By: Kelly Leow
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP) has hovered at the margins of Anglophone pop culture since its first description by doctors in 1977, though the American obsession with the rare form of child abuse reached its peak in the 1990s and, especially, in the decade from 2015 to the present. The 1990s saw a spike in Hollywood portrayals of the psychological disorder, in episodes of Law and Order, Chicago Hope and Judging Amy, as well as the 1999 film The Sixth Sense—all likely inspired by the famous case of a presumed MSBP-sufferer, Yvonne Eldridge, who was convicted of killing two infants in her care by lying about their conditions to medical professionals. A sense of novelty pervades media coverage of the era: The 1992 The New York Times article “A New Mental Disorder Appears in Abuse Cases”, for example, observes that the disclosure of Eldridge’s MSBP (also known as factitious disorder by proxy) “probably explained little to most people”. The article goes on to explain the “newly discovered syndrome”, in which parents—usually mothers or other female caretakers—“fabricate or bring on an illness in their children for the attention and sympathy they gain from others and for the sense of control they gain from caring for a sick child”.
MSBP never really went away in the years that followed, notably in popular literature, where offerings include the memoir Sickened by Julie Gregory (2003), thriller Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (2006) and young adult novel Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon (2015). Yet it was the June 2015 murder of Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard that ushered in a new peak of MSBP portrayals in the United States. Blanchard’s murder was planned and executed by daughter Gypsy-Rose Blanchard and her boyfriend, both of whom were later convicted. Despite that conviction and subsequent time in prison, Gypsy-Rose gained widespread sympathy after evidence emerged of her mother’s MSBP, which had trapped the girl in a lifelong pretence of critical illness.
The Blanchard case was made famous by Erin Lee Carr’s 2017 HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, itself spawning a generation of fictional descendents: Lifetime feature Love You to Death (2019), Hulu series The Act (2019) and Netflix series The Politician (2019 to present) each tell a version of the Dee Dee-Gypsy-Rose story. Beyond explicit representations of the Blanchards, moreover, MSBP pops up as a plot point in many other recent titles, such as It (2017), Ma (2019), Run (2020), A Haunting in Venice (2023) as well as the HBO adaptation of Sharp Objects (2018). Whether directly inspired by the Gypsy-Rose story, or merely riding a wave of mainstream pop interest in MSBP, this present wave of onscreen MSBP narratives are set apart from the ’90s equivalent by a tonal shift, one that prioritizes archness, comedy, stylization—in short, camp—over the dour earnestness of previous efforts. Not every title mentioned above engages with MSBP in a campy way, to be sure, but the “sensibility” (in Susan Sontag’s words) is more prevalent now than before, as evidenced by the Carr documentary title’s reference to 1981 camp classic Mommie Dearest.
Camp (as an aesthetic) and MSBP (as a psychological phenomenon and pop cultural trope, though I am primarily interested in the latter) are both profoundly gendered phenomena. Camp, “a highly developed way of talking about what non essentialist feminism has come to call sexual difference”, has always had a complicated relationship with womanhood, and by extension with motherhood (Ross 325). Meanwhile, a study on MSBP cases around the world between 1965 and 2016 found that “nearly all abusers were female (97.6%) and the victim’s mother (95.6%)”, unsurprising in light of women’s over-representation in parenting (Yates et al.). The grip that MSBP holds upon our cultural imagination, therefore, signals a collective anxiety about maternity gone haywire: the ‘natural’ female instinct to nurture taken to grotesque extremes, the angel in the house turned demon. Arguments have been made that MSBP heralds, on the one hand, a kind of subversively progressive step for women (“an opportunity to obtain ‘power’ over physicians and gain entry into an exciting social world”, Schreier and Libow), and on the other hand a sexist and classist reaction from the largely male medical field to banal “expressions of fretful child-rearing” that do not meet the criteria of pathology (Talbot).
What, then, makes camp such a potent vehicle for narratives of MSBP today? In this essay, I first apply theory about camp to MSBP as popularly understood, finding a kind of “naïve” camp in its workings. I then identify the specific ways that camp manifests in two contemporary media portrayals of the disorder: Mommy Dead and Dearest and The Politician. Finally, I survey the possible feminist implications of camp and its mode of parody—its ability to reveal the performative nature of motherhood and gender writ large—and what this may say about monstrous mothers.
