Jack Halberstam Presents 'After All: On Dereliction and Destitution'

Jack Halberstam, professor of gender studies and English, Columbia University, gave this keynote presentation titled "After All: On Dereliction and Destitution," at the 39th Annual Gender Studies Symposium on March, 11, 2020, at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR.

Halberstam explains:
“For so long we have proposed considering the politics of this or the politics of that – the politics of transgender, the politics of sex, the politics of performance, the politics of resistance – what if politics itself, as a concept and a framework is not the solution but the problem. In other words, what if this need to legitimate everything via the political as we currently understand politics (activities associated with governance) is part of the problem in that it leads to certain kinds of projects and it disallows others – the propulsive projects that engage making, doing, being, building, becoming, knowing, declaring, proposing, dealing, moving and so on. The version of the political which I have just outlined comes complete with its own model of time and temporality: we are committed, within the logic of “just do it,” to a version of the future that breaks with the past completely, moves in a determined fashion in a forward direction and already knows what kind of future awaits. This is the version of a temporal politics that new work I am doing on queer utopian projects from the 1970’s breaks with, offering instead to go back in order to find alternative futures nested in past dreams. The projects I will survey today from a queer, pre-digital, punk world of 1970’s New York City, thrive in a critical utopian space that demands not simply a new world, but a complete and utter dismantling of this world, the here and now. For this reason, using concepts like “dereliction” and “destitution,” I will think about a temporality that resists making, being, doing and invests instead in unmaking, unbuilding and divesting. If capitalism demands acquisition and amplification, the anarchitectural projects surveyed here offer minimalist structures, collapse, nothing and dis-appearance.”

Welcoming remarks and introductions by GSS co-chairs India Roper-Moyes ’20, Rayce Samuelson ’20, and Sharon Soffer ’20.

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