qUCL Annual Lecture: Anarchitecture After Everything

The work of Gordon Matta-Clark represents the spirit and the intentions of this group. I believe we 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.

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Launched in 2014, qUCL is a university-wide initiative that brings together UCL staff and students with research and teaching interests in LGBTQ studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory and related fields.

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.

More about Jack Halberstam

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