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Genuinely made up: camp, baroque, and other denaturalizing aesthetics in the cultural production of the real
Author(s) -
Port Mattijs
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01796.x
Subject(s) - articulation (sociology) , sensibility , impossibility , aesthetics , appeal , baroque , natural (archaeology) , sociology , philosophy , art , literature , history , law , politics , political science , archaeology
The link that J ean‐ J acques R ousseau forged a long time ago between the ‘real’ and the ‘natural’ has proved to be indissoluble. Time and again, contemporary constructions of the real mobilize all that can be linked to nature. Inauthentic, by contrast, is that which is fabricated, made up, artificial, the all‐too‐evident result of human design. In B ahia, B razil, the author encountered a completely different mode in the cultural production of the real. Analysing the performance of a Bahian drag queen who goes by the name of G ina da M ascar, the author discusses ‘camp’ and ‘baroque’ as registers that foster a sensibility for (and appreciation of) cultural forms that are ‘truly false’. He shows how the appeal of these registers – their persuasiveness, their form of truth‐telling – resonates with the sensibilities of people whose biographies are marked by radical discontinuities, and he argues that these registers might be understood as a popular articulation of the L acanian understanding that symbolic closure is an impossibility.