle of the demolition derby, the elaborate decoration of floats that will be seen once and then dismantled — these have the commitment to form over function, the elevation of the ordinary into ceremony, that camp requires. Camp is not exclusively queer, but it was queer communities who named it, theorized it, and made it into a conscious mode of being.

Camp in the Current Moment

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2019 Costume Institute exhibition Camp: Notes on Fashion brought the concept to a mainstream audience in a way that prompted exactly the kind of debate about appropriation, definition, and dilution that any such mainstreaming produces. The exhibition was spectacular and somewhat chaotic, which is perhaps appropriate. What concerns some queer scholars is that as camp becomes more broadly legible and commercially appealing, it loses the specific charge it carries as a minority survival strategy. Camp that everyone can buy into is not doing the same work as camp that was developed by people who had to find a way to live with contempt. The sensibility migrates; the necessity that produced it does not. This is not an argument for keeping camp secret. It is an argument for knowing its history well enough to understand what you are celebrating.