Film Screening of Criminal Queers: directed by Chris Vargas and Eric A. Stanley
Wednesday, April 3rd (12-2 pm) in 370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Eric Stanley, Assistant Professor, Department of Gender and Women's Studies
Criminal Queers visualizes a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex and toward a world without walls. Remembering that prison breaks are both a theoretical and material practice of freedom, this film imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal files become tools for transformation. Follow Yoshi, Joy, Susan and Lucy as they fiercely read everything from the Human Rights Campaign and hate crimes legislation to the non-profitization of social movements. Criminal Queers grows our collective liberation by working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
Eric Stanley is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley where they are also affiliated with the Haas LGBTQ Citizenship Research Cluster. Eric is the coeditor of “Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility” (2017 MIT Press) and “Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex” (2015 AK Press). Along with Chris Vargas, they directed the films “Criminal Queers and Homotopia”. Eric’s writing has been published in journals “GLQ”, “Social Text”, “Women and Performance”, “South Atlantic Quarterly”, “American Quarterly”, and numerous anthologies.
Event sponsored by: Department of Gender and Women's Studies (part of the'Feminist Studies and Visual Media' Spring Lecture series, organized and moderated by Professor Minoo Moallem)
Event cosponsored by: Media Studies, Center for Race and Gender, and Film Studies
Funding provided by: the Chau Hoi Shuen Foundation Fund in Gender and Women's Studies
