Reading Halberstam 1: How to talk about them?

Before we start: how do we speak about 'Halberstam'? I mean: how do we refer to the person?

Him / Her? Jack / Judith? They?

My proposal is to not worry too much about it.

Jack is programmatically sloppy about pronouns & first names, using both interchangeably: The Queer art of failure was published by Judith Halberstam, while Gaga Feminism (which came out more or less in the same year) was published by Jack Halberstam.

In a blogpost (that you can find here) of 2012 he explains that this sloppiness captures 'the form that my gender takes nowadays... my floating gender pronouns capture well the refusal to resolve my gender ambiguity that has become a kind of identity for me..."

She continues to describe how he had also refused to 'transition' completely: "I prefer not to clarify what must categorically remain murky. I prefer not to help people out in their gender quandaries and yet, I appreciate you asking."

The blogpost concludes with "... consider my gender improvised at best, uncertain and mispronounced more often than not, irresolvable and ever shifting."

So, in the spirit of this post I want to propose to improvise & use whatever pronouns we feel ok with.