Batman, Deviance, and Camp Andy Medhurst

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Batman, Deviance, and CampAndy Medhurst
Ooh, Batman!

• Pages 746-760

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Batman over the Decades

• Like Superman, Batman began in DC Comics in 1939,
  with Robin (Boy Wonder)
  
• 40s and 50s Innocent camaraderie
• Bruce Wayne / Dick Grayson / Alfred (butler)
• Comics Code ? cleaned up the comics
• 60s Camp TV series with Adam West
• and Burt Ward
• 70s and 80s Dark Knight series by
• Frank Miller
• 80s and 90s Batman Movies
• No Robin Grim and Dark

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Batman As A Gay Figure?

• Andy Medhurst argues that Batman appeals to gay
  audiences because
  
• Frederic Wertham attacked Batman in his book
  Seduction of The Innocent (1955) on the grounds
  of presumed homosexuality.
  
• The 1960s show was a hallmark for camp (748)
• He is a recurring hero figure for the last fifty
  years. Batman merits analysis as a notably
  successful construction of masculinity (emphasis
  added 748).

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Frederic Wertham

• Seduction of the Innocent (1955)

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a
distinguished psychiatrist named Dr. Fredric
Wertham made a name for himself in the US by
leading a crusade against violent comic books.
His 1954 book exposing the comic-book industry,
Seduction of the Innocent , is still remembered
in American comics fandom as a wildly exaggerated
and overwrought polemic and has gone on to become
a collector's item in its own right.
Fandom kingdom of fans


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• Sometimes Batman ends up in bed injured and
  young Robin is shown sitting next to him. At home
  they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne
  and 'Dick' Grayson. Bruce is described as a
  'socialite' and the official relationship is that
  Dick is Bruce's ward. They live in sumptuous
  quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases,
  and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes
  shown in a dressing gown. . .

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Gothic Romance and Batman

• Batman comics contain references, both visual and
  textual, to gothic archetypes.
  
• The gothic is a style that creates a dark,
  morbid, brooding atmosphere.
  
• Burton in particular took this style and applied
  it to his film in 1989.
  
• Gothic romance used women as endangered objects
  needing rescue. Batman, however, often rescued
  his endangered protégé, Robin, an extension of
  the story beat found in comics and popular
  novels.

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Wertham Other points

• Homosexuality goes with misogyny men love other
  men because they hate women.
  
• Wonder Woman encourages lesbian tendencies in
  girls Wertham suggests women love other women
  because they hate men.
  
• Part of the successful moral attack on comics.

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Reaction to Werthams homophobia

• Re-assert the masculinity of the dynamic duo
• Stress his licentiousness (squires women at the
  Wayne mansion).
  
• Medhurst states that the result is as homophobic
  as Wertham.
  
• Bricolage (def. F. tinkering by a professional
  handy-person) a reading strategy of gay
  audiences to snatch illicit meanings from the
  fabric of normality corrupt decoding to
  satisfy marginalized desires

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Mid-Fifties Comics Code

• Gosh, the code made comics into pamphlets on
  citizenship.
  
• Violence, sexuality (of any kind), and interest
  were removed.
  
• American comics were banned in England and Canada
  for a short period.
  
• Like the Hays Code (1930) limiting what was
  morally acceptable in films (note 17 751).
  
• The little white seal on the top right, was added
  to comic books in the 60s.

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What is Camp? (page 753)

• Camp
• A cultural practice that takes norms and
  standards so seriously that they become
  ridiculous and the privileges attached to them
  unreasonable an over-the-top style magnifies and
  ridicules the norm.
• A satirical or amusing quality present in an
  extravagant gesture, style, or form.
  
• As Medhurst says, camp is extremely difficult to
  describe. But, camp refers to playful,
  knowing, self-reflexive theatricality (753).
  
• At the heart of camp is a rebellious or
  transgressive mode of reading.

