Haunted by Queer Affect: Geoffrey Farmer’s The Intellection of Lady Spider House and Allyson Mitchell’s Killjoy’s Kastle

Abstract

Recent installation projects by Canadian artists Geoffrey Farmer (The Intellection of Lady Spider House, 2013–14) and Allyson Mitchell (Killjoy’s Kastle, 2013) have taken up the architectural, atmospheric and affective structures of the haunted house. These two projects suggest distinct environments for working curatorially with queer affect, defined here as the fraught or stigmatized feelings that often adhere to queer experience. While Farmer’s quasi-museological project draws on the archive and the uncanny in its juxtapositions of varied objects (examined here through camp and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theories of queer shame), Mitchell’s performative and pedagogical work explicitly employs Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist killjoy to reckon with undead tropes from feminist herstories. The affective significance of the distorted domesticity evident in both installations lies in how they animate and explore uneasy queer feelings, which can be traced to the projects’ collaborative origins and the ways that they assemble objects and experiences to highlight difference as much as cohesion.