Become Ungovernable: Trans Life Against the State
UW Elvehjem Building 800 University Ave. , Madison, Wisconsin 53703
media release: UW Center for Visual Cultures lecture, Room L150. Zoom option
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*
Enemies and Friends: Abolition, Anti-imperialism, Anarchism
Friday, March 7, 2025, 2 PM, University Club Room 313
*Please contact cvc@mailplus.wisc.edu to register the workshop.
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.