Out of place. A note on the Italian camp

Abstract

This essay addresses Italian camp, questioning its very conditions and possibility. Camp’s masquerade and subversive sendup, its transgression of ontological, aesthetical and hermeneutical axes – which made it a landmark of 1960s pop culture as well as of pre-Stonewall queerdom – may well be too historically and culturally specific to be extended to Italy. And yet, its performative nature of camp provides the legitimation to Italian camp, one that can be found in everyday life, in art, music, tv, cinema, Opera, literature, theatre and fashion, where Italian camp may as a matter of fact claim some form of paradoxical primacy over its “original” articulation.