Jack Halberstam - "No Church in the Wild: Queer Anarchy and Gaga Feminism."

The PSU Dept. of English Presents: The 2013 Kellogg Awards Ceremony. Featuring one of the world's leading gender and queer theorists, Jack Halberstam. His talk is entitled, "No Church in the Wild: Queer Anarchy and Gaga Feminism."

Co-sponsored by Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Jack Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam's first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. His 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female
masculinity upon hegemonic genders. In his book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), Halberstam described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and
the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity.

In The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Halberstam wrote about "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."

Halberstam's latest book is Gaga Feminism (2012), is "a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem, a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender
and sexual fluidity."

May 13, 2013.