Exhibit is part of semester-long ‘Gender Euphoria’ symposium to ‘make art,’ ‘find queer joy’
The University of Michigan is hosting a semester-long “Gender Euphoria” symposium featuring a “lesbian-feminist haunted house” and a drag performance by one of the public institution’s own professors.
The symposium, hosted by the university’s Stamps School of Art and Design, aims to “make art and find queer joy” within a present “state of emergency” through performances, exhibitions, conversations, and provocations.
On Saturday, it will feature an event called Killjoy’s Kastle Unplugged. Creators describe the performance as a “lesbian-feminist haunted house” designed to help participants “unpack, reject or critically recover” feminist history for the “queer present.” The event is free and open to the public.
A description of past performances on the creators’ website says visitors, guided by a “Demented Women’s Studies Professor,” are taken through several rooms to view performers dressed as “political indoctrinators” and “lesbian avengers.”
The rooms include: “The Crypt of Dead Lesbian Organizations, Businesses, and Ideas,” “The Giant Bearded Clam and Her Familiar,” “The Terrifying Tunnel of Two Adult Women in Love,” and “The Intersectional Activist Wrestling with the Crumbling Pillars of Society.”
One room showcases paintings with phrases such as “Don’t slip on the pussy juice,” “Don’t trip over the severed penises,” and “Expect nudity.”
People waiting in line to enter the exhibit are greeted by performers reciting from scripts encouraging them to read anti-men books before bed, according to the creators’ website.
“I wrote this book, the SCUM Manifesto. Society of Cutting Up Men,” the script reads. “You should read it. Every night before bed. Also, read it to your very, very, very small children, every night–in utero is best.”
The Killjoy’s Kastle project began several years ago with financial support from the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto, Canada, according to an event page on the University of Southern California website. The university hosted the exhibit in 2015.
In a video from a past exhibit in Toronto, naked women with ghost masks show visitors their genitalia and performers encourage visitors to drink “witch piss.” The exhibit’s creators also sell a 13-minute video of the performance online — advertising it for “educational” purposes.
The “lesbian-feminist haunted house” and others through the University of Michigan symposium are being overseen by art Professor Holly Hughes. In a recent interview with Hyperallergic, the professor expressed her excitement about the “Gender Euphoria” events.
“I didn’t want to just celebrate queer art making, though I always wanted to do that, but I thought that queer artists had something crucial to offer in this particular moment of overlapping states of emergency,” Hughes said.
The College Fix contacted Hughes twice via email for comment over the past week, asking about the symposium, but she did not respond. The university’s media relations office also did not respond to The Fix‘s emails asking about the educational value of the symposium.
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The symposium also will feature a drag queen performance by Professor Larry La Fountain-Stokes as “Lola von Miramar,” according to Hyperallergic.
La Fountain teaches in the UM Department of American Culture, including the courses “Drag in America,” “Gender and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean,” and “Engaging Performance.”
Other events included a Sept. 12 performance and lecture by Phranc, (pictured) a self-titled “all-American Jewish lesbian folksinger.”
Over the past month, the university’s Institute for the Humanities Gallery displayed “The Butch Closet,” an exhibit Phranc designed to further explore the “intricacies of self” and the “butch lesbian identity.”
On display are recreated “personal objects and pieces of clothing” that Phranc made with paper and cardboard to “re-imagin[e] her image against a larger historical context of second-wave feminism and queer activism.”
Phranc’s songs include lyrics such as “White means money and white means might but that don’t mean that white’s always right.”
In addition, the art school is offering a three-credit “Gender Euphoria” course this fall.
According to the course’s description, students will study bodies labeled as “different” and explore how they are “not only sites of trauma and alienation” but also of “desire, dissent, creativity, and celebration.”
The symposium is funded “with generous support from the Penny W Stamps School of Art and Design, CEW+, the School of Music, Theater and Dance, the Center for World Performance Studies, the Institute for the Humanities, the Stamps Gallery, the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series, and the State Theater,” according to its website.
The University of Michigan is a public, taxpayer-funded institution. Its motto is “Arts, Knowledge, Truth.”
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IMAGES: Killjoy’s Kastle website, University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design
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