In this talk, Jack Halberstam will explore the meaning of trans embodiment using a vocabulary borrowed from a 1970’s art collective called “anarchitecture.” The work of Gordon Matta-Clark represents the spirit and the intentions of this group. Halberstam believes we should use the language of anarchitecture to describe trans embodiment for a few reasons: First, trans bodies should not become legible within the system of gender that was constructed around its exclusion. In other words, if trans bodies violate binary gender, then they cannot seek to become “real” through that same binary. Instead, they must and do threaten to unbuild the binary, and take apart the version of trans that the binary produces. Second, because anarchitecture delivers a version of transness that does not seek to become a new vehicle for capital, it offers an alternative to the process by which once-excluded groups become new markets. Rather than becoming a new platform for neoliberal marketing, the unbuilding of the body opens onto a critique of capital, real estate and the realities that subtend them. And finally, trans bodies, like the buildings that Gordon Matta-Clark opened up, represent an unworld within which representational systems can and do come apart. The trans body that can be glimpsed through Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural experiments is not figure but ground, not body but landscape, not building but demolition site.

“Anarchitecture After Everything” is presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures, a monthly series inviting researchers and practitioners to discuss timely issues in contemporary architecture, theory, culture, and technology.
 

Gordon Matta‑Clark, Day’s End Pier 52.3 (Documentation of the action “Day’s End” made in 1975 in New York, United States), 1975. © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.