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy and (Naïve) Camp
Though critics have written endlessly about the ineffability of camp, certain qualities, as described in Susan Sontag’s totemic 1964 essay, “Notes on ‘Camp’”, tend to pull focus—some of which are especially pertinent to MSBP and its onscreen depictions. One is a “spirit of extravagance”, of “too much” (Sontag 59). Another is a kind of magpie approach to cultural history, the prizing of the “old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé” (60). Next, and most significant, is camp’s essential theatricality: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’: not a woman, but a ‘woman.’” (Not a mother, but a ‘mother’, we might add.) “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater” (56). Jack Babuscio expands upon this, naming theatricality as one of the four features “basic to camp”, the others being irony, aestheticism and humor (119).
Sontag additionally makes a distinction between naïve and deliberate camp, writing that “camp is either completely naïve or else wholly conscious (when one plays at being campy)… In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails” (59). Instead, deliberate camp is always “alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken”, appreciative of “the thing as pure artifice” as opposed to merely “the thing as meaning something” (57). The concept of naïve—un-self-conscious—camp is useful, I believe, when thinking about MSBP itself. However, others have pushed back against this divide between naïve and deliberate camp. Fabio Cleto for example notes that “the opposition fails because it doesn’t account for so many instances that, although intuitively categorizable as camp, can’t be brought to a belonging into neither one nor the other ‘kind’” (26). The naïve-deliberate camp distinction gets even more slippery in the context of documentary film, as I discuss later.
Before moving into media about MSBP, it is worth thinking through the connection between camp and the disorder itself, at least as it is popularly characterized. MSBP is one of myriad kinds of possible violence perpetrated by mothers unto children, and as such should be situated within the expansive canon, as it were, of maternal abuse. Child abuse is of course a real phenomenon that does great harm to its victims, whose vulnerability is heightened; society understandably reacts to such violations of trust with abhorrence. At the same time, feminist critics caution us to consider the misogynistic foundations upon which discourse about mothers often rests, and how this discourse may be deployed to further curtail women’s freedoms. The Munchausen mother joins the “smother mother”, “refrigerator mother” and “devouring mother” (Ruderman 25) as examples of culturally constructed ‘bad mother’ figures, all of whom are positioned on a spectrum between neglect (too little care) and fixation (too much). As long as one falls outside of an impossibly narrow middle range on that spectrum, it seems, one’s maternal competence is suspect, deemed inadequate or excessive. “Two aspects of the mother-child relationship trouble us deeply, its exclusivity—which inspires jealousy—and its drivenness—which inspires fear,” notes Barbara Almond in The Monster Within. “Implicit in the concept of monstrousness is the idea of too much, of behaviors and feelings that are unmodified, uncontrolled, unsublimated” (120). In her 2004 New Yorker article “The Bad Mother”, Margaret Talbot applies a similar skepticism to MSBP, characterizing the charge as a bogeyman for the new millennium, akin to other historical mass hysterias such as the Satanic panic around ritual child abuse in various countries during the 1980s. MSBP’s potency as such a bogeyman lies in “the notion that mothers can love and protect their children too much”—a notion that is “not new”, Talbot wryly observes.
Putting aside the pathological veracity of MSBP, which is beyond the scope of this essay, it is clear in any event that motherhood provokes intense, often negative, feelings towards women. Camp has served as a vehicle for these feelings at various points in pop culture history. The 1981 film Mommie Dearest, “one of the most beloved gay audience favourites of all time” (Davidson), exemplifies this, centred as it is on the abuse experienced by Christina Crawford at the hands of her mother, the legendary actress Joan Crawford. Perhaps the camp-maternal abuse connection has something to do with the colloquial queer affinity with motherhood—see for example the use of the term “mother” for “the most influential drag queen in the house” within drag communities (Passa 136). Or perhaps camp simply creates the distance audiences need to process extreme violence and tragedy, “allow[ing] us to witness ‘serious’ issues with temporary detachment, so that only later, after the event, are we struck by the emotional and moral implications of what we have almost passively absorbed” (Babuscio 128). Whatever the case, this is the wider context in which the camp and MSBP encounter one another. Yet there are specific features of MSBP that uniquely prime it for camp portrayals.
