Villains, Victims & Vixens: Camp and Late 20th Century Canadian Queer Drama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Queer Canadian drama did not appear upon the stage in any significant way prior to the late 1960s, and even then with only tentative forays into the taboo topic of homosexuality. When gay playwrights began to write openly about gay characters and experiences, they often relied on the use of “Deliberate Camp.” By examining Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” and applying her ideas, and the ideas of her critics, to the emergence of queer Canadian drama, this thesis will argue that this form of queer humour and queer coding was essential to the development and flourishing of Canadian Gay Plays during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, discussing both Deliberate and “Naïve Camp.” The plays I explore are John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna, and Sky Gilbert’s and Kent Staines’s Drag Queens trilogy. The former two plays feature examples of Deliberate Camp characters, but, as often occurs with the passage of time, the plays themselves have begun to be seen as Naïve Camp. The latter plays use Deliberate Camp freely to satirize and criticize the various responses to Gay Liberation and the AIDS crisis. Camp, a very successful form of queer expression in the late 20th century, will play a very different, and diminished, role in the theatre of a post-Modern, post-AIDS world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".