Experimental Queer Scholarship: Camp Biography, Performative Criticism and Monstrous Identification (Subject-Specific Bibliography: <i>Eric Bogosian Is a Real Vampire and So Can You: A 1990s-Style Unauthorized Biography</i>)

Duke UP, 2000.</b></p><p dir="ltr">Newton uses queer theory to combine intellectual autobiography and anthropology, rather than separating critical inquiry from the conditions under which the researcher produces their argument. The audacious title makes intellectual identification part of the argument.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Piggford, George. “Camp Sites: Forster and the Biographies of Queer Bloomsbury.”⁠ </b><b><i>Queer Bloomsbury</i></b><b>, edited by Brenda S. Helt and Madelyn Detloff, Edinburgh UP, 2016, pp. 64–88.</b></p><p dir="ltr">George Piggford identifies a camp tradition in Bloomsbury biography, tracing the influence of Lytton Strachey’s irreverent biographical style through Forster, Woolf and others.

He argues that textual play can disrupt the conventions of psychological realism and totalizing claims to biographical authority.</p><h3 dir="ltr">Performative Criticism</h3><p dir="ltr"><b>Bergman, David. “Strategic Camp: The Art of Gay Rhetoric.” </b><b><i>Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality</i></b><b>, edited by David Bergman, U of Massachusetts P, 1993, pp. 92–109.</b></p><p dir="ltr">Bergman treats camp as rhetorical practice, supporting the use of exaggeration and theatricality as a deliberate critical strategy which do not problematize scholarly seriousness.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Frank, Marcie. “The Critic as Performance Artist: Susan Sontag’s Writing and Gay Cultures.” </b><b><i>Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality</i></b><b>, edited by David Bergman, U of Massachusetts P, 1993, pp. 173–84.</b></p><p dir="ltr">Frank reads Susan Sontag’s criticism through autobiography and gay cultural discourse, wherein the critic’s self-presentation constitutes part of the critical problem.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Freedman, Diane P., Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar, editors. </b><b><i>The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism</i></b><b>.

Duke UP, 1993.</b></p><p dir="ltr">The collection theorizes the breach between criticism and personal narrative as a legitimate critical practice, locating autobiographical literary criticism within feminist and cultural studies modes of inquiry. It supplies an established genealogy for scholarship in which the critic’s affective investment enter the work and deconstructs impersonal objectivity as a legitimating standpoint</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Pollock, Della. “Performing Writing.”⁠ </b><b><i>The Ends of Performance</i></b><b>, edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, New York UP, 1998, pp. 73–103.</b></p><p dir="ltr">Pollock develops “performing writing” which participates in meaning-making.

The essay supplies performance studies theoretical scaffolding for scholarship in embodiment and experimentation are epistemological.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Jane Austen and the Masturbating G***.”⁠ </b><b><i>Critical Inquiry</i></b><b>, vol. 17, no. 4, 1991, pp. 818–37. doi:10.1086/448614.</b></p><p dir="ltr">Using a scandalous conjunction, Sedwick interrogates the histories through which certain interpretations become thinkable.

Its title is methodological: apparent excess, particularly in sexuality, queries what kinds of associations criticism is permitted to make and according to which standards of evidence.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Teaching ‘Experimental Critical Writing.’”⁠ </b><b>The Ends of Performance</b><b>, edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, New York UP, 1998, pp. 104–15.</b></p><p dir="ltr">”Experimental critical writing” as a scholarly practice and teaching methods built around performative utterance and collaborative forms of inquiry.

Treats experimentation as a mode of critical research.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’”⁠ </b><b><i>Partisan Review</i></b><b>, vol. 31, no. 4, 1964, pp. 515–30.</b></p><p dir="ltr">Sontag’s aphoristic essay negotiates her own attraction to camp sensibility. A foundational text for the problem of analyzing a cultural sensibility from a position simultaneously inside and outside it.</p><h3 dir="ltr">Monstrous Identification</h3><p dir="ltr"><b><i>Halberstam, Judith. </i></b><b><i>Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters</i></b><b><i>.

Duke UP, 1995.</i></b></p><p dir="ltr">Monstrosity tretes as historically produced through cultural technologies of bodily difference, including race, gender and class. Halberstam supplies a basis for examining “vampire” as a constructed category whose meaning changes according to who is classified and under what conditions.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Hayward, Eva. “More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves.” </b><b><i>WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly</i></b><b>, vol. 36, nos. 3–4, 2008, pp. 64–85. doi:10.1353/wsq.0.0099.</b></p><p dir="ltr">Hayward uses starfish regeneration and transspeciation to conceptualize transgender embodiment across human and nonhuman boundaries.

The essay develops material and identificatory relations across species difference, extending trans scholarship beyond accounts of identity.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Preciado, Paul B. </b><b><i>Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts</i></b><b>. Translated by Frank Wynne, Semiotext(e), 2021.</b></p><p dir="ltr">Adapted from Preciado’s 2019 address to an assembly of psychoanalysts, the book speaks from the position of the “monster” produced by medical regimes of classification.

Its intervention reverses the usual direction of expert discourse. The pathologized object addresses the institution authorized to explain it.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Stone, Allucquère Rosanne. “Conclusion: The Gaze of the Vampire.” </b><b><i>The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age</i></b><b>, MIT Press, 1995, pp. 165–84.</b></p><p dir="ltr">Stone’s concluding chapter uses the vampire, specifically the figure of The Vampire Lestat from Anne Rice’s <i>The Vampire Chronicles</i>, as a position from which to reconsider subjectivity and embodiment.

The chapter concludes a book that traverses cultural theory and performance, making the vampire, and the gaze of the vampire, an instrument of critical perception.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” </b><b><i>GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies</i></b><b>, vol. 1, no. 3, 1994, pp. 237–54. doi:10.1215/10642684-1-3-237.</b></p><p dir="ltr">A foundational text in critical transgender studies.

Stryker reclaims Frankenstein’s creature as a position from which to articulate transgender rage against medical, discourses that construct trans embodiment as <i>a priori</i> monstrous. Beginning with performance and opening out to critical essay, the work makes identification with the monster both its argument and its method, i.e. monstrous identification as performative scholarship.</p>