abstract
| - Judith Halberstam (born 15 December, 1961) is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California. Before joining USC she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). In the broader cultural sphere, she has made contributions as a gender and queer theorist and author; she is also a participant in the drag king community under the name "Jack" Halberstam. She joined Duke University's faculty in 2007. Halberstam primarily focuses on the topic of female masculinity and has published a book titled after the concept. Some queer scholars have taken her work to be reinforcing heterosexuality and traditional gender roles as well as trying to define the concept of "femaleness". Others have defended her work as groundbreaking in queer theory, as it focuses on whether masculinity need be exclusive to the male domain. As a result, tensions and much debate surround Halberstam's work. Halberstam earned her BA with a major in English, at the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. She received her MA from the University of Minnesota in 1989, and her PhD from the same school in 1991. Her most recent publication, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, looks at queer subculture and proposes a conception of time and space independent of the influence of normative heterosexual/familial lifestyle. She received 2 Lambda Book Award nominations for her most widely-known non-fiction book, Female Masculinity. Halberstam's recent work is on an analysis of failure, doing justice to the topic of the underdog. This assessment of failure privileges those marginal groups of identity that are traditionally lost in an account of history. Her multi-disciplinary (or anti-disciplinary) approach emphasizes the importance of freedom, criticizes the dominance of disciplinary patriarchy, and renews interest in excluded voices for academic contexts.
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