ABSTRACT
In October 2013, artist and filmmakers Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue designed and showcased an interactive performance installation, Killjoy’s Kastle. This piece, a queer/lesbian haunted house, explicitly and humorously explored the various tropes of queer/lesbian feminism (e.g., intersectionality, oppressors, consciousness-raising, spinsters, witches). Taking up the playful reversals and queer performativity of this exhibition, in this chapter, I look at Killjoy’s Kastle and its implications for thinking about queer theory and queer history, particularly as the history of feminism becomes increasingly appropriated, distorted, and rewritten to exclude that which does not represent feminism’s more tame and palatable side. I explore in this chapter the utility of these tactics, and the notion of queer feminist hauntings, that is, the way that queer identities and feminist narratives function as a hidden, silenced, shadowy, and even spooky entity. The chapter begins by looking at the academic readings of Killjoy’s Kastle, followed by an analysis of play and humor as forms of rebellion, particularly as the Kastle highlights feminist comedy, the writings of Valerie Solanas, and the undermining of academia. I follow this with an analysis of queer hauntings, including finding the queer archive, how queer theory opens and shifts discourses of the “hell house” through this performance, and the ways that progressive and radical artists can appropriate and transform narratives of homophobia and misogyny by shifting the affective and emotional reactions we have to queer space.
