![]() Such passages might often suggest a queer sexuality, that is to say, sexuality divergent from the assumptions of present-day heterosexual norms. Queering the eighteenth century means wrenching it from established contexts in order to read it against the grain of traditional readings and dissolving the accreted interpretations that stifle or avoid those textual passages that do not lend themselves to orthodox readings. ![]() Robert Tobin provides a definition of how a queer reading can be applied to late eighteenth-century texts. One of the more recent tasks of queer theory has been to investigate how far queer might be used to describe historical and geographically specific cultures previous to queer theory’s usual orbit of twentieth-century culture. However, one shared aspect of queer readings is their attempt to illustrate those instances where the expectations and patterns of gendered behaviour are overturned or under pressure. Queer bodies and behaviour problematize the links between gender and sexuality as identity categories, and queer is inherently ambiguous and resistant to categorization or, for some, even definition. For Sedgwick it is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick 8). ![]() How can queer be used to articulate what is camp about Gothic? Eve Sedgwick’s definition of queer provides a helpful understanding of what queer can mean. I look at The Monk as an example of Gothic writing that might be legitimately described as camp. In using a queer theoretical approach, I wish to contribute to a shift of critical focus from how traditional Gothic writers’ sexualities are manifested in their fiction, to how Gothic writing self-consciously plays out the indeterminacy surrounding same-sex desire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. One way is by thinking about how camp is queer, especially in how the body and its (mis)interpretation are represented in Gothic writing. Sontag’s identification of Gothic writing as camp provides a springboard from which we can ask how far Gothic writing is camp and in what ways. The above quotation from Susan Sontag argues that Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century are one of the sources for the idea of a camp taste. And the relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental. Today’s Camp taste effaces nature, or else contradicts it outright. They also indefatigably patronized the past. In the eighteenth century, people of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or attempted to remake it into something artificial (Versailles). ![]() But the relation to nature was quite different then. The dividing line seems to fall in the eighteenth century there the origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth). ![]() An overview of how queer helps us to understand why the Gothic is camp is offered, and then a specific analysis of where the camp effects occur in The Monk is provided through a close reading. This anxiety about seeing and understanding desire in not-so-easily visible bodies (like the supernatural) connects to socio-cultural anxieties about how reading gender to read same-sex desire is unstable in the early nineteenth century. In The Monk, the voice and the gaze as conduits of desire and phobia are those signifiers of the body that are shown to disturb a sex-gender binary and to provoke a crisis of reading. The queer valency of Gothic writing, especially in texts such as The Monk, emerges in how the body can be misinterpreted. In particular, Fabio Cleto’s idea of how camp represents a crisis of reading the signs of naturality can be applied to the Gothic’s use of the supernatural. Moving away from a reading of camp as a style stripped of its queer meanings (in particular the reading of the Gothic as camp because it is ‘theatrical’, ‘hyperbolical’ or ‘artificial’) a reading of camp is offered that uses queer theory which questions the naturality and authenticity of gender. Examining the ascription of ‘camp’ by Susan Sontag and others to describe the Gothic, it suggests that the Gothic is camp because it is queer. This article investigates how and why the Gothic can be described as camp. ![]()
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