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Varley

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Review

Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg on Treaty 1 territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. Her writing has appeared in _BlackFlash Magazine_, _C Magazine_, _The Uniter_, _CV2_, _Prairie Fire_, and _PaperWait_.

I didn’t expect to like this book. I expected _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ (2019) to be somewhat of an inside joke that didn’t land, that I should have been in on. A collection of essays, testimonials, scripts, letters and images, _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ documents the travelling performance installation and lesbian-feminist haunted house _Killjoy’s Kastle_, created by artists Allyson Mitchell and her collaborator Deirdre Logue. As a feminist killjoy myself, an artist and writer, a genderfluid Arab femme dyke, a millennial queer, and a women’s and gender studies graduate, I approached this book with caution.

I briefly learned about the kastle in a feminist cultural productions class as an awakening feminist and artist. The maximalist, craftivist, immersive approach had impressed me but I was also turned off, because another student I respected spoke out about the harmful nature of the kastle’s Ball Busta room, identified by multiple _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ contributors as the most controversial aspect of the kastle. The Ball Busta room involved two butch-dyke performers in plaid shirts smashing plaster of Paris balls modelled after truck nuts. The kastle’s guides (the Demented Women’s Studies Professors) used scripts which involved an explanation that the “ball-busting dykes” were smashing the patriarchy. Many trans people, people of colour and allies spoke out about the triggering and offensive nature of this and other aspects of the kastle—such as a white performer in dreads and a general lack of representation—which was followed by a Toronto (2013) and Los Angeles (2015) Facebook response by Mitchell and Logue, included in the book.

Returning to _Killjoy’s Kastle_ years later, with many more tools for nuanced engagement, I think more about the complexities of the kastle and its archive, collectivity, labour, generational divides, what constitutes transparent communication, accountability and the impact of a project on an affective, experiential level. While _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ speaks to the dearth of lesbian and feminist archives, both the kastle and the book act as a collective archive, presenting past happenings through the perspective of multiple contributors, and offering new forms of material engagement.

_Killjoy’s Kastle_ embodies the contradictions of inciting nostalgia while also encouraging critique. The kastle mirrors back the viewer’s subjectivity, which is to say I assume some older lesbians experiencing the work felt nostalgia, while others felt challenged; and some younger queers felt defensive, while others revelled in the experience. Mainstream second-wave feminism is often known for its cis-ness and whiteness, for being anti-sex, anti-sex worker and transphobic. Contemporary queers are familiar with and use the phrase “no TERFS, no SWERFS,” meaning they don’t stand for trans-exclusionary radical “feminists” and sex-worker-exclusionary radical “feminists.” These slogans signal politics, but also speak to the systemic oppression that has been perpetuated from the previous generation. I want spaces to feel safe for the most marginalized people: that is what feminism means to me—anti-oppression. That is what being a killjoy means to me: disrupting the joy fostered by normative spaces, even if that means unsettling or burning bridges with other feminists and queers.

_Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ functions like the kastle itself, creating a collective space for thinkers and makers contending with lesbian and feminist history, teaching something through the process of this creation, and invoking critical engagement for those who witness (in this case, read) it. The book’s aesthetic is high quality with a bold graphic design. It is easy to navigate, colourful, image heavy and cohesive—impressive given the lack of funds for professional photography and the amount of image contributors listed in the book. Though _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ certainly can’t be as immersive as the kastle itself, the book relates conflict at an engaging pace, inclining the reader to go faster to see what happens next, like a juicy drama. At the same time, the multiple perspectives and controversies forced me to slow down and absorb details in order to more fully engage.

Contributor Ann Cvetkovich, one of the Real-Life Feminist Killjoys who worked in the Processing Room at the end of the kastle, speaks in the book of the lack of time for more meaningful engagement with visitors, and the ways she struggled or failed as a facilitator. Cvetkovich’s piece comes more than halfway through the book. After reading several accounts about the importance and opportunity of the Processing Room in unpacking visitors’ experiences, Cvetkovich’s perspective made me question the effectiveness of it. If Mitchell and Logue are intentionally seeking to pervert and provoke through humorous and disturbing depictions of stereotypes and histories, to what extent are they accountable to the affective responses to such a work? Put simply: what does identity based art owe to those whom it claims to represent, and how do its viewers contend with that?

In their introduction, Mitchell and Cait McKinney state that the book “uses _Killjoy’s Kastle_ to ask what kinds of remainders lesbian feminism leaves when its specific iterations become untimely and then die. How does it haunt, and what do we do with these old ghosts?” The kastle is going to be inherently problematic because, as an artwork, it asks us to confront the hauntings of the past. As Heather Love points out, the “I’m with problematic” tie-dyed T-shirt for sale in the kastle’s gift shop suggests an inevitable proximity to that which it seems to mock. “It acknowledges complicity and impurity and suggests that, since stereotypes are inevitable, we might engage them rather than disavow them or try to clean them up.”

