The Importance of Being Bitchy

Abstract

This essay argues that bitchiness is an art form, a style of misanthropy and satiric dissonance that breaks with pious norms of mundane accuracy and “niceness.” Like the more commonly discussed category of camp, bitchiness is an off-color queer sensibility born of social marginalization, reveling in upsetting good taste for laughs. Traversing literary studies and popular culture, this essay tells the story of bitchy luminaries in three historical scenes: the tart wit of nineteenth-century satirists Jane Austen, George Gordon Byron, and Oscar Wilde; classic Hollywood divas and their homosexual contemporaries such as Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams; and the drag culture increasingly visible since the 1980s.