Wildness is a name/a space/a critical tool to move in alternative ways and beyond the norm; unexpected, chaotic force, non-linear movement against colonial progress and modernity. A counter-nature ecology in which there is no room for institutions, domestication and any romanticism. How does it intertwine with queer history and with those bodies and desires that dare to go beyond the place assigned to them by the order of things? Is it possible to use terms such as “wild”, “feral” and “disorientation” to name the tension towards other worlds and to mark the end of the current one? Wild Things, Bewilderment and Beyond is a lecture given by Jack Halberstam, author and professor of Gender Studies at Columbia University. Halberstam leads us along a counterintuitive terrain in which we slide between languages and registers from pop culture to performance; after exploring gothic monstrosity, walking with masculinity without men, practicing failure, and ransacking archives to move through queer space and time, we now move into the wild side of his queer theory. In this exploration Halberstam will be accompanied by and in dialogue with the activist and scholar Antonia Anna Ferrante and the director of the IUAV Theatre and Performing Arts course Annalisa Sacchi.
In addition to Wild Things, Bewilderment and Beyond, Jack Halberstam will also be present at Short Theatre 2022 during the presentation of his book The Queer Art of Failure in the frame of MERENDE on Saturday 17 September at 6 pm.
Jack Halberstam is a Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. 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 now finishing a second volume on wildness titled Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled So We Moved by Adam Pendleton, which played at MoMA until January 2022.
in collaboration with Master in Studi e Politiche di Genere di Roma Tre and the class Teatro e Arti performative of Università Iuav di Venezia.
With the support of the Embassy of the United States of America.
Anticipation of the Night is the discursive space that lights up every day in the late afternoon. For the full programme click here.
