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politics and pleasure, while sometimes problematic, are not mutually exclusive. Browne
(2009, 2010) illustrated the productive political tensions of festivals through examining the
controversial Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (Michfest), a feminist separatist festival that
extends an invitation to only womyn born women to attend, effectively excluding trans
women, who created Camp Trans in opposition. She underscored the diversity within and
between festival goers and therefore the importance of moving beyond fi xed categories of
male/female and heterosexual/homosexual to understand why womyn attend and enjoy
Michfest. Her work pointed to how a critical social theory on embodiment enabled an expla-
nation for attendance and satisfaction that went beyond exclusions or celebration discourses
through working the tensions apparent within the reciprocal relationships between bodies,
music, the past and the present.
Waitt (2005) and Waitt and Gorman-Murray (2008) paid attention to how rethinking the
spatial imperative of gender and sexuality as performative enabled a reappraisal of camp.
Camp is a well-known attribute of lesbian and gay culture. Camp is both an outcome and a
defi ance of oppression. Conventional interpretations position camp as apolitical. These defi -
nitions appraise camp in terms of a 'sensibility', 'style', or 'taste' (Core, 1984; Sontag, 1966).
For example, Sontag wrote that camp is 'a sensibility that, among other things, converts the
serious into the frivolous' (1966: 276). More recently, camp as performative is understood to
be deployed to produce social visibility challenging the normative praxis of everyday life
(Meyer, 1994). Camp plays on the awareness that there is no essential truth about gender and
sexuality. Camp is a reminder of the instability and social fabrication of normative versions of
sexuality. At the same time, camp calls into question how particular institutions sustain
particular versions of sexuality as legitimate. Equally important is how camp lacks prescrip-
tive identity attributes. As Binnie (1997: 231) notes, 'camp offers a space to those dissatisfi ed
by the sharp edges and fi xed boundaries of identity politics'. Waitt (2005) examined the role
of camp during the 2002 Sydney Gay Games. Focusing on the politics of the body and sexual
citizenship, it was argued that the deployment of camp during the 2002 Sydney Gay Games
opening ceremony successfully subverted the spatial imaginaries of the (hetero)sexed sporting
Australian nation.
A similar line of inquiry by Waitt and Gorman-Murray (2008) focused on how bodies
become gendered, sexed and sexualised through the social relationships comprising the
ChillOut Festival, Daylesford, Victoria, which is pitched as the largest rural lesbian and gay
festival in Australia. Camp performances were enacted to critically engage with the unre-
fl exive enactment of performative gender norms that underpin prescriptive, heterosexual
conventions of family, romance and citizenship. The taken for granted defi nitions of sexuality
and gender in rural Australia are challenged through many entrants in the street parade paro-
dying the gendered binaries of masculine and feminine. As a conduit for identity politics, the
camp performances that help sustain the body-spaces of the ChillOut Festival are demon-
strated to be ambiguous. Amongst festival attendees there is both alienation and acceptance
of diverse sexualities. How camp performances simultaneously ruptured and reinforced the
straight/gay binary demonstrated the fl uid meaning, practices and identities of festival space,
which are sometimes mistakenly positioned as sites of sexual liberation. As Johnston (2005)
argued ably, gay pride parades are paradoxical.
In line with deploying critical social theory on embodiment, another productive queer
research perspective on gay pride parades has investigated how emotions inform the cultural
politics of tourism space. Drawing on the embodied conceptual frameworks of Sedgwick
(1993), Probyn (2003) and Munt (1998, 2007), which combined insights from feminism,
sociology, psychology and queer theory, sexuality, emotion and spatiality are not treated as
 
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