Core Post 2 - Tucker Rayl

I’m very intrigued by Gael Sweeney’s article “The King of White Trash Culture,” especially her distinction between a camp aesthetic and a white trash aesthetic. I think camp is a very difficult concept to explain (although Susan Sontag does it perfectly in her legendary essay “Notes on Camp”), and the comparison Sweeney makes between camp and white trash is not fully thought through.

I think the first thing that bothered me about Sweeney’s remarks on camp is that it’s wrong to call camp an aesthetic in the same way it’s wrong to call white trash an aesthetic. There is a look to camp (and white trash), to be sure. But calling them an aesthetic reduces them to simply their image and takes away the philosophy and cultural context that allows each to exist. Camp, as Sontag defines it, is a sensibility. I think it’s also a phenomenon in that some things, as if out of nowhere, perfectly embody camp. Take Dynasty, for example. The show was a boring, though lush, soap opera. Add Joan Collins to the mix, and BAM it’s camp.

Sweeney also says that camp is parodical and deliberate. That camp is tasteless in order to “outrage the dominant taste.” And while I think this is certainly part of the camp philosophy, I think a larger part of camp is simply the celebration of artifice and ostentation. Sweeney tries to say that Dolly Parton is white trash, but not camp. But she’s definitely camp too with her big hair, big boobs, and tacky costumes. Even though Dolly might have a backwoods upbringing, she is celebrated by those that subscribe to a camp sensibility because of her extravagance. And while it might be a partly tongue-in-cheek appreciation, there is certainly sincerity in the campy love of Dolly. After a certain point of ironically loving a thing, you find something about it that you genuinely love. That’s the joy of artifice - it’s all an ornate coverup for something real underneath. And camp is filled with varying levels of irony, sarcasm, and genuine appreciation for artifice.

I know that I am getting hung up on Sweeney’s explanation of camp. But I think if she did not take the care to flesh out the comparison between camp and white trash, I am a bit more skeptical of her treatment of the white trash sensibility in general.