Jack Halberstam, "Anarchitecture After Everything"

The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry will open part of its programming to the public – a series of lectures taught by this Summer's faculty cohort of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University) , Glen Coulthard (University of British Columbia), Jack Halberstam (Columbia University) and Robin Kelley (UCLA).

Jack Halberstam's lecture is entitled "Anarchitecture After Everything.” In this talk, 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. While New York City is a now thoroughly financialized and gentrified space, New York City in the mid-1970’s was the terrain for a competing set of relations to masonry, buildings, walls, glass and the business of art and architecture. Through a prismatic juxtaposition of artists who are rarely read in relation to one another, we can assess these competing visions of the city, some utopian and others dystopian, some committed to improvement, others to destitution. And while artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Beverly Buchanan, in very different ways, shared a love of decaying walls and crumbling brick and saw in them alternative forms of vitality, as we will see, businessman architect, Philip Johnson, entertained fascistic visions of social domination through architecture and of individual greatness through monumentality. A closer look at Johnson’s work demonstrates that there is a potentially sinister side to improvement, expansion, repair and shiny surfaces. This talk examines the dynamics of building and unbuilding in relation to queer community, trans embodiment, aesthetic practice and the necessary world-ending practices of anarchitecture.

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 has just finished a book titled Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto, which will be published by MIT Press in 2026.. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton and he was named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.