Jack Halberstam:
TRANS* FEMINISM AND PERFORMANCE
TRANS* FEMINISM AND PERFORMANCE
In this talk Jack Halberstam will track down a lost history of trans-feminist vocalists within the history of female punk performances.
Along the sonic projects of three queer vocalists, Halberstam traces a chronicle of noise-making that is based on screams, growls, chaotic tempo and shifts in vocal register, in order to produce a soundscape of outrage, refusal, fury and resistance. Through loss of control, modes of bodily rebellion and lyrical excess, these mostly female singers tear up not only harmony and purity, but even the subgenre punk out of which they emerge. In listening to their angry voices as song, as music, as urgent intrusions of voice, we turn away from the grand drama of the symphony and attend to the sound of violence.
WITH Jack Halberstam
The festival Freischwimmer*innen. The Future is F*e*m*a*l*e* is supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and by the Capital Cultural Fund. Media partners: Ask Helmut, ExBerliner, Flux FM, Missy Magazine, taz. die tageszeitung, Zitty.
Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of six books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Female Masculinity (1998), In A Queer Time and Place (2005), The Queer Art of Failure (2011) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012) and, most recently, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (2018). 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 currently working on several projects including a book titled Wild Thing: Queer Theory after Nature on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture and the intersections between animality, the human and the environment.