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. Halberstam believes one 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 Matt-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 titled “Anarchitecture After Everything”, which will be published by MIT Press in 2026. Halberstam was the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton in 2022 and he was named a 2024/2025 Guggenheim Fellow.

This event is co-organised by the Faculty of Arts, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), the Committee on Gender Equality and Diversity (CGED), and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.

Speaker:

Jack Halberstam

The David Feinson Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University

Moderator:

Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, September 25, 2025

Time: 4:00 to 6:00 pm Hong Kong Time

Venue: Room 3.04, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Registration is required

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=102476