Item Details

title

"More Forms and Stranger": Queer Feminism and the Aesthetic of Sapphic Camp

author

Kennedy, Kelley Anne

abstract

This study seeks to locate an emergent tradition of queer feminist camp within two novels of Sapphic modernism. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) both dramatize their own contingency upon exclusionary cultural categories and aesthetic norms, highlighting the imbrication of style with structures of power while mobilizing parody to problematize the cultural hierarchies that are inscribed in the “naturality of signs” (Cleto 17). Building upon critical approaches to camp in feminist and gay and lesbian studies, this thesis argues that the parodic practices enacted within works of Sapphic camp reflect a convergence feminist and proto-queering strategies. I argue that camp strategies create possibilities for protesting the marginalization of female, lesbian, ‘queer’, and gender non-conforming subjects while interrogating the coherence of these very categories. Woolf’s Orlando enacts a camp-coded genealogical critique of English literary history, gender norms, and sexual mores and gestures toward an alternative method of literary composition which maintains an ironic, critical distance from the historically contingent aesthetic forms that it appropriates. In the hands of Sapphic modernists, camp contributes to the development of a proto-queer feminist method of criticism and composition, paving the way for intellectual and political practices that eschew an identitarian basis of solidarity.

subject

Camp

Queer theory

Transvestism

contributor

Klein, Scott (committee chair)

Saloman, Randi (committee member)

date

2020-05-29T08:36:14Z (accessioned)

2020-05-29T08:36:14Z (available)

2020 (issued)

degree

English (discipline)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/96865 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis