Queer Poetics in Proust: From Camp Style to Fortuny

Abstract

Recurring to Susan Sontag’s theorems in Notes on Camp the contribution analyzes main protagonists of the Proustian novel In Search of Lost Time as examples of queer and camp aesthetics that subvert traditional binary discourses of gender and style. In this context the figure of Odette de Crécy is decoded as a hybrid camp figure par excellence and a construction of fluid gender. Recurring on Butlers theorems Odette is analyzed as a construction of nomadic identity which oscillates between hyperfeminine Venus, saintly chaste Zipporah of Botticelli and garçonne. Another main example of queer aesthetics constitutes the figure of Albertine who appears in the pictorial vision of the narrator as a Venetian boy dressed in a Fortuny cloak. Proust’s novel is finally decoded as an archeology of multiple forms of queerness in which queer and campy lifestyle predominates presenting us as pluralistic and polymorphous culture in the sense of Susan Sontag.