Curate, connect, and discover
Writing in the Journal of Lesbian Studies in 2016, Elly-Jean Nielsen, a Ph.D student at the University of Saskatchewan, declared that lesbian camp more commonly followed three themes: erotic, classic, and radical. Eight years before, Annamari Vänskä, a professor of fashion research at Aalto University in Finland, nodded to Serbian Eurovision singer Marija Šerifović, who in 2007 performed in a tuxedo surrounded by five “femininely coded” women. But both seemed less interested in the qualities of dyke camp for dyke camp’s sake and more interested in pairing it with camp as we know it.
Dyke camp overlaps with camp in some areas, certainly. But in others it is completely different; it has its own electric vision. If camp is the love of the unnatural, dyke camp is the love of the ultra-natural, of nature built up and reclaimed, of clothes that could be extensions of the body, of desire made obsessive, of lesbian gestures or mannerisms maximized by a thousand.
Rather than drag, which parodies what is real, dyke camp takes the real and magnifies it, so that it becomes absurd or funny or simply attractive in its own right.