“Animal Anarchy and The Secret Life of Pets” Jack Halberstam Public Lecture

About event

Free public lecture from visiting scholar Prof Jack Halberstam with introduction by Dr J.R. Latham. Animal Anarchy and The Secret Life of Pets In this meditation on wildness and wild things we orient towards thinking about animal worlds, underground domains in which existence is organized otherwise and according to other logics, territories where blind creatures engage in haptic forms of knowing, sensing, being. I want to lay out the stakes of the wild, build an understanding of what we might ask of animals and then conclude with thoughts on animal resistance to human management – animal anarchy here names a wild politics not scripted to the rhythms of conventional activism, not centered on a human actor and not oriented to change in any conventional way. The piece as a whole asks whether animals have already imagined the end of the human?   Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies and English, Columbia University Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of five 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 Trans*: A Quick and Dirty Account of Gender Variability(Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) and has written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam has also coedited a number of anthologies including Posthuman Bodies with Ira Livingston (Indiana University Press, 1995) and a special issue of Social Text with Jose Munoz and David Eng titled "What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?" Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book titled WILD THING on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, the visual representation of anarchy and the intersections between animality, the human and the environment. This event is sponsored by the Deakin Science and Society Network and presented as part of the AusSTS Interdisciplinary Workshop.