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Attention to gender was a lynchpin of feminist criticism from the 1960s to the 1980s, and it usually criticized the masculine bias of society. After that, attention turned more to sexuaUty than gender, and to queer than to masculme-f eminine dynamics. Judith "Jack" Halberstam represents a new wave of gender studies, analyzing the ways in which women use masculinity, for instance in drag king performances, notably in her book Female Masculinity (1998). She also turns to "low theory," looking at a range of representations of transgender in high and low Uterature, film, and life. Halberstam predicts a reinvigorated future for the study of gender, remarking in Keywords for American Cultural Studies that "gender studies may provide a better way of framing, asking and even answering hard questions about ideology, social formations, political movements, and shifts in perceptions of embodiment and community."
Halberstam's first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), is a study of novels such as Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897), as well as films like Silence of the Lambs (1991), which show "a switch in emphasis within the representation and interpretation of monstrous bodies from class, race, and nationality to a primary focus upon sexuaUty and gender." Following upon Female Masculinity, Halberstam offers her observations on drag king Ufe in The Drag King Book (1999), which is paired with photos by Del LaGrace Volcano. Halberstam's next book, In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultura! Lives (2005), coUects essays on transgender in fiction and film, and she has recently completed The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Halberstam also co-edited Posthuman Bodies (1995), co-edits the series Perverse Modernities (Duke UP) with Lisa Lowe, and blogs at http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com.
Born in England in 1961, Halberstam migrated to the US in her teens. She attended University of California-Berkeley (BA, 1985) and University of Minnesota (MA, 1989; PhD, 1991). After teaching at UC-San Diego from 1991 to 2003, she moved to USC, where she is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Gender Studies.
This interview took place in the J. W. Marriott Hotel in Los Angeles on 6 January 2011. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Wüliams, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and transcribed...