Description
Book SynopsisAdvances 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.
Trade Review“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 *
"
Atmospheres of Violence exposes the violent ruse of settling for equality within nested systems bent on widespread immiseration, precarity, and violence, and intricately theorizes near life as a space of inventive resistance, a lab for existential experiments in ungovernability." -- Hil Malatino * GLQ *
"
Atmospheres demands we recognize that a way out of shitholes of the here, now and forever require attention to the breaks and clefts where collective possibility of being together, unconfined, rageful, might give us a kind of shape of impossibility-- one where we might better carve out a life-giving world in the cinders of a colonial humanity." -- Ren-yo Hwang * Society and Space *
"I am humbled by—or rather, humble before (because knowing their previous work, I certainly didn’t enter it with selfproud expectation, rather an interest in learning with)—Stanley’s clear-eyed determination to not only reevaluate the queer/trans station within/for and without the immanently violent social." -- Mel Y. Chen * Society and Space *
Table of ContentsReading with Care ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: River of Sorrow 1
1. Near Life: Overkill and Ontological Capture 21
2. Necrocapital: Blood's General Strike 41
3. Clocked: Surveillance, Opacity, and the Image of Force 67
4. Death Drop: Becoming the Universe at the End of the World 92
Coda: Becoming Ungovernable 114
Notes 125
Bibliography 161
Index 177
