Jack Halberstam is a scholar of English, gender studies, and American studies at Columbia University whose work has expanded queer theory’s engagement with gender non-conformity, temporality, subculture, and the politics of failure.
Core ideas
- Female masculinity: in Female Masculinity (1998), Halberstam argued that masculinity is not the natural property of male bodies but a set of practices that can be — and has been — performed by people of any sex. By centering female-bodied masculine subjects (butch lesbians, drag kings, trans men, tomboys), Halberstam showed that masculinity is detachable from maleness, challenging both feminist analyses that equated masculinity with patriarchal power and queer analyses that focused primarily on femininity and drag.
- Queer temporality: in In a Queer Time and Place (2005), Halberstam analyzed how queer lives are organized through temporalities that diverge from the normative life schedule — birth, marriage, reproduction, retirement, death — that structures heteronormative social time. Queer temporality is not merely a deviation from the norm but an alternative mode of living in time, often structured by subcultural participation, the urgency of the AIDS crisis, and the refusal of reproductive futurism.
- The queer art of failure: in The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Halberstam argued that failure — to conform, to succeed, to reproduce, to grow up — can be a queer practice that reveals the violence embedded in normative frameworks of success, mastery, and achievement. Drawing on animated film, subcultural production, and avant-garde art, Halberstam proposed failure as a way of refusing the terms on which capitalism and heteronormativity offer recognition.
Notable works
- Female Masculinity (1998)
- In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005)
- The Queer Art of Failure (2011)
- Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020)
Related
- Queer theory — the tradition their work extends
- Performativity — the framework their analysis of masculinity engages
- Queer negativity — the disposition their “art of failure” theorizes
- Reproductive futurism — the normative temporality queer time refuses
- Gender binary — the classification their work on female masculinity disrupts