T
he archive of destruction that Atmospheres of Violence worked to apprehend, has, since its 2021 publication, continued to intensify. In a circle of unending cruelty, the legal and extralegal grows this terror on the streets, in libraries and schools and in shelters and psych jails. Everywhere and nowhere, terfs swarm, cops go gay, and we stay on the run. In this murky field of endless assault, it’s hard to know what’s new and what’s just newly visible. Old tropes of trans groomers and queer contagion reemerge in the language of care for young people those in power have never cared about. Danger lives both in ignoring these new antagonisms and in the belief that there were ever better days.
While their militias ready for the coming war, which is already here, we, too often recoil into the mist of diplomacy and the assumed safety of compromise. The brutal tongues of liberalism speak of surrender as if it were victory while the body count keeps climbing. I don’t know how to win, but I do know rather than dialoguing with power we must fight it.
The bleakness of this constricted present cannot be transcended, but it can, through study and struggle, be confronted. In the hard spaces of nospace, I shadow those that know, even against the fact of history, that all is not lost. In the vicious swell of fascism’s spread, the act of writing a book feels too small, yet I return to Amilcar Cabral’s proclamations that “nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory.” It is my hope that Atmospheres offers beyond the diagnostic of the horrible now, a plan for a collective counterattack.
Along with Cabral, I count Mel Chen, Ren-yo Hwang, K’eguro Macharia, and SA Smythe as my teachers. Their soft care and fierce generosity were, even if they were unaware, among the preconditions of this book’s materialization. Their willingness to labor here in the form of a reflection on the text leaves me undone. In the isolation that is the end of the world, its startling to be reminded that we never struggle alone. This is sometimes more difficult to face than the cold singularity of its opposite.
Their insights, both individual, but perhaps most vividly when read together, help clarify what I was unable to say then and am still unable to find the words for now. Further, the way they refracted my work by not simply engaging it, rewrote it towards other ends--- the generativity of the we when the fantasy of an I has been depleted. In staying with their gifts, all I can offer in return to Mel, Ren-yo, K’eguro and SA is my gratitude.
I’m writing this while spending much of my time organizing against San Francisco’s deadly assault on houseless people, many of whom are trans/queer. Here power’s radical inconsistency crystalizes in the quotidian act of street sweeps where gay politicians (and their straight best friends) organize these actions against those without shelter. Instead of offering one of the 60,000+ empty homes currently carving up the City, their commitment is to make life unlivable and to sustain that unlivablity at all costs. In other words, the inclusive exclusion that I sketched in the book continues its path of destruction as desperation hangs thick.
Street sweeps fall away from the narrative of rising anti-trans/queer violence as LGBT San Francisco powerbrokers produce the idea that harm as always “somewhere else.” Against them, our analysis must remain as capacious as the violence itself. This is among the continued lesson that Marsha, Sylvia, and so many other street queens have left for us, and yet most continue to unlearn. There is no “gay power” as they might have had it, without working with people in jails and those living in tents. This position ought not be reactive and focused only on survival or we remain in the trap of progress. Following them, we must destroy the conditions of the world that destroyed Banko Brown, Tortuguita and so many others.
This is another way of saying that if anti-trans/queer violence is atmospheric, so too must be our resistance. The forms it takes can’t be set by the ruling order, or more death will come. The fight, as Major reminds us, is on every front and our weapons are not limited to theirs. To be clear, war here is not a metaphor, nor is it merely cultural, although it is also both of those. Even with the enormity of these words they cannot begin to capture what so many are living and dying through not only in “conservative states” but also on the streets of the Castro and the outside the Stonewall.
Hope and nonhope come at once as we continue to sharpen the contradictions and our knives. Even without the clarity of a map, this does not mean there is no way though---so we keep digging.
Eric A Stanley is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable.
