Jack Halberstam: "No Church in the Wild: Anarchy, Failure and Chaos" | February 15, 2013

Jack Halberstam (English/Director, Center for Feminist Research, USC) delivers their talk, "No Church in the Wild: Anarchy, Failure and Chaos," at the Center for 21st Century Studies (University of WI - Milwaukee) on February 15, 2013, as part of the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC).

Introduction by Richard Grusin (0:00)
Lecture (7:00)
Q&A (1:02:00)

Abstract: "In this talk, I want to build ideas from THE QUEER ART OF FAILURE and begin to develop a theory of queer anarchism from a new companion project titled THE WILD: QUEER ANARCHY in order to weave a story about emergent forms of life through the glimpses we catch of it in popular culture and subcultural production. I start today with an example of the emergence of a startling song of anarchy and revolt that pops up in a mainstream venue -- Jay Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild," in order to point to a kind of emergent cultural idiom that speaks in the language of anarchistic revolt and takes issue with the logics of success and failure that have riddled every aspect of modern life. The idea I want to take from this song and its framing of new logics of power is the idea of a space of "wildness" that opens up within the institutionalized spaces of law and order and that holds open other possibilities for thinking and being -- no church in the wild."