24.6.2025, 7 p.m. at Aula HFBK, no registration needed

Trans After Trans – Lecture by Jack Halberstam & Discussion

Jack Halberstam’s talk thinks trans* in relation to our current set of crises around rights, representations, and recognition. Central to this is a focus on forms of illegibility and in-betweenness, articulated through the concept of unworlding. The talk will build on conceptual reflections that have shaped Halberstam’s work and found broad resonance across trans* and queer theoretical contexts. Halberstam thinks trans* not as a fixed identity but as an ever-expanding, ever-multiplying category of gendered and sexual being. The asterisk operates as a glitch in the grammar of normativity—it resists final form, holds identity open, and insists on political indeterminacy. The Summer School trans* through trembling times will take up this perspective. In concentrated working groups, the Summer School aims to translate the principle of unmaking into social practices and to develop forms of queer commons.

Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a book titled Anarchitecture After Everything, which will be published by MIT Press in 2026.. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton. Halberstam was recently named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. This summer, Halberstam has been in residence at Freie Universität Berlin as a Distinguished Fellow.

25./26.6.2025, all day, Leaky Vessel

Wednesday, 25 June at Hörsaal, room 229

Thursday, 26 June in room 213 and 213 a/b

Collective Digestion with Mawuto Dotou, Luce deLire, Ruxin Liu, Joëlle Mesén-Ramírez, nate wessalowski and others & Community Evenings with nipslips, Evo Sidney and others

At the heart of the Summer School is a process we call Collective Digestion: a shared attempt to explore, in thinking and doing, what theories like Jack Halberstam’s can do in practice. Together, we ask how concepts such as unworlding, illegibility, and in-betweenness can inform social and artistic strategies under conditions of crisis. In concentrated working groups, the Summer School aims to translate the principle of unmaking into social practices and to develop forms of queer commons. Parallel workshop streams will alternate with shared moments of digestion and collective reflection. Each day ends with informal gatherings to continue thinking, resting, and being together.

The session on collective care and love, led by Mawuto Dotou, includes a film screening and uses DIY zine-making to map community care structures and ask how collective love can be shaped. *** Mawuto Dotou is a Hamburg–based transdisciplinary designer whose practice engages zine culture and community care to explore and enact collective love.

The workshop about parasitic praxis, led by Joëlle Mesén-Ramírez, explores how parasitic strategies—extracting host resources at various lifecycle stages, introducing diversity, driving the evolution of other species, contributing to population control, and evading host defense mechanisms to persist within their host systems—can be repurposed as tools of collective unmaking. *** ​​Joëlle (aka Paolo) Mesén-Ramírez is a Costa Rican–born molecular biologist who earned her*his PhD at the University of Hamburg in 2016, researched genetic manipulation of Plasmodium falciparum at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine until 2022, now works on malaria research and teaching at the Center for Structural Systems Biology at the University of Hamburg and performs as DJ La Carpio while co-organizing queer events in Hamburg.

The session about Mainstream People, led by Ruxin Liu, explores relationships between queer individuals and the mainstream through game-like rules that spark exploratory dialogue, examining how dominant narratives and concepts of time shape lived experience and how queer communities have developed survival strategies in response. *** Ruxin Liu is an interdisciplinary artist who organizes community workshops exploring power, internalized oppression, minoritarian perspectives and the transformative potential of hope, collaborating with participants to amplify silenced voices and bring new resources into the conversation.

Inhabiting Queer Spaces Online is an invitation to leave behind the tiring grip of increasingly hostile corporate social media platforms. The workshop provides a space for the careful exploration of community-oriented, non-commerical and decentralized social media alternatives such as the Fediverse (featuring Mastodon and Pixelfed) based in Free/Libre Open Source Software. What does it take for queers to really make themselves at home online? *** nate wessalowski [they/them] is a technofeminist researcher and educator. They are part of a translocal network of feminist servers.

The work stream “Entnazifiziert euch!”, led by Luce deLire, investigates what a comprehensive denazification today could entail by examining original postwar court strategies that left Nazi crimes unpunished, the role of German jurisprudence in 1950s–60s economic stabilization, and continuities in contemporary trans* rights from the Nazi era through the Transsexual Law to today’s Self-Determination Act. *** Luce de Lire is Assistant Professor at Humboldt University of Berlin, with work spanning metaphysics, aesthetics, political theory and queer/trans studies, performances at venues from the Venice Biennale to Centre Pompidou, publications in e-flux journal and British Journal for the History of Philosophy, two books in progress on fascism and Spinoza, active trans activism as part of SBSG—co-authoring an alternative self-determination law and organizing the “queerokratia” conference—and for more se e www.getaphilosopher.com, queerokratia.de, IG @Luce_deLire and @buendnis.selbstbestimmung.

All sessions except of “Entnazifiert euch!” will be conducted in English, with translation support available upon request.