Atmospheres of Violence - by Eric A Stanley

About the Book

Eric A. Stanley examines the forms of violence levied against trans/queer and gender nonconforming people in the United States and shows how, despite the advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past, forms of anti-trans/queer violence is central to liberal democracy and state power.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Atmospheres is a difficult, moving book that I recommend highly to those in trans/queer/feminist studies, perhaps especially those invested in the project of trans/queer of color critique. I know that I will return to Atmospheres for many things, but especially for its modeling--alongside the writing of scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and C. Riley Snorton--of what it might mean to attend to violent archives 'as a praxis of care, as an exercise in solidarity, when the very possibility of ethics has already been destroyed' (15)."--Cameron Awkward-Rich "American Literary History" (10/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"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" (11/20/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"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" (11/20/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"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" (6/2/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"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" (9/23/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"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" (7/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"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"

About the Author

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.