The Joy of Reading a Feminist Extravaganza

by: , November 19, 2024

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Inside Killjoy’s Kastle focuses on a large-scale art installation called Killjoy’s Kastle by Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, which featured an extensive cast of creative and academic contributors. The installation, comprising of multiple performances, sculptural objects, and audio-visual material, has been presented in Toronto (2013), London (2014), Los Angeles (2015) and Philadelphia (2019). The publication focuses on the first three iterations. Queer and feminist community activists, artists, academics, and students contributed to planning and developing the project, making installation materials, and performing as a range of ghoulish feminist (and faux feminist) characters including the Paranormal Consciousness Raisers, Polyamorous Vampiric Grannies, Ball Bustas, and a Menstrual Trans Man with Diva Cup.

Killjoy’s Kastle takes its inspiration from Christian Hell houses: ‘live-action haunted houses put up by churches near Halloween to scare teenagers stiff with scenes of homosexuality, abortion, and other bodily “sins”’ (Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 4). Christian church groups appropriate the conventions of haunted house live-action attractions to terrify visitors with everyday ‘sinful’ activities, whereas non-religious haunted houses tend to focus on fictional ghouls and ghosts or gruesome historical crimes. The first hell houses were created in the USA in the 1970s, and their popularity has markedly increased since the 1990s. In 2016, a church in Chicago planned to create a hell house in an elementary (primary) school focusing on the Pulse nightclub massacre in Florida in which many LGBTQI+ people were injured and killed a few months earlier. Fortunately, this horrific monument to a homophobic hate crime was cancelled. However, it validates the need for LGBTQI+ artworks that critique the harmful stereotypes that feed the flames of bigotry. In their introduction, Mitchell and McKinney describe how important it is to challenge hell houses that equate LGBTQI+ people and unmarried mothers (to name a few of the characters vilified in hell houses) with the monsters and mass-murderers who usually inhabit haunted houses. In ‘Playing Demented Women’s Studies Professor Tour Guide, or Performing Monstrosity in Killjoy’s Kastle,’ Moynan King, who performed as a Demented Women’s Studies Professor in Toronto and Los Angeles, writes that Christian Hell houses aim to convert visitors to Christianity and change their ‘sinful’ behaviours. King notes that Killjoy’s Kastle ‘seeks not to convert but to deconstruct; its goal is to process the fragments of information, histories, and bodies that render the queer woman abject and monstrous’ (King in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 86). By exaggerating lesbian feminist stereotypes to absurd, monstrous extremes, Killjoy’s Kastle holds a mirror to the audience’s attitudes towards female bodies and sexualities.

Inside Killjoy’s Kastle brings the installation to life through academic texts, participant accounts, performance scripts, social media posts, and photographs. The inclusion of first-hand accounts and performance scripts enrich the theoretical discussion in the academic chapters, ‘showing doing’ as King discusses. The book contains four sections. The first section focuses on the process of making the installation. It contains an introduction and a selection of colour photographs showing planning notes and collaborators making materials for the installation. The second section, Rising from the Dead: Inception, contains a chapter by Heather Love contextualising Killjoy’s Kastle in dyke culture, and Sara Ahmed’s essay on feminist killjoys, the theoretical foundation of Killjoy’s Kastle. Love interprets Mitchell’s maximalist style which is dominated by the material quality of softness as a ‘lesbian twist on the gay tradition of camp’ in which the yielding and welcoming feel of the installation creates space in which vulnerability and conflict co-exist (Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 26). Love notes that the softness of the installation creates a comfortable landing-pad for abrasive and uncomfortable ideas, including the elements of the installation that were viewed as being anti-trans and excluding queer people of colour. Visitors to Killjoy’s Kastle may feel alienated from the picture they are presented with, a process that Ahmed argues will enable them to see what is missing from the picture and who has been ‘unseated from the happiness table’ (in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 40). Ahmed’s discussion of feminist killjoys and affect aliens provides the language and concepts needed to read the performance scripts and participant experiences that follow. Two short texts by the curators from the host organisations in Toronto and Los Angeles describe how the collaborations unfolded. The installation in Los Angeles (2015) responded to criticism in relation to queer people of colour and transphobia in a number of ways, such as including the Menstrual Trans Man character and employing more queer people of colour as performers. The LA iteration also provided historical information specific to the city. David Evans Franz, curator at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives and instigator of the Los Angeles installation of Killjoy’s Kastle, writes that the installation highlighted local queer histories and LAPD’s persecution of queer and trans people. In the installation, the ‘Daddy Tank’—a cell used by LAPD from the 1950s to hold gender nonconforming people—was transformed into the ‘Daddy Pen,’ in which performers lift bricks to build their muscles, draw pictures of women in chalk and assuage the fears of visitors (Evans Franz in Mitchell & McKinney 2019).

