“We need to help each other figure out how we’re going to survive the unsurvivable world.”
Today, Eric Stanley joins guest host Karma Chávez to talk about the recent wave of anti-trans legislation and threats to gender-affirming care in the context of Eric’s new book, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable.
They talk about how violence has run in tandem with the history of advances in LGBT+ rights, trans misogyny and violence against trans women, Angela Davis’s concept of “abolition democracy,” and the importance of gender-affirming care, including and especially for unhoused people and people in jails and prisons.
Eric A. Stanley is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
In collaboration with Chris Vargas, they directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2019). Eric is co-editor, with Tourmaline and Johanna Burton, of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press 2017) and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex with Nat Smith (AK Press, 2015). They are the author of Atmospheres of Violence Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke University Press, 2021).
Cover photo: WERK for Consent – A Queer and Trans Dance Protest, January 2018, by Ted Eytan, licensed under CC BY 2.0
