Camping Shakespeare

Collection edited by Louise Geddes and Sam Kolodezh
Abstract due: August 1, 2024
Paper due: April 1, 2025

The editors seek essays for a collection that aims to think about camp and early modern drama. Often imagined as a know-it-when-you-see-it, or more derivatively, as bad performance, camp has been a touchstone of queer culture in its most immediately recognizable form for at least the past century. Camp has been variously defined as wilfully bad taste, a commitment to the marginal and frivolous, and as a tool of building and maintaining radical and often temporary communities of care. Arguably, it has also been present in many early modern plays since their original productions. More recently, it has been sanitized, appropriated, or dismissed by scholars and artists even as it continues to mutate and exist at the boundaries of “good” art. Since the turn of the century, camp has had a popular resurgence on American screens and stages, ushered in by pop culture icons such as Ru Paul, Nathan Lane, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga. On theater stages, this resurgence is often made more explicit in adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare: James Ijames Fat Ham (2021), Taylor Mac’s Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (2019), and Fake Friends Circle Jerk (2020).

This collection invites projects that think about camp as a politically contested space and practice. We welcome essays with the aim of exploring, developing, and articulating a camp aesthetic, methodology, or performance practice within Shakespearean drama and early modern culture more broadly, including, but not limited to, staging practices, parody, adaptation, self-representation, burlesque, queer or racialized histories, and questions of taste. How do camp aesthetics engage with Shakespeare and the early modern? To what extent is camp useful as a framework to understand early modern texts and performances? How does camp use Shakespeare and early modern culture to construct ideas of race? What types of insight can camp offer into the role of parody and adaptation in imagining and forming communities in and out of Shakepseare’s texts and stages? Ultimately, this collection seeks to answer the question of what campy and trashy Shakespeare can offer Shakespeare studies.

Possible topics could include;

-Camp as methodology
-Camp, fooling, and clowning
-Shakespearean camp across the centuries
-Camp and race
-Camp and the limits of genre
-Camp, kitsch, schlag, trash, and twee
-Temporalities of camp
-Camp and kink
-Camp as care
-Politics of camp
-Camp as politics
-Camp as transversality
-Camp and power
-Camp and parody
-Camp and/as performance
-Camp and abjection

Please submit 250 word abstracts and 150 word bios to [email protected] and [email protected] by August 1. Accepted papers will be due April 1, 2025 and should be approx. 6,000 words in length, including notes.