The Feminist Studies department is proud to host trans activist Eric A. Stanley, author of Atmosphere of Violence, in conversation with FMST/CRES Prof. Nick Mitchell and FMST grad student Kaiya Gordon.
Recent advances in LGBTQ rights have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable, theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming contradiction reveals the central role of racialized and gendered violence in the US -- a structuring antagonism in our social world. Drawing on archives of suicide notes, AIDS histories, surveillance tapes, and prison interviews, Stanley offers a theory of anti-trans/queer violence in which inclusion and recognition are forms of harm rather than remedies. Calling for trans/queer organizing and world-making beyond these forms, they point to abolitionist ways of life that might offer livable futures.
Eric A. Stanley is the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, where they are also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory.
