Polemology

We are thrilled to announce the first of the public lectures series part of this year's Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics - Jack Halberstam "Unworlding". The lecture will be streamed online on our page on 18 August (Wednesday), 18:00h. CET.

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English 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 Q***r Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Q***r Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), (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, out in 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 second volume on wildness titled: The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy.

Abstract: In my recent book, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, I propose that wildness is a deeply ambivalent form of power, one that cannot be harnessed neatly by human intention but that spins away from human will towards other forms of engagement. In my book, I offer ambiguous figures who stand in for the potential for wildness to either unmake the world or become a site of ferocious and often erotic appropriation – figure of Max from Where the Wild Things Are who refuses the space of the family home where he is ruled, only to enter the space of the wild things, where he becomes a ruler. My book asks whether we can think with wildness on behalf of different ways of engaging with non-human life and whether we can move away from world making towards unworlding.

Shelley Jackson