While some of both Davis and Crawford’s work could arguably be described as camp (for the former, King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest; for the latter, later-era films such as Strait-Jacket and aspects of the wondrous Nicholas Ray film Johnny Guitar), that their entire careers and places within film history are defined as such does a disservice to their artistry. But they aren’t alone in representing what has become a troubling trend when it comes to women’s work. As camp entered the mainstream lexicon, especially after Susan Sontag’s landmark 1964 essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the term has been increasingly tied to work featuring women who disregard societal norms. Camp is often improperly and broadly applied to pop culture that features highly emotional, bold, complex, cold, and so-called “unlikable” female characters. I’ve seen films and TV shows such as the witty masterwork All About Eve; the beguiling Mulholland Drive; the stylized yet heartwarming Jane the Virgin; Todd Haynes’s Patricia Highsmith adaptation Carol; the blistering biopic Jackie; the deliciously malevolent horror film Black Swan; Joss Whedon’s exploration of girlhood and horror, Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the landmark documentary Grey Gardens (which inspired the 2009 HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore); and even icons such as Beyoncé and Rihanna be described as camp. Look at any list of the best camp films and you’ll see an overwhelming number of works that feature women and don’t actually fit the label. Usually, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the film whose behind-the-scenes story provides Murphy’s launching pad for Feud, will be at the top of the list.

While camp need not be a pejorative, that hasn’t stopped it from being widely used as such. In effect, being labeled as camp can turn the boldest works about the interior lives of complex women into a curiosity, a joke, a punch line. The ease with which camp is applied to female-led films and shows of this ilk demonstrates that for all the (still-paltry) gains Hollywood has made for women in the decades since Davis and Crawford worked, our culture is still uncomfortable respecting women’s stories.

That major Hollywood icons such as Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford (and, more recently, Natalie Portman, thanks to Jackie) have been roped into this lineage isn’t surprising. Society doesn’t know what to do with women of this ilk without discrediting their very womanhood. Take artist and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s offensive description of Mae West in an essay on camp: “[She] played with androgyny to the degree that her final performance — her autopsy — was necessary to prove her biological femaleness.” In his 2013 essay “Why Is Camp So Obsessed with Women?”, J. Bryan Lowder expands on Sontag’s most well-known line: “It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” Lowder writes, “‘Woman,’ the concept within the quotation marks, is not the same thing, at all, as a real woman; the former is a mythology, a style, a set of conventions, taboos, and references, while the latter is a shifting, changeable, and ultimately indefinable living being. Of course, there may be some overlap.” But if all gender is a performance, where does the “real” woman begin? And why does the presence of camp hold more importance than the actual work and voices of actresses such as Crawford, who have come to be defined by it?

At times, camp can feel like a suffocating label. Its proponents often misconstrue the fact that recreating oneself as a character is not merely an aesthetic for women, but rather, for many, a matter of survival. Living in a culture that profoundly scorns ambition, autonomy, and independence in women, girls learn quickly the narrow parameters of femininity available to them. When they transcend these parameters, life can get even more difficult. Women often pick up and drop various forms of presentation in order to move through the world more easily. Performance as a woman — in terms of how one speaks, walks, talks, acts — can be a means of controlling one’s own narrative. Camp often limits this part of the discussion, focusing instead on the sheer thrill of watching larger-than-life female characters cut and snark their way across the screen. How these works speak to women, past and present, becomes a tertiary concern at best, and the work loses a bit of its importance in the process; it either comes to be regarded as niche or, if it still has mainstream prominence, as abject spectacle. In turn, the conversations around these works become less about the women at their centers and more about how those women are presented.

Much of Baby Jane’s camp legacy comes down to how more recent audiences have interpreted Davis’s performance. She’s ferocious, frightening, and grotesque. But framing Davis’s performance as camp, as Murphy does, doesn’t take into account how dramatically acting has shifted over the course of film history. In some ways, camp has become a label used when modern audiences don’t quite understand older styles of acting. Modern actors privilege the remote, the cold, the detached. The more scenery-chewing performances that make the labor of acting visible — such as the transformative work that Jake Gyllenhaal did in Nightcrawler, or most of Christian Bale’s career — is typically the domain of men. (Or, at least, it’s only men who can get away with it without being called campy.) As Shonni Enelow writes in a marvelous piece for Film Comment, “[Jennifer] Lawrence’s characters in Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games don’t arrive at emotional release or revelation; rather than fight to express themselves, her characters fight not to. We can see the same kind of emotional retrenchment and wariness in a number of performances by the most popular young actors of the last several years.” Davis’s work as an actor was the antithesis of that; she painted in bold colors. Even her quietest moments brim with an intensity that cannot be denied.

stede is 'oh this place has something related to my interest i must go in immediately' autistic and izzy is 'if we deviate one inch from my plan for today i will murder someone' autistic

neopronoun user culture is reading a book where a character uses a set of neopronouns you've never seen before and immediately wanting to use them yourself.

Neopronoun user culture

gen q why do some ppl draw the new eggs looking so much older than the other eggs like wouldn’t they technically be younger or at the very least around the same age

Bakugo hot take: his character would have been better if he was a girl. This would also make him even more controversial. I will not elaborate.

Oh god this makes me wonder if. Okay so. I’m about to say something cursed. And I know I’m going to get hatemail about it (or at least very passionate explanations about why I’m wrong).

is bakudeku just yaoi reylo

a bit disheartening every time i come across a yugioh character where im like "wtf this guy is great why have i literally never seen fanart of them before/only seen them in like maybe two pieces of fanworks total" and then i realize it's because they're fat/theyre visibly muscular/they have a slightly wide body type/theyre over the age of 30/theyre um. not pale/theyre some combination of the aforementioned categories. 😐 cool.

one good thing to come of all this is the free bootlicker blocklist in these tags

just gonna go ahead and say this in advance—

if Riz does indeed come out in junior year, and he says, “I’m ace” or “I’m asexual” when referring specifically to his lack of romantic attraction, aromantic people are allowed to be upset about it.

You know, I think many people understand the idea that disability can be a social problem, even construct, in that as more visibility man lead to more accommodations and even educate (regardless of accuracy), but not that disability can still disable regardless of society. Many people understand the idea of a social construct so long as there is still a consise understanding of the social construct, with little wriggle room for nuance and discussion.

there's like, an entire other side to this I had planned but I spent way too long trying to figure out how to do it exactly so I'm decidedly done wrestling with this for now. Might clean it up and post again later?

*chanting* TKITN TKITN TKITN TKITN TKITN

also yeah return of the manbun/half up hairdo that seems to just. attach to 2/3rd of my designs for this man. I have no explanation for this. Manbun. (???)

What if when i move out i get a bunch of display stands for all my furbies and have my whole collection on display in a very visible part of my house so then when i have a guest over the first thing they get when they come to my house is a heart attack

SCREMS my snautsticic child he is trying ok!!!!!! one tiny snake human hybrid built from the cave-ground-up, , attempting to learn all the implicit rules of humanness?! as if it isn't already tough enough out here!!!!

I haz ask... HOW THE QUACK ARE UR LINE'S SO PERFECT- SO RELAXED???!? I have never seen a stiff drawing from you, and everything looks so good.. I just Wana nibble on it! ToT

oh that! that means a Bunch <3 thank you so much <3<3

This was a really unhinged way to find out about this:

🏳️‍🌈 Hc on the Inspector or Dredger?

Ya sure; why not both

Send me 🏳️‍🌈 and a character for my lgbtq+ headcanon and a doodle