Jack Halberstam > Quotes

“The social worlds we inhabit ... are not inevitable, they were not always bound to turn out this way, and what's more, in the process of producing this reality, many other realities and ways of being have been discarded.”
― Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“Read here the words of a monster, brought to you unedited and without embellishment! Yes, it is true -- the monster speaks! ....Whisper its secrets and tell everyone its message -- the monster of whom you speak has left his cage.”
― Jack Halberstam

“Before there were lesbians, there were butches. The masculine woman prowls the film set as an emblem of social upheaval and as a marker of sexual disorder. She wears the wrong clothes, expresses aberrant desires, and if often associated with clear markers of a distinctly phallic power.

She may carry a gun, smoke a cigar, wear leather, ride a motorbike; she may swagger, strut, boast, flirt with younger and more obviously feminine women; she often goes by a male moniker: Frankie, George, Willy, Micky, Eli, Nicky. She is tough and tragic, she was a tomboy, and she expresses a variety of masculinities.”
― Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity

“Who, in other words, can afford transition, whether that transition be a move from female to male, a journey across the border and back, a holiday in the sun, a trip to the moon, a passage to a new body, a one-way ticket to white manhood? Who, on the other hand, can afford to stay home, who can afford to make a home, build a home, move homes, have no home, leave home? Who can afford metaphors?”
― Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity

“...bad guys may also look like winners, but they just tend to die more quickly.”
― Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity

“[...] masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects.”
― Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity

“For such a subject, identity might be best described as process with multiple subjects for becoming and being.”
― jack halberstam