Unlike many kinds of child abuse or domestic violence, which by necessity occur privately so as not to be discovered, MSBP involves a public dimension—with an audience of medical professionals, sponsors and other sympathizers—alongside whatever else occurs at home. The Munchausen mother puts on a performance for this audience, presumably based on a cultural script of devoted and selfless motherhood. The 1992 New York Times article, for example, describes the MSBP type as a skilled actor or public speaker: “She appears to enjoy being in a medical setting and is often described as being able to remain remarkably calm in emergencies. She can describe unemotionally and in great detail the child’s case history, and she welcomes all medical tests, no matter how painful.” In their 1993 book Hurting for Love: Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, Herbert Schreier and Judith Libow include a chapter titled “The Actors and Their Roles”. “It is to the world of the impostor that we must turn for this understanding [of MBPS],” they declare. “Impostors are not content to play out their mendacious roles in private: they must have an audience” (123).
The perpetual role-play inherent to MSBP gives the syndrome a particular affinity with camp, with its privileging of “artifice” and “extravagance”. What is more extravagant than forcing unnecessary medication and interventions upon a healthy child in the name of some imagined maternal ideal? Specifically, in the Munchausen mother’s un-self-consciousness—that is, of camp as a by-product of her actions, as opposed to a lack of self-awareness that she is acting—we find a form of Sontag’s naïve camp. “The pure examples of camp are unintentional; they are dead serious,” says Sontag, using an unfortunately apt qualifier (58). We perceive this seriousness in the Munchausen mother’s fervent attempts to maintain the illusion that her child is ill, attempts that may ultimately result in death. At the same time, Sontag dictates that this seriousness must ultimately fail for a scenario to fully enter into camp. This failure may take place when MSBP is finally brought to light as an act—or perhaps when “the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate and the naïve” stop being tragic and start being slyly amusing, as in below examples in media (Sontag 59).
Camp in Mommy Dead and Dearest and The Politician
As mentioned, the most overtly camp element in Erin Carr’s 2017 documentary, Mommy Dead and Dearest (MDAD), is its title’s winking reference to Mommie Dearest. By calling back to the 1981 Frank Perry film and its portrait of an absurd, terrifying Joan Crawford, MDAD aligns itself with a tradition of not just abusive onscreen mothers but of camp horror—putting a new spin on the latter, one based not in the excesses of classic Hollywood but in the gothic eccentricity of the American South.
The 36-year-old title reference—alongside the closing credits song “Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose”, released in 1973—participates in that distinctly camp “rediscovery of history’s waste”, in the words of Andrew Ross (320). Per Ross, MDAD’s ability to make such an arch reference is predicated on Perry’s and Crawford’s present irrelevance: Camp functions “when the products… of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to produce and dominate cultural meanings, become available, in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste” (312). In fact, MDAD was not the first instance of a 2010s filmmaker applying retro stylings to a MSBP narrative. Director Ari Aster takes the same approach in his 2014 short, “Munchausen”, about a mother who resorts to poisoning her son because she cannot bear to see him off to college. That film’s intentionally old-fashioned cinematic language (dissolves, high-key lighting, sentimental score), over-the-top silent acting and anachronistic art direction provide a camp aesthetic that, like in MDAD, unsettlingly undercuts the gruesome horror at its heart. Despite the retro references shared by the two films, though, MDAD as a feature-length documentary must take a different approach to camp than the tightly stylised “Munchausen”.
Artifice, performance and deception—in the outrageous key required by camp—are the driving forces of MDAD. Carr painstakingly conveys the degree to which not just Dee Dee Blanchard (as classic Munchausen ‘good mother’) but also Gypsy-Rose Blanchard (as model ‘terminally ill child’ and eventual killer) lived their lives through performance. The documentary opens on footage from the police station where Gypsy-Rose Blanchard is interrogated after being arrested for her mother’s killing in 2015. Immediately the audience is tipped off that the distraught Gypsy-Rose might be performing, as the officer begs her to “be truthful”. “I have always loved my mom,” Gypsy-Rose sobs theatrically. “My mom and I are best friends.” Yet at a press conference shortly after, the police make a dramatic public declaration: “Things are not always as they appear… This is a tragic event surrounded by mystery and public deception.” A while later, when Gypsy-Rose—now in prison—sits down for her interview with Carr, she smilingly admits, “This is actually kind of the first time I’ve been honest.”
The layers-deep nature of the Blanchards’ deception thus established, MDAD intensifies the camp through copious use of the family’s collection of photographs and videos, in which mother and daughter are always performing. We see pictures of Gypsy-Rose playing dress-up, often in exaggeratedly feminine drag: Disney princess costumes, a white prom dress with tiara and scarlet wig. In one photo Dee Dee is shown getting her head shaved, ostensibly in solidarity with Gypsy-Rose (whose baldness, we learn, was due not to chemotherapy but to regular shaving by her mother). We imagine how these antics might read as adorable on the surface, but—having been warned about deception—we feel a sickly unease instead, the images’ essential artifice too obvious now. The home videos take the pair’s vamping up yet another notch. Though it is unclear if the footage was meant for anything besides a private archive, Gypsy-Rose’s speech—as directed presumably by Dee Dee—is always in the mode of public address, as if she is already world-famous. We see a video of the two at Cinderella Castle in Disney World, another of them receiving their house as a donation from Habitat for Humanity. In one video from 2009, during some kind of benefit, Gypsy-Rose sings on stage in a nauseatingly sweet, breathy voice, the sick little girl par excellence; not to be outdone, Dee Dee says in equally over-the-top adoration, “I’ve always said I was born to be your mom.” This treacly shtick, already uncomfortable to watch, progresses occasionally into more sinister and coercive ground, such as the video of Dee Dee saying in a menacing sing-song, “She wants to get out, ain’t gonna happen.” (“Are we still on?” asks Gypsy-Rose with a forced hilarity.) Much of the camp horror of MDAD lies in these tensions between saccharine appearance and violent reality, the “sharply defined personality” on display coupled with the “outrageous and ‘unacceptable’ sentiments” produced in viewers (Babuscio 121).
There is further camp to be mined in MDAD’s ironic juxtapositions—the “incongruous contrast… between an individual/thing and its context/association” that Babuscio finds integral to camp (119). Between Gypsy-Rose’s innocuous appearance during her interview (her sweet mousy face and uniquely high-pitched baby voice) and the gory murder she orchestrated (of which her striped prison uniform and handcuffs serve as constant reminder) lies a jarring disconnect. A recurring motif in the film is her girlish pink nails, which are photographed in close-up during her 2015 interrogation; we learn afterwards that painting those nails was the last thing Dee Dee did before her death. Perhaps the most incongruous moment in the film—combining cutesy childishness with sex and murder—is the video Gypsy-Rose shoots of herself and boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn in a hotel room the day after they killed Dee Dee. In the same style as Dee Dee’s home videos, Gypsy-Rose’s camera lingers on Godejohn undressed in bed, while she narrates in sing-song voiceover, “He’s eating a brownie… but later he will be eating me,” then laughs hysterically.
The camp sensibility ultimately complicates the otherwise plainly horrific and tragic events of MDAD (“camp and tragedy are antitheses”, Sontag 62). The major sentiment imparted on the viewer by the film is sympathy, albeit qualified, for Gypsy-Rose, who is positioned more than anything as a triumphant survivor; her relatively light sentence at the end of the film brings relief. This makes sense through the lens of camp: “While camp advocates the dissolution of hard and inflexible moral rules, it pleads, too, for a morality of sympathy” (Babuscio 120). That said, sympathy does not extend equally to all subjects. The black humor provided during interviews by the laconic musings of Rod Blanchard and Claude Pitre, Gypsy-Rose’s and Dee Dee’s respective fathers, may or may not be at their expense—also an occasional side effect of camp (“The fun and pleasure created by camp is often only enjoyed at the expense of others… it is the work of a producer of taste, and ‘taste’ is only possible through exclusion and depreciation”, Ross 322). Should we be laughing with them, or at them? Should we be laughing at all? Certainly we are in ambiguous moral ground here, and camp only muddies the waters further.
