The term “anarchitecture” (a portmanteau of “anarchy” and “architecture”) stems from the language used in the art movement associated with Gordna Matta-Clarkin in 1970s New York. This mode of thinking focuses on the paradoxes and emptinesses that inhabit the spaces we live in and use, ultimately suggesting the “unworlding” of built environments as an aesthetic practice. The term emerged as part of an affront to the urban planning and construction projects in New York at the time that were vehicles for gentrification.

Jack Halberstam is one of the most eminent theorists in gender and queer studies in North America. Halberstam’s lecture relates the practices of splitting and cutting in anarchitecture with the destabilizing potential of transness and the trans body, while articulating forms of structural violence in our times and ways to dismantle them. The interplay between anarchitecture and transness that Halberstam analyzes opens up a perspective on the trans body as a “space of radical unmaking” and as a “portal to new lexicons for transformation.”

Jack Halberstam is David Feinson Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in the City of New York. Halberstam has authored numerous books, including Female Masculinity (1998), In a Queer Time and Place (2005), The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012), Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (2018), and Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020). Halberstam’s most recent book, Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto, is forthcoming this August.

The public lecture is part of the masterclass series “Transformations of the Present” currently being offered by Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute for English Language and Literature within the Department of Philosophy and Humanities. The lecture is also a run-up event for the two-day international symposium on “Dismantling Fascist Forms: Word-Making, Refusal, and Critique,” taking place on June 22 and 23, 2026.