The 24th Annual Diane Weiss ’80 Memorial Lecture:
“The Queer Art of Failure ”
J. Jack Halberstam, Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Gender Studies, USC
Thursday, April 7, 2011 — 8:00 p.m. — PAC 001
ALL ARE WELCOME!
J. 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. Her work on female masculinity refutes the notion that butch lesbians are just imitations of “real men” and instead locates gender variance within a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders. Her ground-breaking 1998 book, Female Masculinity, tracks the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam’s last book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. The book explores queer uses of time and space that have developed in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. She also blogs at bullybloggers.com and has just finished a book, the title of which is also the title of her Weiss lecture. The Queer Art of Failure will be published by Duke University Press.