Applying Sontag’s framework of naïve versus deliberate camp to MDAD quickly brings more complications. While the late Dee Dee is an example of naïve camp—being unaware of her eventual participation in a campy documentary—the same determination cannot be made for others in the film. “Camp rests on innocence,” wrote Sontag. “That means Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it… Persons, however, respond to their audiences. Persons begin ‘camping’” (58). It is conceivable that Carr’s interview style, or her communication of the tone of her film, might have prompted subjects into leaning into certain campy directions in speech or mannerism, therefore tipping over into the territory of deliberate camp. After all, Cleto observes that “we can’t really settle whether each of [the camp icons of culture] made a conscious deployment of the camp fascination strategy… or if they were articulating that strategy in spite of themselves, be that through an exercise in camp decoding (either retrospective or contemporary), or through the assignment of ‘stage directions’ that promote the star as camp icon” (27). Even in documentary—an ostensibly less manipulative medium than narrative film—this is true, as Babuscio notes of Jack Hazan’s 1973 film, A Bigger Splash: “[David] Hockney and his friends appear as themselves, so that the relationships portrayed are much the same as in reality. But the reality is also rehearsed: Hazan occasionally suggests themes for these ‘characters’ to act out, and the line separating being and role-playing becomes blurred” (121). The existence of a production of any kind, whether documentary or narrative feature, would therefore seem to erode lines between naïve and deliberate camp.
Perhaps Cleto is right that the opposition “between self-aware (active) and naïve (passive) participants” in camp is not always useful (28). Nonetheless, there is a persuasive quality to Sontag’s thinking on egregiously deliberate camp—i.e. that it produces a lesser form of camp than that which is innocent. We see this in the spin-offs of the Blanchards’ story, particularly Ryan Murphy’s soapy, snarky The Politician, the most openly camp of the three 2019 titles. Alongside The Act and Love You to Death, The Politician has an actor playing (a version of) the MSBP-afflicted Dee Dee, and thus necessitates a performance (of the character) out of a performance (of motherhood). Yet the fact of these performances being simulacra does not increase the camp quality of the titles; if anything their camp possibilities seem diminished.
Set at the fictional Saint Sebastian High School and featuring a bisexual protagonist as well as other queer characters, The Politician is more explicitly queer than the other titles mentioned in this paper, which is in keeping with the “peculiar affinity and overlap” between camp and “homosexual taste” (Sontag 64). Camp manifests in the series’ heavily stylized acting, its lavishly decorated interiors, its inexplicably retro costumes and its delight in the eccentricity of the super-wealthy. (The first episode features two shirtless twins shooting arrows into a life-sized wooden moose in their mansion’s backyard.) The hollowness of appearances is again the overarching theme across the series: The question “What if all I’ll ever be able to do is pretend to feel?” repeats in dialogue, inevitably followed by “Does it matter if you can’t tell the difference?” MSBP enters the picture in the form of Dusty (Jessica Lange) and Infinity (Zoey Deutch) Jackson, a grandmother-granddaughter pair based on Dee Dee and Gypsy-Rose. While Deutch does a passable parody of Gypsy-Rose, complete with squeaky voice and beatific smile, the scenery-chewing Lange, herself a Hollywood throwback, does the heavy lifting when it comes to camp. Sporting giant shades, fake nails, various glittery and/or animal print outfits and the mannerisms of a Southern Belle, she blasts Shirley Bassey while cooking bologna cups, knocking down martinis and spitting lines like “I’ve been thinking… I might have some psychological problems”. There is in spite of this something stiff and lifeless about The Politician’s construction of camp; it brings to mind Sontag’s pronouncement that “when self-parody lacks ebullience but instead reveals (even sporadically) a contempt for one’s themes and one’s materials… the results are forced and heavy-handed, rarely Camp” (58). Indeed the brand of camp present to some degree in all Ryan Murphy’s oeuvre has been criticised for being overly cynical and retrograde, “an affected form of camp bereft of resistive promise” (Ryalls). Being generous, we might say of The Politician that “it only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism)” (Sontag 65). But the series never achieves the campy thrills of MDAD, and thus joins others who “want so badly to be campy that they’re continually losing the beat” (Sontag 58).
Conclusion: Happy campers?
Sontag suggests that camp arose because “traditional” forms of irony and satire seem “inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled” (62). Though she might not have guessed it in 1964, camp does seem a fitting response to our current age, rife as it is with especially performative representations of mothering (see social media ‘momfluencers’ and their latest incarnation, the ‘trad-wife’). So what implications does this recent turn to camp have on our attitudes towards Munchausen mothers—and mothers in general?
