Resist This Space

On the first night of a Columbia University conference devoted to trans life and aesthetics, co-organizer Jack Halberstam articulated a clear agenda for the ensuing discussions: “Given the way the world looks right now, world-building”—a typical mode of architectural or narrative speculation—“isn’t the task that we want to set for ourselves.” Instead, he noted that his forthcoming writing was trying to identify ideas that “[moved] along the grain of the entropic” toward “unbuilding, dismantling, undoing, and unmaking.” A later comment from theorist Marquis Bey, made in the context of a conversation about “unmaking” domestic space, was emblematic of the ruminative, exploratory threads that the event gathered over two subsequent days: “How am I occupying space in ways that elude the way that space is being read? So that if I’m home, it might not be apparent that I’m ‘at home.’”

This deconstructive attitude held in a segment about “systems frames and regimes within which the body can or cannot appear or be seen” and architecture’s typical embodiment of these powers. Because a building’s stability produces a “constant resistance to what happens inside of it,” Xavi Aguirre argued, it would be better if designers embraced a pliant outlook toward structure and, indeed, authorship. As they showed, if given an easily reconfigurable spatial script, people could reshape their dwellings to suit their changing desires. For the theorist Kadji Amin, space goes further than resistance by being an active part in the constitution of its subjects. He illustrated the point by parsing the difference between two gender structures, the internal “identity” of the white transvestite and the external “appearance” of the black and Puerto Rican transsexual queens, through their respective spaces: the private suburban home and the urban street. As the panel program wore on and calls for various forms of trans liberation were discussed at length, the sound of protesting students on the quad made audible the connections between trans oppression and those of other groups. At the conference’s conclusion, much of the audience spilled out of Buell Hall to join in solidarity with those outside.