UNITED STATES AUTHOR · GENDER IDENTITY · EXHIBITIONS
Jack Halberstam
Also known as: J. Jack Halberstam, Judith Jack Halberstam
Jack Halberstam, also known as Judith Halberstam, is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature, as well as serving as the Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California (USC). Halberstam was the Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego before working at USC. He is a gender and queer theorist and author. Halberstam, who accepts masculine and feminine pronouns, as well as the name "Judith," with regard to his gender identity, focuses on the topic of tomboys and female masculinity for his writings. His 1998 Female Masculinity book discusses a common by-product of gender binarism, termed "the bathroom problem" with outlining the dangerous and awkward dilemma of a perceived gender deviant's justification of presence in a gender-policed zone, such as a public bathroom, and the identity implications of "passing" therein. Jack is a popular speaker and gives lectures in the United States and internationally on queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film and animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book on fascism and (homo)sexuality
They sport vintage suits and fancy ties, slicked-back hair and neat moustaches, baggy jeans and leather jackets, hats and caps and impressive sideburns.
— from The drag king book
Most acclaimed
Alex Da Corte, As Long As the Sun Lasts
"Alex Da Corte (American, born 1980) has been commissioned to create a site-specific installation for The Met's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. The Roof Garden Commission: Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts will be on view from April 16 through October 31, 2021. It is the ninth in a series of site-specific commissions for the outdoor space. Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey, and lives and works in Philadelphia. After training as an animator at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, he received a BFA in Printmaking/Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and an MFA from Yale University. Working across a range of media including film, performance, painting, installation, and sculpture, Da Corte's practice is invested in deconstructing and reinventing those objects and cultural icons that are not only familiar and beloved, but also contested. His work was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale and the 2018 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Museums that have mounted solo exhibitions include the Prada Rong Zhai (2020), Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne (2018), Secession in Vienna (2017), MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (2016), and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2015). In March 2020, Da Corte reinvented Allan Kaprow's performance Chicken (1962) as part of Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-Garde.." -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Kiss My Genders
Kiss My Genders celebrates more than 30 international artists whose work explores and challenges traditional gender categories. The book features works from the late 1960s through to the present, and focuses on artists who draw on their own experiences to create content and forms that challenge accepted or stable definitions of gender. These include Lyle Ashton Harris, Sadie Benning, Nayland Blake, Jimmy DeSana, Chitra Ganesh, Peter Hujar, Juliana Huxtable, Zoe Leonard, Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry, Kent Monkman, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Christina Quarles and Del LaGrace Volcano, among many others. Working across mediums, many of these artists treat the body as a sculpture, and in doing so open up new possibilities for gender, beauty and representations of the human form. From pop culture and gender dissidence to the embrace of the "monstrous" or "freaky," from the politics of pose to transfeminism and politics on the street, each of these artists throws light on a different way of seeing.
The Queer Art of Failure
"The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido."