Michael Trask Camp Sites All Manuals & Guides sku-22333216

Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America is a hardcover book by Michael Trask in the Post*45 series. Listed under All Manuals & Guides as sku-22333216, it reads across disciplines of the mid-century university. Trask argues that the postwar shift from consensus liberalism to New Left radicalism involved continuities as well as ruptures.

Both Cold War liberals and radicals treated the university as a place for politics, yet excluded homosexuality from their political ideals. Liberals favored a politics of style over substance and saw gay people as unable to separate the two or sustain the suspension of disbelief they considered necessary.

Radicals favored authenticity and associated gay people with the role-playing and duplicity they rejected in liberalism. Through camp, the underground sensibility of pre-Stonewall gay life, the book examines performance, authenticity and the rise of meritocracy.

It argues that assumptions about homosexual experience and identity shaped ideas about postwar social style and persisted despite post-Stonewall consciousness-raising.