Guilty Pleasures - PB

Despite the promise of the subtitle, Robertson (who teaches at the University of Newcastle in Australia) doesn't represent a range of feminist camp over the years. Rather, she simply presents a few case studies in different chapters (Mae West, Joan Crawford, Madonna). While these are all interesting, they do not hang together particularly well. The freshest information here can be found in the introduction, in which Robertson examines the aesthetics of camp and how it has been assumed that camp exists in the form of gay male culture appropriating women's culture, but that the inverse is never true. ""Women... are objects of camp and subject to it but are not camp subjects."" The individual chapters are then somewhat disappointing, however, as they closely examine specific performers and performances. Robertson examines whether Mae West was a camp creator, or merely a camp object. In a 1971 Playboy interview, West opined, ""Camp is the kinda comedy where they imitate me."" Another essay dissects the film Gold Diggers of 1933, positing that ""the comic gold digger is to feminist camp what the dandy is to gay camp."" Although it opens with an introduction to Joan Crawford as camp figure, the third essay quickly narrows in on her performance in Johnny Guitar as the mannish Vienna. Finally, in an anemic essay that perhaps proves there is not another drop of analysis to be squeezed from Madonna's body of work, Robertson examines the material girl's politics and claims that they warn us against a tendency to ""naively substitute camp for politics."" (May)