Eric Stanley

Lecture Abstract:

While surveillance technologies proliferate, Tourmaline’s 2017 film “The Personal Things” explores Miss Major’s escape from the lockdown of state recognition. Along with Major’s theorization, this paper thinks with the double bind of trans/queer youth of color that the state deems “ungovernable”. This structuring antagonism might find these young people captured by the totalizing violence that is youth jail, while it also names a tactic of getting free. Following them, it is the collectivizing of these practices that grows an alternative to democracy and its mandates of legibility. These commitments to an errant life—gender fugitives on the run from classical recognition by way of provoking an encounter with unintelligibility—illustrates the fierce strategies necessary for becoming, as Denise Ferreira da Silva suggests, a “nobody against the state.”

Workshop Abstract:

Using the recent issue of TSQ, “Everything Must Go” as our place of departure, this workshop will center the question of the state form in current and historic movements for collective trans/queer liberation. Along with suggested readings, we will investigate some of the tensions in current abolitionists scholarship and organizing when these terms are deployed. In other words, we will ask, perhaps without answer, how might abolition endure the inclusive force of the state, which is also to inquire, ought the state survive abolition’s radicality?

Biography:

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 the University of California, Berkeley where they are also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory.They are the author of Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable and the co-editor of Everything Must Go: Abolition, Anti-imperialism, Anarchism, a special issue of TSQ. Their other collections include Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex.