The Research Centre for Identities, Politics and Cultures – IPAK.Center has the honour to announce the public lecture of prof. Jack Halberstam “On Behalf of Failure”, to be held on 20 August, at 7.30 p.m., at the Faculty of Media and Communications – SINGIDUNUM, Belgrade.

In this lecture prof. Halberstam will open discussion on the relevance of thinking failure as what prevents reinstating the zero sum logics of success. The lecture will further ask what are the politics of failure and how might failure offer us a methodology for queer studies, as well as does failure offer an epistemological framework that allows for different distributions of merit, value and relevance. Without proposing to answer all of these questions, prof. Halberstam wants to take a stab at a few of them as a way of beginning a conversation about failure, its uses, its abuses, the angle it offers us on human action and inaction and the potential dangers of thinking with and through failure as they are unevenly distributed across populations. The lecture will tackle 3 sections each framed by a question, explained by way of an example and summarized in relation to some counter-intuitive lessons about life, loss and the exquisite texture of losing.

The lecture of Jack Halberstam is integral part of the public programme of the Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics, organized by IPAK.Center, to be held in Belgrade from 18-24 August. His lecture and engagement in the frames of the Summer School has been supported by the US Embassy in Serbia.

Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Female Masculinity (1998), In A Queer Time and Place (2005), The Queer Art of Failure (2011), and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012). Halberstam written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections, and has co-edited a number of anthologies including Posthuman Bodies with Ira Livingston (1995) and a special issue of Social Text with Jose Munoz and David Eng titled “What’s Queer About Queer Studie s Now?”. The main topics of interest for Jack Halberstam include: queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film, animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book titled “The Wild”, on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, the visual representation of anarchy and the intersections between animality, the human and the environment.

Jack Halberstam "On Behalf of Failure"