Atmospheres of Violence

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.

“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) “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 "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) "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) "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) "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) "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) "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)

• Reading with Care  ixAcknowledgments  xiIntroduction: River of Sorrow  11. Near Life: Overkill and Ontological Capture  212. Necrocapital: Blood's General Strike  413. Clocked: Surveillance, Opacity, and the Image of Force  674. Death Drop: Becoming the Universe at the End of the World  92Coda: Becoming Ungovernable  114Notes  125Bibliography  161Index  177