orienting spectacle: the politics of 'Orlando's' sapphic camp - Dis

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1998 by D.A. Boxwell

And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each.... Thus it is no great wonder if, as she pitted one sex against the other and found each full of the most deplorable infirmities, and was not sure to which she belonged - it was no great wonder that she was about to-cry out that she would return to Turkey and become a gipsy again.... (158-59, my emphasis)

Not only is this the first use of the word "ambiguity" in the novel, this is the telling moment in Orlando when the sheer impossibility of negotiating the oppressive boundaries and binaries of the sex/gender system, which define and coerce essentialist conceptions of gender and sexual identities, becomes the most exasperating for Orlando. Still more telling, for my purposes here, is the significance of Turkey and the possibility of assuming, rather than merely being, another racial and ethnic identity in an other realm of "becoming."

The possibility that multiple identities can be adopted, donned, and even invented fuels much of Orlando's strategies of destabilization and denaturalization. As the biographer relates, for all Orlando's "travels and adventures and profound thinkings and turnings this way and that, she was only in a process of fabrication" (175). "Fabrication" is the mot juste for Woolfs project, just as it is the foundational principle of camp and drag. Foucauldian-inflected theories about the body, such as Judith Butler's, posit the body not as "being" but as a variable boundary, "a surface whose permeability is politically regulated" (Gender Trouble 139). The body - and Orlando's multiply sexed, gendered, classed, and racialized body confirms Butler here - is "a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality," the surface on which the interior signification of gender is performed. "Gendered bodies... are so many 'styles of the flesh,'" Butler contends, but

these styles are never fully self-styled, for styles have a history and those histories condition and limit the possibilities. Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an "act" as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where performative suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning. (139)

When Butler avers that gender is a performance or an "act," she is concerned that this act is less a project originating from a radical will than a strategy that "better suggests the situation of duress in which gender performance always and variously occurs" (139). Thus gender is always embedded in the political realm. Hyperbolic repetitions or iterations in camp and drag (parodic deformations and reformations), however, expose the illusion of an abiding gendered self. Butler has most recently contended, in Bodies That Matter, that drag (and I extend her argument to include camp) is not unproblematically subversive; indeed, "At best, it seems drag is a site of a certain ambivalence" (125) born out of both "a sense of defeat and a sense of insurrection" (128). Echoing Butler, I would like to suggest that camp also "is subversive to the extent it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality's claim on naturalness and originality" (125). Butler's strategy of questioning the political implications of drag seems all the more apt in light of Woolf's deployment of the camp sensibility and style in Orlando.