Notes on Caitlyn, or Genre Trouble: On the Continued Usefulness of Camp as Queer Method

This article argues that Caitlyn Jenner’s failed performance as transgender spokeswoman can be best understood through the queer reading practice of camp. Camp’s subversive potential to denaturalize gender through the scene of its failed performance has often been celebrated within queer theory but currently faces suspicion that the unseriousness with which it reads gender performance is implicitly transphobic. This article contends, however, that Jenner’s failure to convincingly appropriate the conventions of LGBT political seriousness sends up these conventions themselves, demonstrating the continued need for camp spectatorship precisely in the attempt to banish it.