Irony?

I started reading a chapter of Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema by Matthew Tinkcom (which is one of the best scholarly titles I've encountered). I was particularly struck by this paragraph about irony:

We discover, though, that irony is a depleted term for comprehending the variety of contemporary cultural practices encompassed in its name, and perhaps worth recalling is that the term carries with it its classical meaning, whereby irony was defined as a form of feigned ignorance. To be ironic in this sense is to maintain a pretense of not knowing in order to produce an alternative knowledge of a statement, object, text, or performance: insisting that one is not perceiving the conditions under which the ironic message is dispensed, not possessing its different registers of signification, not acknowledging that one is perhaps the perfect recipient of the statement that one claims only to be overhearing, irony captures a form of complicity between producer and recipient, one allowing for a form of textual camouflage that provides for a hidden, ambivalent interpretation to arise around the message. (156)

I think that irony as a means of reading culture, as it is practiced now by a lot of people, is not about ambivalence, it's about entirely disliking or having disdain for a cultural product and consuming it ironically in order to play up or perform that dislike. It's almost a way to disavow any ambivalences towards the cultural product. This is why I find camp, with its ambivalences, much more interesting. Of course, as Tinkcom points out, "irony is a depleted term." His revisiting of the original meaning of irony is fascinating to me. It comes near the beginning of a chapter about John Waters. I'm excited to see how ideas about irony and its relation to camp play out in the rest of the chapter.