The third section, The Kastle: Execution, includes academic chapters by Helena Reckitt, Moynan King and Ann Cvetkovich. Reckitt writes about experiences of the Kastle from interviews with different participants, while Cvetkovich and King reflect on their own experiences as performers in the installation. This section also contains 11 short texts comprising performance scripts and personal experiences by performers, and a series of colour photographs of images of the installation and performers in Toronto and Los Angeles.

The Kastle: Execution highlights the educational and transformative imperative of the project. Information is embedded in the installation. Collaborators undertaking the parts of Riot Ghouls dance with large sculptural replicas of feminist books in The Riot Ghoul Salon, a space decorated with wallpaper displaying feminist texts. Spaces in the installation provide visitors with an introduction to feminist histories ‘through a fun house version of a women’s studies classroom or museum, where slogans and a bibliography were available through monsters, zombies, and humour’ (Cvetkovich in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 124).

The pedagogic intention of the work is apparent in the chapter ‘Demented Women’s Studies Professor Tour Guide Script:’

This is the Straw Feminist Hall of Shame. Anyone know what that is? (See if anyone in the group knows.) I will enlighten you. Straw Feminists are the hybrid ghouls of feminism constructed by popular culture in an attempt to scare us away from true feminist practice. These ‘gals’ call themselves feminist but have a highly suspicious (and highly assimilated) politic’ (performance script in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 102-3).

The Demented Women’s Studies Professor Tour Guides describe feminist ideas and demonstrate that there are multiple feminisms, some of which are harmful to intersectional feminist approaches. For example, in the Crumbling Pillars of Society Room in the installation in Los Angeles, the performer playing the Intersectional Activist struggles to dismantle the pillars of society, teaching audiences about intersectional feminism. The Demented Women’s Studies Professor Tour Guide performer explains to the audience:

The Intersectional Activist … serves as a threat to simplistic feminisms as well as the structures themselves. These are the crumbling pillars of society (turn them each to the audience and read them), the structures of racism, colonialism, transphobia, ableism, misogyny, et cetera. We all make our way through these structures daily, some with benefit and many to their detriment, but according to killjoy, this architecture must be taken down as it hurts us all. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US’ (performance script in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 100).

This immersive but otherwise passive experience is activated by movement: visitors are encouraged to ‘Help us dismantle [the pillars] by pushing your way through and onto the other side together’ (performance script in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 100). The tour guides are ‘showing doing’ and ‘showing doing explaining’ simultaneously (Richard Schechner quoted by King in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 87).

A number of the contributors to the book who participated in the project are academics. Ann Cvetkovich performed as a killjoy in the final space of the installation, the Processing Room, in which visitors reflect on their experiences with the help and guidance of the killjoys. Reflecting on her experiences in this role, Cvetkovich writes:

given the number of professors in the house, Killjoy’s Kastle was indeed an opportunity to think about our work as teachers—to perhaps indulge in the places where we hold back in the classroom. In the manner of the Demented Women’s Studies Professors, we could give ourselves permission to engage in the kinds of behaviour that feminist pedagogy discourages, playing the killjoy by asking overly demanding questions or lecturing pedantically (Cvetkovich in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 124-5).

