To this end, I investigate how racialized anti-trans/queer violence is foundational to and not an aberration of the social world. What this means is that we must work to understand the various ways violence delineates trans/queerness if we want to end it. However, my attention to the work of violence is not because I believe it to be the limit of trans/queerness but because, under the order of the settler colonial state, harm is any and everywhere. The book does dwell in the space of death, and the first pages include a note on “reading with care” so people will be aware of its content. Photo by Diana Davies, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library Johnson pickets Bellevue Hospital to protest treatment of street people and gays, ca. In what ways has death become central to understanding both LGBT history and trans/queer people today? Marsha P. Johnson, a pioneering transgender activist, and trans/queer death is generally the subject of the book. Your book begins at the site of the death of Marsha P.

Their other projects have included the anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, co-edited with Tourmaline and Johanna Burton and the films Criminal Queers (2019) and Homotopia (2008), in collaboration with Chris Vargas.įor this visual interview, Julia Sizek, Matrix Content Curator and a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, asked Professor Stanley about their research, drawing upon images and videos referenced in the book. Stanley, Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, argues that anti-trans/queer violence is foundational to, and not an aberration of, western modernity. How should we understand violence against trans/queer people in relation to the promise of modern democracies? In their new book, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonisms and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable ( Duke 2021), Eric A.

Eric stanley atmospheres of violence