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Kimberly Lau on “Camping Masculinity”
I recently had the pleasure of listening to a fascinating talk by Dr. Kimberly Lau, a
professor and provost at Oakes College, and a professor in the Literature Depart-
ment and an affi liated faculty member in Games and Playable Media at UCSC. She
intends to publish a larger piece on the work she previewed for us. Her proposition
is that:
. . . hypermasculinity might be closely aligned with camp in
World of War-
craft and
that a camp masculinity might share the goal of disrupting heg-
emonic constructions and constraints, in this case by enabling alternative
forms of masculine sociality and opening up spaces for prohibited hetero-
masculine desires.
Lau uses the term “camp” in two ways. In
WoW
, players can hang out (“camp”)
where a character died and whack him every time he re-spawns “as a form of
sabotage.” Using Susan Sontag's work, Lau gives us a second defi nition of “camp”
as “a cultural practice and a theory of exaggeration, excess, and play.” These two
defi nitions come together for Lau in her analysis of in-game interactions and ethno-
graphic studies of
WoW
players.
She began her talk by showing us some examples of hypermasculine fi gures
from MMFPS like
Call of Duty
and
Gears of War
—hyper-hard-bodied fellows with
narrow waists and bulging muscles. She observed that these are normative hyper-
masculine images that are not intentionally “camp.” Then she showed us some
characters from
WoW
. “I mean, how can a really powerful hypermasculine human
frost mage named Chuck Norris—who also happens to be wearing a dress—not be
about play and extravagance, about camp?” The scales fell from my eyes. She also
screened some highly “camp” commercials from Blizzard featuring William Shatner,
Mr. T., and Chuck Norris himself, all with an in-your-face but tongue-in-cheek hyper-
masculinity based on the “camp” characteristics that many attribute to these actors
retrospectively in their “serious” work.
She told us about the cult of Chuck Norris in
WoW
, and mentioned the fact that
“Chuck Norris is among the most common, if not the most common, avatar name in
World of Warcraft
with 1081 Chuck Norrises.” But I advise caution here; Chuck Norris
might be mighty angry if we called him “camp.” His commercial was by far the least
“camp” of the three we viewed. Further, his affi liations with the NRA and Tea Party
(continues)
