Queer Archives, Aesthetics, and Performance
- Heather Love and Brooke O’Harra
- School of Arts & Sciences
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Arts Course Development Grant
Curricular Support Grant
Allyson Mitchell and Deidre Logue are the artists behind Killjoy Kastle, which will be presented in the Crane Arts building in fall 2019 and is a central component to Heather Love and Brooke O’Harra’s course. In 2010, Allyson Mitchell created a piece inspired by the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, titled “A Girl's Journey to the Well of Forbidden Knowledge,” which transformed a gallery space into a lesbian feminist library. Pictured here is an image from that project. Heather Love and Brooke O’Harra will also be bringing students to visit the Lesbian Herstory Archives as part of their course.
Heather Love and Brooke O’Harra will co-teach a new course titled “Queer Archives, Aesthetics, and Performance,” which will take several approaches to the question of how to represent the queer past: through training in archival methods and in scholarly debates about historiographical ethics; through engagement with the work of artists who make archives central to their practice; and through lab-based training that aims to represent encounters with queer history through embodied performance. The course will address both practical and theoretical issues raised by research in LGBT archives, and will take advantage of local resources in Philadelphia, including the John J. Wilcox Archives at the William Way Center. Students will also engage with the staging of Killjoy Kastle in Philadelphia in Fall 2019: a Pew Center for Arts and Heritage-supported project by Toronto Artists Allyson Mitchell and Dierdre Logue, which addresses the difficult history of lesbian feminism, as well as its potential for contemporary LGBT politics.