Unworlding: Anarchitecture After Everything

Jack Halberstam will be delivering a guest lecture at the University of Copenhagen.

Abstract

Today, I am going to lay out some ideas that build on many different aesthetic performances and practices involving queer and trans bodies that search for and produce new vocabularies for discussing transness and new deployments of transness for the project of dismantling world and worldedness as concepts that hold current political realities in place. I will look at trans anarchitectures alongside photographs by Alvin Baltrop and sculptures by Beverly Buchanan in order to offer a meditation on art, sex and architecture and to think about worlds ending, falling apart and collapsing.

 

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 University Press, 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 entitled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press, 2017). Halberstam’s latest book is entitled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, published in 2020 with Duke University Press. In 2018, Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film entitled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton, and named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. Halberstam is currently finishing a second volume on wildness entitled Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse. 

 

This event is free and open to the public, with no registration required.

Funded by the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies Art and Health and Art and Earth research clusters at the University of Copenhagen, and organized in collaboration with Christa Holm Vogelius and IngerGen.

For questions, please contact Christa Holm Vogelius or Jessica Holmes.