Anarchitecture After Everything

Jack Halberstam is David Feinson Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and the author of seven books, including Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance, The Queer Art of Failure, and Female Masculinity. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, he is the winner of the Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship and was recently the subject of the film So We Moved by Adam Pendleton in 2022.

ENDORSEMENTS“A dazzling, groundbreaking series of meditations on the relationality of trans bodies and buildings. Halberstam’s deft analyses of the places, artworks, narratives, and histories produced by artists deeply committed to dismantling modernity’s oppressive enclosures could not be more timely than in this moment of fascism’s violent retrenchment.”—Mabel O. Wilson, author of Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture “A must read. Understanding trans bodies as ‘unarchitectural’ projects and architecture as a task for building social and political norms, Halberstam has written a new theory of the body as much as a manifesto for unbuilding architecture.”—Paul B. Preciado, author of Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition“Finally, the trans aesthetics we’ve been waiting for. Halberstam’s blazing manifesto argues for the reshaping of bodies and worlds through anarchitecture. For those seeking an antiformal aesthetics connected to an insurrectionary politics of dismantling an already-broken world, this book is your weapon.”—Claire Bishop, author of Artificial Hells and Disordered Attention“Halberstam’s timely reading of anarchitecture emphatically unsettles the concept in the most generative ways imaginable, treating the fugitive interests of the trans and racialized body as not only formative, but more relevant than ever.”—Pamela M. Lee, author of Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present

• Introduction: The Language of Anarchitecture1 Trans Anarchitectures and the Unmaking of Gender2 The Aesthetics of Collapse3 Broken Windows: The Art of Demolition4 Feminist Dereliction5 The Anarchitecture of LanguageAcknowledgementsNotesBibliographyIndex