FMS Reading Group: Anarchitecture After Everything

Reading Group
Winter 2026-2027


In conjunction with our open discussion on the FMS lab value “practicing queer and trans* politics”, we will gather this year to read Jack Halberstam’s new book, Anarchitecture after Everything (MIT, 2026). Anyone who is interested in joining this reading group can reach out to info@feministmediastudio.ca. Krista Lynes (who will be organizing the group) will reach out to coordinate times with interested members.

Anarchitecture After Everything:

A revolutionary way of seeing bodies and built environment that unites radical politics and trans aesthetics.

From a leading author and queer theorist known for reframing many of the most pressing questions about counter-intuitive ways of being.

Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment, staged a vigorous confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects in the 1970s. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within anarchitecture, joining the movement’s practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness to detonate acts of formal violence in our time.

Anarchitecture describes the aesthetic practice of splitting and cutting, dismantling and undoing, unmaking, unbuilding, and ultimately unworlding. The trans body splits bodily coherence, dismantles the gender binary, and unbuilds bodily meaning. In these chapters, Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts, along with Alvin Baltrop’s 1970s images of collapsing warehouses and Beverly Buchanan’s post-demolition fragmentary sculptures, return with a vengeance through the contemporary aesthetic gestures of Yve Laris Cohen, Jesse Darling, Nicole Eisenman, Kiyan Williams, Cassils, boychild, and Every Ocean Hughes. Anarchitecture unmakes space and offers a new rhetoric for emptiness. In its conclusion, the book explores this rhetoric through Renee Gladman’s anarchitectural experiments with language.

By reading anarchitecture through transness and transness through anarchitecture, Halberstam helps us see the trans body as a space of radical unmaking and as a portal to new lexicons for transformation. (MIT Press)