Camp Disney: Consuming Queer Sensibilities, Commodifying the Normative

• In Event: 46.053 - The Disney Curriculum: Pedagogies of Being and Buying

Abstract

David Halperin insists, “That gay men have a specific, non-standard attachment to certain cultural objects and cultural forms is the widespread, unquestioned assumption behind a lot of American popular humor” (2012, p. 9). To explore his idea “about the relation between sexuality, on the one hand, and cultural forms, styles of feeling, and genres of discourse, on the other” (p. 14) to see where it might productively lead us, I am interested in how Disney commodifies, caricatures, and capitalizes upon ‘camp’ sensibilities, seemingly as sources of humor, in order to entertain, and to educate. As Esther Newton wryly observed, “While camp humor was an assertion of gay existence, much of its content was self-hating, denigrating, and incompatible with the assertions of gay pride” (1979, p. xii). Unlike other aspects of Disney films, where [gay] audiences need to “queer heteronormative culture.....to decode heterosexual cultural artifacts and recode them with gay meanings” (Halperin, 2012, p. 18), this project start with already-queer camp (“an in-group word which denoted specifically homosexual humor” Newton, 1979, p. xx) moments in these films. So I explore ‘camp’ Disney with reference to four iconic Disney characters, both as points of departure for my inquiries and as analytics in order to exhume ways in which the curriculum of popular culture teaches and is learned.

Allowing that homosexuality is “an assortment of characteristic social and cultural practices” (Halperin, 2012, p. 10), I read these characters both with and against the grain – as both referencing and drawing upon, and repudiating, queer sensibilities. I am interested in how these camp discourses “are deployed, how they gain authority, and how they are de-authorized in given contexts” (Rasmussen, 2006, p. 52). To interrogate this, I marshal Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology (2006) in order excavate queer conceptualizations of subjectivities (Kumashiro, 2002; Rasmussen, 2006) and what this might mean for the educative project of engaging with popular culture (DePalma & Atkinson, 2009; Giroux & Pollock, 2010; Halberstam, 2012). This enables me to better “understand the larger relations between sexuality and culture, between kinds of desire and conventions of feeling” and to capture the extent to which social practices and cultural forms are both gendered and sexualized” (Halperin, 2012, p. 14).

Author

• Will Letts, Charles Sturt University