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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Matthew Tinkcom, Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2002)
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| MARX HAS BEEN called many names, but "campy" is not usually one of them. Within queer studies, Marx is more often viewed as a dogmatic old fogey determined to rain on the rainbow parade. Not so for Matthew Tinkcom who, in Working Like a Homosexual, undertakes a campy reading of Marx and a queer Marxist reading of camp. |
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Given the ambiguity of Tinkcom's clever title, we should begin by clarifying what he means by "working." Within gay/lesbian studies, scholars have developed the interesting notion of "queer work": the way particular types of jobs and/or places of employment come through popular cultural stereotyping to be viewed as "gay." Think hairdresser or waiter. In these types of jobs, gay men forge mutually supportive work environments in which they can be openly gay among coworkers. But Tinkcom's study of cinema is not about Hollywood or queer filmmaking as a refuge for homosexuals working as costume makers and set designers (although hairdressers do make an appearance in Tinkcom's discussion of Warhol's film Haircut (No.1)). Another line of inquiry within gay/lesbian scholarship, the one perhaps most recognizable to specialists in labour studies and featured in anthologies such as Out at Work: Building a Gay-Labor Alliance (2001), centres on the experience of gay/lesbian workers and the labour movement. But, again, Tinkcom is not especially interested in homosexuals working in the film industry or in the labour process of queer filmmaking. What then does Tinkcom mean by work? |
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Tinkcom is concerned with camp and cinema as forms of intellectual and aesthetic work. And don't be too quick to dismiss the value of campy labour, for Tinkcom argues that camp, like Marxism, is nothing less than a critical knowledge of capitalist modernity. In order to tease out camp's critical take on capitalism, Tinkcom substitutes the customary emphasis on the consumption of camp with an appreciation for its production. From Susan Sontag's 1964 "Notes on Camp" (and here Tinkcom usefully adds to D.A. Miller's dead-on deflating of Sontag's self-styled urbanity) to more recent collections, such as Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality (1993) and Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject (1999), the study of camp has focussed primarily on reception, on the pleasures differently-situated audiences derive from camp performances. The work involved here — the decoding of meaning — is something undertaken by the audience, by the consumers of camp. But Tinkcom calls for an analytical shift away from camp as consumption to camp as production, specifically, to camp as a form of queer intellectual labour. |
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The importance of being campy is usually derived from the sexual or gender dissidence of the camp act. But for Tinkcom, the political and philosophical significance of camp lies in the way it encodes a queer critique of capitalist notions of value. This can take different forms. For example, in his chapter on Vincente Minnelli's early film musicals for MGM, Tinkcom shows how the lavish, campy visuals of Minnelli's musical numbers destabilize the ostensible narrative of heterosexual romance. However, Minnelli's films made more than sex/gender trouble; they also represented a distinctly queer commodity form. That The Pirate, for instance, was a box office flop may confirm that the film failed to meet normative narrative desires, but it also represented a beautiful failure that tampered with capital's ability to extract a profit from the film's queer labour. Sometimes camp critique rests on its status as trash within capitalist culture. Camp labour recycles and gives new queer meaning and value to that which wasteful capitalism tosses aside as no longer profitable. This process of queer resignification can be easily traced in Tinkcom's discussion of the films of John Waters, from Pink Flamingos to Polyester, and in what Tinkcom refers to as the filmmaker's "trash aesthetic." |
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Tinkcom's revaluing of camp as labour may disconcert some queer readers/viewers, for it undercuts our cherished position as the chosen consumers of camp with privileged access to its hidden meanings. Camp's function as a delicious secret to be savoured only by those audience members in the know may be less important than other knowledge concealed in the camp commodity, knowledge that can speak to all those who labour under the constraints of our current economic system. Take note: Tinkcom's title is not working as but working like a homosexual, opening up the possibility that anyone, regardless of sexual preference, might tap into camp's queer critique of capital should they choose, if only for the duration of a camp performance, to work like a homosexual. Tinkcom concludes that in the face of capitalism's alienated drudgery, the campy, cinematic products of queer labour "give back to us the pleasures of work that the world of capital so insistently forecloses from us in large and small ways each day." (194) When's the last time you read something like that in a work of queer theory? |
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That I'm taken with many of Tinkcom's cultural readings and theoretical musings is not to say I have no problems with the book. Much of camp is embedded in the broader history of gay male subcultures. Tinkcom is acutely aware of this; he reminds us often that we are looking at post-World War II, gay male, metropolitan subcultures. But Tinkcom makes very little use of the now extensive literature on the gay social/urban history of this period. One of the book's most convincing chapters is on Kenneth Anger's filmic treatment of the commodity and the fetish, from the highly-polished chrome of Kustom Kar Kommandos to the leather boots and chains of Scorpio Rising. But what precisely was Anger's relationship to the car/bike and leather/Levis cultures emerging in Los Angeles and New York in the postwar period? Such missed opportunities are unfortunate because contextualizing camp production within the varied histories of gay subcultures would not only have underscored its historical specificity but would also have grounded Tinkcom's homosexuals and their queer intellectual labour in material/spatial settings in ways that would have meshed nicely with Tinkcom's Marxist affinities. |
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Still, it is my hope that Tinkcom's elegantly-written book doesn't share the fate of so many recent studies of popular culture: queer today and gone tomorrow. Future scholars may rediscover and revalue the many forgettable queer cultural studies that litter academic remainder tables today, but Working Like a Homosexual deserves a longer life, allowing us to linger over its surplus of value. |
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Steven Maynard
Queen's University |
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