The Gothic as Camp: Queer Aesthetics in The Monk
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates how and why the Gothic can be described as camp. Examining the ascription of ‘camp’ by Susan Sontag and others to describe the Gothic, it suggests that the Gothic is camp because it is queer. Moving away from a reading of camp as a style stripped of its queer meanings (in particular the reading of the Gothic as camp because it is ‘theatrical’, ‘hyperbolical’ or ‘artificial’) a reading of camp is offered that uses queer theory which questions the naturality and authenticity of gender. In particular, Fabio Cleto’s idea of how camp represents a crisis of reading the signs of naturality can be applied to the Gothic’s use of the supernatural. The queer valency of Gothic writing, especially in texts such as The Monk , emerges in how the body can be misinterpreted. In The Monk , the voice and the gaze as conduits of desire and phobia are those signifiers of the body that are shown to disturb a sex-gender binary and to provoke a crisis of reading. This anxiety about seeing and understanding desire in not-so-easily visible bodies (like the supernatural) connects to socio-cultural anxieties about how reading gender to read same-sex desire is unstable in the early nineteenth century. An overview of how queer helps us to understand why the Gothic is camp is offered, and then a specific analysis of where the camp effects occur in The Monk is provided through a close reading.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it