Queer sensitivities at the exhibition Camp: notes on fashion (2019). Meeting Sontag at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts

Abstract

Almost six decades have passed since Susan Sontag published Notes on Camp in 1964, reclaiming attention to an aesthetic sensibility that had historically been repressed and persecuted. Although it has been referenced in academic cultural studies as an elusive concept, what Sontag called "camp" can be found in a large part of the forms of artistic and cultural expression, revealing itself as a complex aesthetic whose political nature would challenge the status quo of the normalization and normativity of western societies. Characterized by breaking the balance between high art and the embrace of popular culture, the complex camp aesthetic has been an inspiration for multiple cultural productions in recent decades, boasting of different ways of inhabiting spaces and understanding the body and social interaction from subalternity, irony, artifice, theatricality and exaggeration, issues associated at first with homosexual identities. However, the exhibition in 2019 with the name Camp: Notes on Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York offers interesting readings on the evolution of the concept, the new relationships of clothing with the construction of gender identities and the opening of museum practices to ideologies that promote dissident representation, making different displays through merchandising and raising interesting debates on the performativity in fashion studies.