Queer Monstrosity Creative Projects
Student presenters: Declan Melchoir, Carrie Schwartz, Isabelle Valencia, Rebecca Boese
Faculty Mentor/Collaborator: Ellen Mahaffy
Honors students in the class titled A Queer Lens: Representation in Art, Photography, and Film were tasked with creating a "queer monstrosity" that reflected and reconstructed traditional ideas of what it means to be queer in society. Each project dismantled the definitions of gender, sex, sexuality, and heteronormativity by allowing students to create a monster that applied to their own identity through any means they proposed, whether it was sculpting, painting, destroying, or drawing. The creative process began with a rough sketch, where students then pitched concepts to the class, and finally received guidance from faculty and staff to realize their vision. Using this process to create a monster aligns with queer theory because of the monsterization of queer characters in film and the queer coded monsters and ideas that are prevalent in horror films. Taking the idea of monstrosity and cultivating it into a work of art where it depicts and evokes some sort of feeling (horror, longing, confusion, desire, etc.) was the main goal for the project.