The installation entangles education and humour, mixing monsters with real figures and histories in performances of ‘faux, fantastic, and sometimes very real feminist pedagogy’ (King in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 92). The installation evokes a ‘dizzying is and is not’ loop characteristic of queer culture, in which the slippage between performance, representation, doing and being means that ‘everyone participates constantly’ in the production of the queer representational frame (King 2019: 95).

The kaleidoscopic effect caused by mirroring and exaggerating also produces a queer temporality. The Kastle predominantly focuses on feminisms’ histories giving the impression that it is an historical archive. However, some of the characters in the Kastle introduce contemporary phenomena. For example, in Los Angeles, there was a Multifaced Internet Troll ‘snarling out hash tags,’ who has ‘right on’ politics by day, but at night is a ‘fucking dick—trolling, trolling, waiting for you to slip up. She is young, impetuous, and super queer. Or is she actually an old cisfart?’ (performance script in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 102). The installation presents a queer timeline in which passageways join spaces in which past and present feminisms clash. King describes this as a ‘too-muchness’ that does not build narrative in a linear fashion but is a ‘scrambled trajectory’ (92). The idea of the unavoidable certainty of (heteronormative) progress is denied in this queering process. New futures become possible in the scrambled, distorted feedback loops between past and present.

The final section, The Crypt: Archiving and Reflections, contains posts from Facebook by Mitchell and Logue, which outline some of the criticisms of the installation (‘Facebook Statement: “We Learn More Every Time We Do This”’), Catherine Grant’s chapter ‘The Graveyards of Community Gathering: Archiving Lesbian and Feminist Life in London,’ ‘Reflections of a Real-Life Feminist Killjoy: Ball-busters and the Recurring Trauma of Intergenerational Queer-Feminist Life’ by Kyla Wazana Tompkins, S. Trimble’s contribution ‘Home Sick: Horror, Gothic Storytelling, and the Queers Who Haunt Houses,’ and photographs of the installation’s current location in a storage container.

These texts consider the installation in relation to lesbian feminist archives, histories and art histories. In the introduction, Mitchell and McKinney describe the burden of queer artworks, made up of ‘stuff that is hypervisible and hypermaterial, stuff that is central to the practice and important within lesbian art economies but viewed as heavy, too-tactile garbage within the larger art world’ (Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 11). By bringing together differing materials in the book they aim to find new ways to document queer-feminist art and activism so that future ephemeral activities are better recorded and their histories kept alive. Inside Killjoy’s Kastle begins this archive queering process.

The inclusion of collaborators, curators, and theorists helps to position Killjoy’s Kastle as a node in a lesbian feminist network of people, organisations, and ideas, and reiterates a function of the installation as repository of second-wave feminist thinkers and texts. For example, a space in the installation under the title ‘The Crypt of Dead Lesbian Organizations, Businesses, and Ideas’ features sculptural gravestones carved with the names of organisations that no longer exist. There are also gravestones emblazoned with ideas such as ‘the universal female’ and ‘cisterhood’ that feminisms are trying to lay to rest. Catherine Grant’s chapter ‘The Graveyards of Community Gathering: Archiving Lesbian and Feminist Life in London,’ discusses the production and afterlife of the gravestone sculptures made for the London iteration of the kastle (2014). The installation in London was curated by Nazmia Jamal and supported by BFI Flare: London LGBTQ+ Film Festival. Using Bertolt Brecht’s concept of learning-play, Grant argues that the gravestones for defunct Black British feminist and lesbian organisations produced by Jamal and collaborators function as a ‘demand that the audience take part in this process of archiving and remembering and reflecting on how history is shaped’ (in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 184). People remembered or learned about the organisations as they carved the names into the sculptures or viewed them in the installation, preventing marginalised histories from becoming invisible or remaining as ‘whispers in the margins of mainstream feminist history’ (in Mitchell & McKinney 2019: 185).