On the surface the MSBP subgenre might appear to only perpetuate sensationalist, misogynist stereotypes, stoking “recurring social anxiety about mothers while absolving communal responsibilities to support mothering practices, thereby further harming the very mothers marginalized by the trope” (Palko 596). Or are onscreen monstrous mums innately subversive instead? Writing in The Point, Kelsey E. Henry argues that the “mommy horror” cinematic genre, “despite its largely sexist roots, can be compassionate, critical and curiously feminist… illuminate[ing] motherhood as something that is not wholly innate, but imposed, as a prescriptive role”.
Throw camp into this mix and we begin to appreciate what critics propose regarding the liberating—because denaturalizing and performative—potential of the sensibility, vis-à-vis gender and sexuality. “Camp, by focusing on the outward appearances of role, implies that roles, and, in particular, sex roles, are superficial—a matter of style,” writes Babuscio. “Indeed, life itself is role and theatre, appearance and impersonation” (123). That said, some critics are notably less optimistic about camp’s powers to dismantle pre-existing gender frameworks, viewing the sensibility as “mere play with given conventional signs”, one that as such only “replaces the signs of ‘masculinity’ with a parody of the signs of ‘femininity’ and reinforces existing social definitions of both categories” (Britton 138).
As ever with camp, there are no easy answers—especially when the stakes are as life-and-death as they are in the context of MSBP. Yet there could be some feminist value in ‘monstrous mother’ camp after all. Both Babuscio and Britton were writing above about camp as traditionally expressed, i.e. by queer men assuming the drag of femininity. Focusing specifically on women performing (camp) womanhood, and citing Judith Butler, Mary Ann Doane and Joan Rivière, Pamela Robertson does find camp’s gender parody to be productively feminist. “What gender parody takes as its object is not the image of the woman, but the idea—which, in camp, becomes a joke—that an essential feminine identity exists prior to the image”, she argues (274). In this gender parody, what Rivière conceived of as the “placating” masquerade of womanhood can indeed “become a gesture of defiance” (274). This lends itself to a negotiated critique of femininity’s confines, in which “the female spectator laughs at and plays with her own image—in other words, to imagine her distancing herself from her own image by making fun of, and out of, that image—without losing sight of the real power that image has over her” (277).
Employing camp in media portrayals of MSBP suggests therefore that, in the movies and in life, there are no true ‘good mothers’, only women performing citations of motherhood to various degrees of success or (possibly catastrophic) failure. This understanding might begin to loosen the hold that maternity ideals have on us, possibly even reducing the likelihood of real-life Munchausen behaviors in the process. If motherhood is the ultimate role for women—one likely to garner bad reviews—perhaps the parodic play enabled by camp aesthetics provide our best hope for widening the impossibly narrow range of maternal acceptability in culture.
Works Cited
Almond, Barbara. The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood. University of California Press, 2010.
Babuscio, Jack. “The Cinema of Camp (AKA Camp and the Gay Sensibility).” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 117-135.
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Britton. Andrew. “For Interpretation: Notes Against Camp.” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 136-142.
Cleto, Fabio. “Introduction: Queering the Camp.” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 1-42.
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Henry, Kelsey E. “Monstrous Motherhood”. The Point, 30 October 2015. Web. https://thepointmag.com/criticism/monstrous-motherhood/ Accessed 23 December 2024.
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Robertson, Pamela. “What Makes the Feminist Camp?” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 266-282.
Ross, Andrew. “Uses of Camp.” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 308-329.
Ruderman, Judith. “D. H. Lawrence’s Dis-Ease: Examining the Symptoms of ‘Illness as Metaphor.’” The D.H. Lawrence Review, vol. 36, no. 2, 2011: pp.72–91. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/45176295> Accessed 10 December 2024.
Ryalls, Emily D. “Camping the ‘post-’ on Scream Queens.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 35, no. 2, 2017: pp.166–179. < https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1376106> Accessed 12 January 2025.
Schreier, Herbert A., and Judith A. Libow. Hurting for love: Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. The Guilford Press, 1993.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 53-65.
Talbot, Margaret. “The Bad Mother.” The New Yorker, 2 August 2004. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/08/09/the-bad-mother Accessed 5 January 2025.
Yates, Gregory, and Christopher Bass. “The perpetrators of medical child abuse (Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy) – A systematic review of 796 cases.” Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 72, 2017: pp.45-53. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.07.008> Accessed 6 January 2025.
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