I'm Scared I'm Definitely a Lesbian

By Jax Lastinger

October 16, 2019

Killjoy’s Kastle is a feminist haunted house that merges performance and installation art for an immersive experience that explores themes of feminist theory, lesbianism, queer activism, and more. In groups of 6-8, visitors are welcomed to the haunted house by a tour guide/performer, playing the role of a renowned “demented” women’s studies professor. The tour brings visitors through the space, engaging in both an artistic critique and analysis of feminist themes, as well as an active engagement in social justice praxis.

I visited Killjoy’s Kastle on opening night in Philadelphia, on October 16th. We were welcomed by the ghost of Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, who gave us a run-down of the Kastle, before tasking us, a group of 10 strangers, with selecting a group name for ourselves. In a stroke of pure lack of inspiration, our group selected the name “Get One While They’re Legal”, based on a performer/agitator who was wandering the entrance space to the Kastle, adorned in cloth-wrapped coat hangers and chanting “Abortions! Abortions! Get one while they’re legal!” We were then shepherded into a performance space with an undead lesbian performer, framed by a stage with a sign reading “BIG DYKE ENERGY”. After a brief performance, we were launched into the tour, which started with an outline of what we would be experiencing, as well as a consent check-in about whether we were okay with being touched or getting wet.

The tour itself featured a number of stops, including a graveyard of dead lesbian organizations, a tableau of ghouls trapped in a “stereotype of suburban white women looking at their genitals in the mirror”, a library dance party, and a visit to the home of the friendly neighborhood carpet muncher. The themes and concepts explored through this haunted house call into question what we perceive as “scary”. From the demented women’s studies professor whose simultaneous links to the ivory tower and feminist activism perturb our notions of the boundaries between the power-ful and the power-less, to the four-faced internet activist shopping incessantly for Blundstones, to the exhausted and burnt-out activist laid out on the floor beneath the pillars of oppression against which they have battled for the entirety of our tour (or time), Killyjoy’s Kastle invites participants on a journey of self-conscious laughter, queer art, and white heteropatriarchal insecurity. Through humor and art, the Kastle troubles the normative and normalizes the troublesome (i.e. the naked body, queerness, and histories of activism).