Butch Latina Camp in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings

This article offers an articulation of Latina butch camp through close-readings of Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings (2003), a coming-of-age novel set in California’s Bay Area in the 1960s. Trujillo, through protagonist Marcia “Marci” Cruz, utilizes camp as an analytic to denaturalize age-based, gendered, racialized, and class-based violence. In direct engagement with Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” (1964) and recent critical interventions from Lesbian Studies, Black Studies, and Latinx Studies, I develop a framework for butch camp that expands upon camp’s notions of extravagance, character, and humor, while divesting from the ways in which its conflation with white gay male sensibility overlooks other queer aesthetic and political contributions. Finally, the article offers a theorization of “Latina butch kid camp,” which utilizes camp body humor that invokes visceral encounters of the body to reorient the queer Latinx child away from harm and towards “feeling good” as a political practice.