Jack Halberstam Add a review

Jack Halberstam (; born December 15, 1961), also known as Judith Halberstam, is an American academic and author, best known for his book Female Masculinity (1998). His work focuses largely on feminism and queer and transgender identities in popular culture. Since 2017, Halberstam has been a professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. Previously, he worked as both director and professor at The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California (USC). Halberstam was the associate professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego before working at USC.

Halberstam lectures in the United States and internationally on queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film and animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book on fascism and (homo)sexuality.

In Halberstam's most popular piece, Female Masculinity, he attacks the protected status of male masculinity, treating it not as foundational, but the least interesting of a wide number of variants. In addition, he points out the ways in which female masculinities have been pathologized. In the first full length study of its kind, Halberstam traces the presence of female masculinities throughout history, offering it as a viable and ancient option. The text argues for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories, using examples such as “the bathroom problem” to point out every-day ways in which nonbinary people are excluded. The book was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Studies in 1998 and awarded the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction in 1999.