Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna.

Although "survivor" is the current term of choice for anyone who has endured trauma or even just a bad Friday night, let's go ahead and call Pamela Robertson a "victim" of the unavoidable lag between the epiphanic moment when a graduate student alights on a marvelous dissertation topic and the subsequent publication, countless hours of uncompensated labor later, of a book filled with now obsolete ideas. In the ever-changing world of the academy, particularly in the newly formed domains of cultural studies, blink and you'll miss the revamping of entire schools of thought, never mind departments or fields of study.

Such is the case with Guilty Pleasures. A few years back, when irony and academic feminism were just getting acquainted, this carefully wrought project to "reclaim camp as a political tool and rearticulate it within the theoretical framework of feminism" was perhaps more pertinent - now everyone and her stylist knows that audiences use culture in ways its producers may not have intended. A case in point: the mainstream-media coverage in 1994 of overeducated young adults across the country gathering weekly to laugh at and talk over the utterly banal and yet over-the-top Melrose Place.

To be fair, Robertson's aim is true. She doesn't cast the pleasure women might take in romantic musicals, Mae West, the figure of the "gold digger," Joan Crawford, or Madonna as an act of political subversion akin to tossing a Molotov cocktail into the White House. Rather, Robertson views these images of femininity played out on the silver screen as an invitation to poke fun - without ever losing sight of their complicitous relationship to the status quo. Unfortunately the dogged and narrow seriousness with which Robertson investigates her subject ends up making the book a quasi-camp object in itself. If, as Susan Sontag announced over three decades ago, "the whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious" it's a bit odd that the writer can't muster a tad more style and wit in her investigation of such overwrought staples of the genre as Crawford's role in Johnny Guitar.

Robertson's need to "reclaim" camp from gay men marks the book's first theoretical anachronism: the assumption that feminists and gay men are inherently antagonists, vying for the ability to do what they will with female performativity. The notion that a sensibility has a rightful owner is only matched in silliness by the idea that gay men hold so much more power than we little women that they can - and will - take, take, take if not forcibly resisted. While it is a scientific fact that gay men occupy more than their fair share of the dance floor and monopolize certain pieces of gym equipment, extensive testing has yet to reveal that they lay claim to a significantly larger piece of the camp pie.

And lesbians? Oddly enough in a project centered on acts of female performance, masquerade, subversion, and pleasure, Robertson manages to zigzag right around the quagmire of lesbians' relation to camp. It's as if she can't drag herself away from the tug-of-war she has established between women (straight) and gays (male). Lesbians get the occasional nod - as recovered hidden-from-history characters or accomplices to the feminist project of "denormalizing" gender roles - but never as mature producers or spectators of camp.

Although Robertson's close readings of camp performances shed light on the historical context of their production and help define how women have made camp all by themselves, her preferred brand of feminism seems ill-equipped to deal with sex, gender, parody, and irony with the complexity now regularly found in queer and cultural studies.

Deb Schwartz has written for The Village Voice, New York, and The Nation.