Nicast Episode 4: “Destitution, Queer Architecture, and the Rogue Intellectual”
with Jack Halberstam
NICAst is hosted by Pepita Hesselberth, Joost de Bloois and Benjamin Schoonenberg.
The fourth episode of NICAst features a conversation with Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies at Colombia University. The conversation between Halberstam, Hesselberth and De Bloois touches on the following topics:
- Destituting transness
- Queer architecture and the aesthetics of collapse, demolition, decay and abandonment
- Queerness as a politics of withdrawal and refusal
- The indebtedness to Black Studies in conceptualizing queer withdrawal
- Institutional crisis and the creation of anarchives
- Para-academic thought and the undercommons of the university.
- The rogue intellectual, or how can we learn from the sciences by thinking through entropy and quantum physics?
- Cynical resignation, naive optimism, failure and its others
This episode’s guest
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 , Female Masculinity , In A Queer Time and Place , The Queer Art of Failure , Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance. Halberstam’s latest book, out in 2020, 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.