JUDY GRAHN’S VIOLENT FEMINIST CAMP

HONNI VAN RIJSWIJK

It is often said that feminists, especially radical lesbian feminists, are

not funny. Conservatives have levelled lack of humour at feminists as
a political weapon, as a sort of baseline attack: the claims of feminists,
they have argued, are a bit of a joke, whereas they themselves are not
funny. With Judy Grahn, we see this weapon being wielded
figuratively in retaliation: not only is her work funny, it is violently
funny and both funny and violent. In my reading of two of her poems,
‘The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke’ and ‘I have come to claim’,
I argue that Grahn’s humour plays on elements of camp and violence
as a site of political subversion. At the time of writing both poems,
during the 1960s, Grahn was very concerned with working-class,
feminist, lesbian politics. These concerns arise thematically in her
work of the 1960s, where she deals with sexual violence,
homosexuality, racism and class politics. My focus here is not so
much on thematics but on the aesthetics of Grahn’s poetry. How do
camp humour and violent imagery articulate her concerns? In each
poem, women’s bodies are the subject of extreme violence: what is
signified as being worked through these bodies and what does this
reveal about the historical moment of their writing? How is humour
effective in conveying these points, as opposed to a more earnest
treatment?
In her re-writing of the history of lesbian feminist poetics and
politics, Linda Garber argues that the starting-point chosen for a study
of lesbian feminist poetry determines the themes of study: a genealogy
based on the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Garber argues, produces a
white, middle-class bias, whereas a shift to a focus on poets such as
320 Honni van Rijswijk

Judy Grahn introduces a story of the development of feminist poetics

and politics arising out of working-class, materialist concerns.1 Garber
emphasizes the ‘central role of lesbian poets as theorists of lesbian
identity and activism’,2 and positions Grahn as a key ‘poet-theorist’ in
her supplementation of the white, cultural feminism of the 1970s and
1980s with an investigation of working-class and anti-racist
feminisms originating in the 1960s. Grahn herself said of ‘Edward the
Dyke’ that she chose the title so that ‘people had to say the word
dyke’. 3 This was as much about challenging a class aesthetic as it was
about sexuality.
Grahn’s work mobilizes camp in its interrogation of class and
sexuality. Camp first began to be theorized in Susan Sontag’s essay
‘Notes on Camp’, which was written in 1964 and is roughly
contemporary with Grahn’s poem ‘Edward the Dyke’. The ‘Notes’
consist of a number of Wildean aphorisms such as: ‘the essence of
Camp is its love of the unnatural’; ‘the Camp sensibility is
disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical’; and ‘Camp is a
vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It
is the love of the exaggerated, the “off” ….’4 Overall, Sontag’s
approach has largely been left behind: her formulation of camp as an
‘apolitical’ aesthetic movement only, for instance, over trivializes
camp and fails to recognize its subversive potential. While camp can
be about ‘Tiffany lamps’ and ‘old Flash Gordon Comics’, it does
serve larger political and theoretical functions, especially in relation to
demonstrations of the performativity or contingency of gender and
sexuality.5
An important function of camp is the way that it enables a critical
re-seeing or transformation. It is also potentially subversive because
of the ways in which it ‘asserts an opposition between the absurd and
the serious’.6 Camp humour relies on an incongruity between an

1
Linda Garber, Identity Poetics: Race, Class and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of
Queer Theory, New York, 2001, 32-33.
2
Ibid., 9.
3
Judy Grahn, The Work of a Common Woman, New York, 1978, 37.
4
Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Against Interpretation, 3rd edn, New York,
1967, 275-92, 275, 277 and 275.
5
Ibid., 277 and 278
6
Scott Long, ‘The Loneliness of Camp’, in Camp Grounds, ed. David Bergman,
Amherst: MA, 1993, 79.