Anarchitecture After Everything - by Jack Halberstam (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A revolutionary way of seeing bodies and built environment that unites radical politics and trans aesthetics.

From a leading author and queer theorist known for reframing many of the most pressing questions about counter-intuitive ways of being.

Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unbuilding and unmaking the built environment in the 1970s, staged a vigorous confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within Anarchitecture and joins the art movement's practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness to detonate acts of formal violence in our time.

Anarchitecture describes the aesthetic practice of splitting and cutting, dismantling and undoing, unmaking and unbuilding, and, ultimately unworlding. The trans body splits bodily coherence, dismantles the gender binary, and unbuilds bodily meaning. In these chapters, Gordon Matta-Clark's cuts, along with Alvin Baltrop's images of collapsing warehouses and Beverly Buchanan's post-demolition fragmentary sculptures, return with a vengeance through the contemporary aesthetic gestures of Yve Laris Cohen, Jesse Darling, Nicole Eisenman, Kiyan Williams, Cassils, boychild and Every Ocean Hughes. Anarchitecture unmakes space and offers a new rhetoric for emptiness. In its conclusion, the book explores this rhetoric through Renee Gladman's anarchitectural experiments with language.

By reading anarchitecture through transness and transness through anarchitecture, Halberstam helps us see the trans body as a space of radical unmaking and as a portal to new lexicons for transformation.

About the Author

Jack Halberstam is David Feinson Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and the author of seven books, including Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance, The Queer Art of Failure, and Female Masculinity. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, he is the winner of the Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship and was recently the subject of the film "So We Moved" by Adam Pendleton in 2022.