Incongruous Entertainment
Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5808018 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Steven Cohan (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Pages | 378 |
| Publication date | 2005-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Incongruous Entertainment (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/9780822387077 |
| OpenAlex | W4214694379 |
| Open Library | OL29605005M |
| ISBN | 9780822387077 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
introduction ainstream fare in the studio era, the mgm musical is today considered an outdated, niche commodity-it has become camp.Camp itself dates back to the time of the closet, the same period when musicals flourished at mgm.In response to that era's oppression and censorship of homosexuality, camp allowed for the ironic, self-reflective style of gay men passing as straight, who kept a ''straight face'' so as not to let outsiders in on the joke, while simultaneously winking at the initiated in shared acknowledgment of it.Camp can be defined as the ensemble of strategies used to enact a queer recognition of the incongruities arising from the cultural regulation of gender and sexuality.The flamboyance of camp when inflected as style, taste, wit, parody, or drag may seem the antithesis of passing, but to be flamboyant was a fundamental component of the joke.Camp strategies for achieving ironic distance from the normative have always exploited the slippery space between a ''posture'' and an ''imposture,'' between ''resembling'' and ''dissembling''-in one way or another, camp signaled the queer eye for a straight guise.Now out of the closet and made more visible, camp continues to bear this significance today as a queer practice and, in academic circles, as queer theory.By now, too, the camp reputation of the musicals produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s-the studio era-is pretty much taken for granted as a consequence of the genre's cultish value for gay men.''In gay subcultural argot,'' Brett Farmer observes, ''the term musical has long been used as a coded ref
Cinema and Media Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Camp (Style) · History and criticism · Homosexuality and motion pictures · Homosexuality in motion pictures · Metro-goldwyn-mayer · Musical films · Musical films, history and criticism · united states
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2023 (14) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |