The Mitred Edge from the Pope to Rihanna to Moira: How Kitsch Enables the Queer Camp

This presentation focuses on the Pope’s mitre, an object linked to the human, the bible (the “mitered” edge represents conjoined Old and New Testaments), the church-as-institution, and the divine. As an object replicated through image and kitsch refabrication (the Halloween costume), the mitre, and more broadly, the relation between divine and human encounter, undergoes a reverse transubstantiation: that is, a movement from the immaterial to the kitsch material.

Stripped of its divine aura, this mitre-as-object, comes to a devaluation (Benjamin). Here, the mitre provides a connection point to the kitsch’s inversion, camp. Camp uses the kitsch object as the material for its own celebration of excess. Thus, at the Met Gala’s theme “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” Rihanna’s self-presentation in a jeweled gown and mitre, locate a moment of transfer from kitsch to the material excess of camp. It is the referential, sacred object turned to fashion and bedazzled with material, not spiritual, reification.

Rihanna’s adornments of the mitre became the source material for the well-known costuming of Moira Rose in Schitt's Creek. In the season finale, Moira officiates the gay wedding of her son in camp Pope-drag, donning a mitre, whose base is a coiled crown of golden hair. The symbolic queer markers – of drag wig culture, of costume and excess also work as queer advocacy: to sanctify gay marriage through queer/camp appropriation. This camp drag transformation of the mitre serves as a pointed critique of the church’s disavowal of gay marriage.