I am left with a sense of conviction—not about whether _Killjoy’s Kastle_ was right or wrong, problematic or pure, successful or failed, but about the ways that art creates alternate and essential—albeit at times difficult—modes of engagement. Just as I am called to be a feminist killjoy, I am also called to “lesbian hardcore processing,” as the kastle encourages. I am compelled by the stickiness of both/and rather than either/ or. I was, perhaps, most convinced by Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s assertion in the book: “When we dream of a totalizing politics, and when we dream of spaces that might manifest those totalized politics as whole and healing formations, we will always be disappointed.” 

Tompkins asks: “Do we always have to slaughter our mothers? And, at another level, can feminist thinking and feminist movement learn to get out of the political way or engage differently when it is time to learn from emergent or long-suppressed or traumatized ideas and formations?”

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Christina Hajjar reviews the book _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings_ (2019) by Allyson Mitchell and Cait McKinney, published by UBC Press. 

Inside Killjoy's Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings: Allyson Mitchell and Cait McKinney

Natasha Chaykowski is a writer and curator based on Treaty 7 Territory in Calgary. Currently, she is the Director of Untitled Art Society.

“It’s one thing to panic about uncertain futures.”  
—Bridget Moser

The actual weight of the world is 13,170,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000 pounds and that is a load that an average human being can’t really comprehend. (As if there is such a thing as an average human being, or an average anything right now, or ever.) But what we can know is that the gravitational impact of hypothetically holding such a weight on one’s own shoulders would surely necessitate some serious physical and non-physical therapy. And while of late there is certainly an accumulation of things to be disoriented and weighed down by, I have nonetheless continued to send emails, which I have begun to uniformly sign with a resigned “Stay safe and love your loved ones and yourself.” It’s better than “I hope this note finds you well” but a far cry from “Yours, in this ongoing collective effort to dismantle a system of incomprehensible violence.”

Sometimes and especially these days, when I watch something made by Bridget Moser, I say aloud to myself: what is she doing and why does it make me feel like this? I mean: when I encounter her hands manipulating a set of rose-coloured rubber lips, and soft, shifting, droning tones play in the background, the sonic equivalent of the way a horizon slides imperceptibly from bright yellow and blue to brilliant orange and purple, a slide we take for granted because some- times it’s normal, and those lips speak a script in a disembodied, robotized voice (probably the artist’s?) and say things like “I don’t know what I’m doing” and “It’s just a feeling I’d like to have” and “I am more than a purposeless body waiting for eventual death”—when I encounter this, why do I want to sob, to unleash a kind of cosmic scream that can’t be perceived as a sound wave, to be suspended in a dark ether of peace, eyes closed, surrounded by specks of light? I don’t really have an answer. But a friend once told me that Bridget is like a prophet of our generation, and I believe him. I guess it doesn’t really matter why cooked spaghetti hanging out of a vase and being braided as Enya’s “Storms in Africa” (1988) plays makes me feel this way, but it feels important that it makes me feel. “I don’t know what I’m feeling but I’m feeling something,” Bridget says.

I’m not going to refer to Bridget by her last name here, because it seems disingenuous. If you’re reading this, you probably know her or at least know of her work. And now, the rules we’ve abided by seem to hold little authority. You could stop reading this right now and instead go watch Bridget’s video online (confirmation, perhaps, that both galleries and art reviews were never really necessary, like so much else), as the Remai Modern didn’t open Bridget’s show because of this pandemic. Such an erosion of orthodoxy feels to me like the sensation of teeth shifting back, yearning for the places they belong, their rightful crooked spots, gnarled before they endured a decade of braces. I’m not sure why, but throughout Bridget’s new video there are acrylic resin teeth strewn about, usually in the company of fake nails with a French manicure and light-pink earplugs, sometimes as part of a still life, sometimes being poured out of a white dolomite conch shell. These piles of parts are for me an ethereal reminder that parts of ourselves will one day be strewn about—broadcast minerals accruing in a river basin or muscle matter and body fat enriching the soil—and that it is inaccurate to think of the calcium that constitutes our bones as belonging to us.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I don’t know why I’m still writing emails, but I think maybe Bridget is always speculating about such things. The lips move and they narrate my recent days: “I take showers just to pass the time”; “When I’m this lonely, I start getting intimate with all the furniture in the house.” She made this work months ago. If a prophet is a kind of “inspired teacher,” an intermediary between us and the vast expanse of the sublime unknown, that dark ether of peace that we don’t know anything about and that we don’t have a word for, but that I call magic, then maybe Bridget really is like a prophet. “We’re living on this meaningless island, and I think it’s getting sick. Maybe it’s already very unwell,” she says. Yes, all of our crops are dying. Yet we persist. Now the task is to ensure that this persistence isn’t in vain, because one day we will not carry the weight of the world but instead be among the many parts that constitute it. Actually, of course, we already are.

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Natasha Chaykowski reviews Bridget Moser’s exhibition, _My Crops Are Dying But My Body Persists_, at Remai Modern, Saskatoon. 

My Crops are Dying But My Body Persists: Bridget Moser

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C Mag

My Crops are Dying But My Body Persists: Bridget Moser

Inside Killjoy's Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings: Allyson Mitchell and Cait McKinney

Condolere Sanctuaries: Eve Tagny

Architecture after the Asylum: Hannah Hull, Agata Mrozowski, Maria-Saroja Ponnambalam, Rupali Mozaria, arielle tai, and Joe Wood