ANN ARBOR, Mich. — What does it mean to find queer joy in an emergency? For Holly Hughes, it starts with embracing euphoria.
Gender Euphoria is the title that Hughes — an acclaimed performance artist and playwright — chose for a semester-long symposium at the University of Michigan, where they teach in the theater and drama department. Described online as a series of “performances, exhibitions, conversations, and provocations” designed to “explore how to make art and find queer joy in a state of emergency,” it feels more urgent than ever.
“I didn’t want to just celebrate queer art making, though I always want to do that, but I thought that queer artists had something crucial to offer in this particular moment of overlapping states of emergency,” Hughes told Hyperallergic by email. “The queer community has a long history of using creative expression, often humorous, joyful, erotic, to not just survive but thrive in uncertain and challenging times. That sense of play and celebration is present often when conditions are dire.”
Hughes, a Michigan native, came of age as an artist in New York just as the AIDS epidemic began to ravage queer communities. They found refuge in Manhattan’s WOW Cafe Theatre and in creating art. With Gender Euphoria, Hughes and an impressive lineup of artists and scholars seek to cultivate a similar sense of queer community. As LGBTQ+ rights are rolled back on state and national levels, it’s also crucial to support queer and gender studies, fields that are increasingly under attack.
The symposium kicked off on September 12 with a keynote speech and performance by LA-based musician and artist, and “All American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger,” Phranc. It was followed by the opening of The Butch Closet, an exhibition of Phranc’s visual art at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities Gallery, curated by Amanda Krugliak and continuing through October 25.
“Community saved my life,” Phranc said in a phone conversation. The artist found her first like-minded peers at the Women’s Center in Venice Beach and in LA’s 1980s punk scene before embarking on a solo music career. After a family tragedy, she turned to sculpture, meticulously crafting replicas of meaningful clothing items out of cardboard. Some of these are on view in The Butch Closet, including a “magic coat” that served as protective armor in her childhood, as she writes in the catalog, and her signature combat boots.
Fittingly, the exhibition’s centerpiece is a recreation of Phranc’s childhood closet. Filled with the clothing, pictures, and memorabilia that sustained her, it reflects the sanctuaries of self-expression that many marginalized people create for themselves. For the artist, the Gender Euphoria symposium is about “connecting with the queer community of today and tomorrow … and being a part of the bigger picture.”
Phranc also stressed the importance of humor in her work as a way to open lines of communication, and humor is a thread that runs through Gender Euphoria. With Killjoy’s Kastle Unplugged, on November 2, Toronto-based artists Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell bring a sense of mischief and a maximalist aesthetic to the history of LGBTQ+ feminism. The artists described their “lesbian feminist haunted house” by email as “a nightmarish vision of feminist terror where visitors are encouraged to dialogue about contemporary queer politics.”
Each site-specific iteration “unpacks lesbian histories for the present” and “depends on connection with community,” they explained. Yet any concerns that Killjoy’s Kastle is more a didactic exercise in queer and feminist theory than a riotous perversion of a Christian “hell house” should be dispelled by characters like the “polyamorous feminist grannies,” zombie nymphs, and the ghost of Valerie Solanas — infamous author of SCUM Manifesto — greeting visitors at the entrance.
Symposium project manager Leah Crosby and artist and professor Larry La Fountain add to the symposium’s lineup of Halloween festivities. La Fountain brings his drag persona, Lola von Miramar, “out of the closet to provide everyone with a very spooky time,” and on October 8, Crosby will teach Freaky Fibers, a workshop on crocheting spiderwebs.
Accompanying these events are group discussions bringing together artists and scholars in a range of fields. On November 1, Ann Arbor’s Stamps Gallery will host two long table conversations, as well as a book launch party for Jill Johnston in Motion: Dance, Writing, and Lesbian Life by dance historian Clare Croft. The book launch features a discussion between the author and pioneering queer cultural anthropologist Esther Newton, most recently the author of My Butch Career (2018).
Artist Joey Quiñones, who heads the Fiber Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, sees the long table discussions as an “opportunity for meaningful dialogue with Black, Brown, and queer folks in Michigan.” Quiñones will be in conversation with Chris E. Vargas, author of Trans Identity in 99 Objects; Tony Whitfield; Nicole Marroquin; Andrea Bolivar; and others.
“As someone who identifies as Afro-Latinx and queer, I often find myself in conversations where race supersedes all,” Quiñones added by email. “If we learned anything at all about intersectionality, all my social categories are with me at all times, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict.”
The symposium concludes on November 21 with “Tearing Down Our Walls,” a talk by artist, curator, and educator Nayland Blake. Blake will also host a Gender Discard Party as part of an ongoing project in which visitors are invited to give away an item that signifies “an onerous aspect of gender,” in the artist’s words. “It’s the place where people can come together and talk about how the objects in their own life have worked as a reinforcement or impediment to their self-understanding, and give them a chance to shift that,” they told Hyperallergic in a phone conversation.
For Blake, who was the subject of a traveling career survey in 2019–20 and has a book of their collected writings forthcoming from Duke University Press, the current culture wars over gender theory speak to the potential of queer radicalism.
“It’s contentious at the moment because people understand how powerful it is,” they noted, concluding, “People who are disenfranchised by mainstream art systems start to build their own power. … At a certain point, that gets chopped down and so doing stuff like [Gender Euphoria] is the way that we can keep it going.”
If Gender Euphoria seems like the kind of celebration that could only happen on the coasts, it’s worth remembering the innumerable contributions to LGBTQ+ art, culture, and activism with roots in cities and college campuses across the country. “The University of Michigan’s been ground zero for so much scholarly work on queer studies, with some of the most well known scholars in that field on faculty … It’s also the site of the first ‘LGBTQ+’ student center, founded more than 60 years ago,” Hughes explained.
The symposium is increasing awareness and education about queer life in a 2024 swing state with a fiercely divided political landscape — and, just as importantly, Hughes and their collaborators are offering LGBTQ+ people the tools for resilience in the face of oppression and erasure. Growing up in Saginaw, Michigan, in the 1960s and ’70s, Hughes didn’t have that comfort. With Gender Euphoria, they’re returning to their roots, working from the middle of America outward to bring people together and break the binary.
