Instead, the two music videos are considered as creative works of Black feminist thought, following Patricia Hill Collins (2009). The article argues that the epistemic habit of asking this question often works counterproductively and stabilises the boundaries of feminism. The article examines two recent music videos by Black female artists, Nicki Minaj's Anaconda (2014) and Beyoncé's Formation (2016), and the heated online discussions around them about whether they are feminist or not. In the coda to the article, we reach beyond the 1980s to explore a more flexible approach to camp in the artistic output of twenty-first-century African American performers of Queercore and Afrofuturist scenes, which were partially enabled by Jackson's and Prince's performances.

Analogously, Jackson fashions himself as a Peter Pan-like eternal adolescent who never makes his final identification as either heterosexual or LGBTQ desiring agent. Prince in Purple Rain refuses to assume the patriarchal position of the Father.

As a result, their performances are complexly de-Oedipalized. In particular, the two artists distance themselves from the extensive ideological and physical pressures exerted on the black male body in the early 1980s. Camp serves them as a platform to mourn the cultural displacement of the black male body in a postslavery America. We claim that their employment of camp is political rather than escapist and depoliticized. Jackson's and Prince's performative personas are both liberatory and burdened with the received cultural scripts of black masculinity. We explore their camp aesthetics and their recasting of the cultural representations of the black male. The article analyses Michael Jackson's album Thriller and Prince's movie Purple Rain. Although the intersectional approach that focuses on the interrelations between the categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality has become a standard in cultural studies, critics continued to focus mostly on gender and sexuality in camp performances without accounting for the race factor. This was further confirmed by the response to our call: even though the submissions were not bountiful (which is symptomatic in itself), several authors explicitly expressed a need of adding such critical perspective to the field. What we found even more surprising was that-when we researched the field before releasing a CFP for the issue On Uses of Black Camp-the scholarship of the last seven years has not contributed any book-length volume on the topic. When preparing the paper, we were surprised by an almost complete lack of scrutiny devoted to race in the aesthetics of camp. Our adventure with the notion of black camp began in 2010 when we co-authored a conference paper on Michael Jackson and Prince.

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