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Camp Quotes from the Text (viewed as inadequate
or limited by Medhurst)
To be camp is to present oneself as being
committed to the marginal with a commitment
greater than the marginal merits.
Camp sees everything in quotation marks. Its
not a lamp, but a lamp not a woman but a
woman It is the furthest extension, in
sensibility, of the metaphor of life as
theatre. Camp is a way of poking fun at the w
hole cosmology of restrictive sex roles and
sexual identifications which our society uses to
oppress its women and repress its men.
Camp was and is a way for gay men to re-imagine
the world around them by exaggerating,
stylizing and remaking what is usually thought to
be average or normal. Camp was a prison for an
illegal minority now it is a holiday for
consenting adults.
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Is 2004s Starsky and Hutch camp?
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• Medhurst argues that the 60s TV show Batman is a
  knowing and self-mocking interpretation of those
  cheesy 1950s Batman stories covered with a
  thick layer of ironic distance
• Thus Camp is anything that is supposed to be
  serious but comes across as cheesy or over-the
  top
  
• The batman cape
• The skin tight body suits
• The corny dialogue - POW! BANG! POP! that most
  people remember

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Campish signs of the Duos gayness

• Marsha Queen of Diamonds episode
• just married sign (Alfred and Batman)
• Black Widow episodes
• Tallulah Bankhead as Robin
• Batmans Im Just a Little Buttercup song
• Camp transposes the codes of one cultural form
  into the inappropriate codes of another (756).

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Re-heterosexualization of Batman

• Get rid of Robin.
• Add darkness, grit, and real life (Ayatollah
  Khomeini).
  
• Add Vicki Vale to Tim Burtons film Batman (a
  kind of Lois Lane equivalent).
  
• Imply that the Joker (Batmans bad twin) is gay.
• Arkham Asylum Joker as screaming queen frequent
  references to this place continue to be used in
  current comic books on the Batman theme.

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Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale
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Why see Batman as gay?

• When lesbian and gay readers found no positive
  images to confirm their position in the culture,
  they used camp, reworking existing
  heterosexualized texts to accommodate them.
• Camp asserts that there is no absolute truth to a
  text, that if I want Batman to be gay, then, for
  me, he is (760).
  
• Superhero texts, like other texts, only have
  truth and power when we allow them to do so camp
  recognizes and plays with this social reality
  of texts.

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Camp vs Kitsch

• kitsch (German rubbish)
• Any artefact that aspires to have artistic
  integrity but is judged to be pretentious,
  sentimental, or out of step with current notions
  of good taste. While this clearly includes cheap
  mass-produced souvenirs created to satisfy a
  market that is unable to distinguish between what
  is kitsch and what is not.
• The Macmillan Encyclopaedia 2001

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Examples of Kitsch/Camp
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Camp?

• Shows from the 60s
• Avengers
• Man from UNCLE
• Thunderbirds
• Shows from the 70s and 80s
• Magnum PI
• Remington Steele
• Moonlighting

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Susan Sontag

• Many things in the world have not been named
  and many things, even if they have been named,
  have never been described. One of these is the
  sensibility -- unmistakably modern, a variant of
  sophistication but hardly identical with it --
  that goes by the cult name of Camp." -
  Sontag, Notes on Camp (1964)
• Sontag argued that there was more to camp that
  just silliness or pretence or fake elegance.
  According to her, camp is a whole sensibility
  that evaluates the world strictly in aesthetic
  terms.

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Stereotyping

• Stereotypes are not actual people but widely
  circulated ideas or assumptions about particular
  groups
  
• They involve both categorizing and evaluating an
  entire groups identity based on simple
  characteristics.
  
• They usually emphasize some easily grasped
  feature of the group in question and suggest that
  these are the cause of the groups position.
  
• Usually, though not always, negative.
• Stereotypes try to insist on absolute difference
  rather than a spectrum of difference skin
  colour, masculine and feminine, religion,
  political persuasion, etc.

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Gay Stereotyping

• Recall the film The Celluloid Closet? What
  stereotypes of gay and lesbian characters emerged
  in the past?
  
• How about gay and lesbians shown on mainstream
  TV? Think of an episode of Will and Grace? Or
  Queer as Folk? Dawsons Creek? Queer Eye for the
  Straight Guy?
• How are lesbians depicted? Why the focus on men?

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Am I my Body?

• Part of understanding Pop culture involves
  theories of the body and how it shapes who we
  are.
  
