Overview

Advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past-marriage equality, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes legislation-have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence, theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming contradiction reveals the central role of racialized and gendered violence in the United States. Rather than suggesting that such violence is evidence of individual phobias, Stanley shows how it is a structuring antagonism in our social world. Drawing on an archive of suicide notes, AIDS activist histories, surveillance tapes, and prison interviews, they offer a theory of anti-trans/queer violence in which inclusion and recognition are forms of harm rather than remedies to it. In calling for trans/queer organizing and worldmaking beyond these forms, Stanley points to abolitionist ways of life that might offer livable futures.

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9781478013303

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Reviews

Eric A. Stanley's Atmospheres of Violence animates trans/queer, young queer, and racially dominated lives never quite stamped out by a brittle white supremacist egosystem. Written with tenderness and passionate thunder, the book's brilliant storytelling circulates grief and hope for the governed who remain alive and ungovernable. Throughout, Stanley offers vital pedagogies of truancy and wicked survival for potential collective life. -- Lauren Berlant, author of * Cruel Optimism * Atmospheres of Violence offers a generous and generative reminder that queer and trans lives have always been bigger and more brilliant than the deadly state that tries to frighten and cajole us. Out of a devastating archive, Eric A. Stanley's queer and trans stories rise beyond assimilation, honoring our gorgeous survival and refusals as resistance. -- Tourmaline, artist, activist, and writer

Eric A. Stanley's Atmospheres of Violence animates trans/queer, young queer, and racially dominated lives never quite stamped out by a brittle white supremacist egosystem. Written with tenderness and passionate thunder, the book's brilliant storytelling circulates grief and hope for the governed who remain alive and ungovernable. Throughout, Stanley offers vital pedagogies of truancy and wicked survival for potential collective life. -- Lauren Berlant, author of * Cruel Optimism * Atmospheres of Violence offers a generous and generative reminder that queer and trans lives have always been bigger and more brilliant than the deadly state that tries to frighten and cajole us. Out of a devastating archive, Eric A. Stanley's queer and trans stories rise beyond assimilation, honoring our gorgeous survival and refusals as resistance. -- Tourmaline, artist, activist, and writer A must read for those interested in dismantling systems of oppression and in trans/queer liberation. Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals. -- A. N. Weiss * Choice * A remarkable contribution to queer theory, an imperative analytic for abolitionist praxis, and a poignanttestament to enduring the present world in service of destroying the present world, Atmospheres of Violence is a vital text for those who look, labor, and long for livable lives on the horizon. -- Kerry Keith * Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association *

Author Information

Eric A. Stanley is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and coeditor of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex.

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