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Jack Halberstam (born 15 December 1961) is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California. Formerly Judith Halberstam, 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; he is also a participant in the drag king community under the name Jack Halberstam.

Halberstam primarily focuses on the topic of female masculinity and has published a book titled after the concept. In this work, she famously discusses a common by-product of gender binarism, termed "the bathroom problem". This outlines the dangerous and awkward dilemma of a perceived gender deviant's justification of presence in a gender-policed zone, such as a public bathroom, and the identity implications of "passing" therein [1]. 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, 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. He 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.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Judith Halberstam", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0