When the installation in London closed, Jamal auctioned some of the gravestones to raise money for The Lesbian Immigration Support Group (LISG), and donated others to The Feminist Library in London, enabling them to enter another archive and form new connections with the past and present. Grant visited the library to view the gravestones, three of which were propped on files next to a 1907 suffrage poster titled ‘The Haunted House.’ The poster depicts the Houses of Parliament haunted by the spectre of a woman demanding her rights. This juxtaposition reinserts the Black British Lesbian Feminist organisations on the gravestones into mainstream feminist history, enabling an intersectional revisionist history to be imagined. In the chapter ‘The Sound of White Girl’s Crying,’ Jamal describes the afterlife of another of the gravestones, and the personal and public experiences it holds. For the London installation, Jamal carved a gravestone for Black Fist, a black feminist group with a logo featuring Jamal’s fist, based on a drawing by an ex-lover. As Jamal notes, the gravestone is a public memorial to an organisation and private memorial to a relationship. It is also a relic of the London installation given new life in the Los Angeles iteration (2015) where Jamal played the part of Dr Yoni Ladoo —a demented Women’s Studies professor—further enlivening the archive with new trans-Atlantic connections between past and present.

The other two academic texts in this section are tangentially linked to the installation, extending the ideas presented in the Kastle while drawing attention to the archival function of the book. Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ chapter, ‘Reflections of a Real-Life Feminist Killjoy: Ball-busters and the Recurring Trauma of Intergenerational Queer-Feminist Life,’ discusses Jill Johnson, a lesbian writer, journalist, and dance critic, and her often divisive articulation of feminism. Wazana Tompkins compellingly argues that intergenerational anger enables feminist thought to develop dialectically and challenge the exclusions of some contemporary feminists. S. Trimble’s contribution ‘Home Sick: Horror, Gothic Storytelling, and the Queers Who Haunt Houses’ examines literary haunted houses. Trimble’s hypothesis that queer women haunt property and the families that reside in them is fascinating. This reading of queer hauntings isn’t discussed in relation to Killjoy’s Kastle, which is unfortunate because it introduces a reading of the ghosts haunting Killjoy’s Kastle based on class and social privilege that is not overt in the rest of the book. Both of these chapters present fascinating arguments that extend the conceptualisation of Killjoy’s Kastle by placing it in dialogue with other histories and cultural artefacts. Unfortunately, there is little space to apply those ideas explicitly to Killjoy’s Kastle. The final section of the book would have been enriched with more chapters that highlight connections between the project and a wider network of people, events and ideas.

Initially, I found the final section of the book incongruous and felt that a separate volume would allow more space for texts that extend the networked relations between lesbian feminist artworks and other disciplines. However, I began to imagine a scrambled book structure that replicated the scrambled, queer timeline and disorientating perspectives presented in the installation. For example, structuring the book so that a chapter that zooms into a detail, such as a performance script, is immediately followed by a chapter that tangentially discusses the project might have diminished the publication’s efficacy as an educational resource but may have infused more of the joyful chaos that the project exudes.

The book is an anomaly, something between an academic book, an exhibition catalogue, and an archive. As a creative archive, Inside Killjoy’s Kastle captures the complexity and evolution of the project. However, and despite presenting a variety of voices and experiences, the audience’s voice is almost entirely absent. The ‘Facebook Statements’ allude to audience members’ negative experiences in relation to trans hostility and the erasure of race. These criticisms are discussed in the introduction and Cvetkovich’s chapter (along with discussions of positive audience experiences), but the tone of the publication is overwhelmingly celebratory and positive because most of the contributors were directly involved in the project. This close connection means that the discussions do not have critical distance that would be present in an academic publication. In addition, it is not clear if visitors, particularly those who took part in the debates on Facebook, were invited to contribute. Gathering feedback about the impact of ephemeral art projects can be difficult, and queer archiving projects could continue Mitchell and McKinney’s aim to find methods for ‘enlivening history together’ (2019: 11) by developing creative methods of capturing and enfolding audience experiences into the fabric of the archives. Despite these small limitations, Inside Killjoy’s Kastle is a joy to read and presents a positive step forward in the aim to queer the feminist art historical archive.


REFERENCES

Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings (2019), Allyson Mitchell & Cait McKinney (eds), Vancouver: UBC Press and Toronto: AGYU.

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