J. Jack Halberstam Quotes

#1. But why should women and queer people learn to forget? Generational logic underpins our investments in the dialectic of memory and forgetting;

J. Jack Halberstam

#2. We seem to assume that no one really wants to be a girl or a woman, and therefore some people, say female-bodied people, must be forced into these abject genders

J. Jack Halberstam

#3. To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters.

J. Jack Halberstam

#4. We need to think about sex and gender in a more ecological kind of framework, understanding that changes in one environment inevitably impact changes in other environments. Gender here might be thought of more as a climate or ecosystem and less as an identity or discrete bodily location.

J. Jack Halberstam

#5. This is a story of art without markets, drama without a script, narrative without progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.

J. Jack Halberstam

#6. Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours.

J. Jack Halberstam