Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death (review)

Feeling Pretty and Queer

“I feel pretty, oh so pretty, I feel pretty, and witty, and gay.” It is perhaps the conceit of the camp queen that makes me feel that these lines—sung by Maria in West Side Story—were written just for me. In fact, in their association of feeling and aesthetics (the pretty), these lines might be said to define camp (to the extent that it can be defined) in addition to exemplifying it. For as Susan Sontag describes in her now canonical “Notes on ‘Camp,’” camp is above all a way of feeling—”sensibility” is the word she uses—a feeling about the aesthetic: “It is one way of seeing [End Page 159] the world as an aesthetic phenomenon” (106). So when I lip-sync to these lyrics, I not only feel pretty (have a feeling about myself as an aesthetic object), I also have a feeling about what pretty is. In spite of the unnaturalness (read artifice) Sontag finds in camp, this link between feeling and pretty feels as “natural” to me as the “natural woman” “you make me feel like” when I lip-sync to Aretha Franklin. I was thus quite surprised to learn upon reading Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death (New York: Continuum, 2002) that the link between aesthetics and feeling is actually quite recent in the history of Western philosophy.