This paper was presented at Culture in Practice: 31st Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, Friday 8 December 2023.

Paper Abstract

This paper, situated at an intersection between the fields of cultural, popular and media studies, examines the use of Camp aesthetics as a tactic of political parody in the settler colony of Australia.

Despite Susan Sontag’s oft-cited description of Camp as being “disengaged, depoliticised – or at least apolitical” because it is “serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious” (1964, pp. 5; 26), theorists including Moe Meyer (1994) believe that frivolity lends Camp the capacity to function as political parody. Meyer’s highlighting of the proximity of this characteristic of Camp to queer sensibilities is additionally instructive here. Proceeding from these observations, this paper analyses Pauline Panstdown’s 1998 song and music video I Don’t Like It and Tony Albert’s 2020 multimedia series You Wreck Me. Through explicit political parody, these two works use Camp aesthetics to critique figures of hate and systems of oppression in Australia.

Pantsdown, the alias of artist and activist Simon Hunt, is a satirical drag character parodic of right-wing populist politician Pauline Hanson. By sampling fragments of Hanson’s speech and re-contextualising them, I Don’t Like It critiques Hanson’s reactionary and prejudiced political views and the political climate which supports such beliefs. Tony Albert’s series You Wreck Me responds to the widespread social movements demanding the removal – or destruction – of monuments to perpetrators of settler colonialism. Through employment of the aesthetics of Camp, Albert exposes the artifice of so-called Australia and the fragility of its constructed mythology, speaking to the history of Camp as a form of resistance against the violence of settler sovereignty. In interrogating the work of these two practitioners, this paper aims to contribute to understandings of the important role queer satire plays as a form of resistance to Australia’s dominant structures.