Jack Halberstam, “Anarchitecture After Everything”

e-flux Architecture presents “Anarchitecture After Everything,” a lecture by Jack Halberstam at e-flux on Thursday, April 3 at 7pm.
In this talk, Jack Halberstam will explore the meaning of trans embodiment using a vocabulary borrowed from a 1970’s art collective called “anarchitecture.” The work of Gordon Matta-Clark represents the spirit and the intentions of this group. Halberstam believes we should use the language of anarchitecture to describe trans embodiment for a few reasons: First, trans bodies should not become legible within the system of gender that was constructed around its exclusion. In other words, if trans bodies violate binary gender, then they cannot seek to become “real” through that same binary. Instead, they must and do threaten to unbuild the binary, and take apart the version of trans that the binary produces. Second, because anarchitecture delivers a version of transness that does not seek to become a new vehicle for capital, it offers an alternative to the process by which once-excluded groups become new markets. Rather than becoming a new platform for neoliberal marketing, the unbuilding of the body opens onto a critique of capital, real estate and the realities that subtend them. And finally, trans bodies, like the buildings that Gordon Matta-Clark opened up, represent an unworld within which representational systems can and do come apart. The trans body that can be glimpsed through Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural experiments is not figure but ground, not body but landscape, not building but demolition site.

Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance(University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a book for MIT Press titled Anarchitecture After Everything. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton and Halberstam was named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.
“Anarchitecture After Everything” is presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures, a monthly series inviting researchers and practitioners to discuss timely issues in contemporary architecture, theory, culture, and technology.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.
Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.​
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator that leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Host or Publisher e-flux Screening Room