Other Camp pairs 1990s experimental media produced by lesbian, bi, and queer women with queer theory to rethink the boundaries of one of cinema's most beloved and despised genres, camp. I argue that camp is a creative and political practice that helps communities of women reckon with representational voids. This project shows how primarily-lesbian communities, whether black or white, working in the 1990s employed appropriation and practices of curation in their camp projects to represent their identities and communities, where camp is the effect of juxtaposition, incongruity, and the friction between an object's original and appropriated contexts.Central to Other Camp are the curation-centered approaches to camp in the art of LGBTQ women in the 1990s. I argue that curation- producing art through an assembly of different objects, texts, or artifacts and letting the resonances and tensions between them foster camp effects-is a practice that not only has roots within experimental approaches camp but deep roots in camp scholarship. Relationality is vital to the work that curation does as an artistic practice. I link the relationality in the practice of camp curation to the relation-based approaches of queer theory, Black Studies, and Decolonial theory. My work cultivates the curational roots at the heart of camp and different theoretical approaches to relationality in order to foreground the emergence of curational camp methodologies and approaches to art as they manifest in the work of Sadie Benning, G.B Jones, Kaucyila Brooke and Jane Cottis, Cheryl Dunye, and Vaginal Davis.My first chapter rethinks Sadie Benning's It Wasn't Love (1992) and G.B Jones's Tom Girls drawings as works that question the relationship between butch, masculinity, and camp in order to show how butch and camp are not always oppositional. Both Benning and Jones playfully navigate the fractional distances and proximities in their forms of camp, blurring lines between masculinity and maleness and past and present, respectively.My second chapter demonstrates how Kaucylia Brooke and Jane Cottis use camp to illustrate the pitfalls of lesbian representation within classical Hollywood cinema throughout their news-documentary spoof, Dry Kisses Only (1990). I argue that Brooke and Cottis's film and the camp produced within it, are as messy (in the best and queerest sense of that word) as the lesbian representational bind. I read a strange scene near the film's end as staging the conundrum of lesbian representation, where some lesbian's resolute visibility shatters verisimilitude.While my first two chapters focus on how white lesbian artists utilize an impulse to curate as they complicate and counteract the stereotypical images of their identities, my third and fourth chapters shift the focus to curators of color and their own efforts to highlight the lack of representations and archives of their communities and their histories. Chapter 3 examines Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (1997) and the photographs of Zoe Leonard as one means of camping history through the interrogation of communities, intersectional histories, and archives. I chart Dunye's protagonist's failures to find information within traditional archives in order to demonstrate how Dunye literally and figurative hones "the outside" as a theoretical camp edge.Chapter 4 rewrites the history of camp to center Vaginal Davis as a pivotal and under recognized figure in the historical trajectory of camp and queerness. I argue that throughout her 40-year career as curator and artist, Davis has used camp to call attention to the uneven ways humanity is ascribed to people of color. What starts out in her zines as a critique of racializing forces through her own objectification, develops into a representational strategy in That Fertile Feeling (1982). Davis's video zines mark a shift in medium and focus to the compromised notions of humanity that cohere around those living at the gender and sexual margins of society. Camp and marginality are harnessed by Davis to show the vitality at work amidst oppression.
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