Camp is Cancelled
Here is the invitation to our session on camping:
"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up." - An Ideal Husband
Hey Happy Campers,
This upcoming book-club we will be going CAMPING. That’s right...camping! We invite you to join us around the campfire and share your best “camp” stories...camp sees everything in quotation marks. This is a book-club of two parts. The first, reading the article (Susan Sontag), watching the video and considering the questions we have provided and the second, an invitation to express yourself and your through sharing a story/experience/aesthetic/anything around the campfire.
We invite you to read/watch/digest the following video and attached article and to consider the following perspectives as you go…
What is a pure aesthetic aspect of your identity? What is the role of aesthetics in your personal identity? What parts of you should be more artificial / camp? How would that look? Do you recognise any duplicity in yourself? Can camp truly be serious? Could aesthetic also be political? What implies that? What do you think is seductive about yourself? Is that something “natural” or “cultural”? What would be considered “camp” in the future? 50 years from now? 200 years from now? How do your tastes vary, what does that have to do with Camp? Do you have any camp memories? Can you think of a personal of historic camp memory Suggested Workforms: "How to:" develop an artificial identity A short opera Poetry / slam Drag / dressing up Puppet show Storytelling
We look forward to seeing you and your best camp gear there ;)
- A note about cancellation. The author of the think piece on camp (contrapoints) has since been cancelled for employing a terf voice actor on one of her videos. As she is trans herself this felt like an odd choice from many within the community. Personally, I’m not in favour of cancellation per sae. I feel like the queer community holds its members to an extremely high standard. To this I say, excuse me? Have you talked to any straight white men lately? They are on another planet in terms of uncouth behaviour.
I read something recently about the tolerance paradox, whereby we become SO tolerant as a group that we are absolutely intolerant of anything that is perceived as remotely “intolerant” behaviour.
We could be really hard on each other sometimes as a group, I wish we’d been gentler .