Vortrag in englischer Sprache von Ann Pellegrini (New York University) im Rahmen der Veranstaltungsreihe „Queere Interventionen. Gespräche zu Kulturwissenschaft und Kunst“
Zeit: 8. Mai 2007, 19.00
Ort: Depot. Kunst und Diskussion, Breite Gasse 3, A-1070 Wien

Every October, hundreds of evangelical churches across the United States mount Hell Houses, Christian riffs on the haunted houses that dot the landscape of U.S. secular culture each Halloween season. Where haunted houses scare you for fun, Hell Houses scare you to Jesus. In a typical Hell House, actors playing demon tour guides take the audience though a series of bloody staged tableaux depicting sinners whose bad choices–homosexuality, abortion, suicide, and, above all, rejection of Christ’s saving grace-lead them straight to hell.
This presentation discusses Hell Houses’s use of, and belief in, theatre as a medium of evangelization and their particular anxiety around issues of sexuality. Their depictions of homosexuality as damnable act and identity have come under attack by gay and lesbian activist groups, but have also, surprisingly, been criticized by some mainline Christian organizations.
I focus my analysis on the Hell House staged by the New Destiny Christian Center in the Denver suburb of Thornton, Colorado, in October 2006. I also discuss the 2001 documentary Hell House (dir. George Ratliff). Ultimately, I suggest that there may be something a little bit „queer“ in Hell House’s insistence on the „contagion“ of sexual depictions.
My examination as a whole is in service of a larger set of questions about religion, sexuality, the limits of „tolerance,“ and the politics of hate in the United States today.
Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (1997), co-author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (2003), co-editor of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003), and co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Secularisms. She also co-edits a queer studies book series, Sexual Cultures, at New York University Press. In 2007, she is the Freud-Fulbright Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung and the University of Vienna.
Organisiert von:
Andrea B. Braidt (TFM Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft, Uni Wien)
Susanne Hochreiter (Institut für Germanistik, Uni Wien)
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