Working Like a Homosexual Camp, Capital, Cinema

With a special emphasis on the tensions between high and low forms of culture and between good and bad taste, Matthew Tinkcom offers a new vision of queer politics and aesthetics that is critically engaged with Marxist theories of capitalist production. He argues that camp-while embracing the cheap, the scorned, the gaudy, the tasteless, and what Warhol called "the leftovers" of artistic production-is a mode of intellectual production and a critical philosophy of modernity as much as it is an expression of a dissident sex/gender difference. From Minnelli's musicals and the "everyday glamour" of Warhol's films to Anger's experimental films and Waters's "trash aesthetic," Tinkcom demonstrates how camp allowed these gay men to design their own relationship to labor and to history in a way that protected them from censure even as they struggled to forge a role for themselves within a system of "value" that failed to recognize them.