MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | DOING NOTHING/NOTHING DOING | SPRING 2026

Notes on Elizabethan Camp, Or, Much Ado about Ruffs

This paper considers the status of Queen Elizabeth I as a quintessential camp icon through close analysis of the sartorial signifier used by writers, artists, and filmmakers to conjure her fabricated presence, namely, the Elizabethan ruff. It begins with Virginia Woolf’s take-down of the ruff in Orlando: A Biography (1928) and in the novel’s subsequent filmic iterations, such as Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando (1981), and Paul Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography (2023). It then turns to re-imaginings of the ruff in works by visual and performance artist-activists from the 1970s to the present, such as Stephen Varble, Zanele Muholi, and Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi. The paper will risk making much ado about nothing by taking seriously the trivialized modes of meaning-making through which camp subverts aesthetic forms and established norms. 

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