Wednesday, September 14, 2011

"[She] Wants So Badly to be Campy that She's Continually Losing the Beat"

Note the robot with the high heels.

      After reading Susan Sontag's Notes on "Camp", I watched RuPaul's Drag Race (season 3, episode 12: "Jocks in Frocks"). I was very curious how the transformation of heterosexual jocks into drag queens would go. And WOW metamorphosis~!
      Afterwards I tried to figure out why Carmen Carrera was eliminated once again. It seems to me that


  • Carmen was "too mediocre in [her] ambition" when it came to building up her drag sister: the jock was left looking like a masculine man in a dress. Carmen did not go far enough and, by focusing primarily on herself, left her partner looking like a caterpillar poking out of its cocoon with crumpled wings—an incomplete transformation. Maybe the judges would have enjoyed it more if Carmen was joking around, but Carmen was totally serious. Serious about the serious.
  • Carmen did the opposite during the lip-syncing and tried too hard. She "wants so badly to be campy that she's continually losing the beat"; Carmen continuously mentioned that her style was nudity, but her stripping during the lip-sync seemed like she just wanted some shock value and was a try-hard. In other words, Carmen failed to grasp the finer aspects of Camp both times.
-Jeremy 

2 comments:

  1. So true, Carmen was only responding to someone threatening what she had stylized as her own "camp", kind of like defending what she assumed to be hers. The things with trends though is that no one person owns them, in a sense by following them they might actually own us.

    --Jheanelle G.

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