Product Description

What does camp have to do with capitalism? How have queer men created a philosophy of commodity culture? Why is cinema central to camp? With chapters on the films of Vincente Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and John Waters, Working Like a Homosexual responds to these questions by arguing that post–World War II gay male subcultures have fostered their own ways not only of consuming mass culture but of producing it as well.

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.

Students and scholars of cinema, queer studies, Marxism, modernism, popular culture, and political economy will enjoy this book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1136522 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
"A brilliant, innovative study of camp that exceeds the terms in which this topic traditionally has been conceived. The result is a reformulation of camp as queer industrial labour, from the perspective of the production as well as the reception of that work. Anyone working on camp will hereafter have to reckon with this book."-Steven Cohan, author of Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties

From the Publisher
“A brilliant, innovative study of camp that exceeds the terms in which this topic traditionally has been conceived. The result is a reformulation of camp as queer industrial labor, from the perspective of the production as well as the reception of that work. Anyone working on camp will hereafter have to reckon with this book.”—Steven Cohan, author of Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties

From the Back Cover
“A brilliant, innovative study of camp that exceeds the terms in which this topic traditionally has been conceived. The result is a reformulation of camp as queer industrial labor, from the perspective of the production as well as the reception of that work. Anyone working on camp will hereafter have to reckon with this book.”—Steven Cohan, author of Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties

Customer Reviews

"Working" requires a bit of labor on the part of the reader
Tinkcom's text is hard to digest at times, especially the lengthy introduction that exposes the manuscript's origin as a dissertation. Work through the intro pays off for tenacious readers, as the book is an insightful inquiry into camp using Marxist theory and a menagerie of examples drawn from both "high" and "low" forms of filmic art. The author does a decent job of historicizing different types of cinematic queer cultural production while engaging his assertion that camp forms a critique of capitalism. If one can muddle through the excessively exhaustive introduction they will find the cinematic examples the author uses and the research he has undertaken compelling. One can only hope that Tinkcom's work is indicative of forthcoming scholarly inquiries critically engaging queer subjectivity in the vein of Richard Dyer's recent and more accessible volume of essays, The Culture of Queers (2002).