The University of Michigan (UM) hosted “Killjoy’s Kastle,” a “lesbian-feminist haunted house” that seeks to promote the “LGBTQ+” movement.
The haunted house is part of the “Gender Euphoria” event series that the school is hosting for the fall semester.
Killjoy’s Kastle, which the school offered on Saturday, is a “large-scale, multimedia, walk-through installation and performance that evokes all the fright in lesbian-feminist histories so that we might unpack, reject, or critically recover these stories for the queer present,” the exhibit’s organizers state.
They also characterize it as an “expansive and maximalist queer nightmare of epic proportions.”
The two project organizers are Allyson Mitchell, who created “Pissed Off,” a “coven of lesbian feminist Sasquatch monsters and a room-sized Vagina Dentata,” and Deirdre Logue, a filmmaker whose work “explores anxiety, the queer body and the limits of ability through video installation and projection.”
Both Mitchell and Logue also worked together on a previous project called the “F.A.G Feminist Art Gallery.”
The main organizer for the Gender Euphoria series is Holly Hughes, a professor at UM’s Stamps School of Arts and Design.
“I didn’t want to just celebrate queer art making, though I always want to do that, but I thought that queer artists had something crucial to offer in this particular moment of overlapping states of emergency,” Hughes told Hyperallergic about the project.
“The queer community has a long history of using creative expression, often humorous, joyful, erotic, to not just survive but thrive in uncertain and challenging times,” Hughes continued. “That sense of play and celebration is present often when conditions are dire.”
Campus Reform has contacted the University of Michigan for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