• Assumption that has prevailed in Western Thought
  since the philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650)
  is that the mind and body were separate I
  think therefore I am they were distinct
  entities.
• The body is now perceived as infinitely
  changeable you can mould your identity by
  modifitying your body hair, piercing, tattoos,
  the health fitness trend, plastic surgery etc.
  are current examples that blur the distinction
  between mind/body.
• Think of your body as a narrative something you
  can create and inscribe as you please.

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Bodies that Matter

• Where bodies get tricky they take on cultural
  and political meaning when we apply categories of
  race, gender, and sexual orientation body as
  politics.
• Until the 18th century, identity wasnt a real
  question who you were was determined by the
  role you played in institutions of the family,
  church, class hierarchy, and so on.
• Society evolved people were liberated from
  traditions and individual identity emerged.
  
• Began the cultural questioning of nature/nurture
  what was the role of birth and the environment
  on shaping personality.

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• By 19th early 20th C the idea that identity was
  something that was coherent and fixed began to
  change.
  
• Darwins theory of Evolution (evolving self).
• Karl Marx concept of history (classed self).
• Freuds psychoanalysis (the unconscious self).
• Ferdinand de Saussures (the self in language).
• We now view from Postmodernism that identity
  is constructed always in the process of becoming
  a form of production.
  
• We are always a compromise between who we are and
  how others see us.
  

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What do we mean by Gender?

• Anthropologists tend to suggest that sex is
  biological, while gender is cultural.
  
• We use sex to refer to what people perceive at
  the biological level. Male or Female.
  
• Sexuality refers to orientation, object choice,
  sexual activities and imaginings.
  
• Gender, on the other hand, relates to the
  construction of culturally meaningful categories
  around this biological division. It refers to the
  attributes, behaviors, personality
  characteristics, and expectancies associated with
  a person's biological sex in a given culture.
• While the two terms are inextricably linked
  never confuse them there are not the same!
  

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Performativity and Acting

• A way to challenge current ideas of identity is
  through the notion of performance or
  performativity developed by Cultural theorist
  Judith Butler.
• Think of a theater performance actors playing
  scripted roles.
  
• Becomes a metaphor for enacting sex and gender.
• The script, broadly, refers to mythologized
  gender ideas.
  

Judith Butler
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Gender is a Drag

• Repetition is the key to Butlers theory your
  sexual identity is naturalized considered
  normal because you repeat it both consciously
  and unconsciously every day.
• But a performance is a play its not real,
  right? Its a representation, a script that
  undermines the idea that your identity is
  stable.
• Butler takes interest in the image of the drag
  queen, effeminate gay man or the Butch /
  Femme lesbian identities.
  
• For Butler the Drag Queen is revolutionary.

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The problem we cant take off the costume

• This is why Butler says finally that GENDER IS
  DRAG we are all in drag right now.
  
• Butler is clear when she says, I do not mean to
  suggest that drag is a role that can be taken
  on or off at willthe subject doesn't decide
  which gender it will be today.
• Gender is not a performance its performative
  because we dont just perform our gender once
  it is compulsory.

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Queer Theory

• Queer theory is a brand-new branch of study or
  theoretical speculation it has only been named
  as an area of criticism since about 1991. It grew
  out of gay/lesbian studies.
• Queer theory looks at, and studies, anything that
  falls into non-normative and deviant categories,
  particularly sexual activities and identities.
  
• The word "queer," as it appears in the
  dictionary, has a primary meaning of "odd,"
  "peculiar," "out of the ordinary."

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• Queer theory is a set of ideas based around the
  idea that identities are not fixed and do not
  determine who we are.
  
• It suggests that it is meaningless to talk in
  general about women or any other group, as
  identities consist of so many elements that to
  assume that people can be seen collectively on
  the basis of one shared characteristic is wrong.
• Indeed, it proposes that we deliberately
  challenge all notions of fixed identity, in
  varied and non-predictable ways.
  
• It is a mistake to think that queer theory is
  another name for lesbian and gay studies.

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• Queer theory concerns itself with any and all
  forms of sexuality that are "queer" in this
  sense, and then, by extension, with the normative
  behaviors and identities which define what is
  "queer.
• In other words, queer theorists attend carefully
  to what characters want and do.
  
• Medhurst performs a queer reading of Batman
  because previous treatments and representations
  of the superhero allow for such a reading.
  
• Often, queer theory explores hidden or codified
  meaning in film and literature to reveal
  identities.