Trans Before Trans x Eye

Jack Halberstam is a professor of English and Gender Studies at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of many books in which queer theory, pop culture, art, and film seamlessly intersect, including well-known titles such as The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Female Masculinities (1988), and Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (2017). This August sees the publication of his latest book Anarchitecture After Everything, making this special Queer Power evening a film screening and book launch rolled into one.

A Question of Silence with Q&A

In his latest book, Halberstam celebrates the dismantling and deconstruction of well-known structures and edifices. Queer power and ‘Anarchitecture’ combine in A Question of Silence, Marleen Gorris' classic which upends the expected female response to patriarchal violence.

Halberstam will give a short lecture to accompany the film. Philosopher and author Simon(e) van Saarloos invited Halberstam to Amsterdam and will moderate the Q&A.

Oscar winner Marleen Gorris (Antonia, Mrs Dalloway) made a surprising debut in 1982 with her feminist thriller A Question of Silence. Three women, unknown to one another, kill the owner of a women’s boutique. What was their motive? Why did the shopkeeper have to die? What pushed the women to this deed? A psychiatrist (Cox Habbema) is given the task of finding out.

Feminist and director Marleen Gorris’ debut – a compelling psychological thriller for which she won a Golden Calf at the Netherlands Film Festival and which was well-received internationally – was hotly debated at the time of its release, and announced the arrival of a thought-provoking new talent.

Book sale

After the screening, San Serriffe book store will sell the book Anarchitecture After Everything, in which Jack Halberstam explores the meaning of trans-corporeality using a vocabulary borrowed from a 1970s art collective known as 'anarchitecture'.