Jack Halberstam - Collapse, Demolition and the Queer Geographies

This talk will explore demolition, dereliction, queerness, and dispossession in relation to Glasgow in particular. For this event on flux and urban decay and renewal in relation to Glasgow, I will focus on queer art and architecture in works focused on Glasgow. In Shuggie Bain, the queer child moves around the city with his alcoholic mother in the 1970s, shifting from one ruinous housing development to another, and the social rejection he experiences plays out against a backdrop of slag heaps and clay pits. Like the detritus of industrial collapse, queer life unfolds in the ruins and eschews improvement and development for demolition and destruction. Earlier in the century, another queer artist, Joan Eardley, painted complex portraits of street kids she met near her studio in Townhead. Slated for demolition, Townhead offers a dramatic backdrop for childhood. What are the connections, I will ask, between representations of (queer) children in the works of Douglas Stuart and Joan Eardley, and their depictions of Glasgow itself as a site of change, collapse, and urban pessimism? This event sponsored by and in partnership with the Glasgow Gifford Lectures.