Queer 2.0 Judith 'Jack' Halberstam Complicates Gender

“Masculinity has a bad reputation. It is not entirely undeserved, and the strength of feminist criticism, especially as it arose in the 1970s and 80s, was pointing out the masculine bias of our society and its cultural artifacts, like literature. So it was something of a surprise when, in the late 1990s, Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam resuscitated masculinity. It was not the usual idea of masculinity, however: It was what she termed, in the title of her 1998 book, ‘female masculinity.’ In her turn to an aspect of gender that had been largely ignored in both feminism and queer studies, Halberstam represents a second generation of queer theory, underscoring the transitive nature of gender, or ‘transgender.’”