Jack Halberstam
Trans* After Trans
Dates
1/25/25
7:00 PM
Interview Magazine»Jack Halberstam, a radical social thinker whose critiques have transformed our notions of queer theory and representation, has never shied away from necessary battles – from decoding patriarchal masculinity and the stasis of the straight white gaze to offering alternative notions of value in queer life«
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In his book "Trans*: A Quick and Quirky History of Gender Variance", Jack Halberstam, Professor for Gender Studies at Columbia, used the term “trans*” to describe a form of trans politics that pivots away from recognition and inclusion and points towards new understandings of the body, transitivity, being/un-being and an emergent politics of solidarity. Anyway, he begins there in order to put pressure on the category of trans and he offers today to destitute trans as it functions as a reference point for bodily change on the one hand but simultaneously as a steadying of the ontologies that threatened to be undone by its emergence on the other. If destitution names a set of insurrectionary movements that seek, in the words of Kieran Aarons and Idris Robinson, “to tear down, dismantle, and cancel prevailing political representations and institutions, without proposing others to replace them,” then what might this look like in terms of a trans politics of representation? Halberstam’s new work has been committed to the scene of dismantling, to the spectacle of coming undone, to the unraveling of binary forms and to anarchitectural orientations to being, self, body.Anarchitecture, Gordon Matta Clark wrote in an exhibition description in the early 1970’s, means “working with absence” and “opening spaces to redistribute mass” and “emphasizing internal structures through extraction.” How might these relations to space and absence describe a very different trans orientation?
