Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema

Series Q

by Matthew Tinkcom

What does camp have to do with capitalism? How have queer men created a philosophy of commodity culture? Why is cinema central to camp? With chapters on the films of Vincente Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and John Waters, Working Like a Homosexual responds to these questions by arguing that post–World War II gay male subcultures have fostered their own ways not only of consuming mass culture but of producing it as well.
With a special emphasis on the tensions between high and low forms of culture and between good and bad taste, Matthew Tinkcom offers a new vision of queer politics and aesthetics that is critically engaged with Marxist theories of capitalist production. He argues that camp—while embracing the cheap, the scorned, the gaudy, the tasteless, and what Warhol called “the leftovers” of artistic production—is a mode of intellectual production and a critical philosophy of modernity as much as it is an expression of a dissident sex/gender difference. From Minnelli’s musicals and the “everyday glamour” of Warhol’s films to Anger’s experimental films and Waters’s “trash aesthetic,” Tinkcom demonstrates how camp allowed these gay men to design their own relationship to labor and to history in a way that protected them from censure even as they struggled to forge a role for themselves within a system of “value” that failed to recognize them.

Genres: Queer, LGBT

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Matthew Tinkcom is Associate Professor of Communication, Culture and Technology and Affiliate Faculty of English at Georgetown University, USA. He is the author of Working Like a Homosexual: Camp: Capital, Cinema and Grey Gardens, co-editor of Key Frames: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies as well as articles that have appeared in Cinema Journal, South Atlantic Quarterly and collections from Duke University Press and the British Film Institute. He has served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar and Director of the Program in American Studies.

Reviews

[Matt Gately · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tinkcom argues that camp is worth attending to critically due to its stance toward value and value’s fluctuations under capitalist modes of production, and that queer filmmaking is a productive site for this attention. Further, he argues that camp cinema as examined through Vincente Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and John Waters allow us to read camp as a mode of queer labor in both production and reception, contrary to Marxist conceptions of undifferentiable labor.

The book has useful and insightful analysis of the filmmakers in question and has some useful theorizations in terms of labor. I would have liked a bit more theory around what his thoughts mean/change in terms of what we think, as well as greater emphasis on the theoretical insights.

[Lex McClellan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I particularly like that 2001 Tinkcom's last paragraph states he isn't sure if all this applies anymore. Well, let me tell you, dear friend: It does.