Queering Femininity One Camp Gesture at a Time

Irene Neophytou's blog, adapted from her essay which won first prize in the 2025 Queer Futures competition, analyses how artists queer gender by appropriating its coded gestures, amplifying them to the point of rupture, and thereby generate a liminal, defiant space.

Susan Sontag (1964) famously described camp as “the love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration”, also suggesting that camp could be “disengaged” from politics. However, queer theorists like Muñoz (1999) have reclaimed it as a tactic of resistance, a way to re‑appropriate cultural codes and imagine a queer futurity. In our visual landscape today, the line between gender performance and artistic excess has become all the more porous. Hyper‑feminine aesthetics have become a flashpoint for criticism, rather than celebration and empowerment. They are met with negative reactions because the excesses of hyper‑femininity can look like a reinforcement of stereotypical gender roles, and many observers dismiss them as just decorative or superficial rather than as a deliberate, subversive strategy. These amplified feminine gestures are interpreted as “just more of the same” instead of a conscious critique of gender. In observing criticisms of hyper-feminity, it occurred to me that camp is rarely taken seriously as an aesthetic strategy capable of queering, not only visual norms, but gender itself.

As Judith Butler (1990) argued, gender is not an innate, pre-existing essence, but a series of repeated, culturally coded acts that become our gender identity. When artists lean into exaggerated makeup, towering heels, and theatrical gestures, they make the artificial visible, exposing the “act” behind the “identity”. This exposure is precisely what camp celebrates: the artifice that reveals gender’s performative nature. When camp enters the equation, gender in art does not simply play dress‑up. It transforms femininity into a deliberately exaggerated aesthetic that becomes a conscious act, exposing how gender has always been a construct.

Cindy Sherman’s staged photographs exemplify hyper‑feminine camp that operates through what queer theorist Eve Sedgwick (1992) calls “camp‑recognition”: the moment a queer viewer detects something unintentionally queer, something “off” in a cultural product that was not originally meant to be queer, recognizing in its failed seriousness something resonant with queer ways of thinking and being. In her ‘Untitled Film Still’ series, Sherman assembles props such as aprons, high heels, and dramatic lighting to mimic femininity in cinema. 

Baudrillard’s (1995) notion of the Simulacra helps explain why Sherman’s images feel both familiar and unsettling: the photographs are “copies without an original,” a hyper‑real echo reproducing a hyper-feminine archetype that never existed in any actual cinematic narrative. In her Untitled Film Still #35, Sherman uses props like an apron, high heels, and uses cosmetics, all of which correspond to the traditional symbol chain related to femininity. The objects, the signs, become a meta-representation of femininity, since femininity represents a series of cultural images already in circulation; they represent a femininity that no longer refers to an essential truth or an original source. In a way, her photographs are a simulation of simulations. The image functions within a self‑referential chain of signs that point only to other signs, thereby erasing the boundary between representation and reality and depicting gender as a constructed performance of signs, actions, language, and behaviours. Roland Barthes  (1957) contributed in semiotics with his “myth theory”, where signs enter a second-order level of signification, creating a myth where everyday culture objects carry an ideological meaning which present socially constructed ideas as if they were natural, self-evident truths. The result is a visual camp‑recognition that destabilises the seriousness of gendered representation, allowing the audience to experience femininity as a “myth”, a second‑order sign that pretends to be natural.

If Sherman deconstructs femininity through photography, drag artist Chappell Roan pushes the disruption further by deterritorialising femininity altogether. Roan, a cisgender lesbian who identifies with drag, magnifies makeup, gestures, speech and costume to such excess that the performance becomes a hybrid “assemblage” of desire, cultural debris and affect. For Butler (1990), drag “reveals the imitative structure of gender itself,” revealing its contingency, while Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) schizoanalytic notion of a “desiring‑revolution” would capture Roan’s work as a “line of flight” that grants each subject its own sexes and breaks binary constraints. Her Pink Pony Club music video mixes “trash” aesthetics with historical icons like Joan of Arc, creating a “line of flight” away from conventional femininity. The hyper‑feminine excess is comedic relief; it generates affective labour, producing shared feelings of queer joy, shame, and longing that bind audience and performer. 

Muñoz’s (1999) idea of queer futurity, the feeling of a horizon of possibilities that is not yet realized, finds a visual counterpart in Roan’s work, where the hyper‑feminine spectacle becomes a site for imagined futures. As he writes, “[q]ueerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality... we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality”. By turning hyper‑femininity into a collective affective experience, Roan demonstrates how camp can function as a political tool that envisions new modes of being beyond any binary systems.

Hyper‑femininity, when paired with camp, does more than entertain; it creates affective and imaginative spaces for resistance and continual becoming. Sherman’s self‑staged photographs exhibit femininity as simulacral and mythic, inviting a camp‑recognition that makes gender legible as artifice. Roan, on the other hand, deterritorialises femininity from within, re‑territorializing it into a queer assemblage that refuses containment. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) remind us, we are “a little block of becoming,” and through camp, femininity becomes something that can be assembled, disassembled, and queered again.

Artists constantly queer gender by appropriating its coded gestures, amplifying them to the point of rupture, and thereby generate a liminal space that can be seized by new, defiantly queer forms of expression. Instead of criticising the overtly exaggerated and the deliberately artificial for not doing enough for queerness, we must first acknowledge how queerness becomes increasingly powerful through camp’s aesthetic logic. In this light, hyper-femininity in camp visuals is not a decorative diversion from “truth,” but a strategic intervention that reconceptualises what truth can be and that is something to be celebrated unapologetically.

Author Biog:

Irene is a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, studying English Literature. This piece is adapted from an essay originally written for the interdisciplinary module Introduction to Queer Studies, completed during her first year. Her work explores themes of queerness, with a particular interest in the intersections of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. 
 

References:

Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press.

Barthes, R. (1957). Mythologies.

Berlant, L. (2006). Cruel optimism. Differences, 17(3), 20‑36. 

Baudrillard, J. (1995). Simulacra and simulation.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. 

Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980).

Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. University of Minnesota Press.

Rancière, J. (2013). The politics of aesthetics. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1992). Epistemology of the closet. South Central Review, 9(2), 105. 

Sontag, S. (1964). Notes on camp.

Zimmer, C. (2024). A feminomenology of Chappell Roan. Avidly.