Gender and queer theorist Jack Halberstam is expanding his influential ideas into architecture with a forthcoming book, Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto, due from MIT Press in 2026. The project builds on decades of work that has challenged fixed ideas of identity, culture, and representation.
Halberstam's thinking began to shift after encountering Gordon Matta-Clark's radical interventions in abandoned buildings. Those works, he says, opened a new language for reading the city and its structures. In this framework, architecture is not only about construction, but also about how spaces can be questioned, reworked, and reimagined.
Unbuilding as a way of thinking
At the center of the new book is the concept of anarchitecture, a term Matta-Clark used to describe the dismantling of structures. Halberstam connects that idea to transness, arguing that identity should not simply be folded into existing systems, but can instead reveal how those systems are built in the first place.
He describes transness as something that exposes the limits of the gender binary. Rather than asking for inclusion inside a rigid framework, his approach suggests that deeper change may come from questioning the framework itself. In that sense, the book moves beyond identity labels and toward a broader rethinking of bodies, cities, and social order.
Halberstam also traces links between queer thought, anarchist politics, and cultural forms that often sit outside academic seriousness. From animation and comedy to horror, he has long argued that popular culture can carry complex ideas about resistance, refusal, and transformation. For him, these genres often reveal what formal discourse overlooks.
That same perspective shapes his view of the future: not as a fixed destination, but as something that emerges through unmaking and rebuilding differently. The book suggests that architecture, culture, and social life may all be read through this lens of creative disruption. It points to a future where new forms of living could begin with rethinking the structures already around us.
