Camp as a Queer Statement: Decoding Chappell Roan’s Artistry
As part of an LGBTQ+ Culture Studies course, I was tasked with identifying contemporary instances of camp. While numerous examples exist, I believed that Chappell Roan deserved a particular spotlight. This article is a culmination of my coursework and has been revisited since the course’s conclusion.
Within popular culture, artists use songs and accompanying music videos to construct, maintain, or denounce particular narratives. Through a combination of musical and lyrical strategies, many queer musicians choose to reconstruct notions of sexuality held in heteronormative environments. Take a familiar example: Lil Nas X’s music video “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” uses queer iconography to theatrically re-enact biblical stories and question theological perspectives on sexuality. In a similar manner, artist Chappell Roan’s use of intertextual allusions within her pop ballads deserves more recognition. This practice is apparent in the music video for My Kink is Karma, where her voyeuristic performance of queerness using a campy aesthetic is used to re-appropriate an LGBTQ-coded villain. Roan’s message — evil transcends gender and sexual orientation.
Centered around the idea that the more theatrical a character is, the more they belong to the camp sensibility, Michael Halperin (author of How to Be Gay) asserts that “representations of feminine abjection…focus on glamorous women who are hysterical, extravagant, desperate, ridiculous, passionate, obscene, degraded, [and are] on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” This theme is prominently displayed in the opening scene of My Kink is Karma, where Roan’s post-breakup turmoil unfolds as her boyfriend callously discards her belongings as she clings to his legs. Throughout her performance, the audience witnesses Roan adopt an exaggerated caricature of the heartbroken woman: emotionally fragile, overly-dependent, and easily succumbing to tears (with the ensuing streaky mascara).
She gets progressively more uncontrolled by smashing his face into a cake, sensually licking it off of him, and pinning him to a wall reminiscent of bondage apparati. As she does this, she transitions from wearing conventional attire to an avant-garde style that subverts the mainstream. Taking inspiration from drag burlesque makeup and HIM, a queer character modeled after Satan in the Powerpuff Girls, Roan arrives at her final look: black horns, a pink boa, red lingerie with nipple tassels, heart-shaped face paint, black stilettos, and a dominatrix persona to match. Even though HIM steers towards the androgynous — his clothing and voice defying traditional gender norms — Roan relies on more legible signifiers of femininity, albeit overembellished.
Aside from its use as an aesthetic approach, camp can be used as a means of re-appropriation, whereby people co-opt ideas and practices from different cultures.
In this context, Roan steals problematic elements of heteronormative media to play with the dated trope that queer men are evil. In the Powerpuff Girls, the king of darkness, HIM, is characterized as a predatory cross-dresser donned in knee-high boots and rogue blush. By borrowing aspects of his costume and incorporating the theme of villainy in her music video, Roan acknowledges the homophobic lens through which HIM is portrayed. As if subtly nodding to other LGBTQ+ members to notice the inaccuracy in which straight culture conflates gay men with deviance, Roan adopts HIM’s mannerisms to signal that evil is not exclusive to gay men, but can extend to everyone — even bisexual women.
Her use of re-appropriation as a mechanism to reclaim power for the queer community connects to ideas put forth in Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” where camp “employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders”. Accordingly, heterosexual audiences might disregard the resistive meaning implicit in Roan’s music video, believing she is commodifying queer culture to reify stereotypes rather than disrupt them.
While I positively interpret the use of camp and re-appropriation in My Kink is Karma, others may put forth an alternative perspective, one that penalizes Chappell Roan for 1) promoting queer stereotypes and 2) capitulating to the male gaze. An arguably important element of a musician’s commercial success is how marketable of an asset they are in the entertainment industry. Using this line of reasoning, Roan objectifies queerness by parading around as a hyper-sexualized version of HIM to increase music video viewership among heteronormative masses. When Roan utilizes LGBTQ+ elements in her video, queerness is treated as a spectacle that can be leveraged to gain attention and broad appeal. Instead of inhabiting both neutral and extravagant personalities, queer people are reduced to a singular identity: purely sexual beings that exist in a constant state of performative, campy flamboyance.
So while there may be disagreement between Roan’s intentions and outcomes, we can acknowledge the inherent interpretive nature of popular music, particularly songs using queerness as a mode of performance. For me, the combination of eccentric makeup and sadomasochistic behavior that Roan uses throughout the music video can be viewed as camp. What’s more, her use of the character HIM from Powerpuff Girls is an example of how queer individuals can reclaim tropes perpetuated in the wider culture and redefine them to fit a more holistic picture.
Bychowski, Dr. M.W. “Sugar, Spice & Him: Transgender on The Powerpuff Girls.”Transliterature: Things Transform, 11 November 2014,http://www.thingstransform.com/2014/11/sugar-spice-him-transgender-on.html.
Halperin, David M. How to Be Gay, Harvard University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/babson/detail.action?docID=3301125.
Roan, Chappell. My Kink Is Karma. YouTube, 12 May 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePsqyPMIg6I. Accessed 21 November 2022.
Rourke, Kerry. “Consumption, Appropriation, and Play.” 14 November 2022, Babson College, Babson Park, MA.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” 1964.
