Toshio Meronek, Eric A. Stanley
A Room of One's Own 2717 Atwood Ave., Madison, Wisconsin 53704
media release:
A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome authors Toshio Meronek and Eric A. Stanley for an evening of discussion on their books Miss Major Speaks and Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable, respectively.
This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own Bookstore.
About the Books
In Atmospheres of Violence, 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.
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.
Miss Major Speaks
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the HIV/AIDS crisis and a world that white supremacy has built. She has shared tips with other sex workers in the nascent drag ball scene of the late 1960s, and helped found one of America’s first needle exchange clinics from the back of her van.
Miss Major Speaks is both document of her brilliant life–told with intimacy, warmth and an undeniable levity-and a roadmap for the challenges black, brown, queer and trans youth will face on the path to liberation today.
Toshio Meronek’s collaboration with activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary, was awarded the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction.
They cover the end of capitalism on the podcast Sad Francisco, and their writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Nation, them, and Truthout.
Eric A. Stanley is the author of Atmospheres of Violence Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable and the editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. They live and organize in San Francisco, CA.