Distinguished Fellow of Global Literary Studies in Research Area 3: "Future Perfect"

April–July 2025

Anarchitecture After Everything: A Manifesto for Trans Bodies

Jack Halberstam's project explores how the language of anarchitecture from a 1970s art movement offers new theories of the transgender body. The lexicon of unbuilding, unmaking, undoing, dismantling, splitting, cutting and demolishing describes both an aesthetic practice mostly associated with the art work of Gordon Matta-Clark and a radical way of understanding the trans body. Trans bodies, according to this anarchitectural reading, dismantle the gender binary, unbuild the meaning of the body and split bodily coherence. By reading anarchitecture through transness and transness through anarchitecture, we arrive at new understandings of embodiment, politics, anarchy and aesthetics. The project links Matta-Clark's unbuilding practices to the work of other queer artists in the 1970s – such as Alvin Baltrop and Beverly Buchanan – who were also attracted to the entropic energy associated with collapse and demolition. Anarchitecture After Everything will be published as a book and sets up a confrontation between the anarchic practices of dismantling and the conservative commitments to building that animated urban renewal, the designing of skyscrapers and gentrification in the 1970s. By countering urban renewal with demolition art, we catch a glimpse of the radical understandings of space, language, dwelling art and community that were pervasive in NYC at this time. Each chapter brings a 1970s art project into dialogue with contemporary trans art (by Yve Laris Cohen, Jesse Darling, Every Ocean Hughes) and the book ends with a look at the anarchitectural experiments with language in the work and art of Renee Gladman.

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 titled Anarchitecture After Everything, 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. Halberstam was recently named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.