Instead, to different degrees and in distinct registers, Stanley and Currah urge those who care about trans/queer people and anti-subordination to focus on imagining redistributive ways of being together that do not rely on rigid state classifications, the visible identities they produce, and the tendencies they quash. Rather, it is the beautiful nonconforming tendencies of transness that model ways of becoming ungovernable and living together through critical praxis. Stanley and Paisley Currah-broaden our understanding of the source of this violence, underscoring the degree to which it represents a defining feature of government and governing more broadly.īy so doing, the authors challenge us to consider that queer liberation will not, in fact, come from the state. They shift the field of struggle for queer liberation from narrow discussions of identity politics and legal recognition (and, indeed, narrow discussions of queer liberation). Two new books by leading scholars of gender and political science-Eric A. With unrelenting devastation, the lives of transgender people are being targeted in prisons, streets, schools, and state capitals. This all-encompassing violence toward trans/queer people (and people of color most acutely) is often framed as a product of individual hate and transphobia, a cynical political ploy, or both. And the solution to such violence is often framed as recognition of trans identities by the state.

Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable

Eric stanley atmospheres of violence