Jack Halberstam

Jack Halberstam is one of the outstanding figures in gender and queer theory studies. A professor at the University of Southern California, Halberstam has been, until this year, director of the Center for Feminist Research and visiting professor at Columbia University, besides being author of Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998 – published in Spanish as Masculinidad femenina, Egales, 2008), a classic of queer literature which explores the different forms of masculinity evolved by women over the last three centuries. A considerable part of Halberstam’s work is concerned with the study and critique of forms of gender representation, resulting in books like The Drag King Book (1999, co-authored with the artist Del LaGrace Volcano), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005) and, more recently, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (2013). The forthcoming work Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (2017) describes how public debate on gender variability and trans people has spread and become more conventional over the last decade.