Atmospheres of Violence Quotes

“Fanon reads suicide of the oppressed as a practice that dissolves the colonizer's responsibility for the massive violence he perpetuates, closing the circuit he names as 'fate' on the outside/inside of coloniality. Fate, then, exists as an object of misappropriated cathexis that allows for the externalization of the drama of suicide - the oppressed are left without choice and thus the oppressors are left without blame. Caught in a trap, their failure to adhere to the demands of the colonizers brings with it death, while surviving means a death in life. Through suicide the colonized are rendered not as 'reasonable human beings' as they are overcome with the irrationality of autodestruction.”
― Eric A. Stanley, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable

“Along with the anecdotal evidence that circulated through the gossip of the street, which suggested her ends were no her own, Sylvia said that the two had a pact to die together and that Marsha would not have left without her: "Every time I look at that damn river and I sit there and meditate on the river I feel her damn spirit telling me, 'You gotta keep fighting, girlie, cause it's not time to cross the River Jordan!”
― Eric A. Stanley, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable

“While a 'cure' for HIV would, in effect, decrease Gilead's market share, PrEP not only allows for the capture of those who are HIV+ but has transformed all those who are not into consumers - market saturation as a way of life.
Because of PrEP's prohibitive cost, many of those most impacted by HIV, namely young Black, Indigenous, and/or Latinx trans women and MSM as well as IV drug users, have limited, if any, access. The ongoing legacies of colonial medical disinformation swirls with transphobic epidemiology and the homicidal stigmatization of IV drug use that results in the uninterruption of the pandemic for some, while the end of AIDS is habitually proclaimed for others. In a lethal irony, it is the logic of the patent - the argument that innovation is only spurred by the security of private property - that replicates the virus and its differential death. Put plainly, the HIV cells of those taken without their informed consent or compensation, housed in the NIH reagent bank and also laboring in publicly funded labs that produced PrEP, are withheld from the same populations, and perhaps the same people from whom they were initially extracted. The theft of their viral labor helped grow Gilead's incalculable wealth, which includes $36.2 billion in earnings off Truvada alone.”
― Eric A. Stanley, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable

“Queer contagion, including the anxiety triggered by gender nonnormativity, found its viral materiality in the early 1980s. The diagnosis of gay cancer, or GRID (gay-related immune disorder), the original name for AIDS, was a vengeful nomenclature for the perversion of existing in a world held together, at least in part, by trans/queer undoing. Found by chance, queers began showing symptoms of unexplainable illnesses such as Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). Unresponsive to the most aggressive treatments, otherwise healthy, often well-resourced and white, young men were deteriorating and dying with genocidal speed. Without remedy, normative culture celebrated its triumph in knowing the tragic ends they always imagined queers would meet. This, while the deaths of Black, Brown, and Indigenous trans and cis women (queer or otherwise) were unthought beyond the communities directly around them. These women, along with many others, were stripped of any claim to tragedy under the conditions of trans/misogyny.
Among the architects of this silence was then-President Ronald Reagan, who infamously refused to mention HIV/AIDS in public until 1986. By then, at least 16,000 had died in the U.S. alone. Collective fantasies of mass disappearance through the pulsing death of trans/queer people, Haitians, and drug users - the wish fulfillment of a nightmare world concertized the rhetoric that had always been spoken from the lips of power. The true terror of this response to HIV/AIDS was not only its methodological denial but its joyful humor. In Scott Calonico's experimental short film, "When AIDS Was Funny", a voice-over of Reagan's press secretary Larry Speakes is accompanied by iconic still images of people close to death in hospital beds.
LESTER KINSOLVING: "Over a third of them have died. It's known as a 'gay plague.' [Press pool laughter.] No, it is. It's a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this."
LARRY SPEAKES: "I don't have it. [Press pool laughter.] Do you?"
LESTER KINSOLVING: "You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry!" [Press pool laughter.]
LARRY SPEAKES: "Do you?"
LESTER KINSOLVING: "No, I don't.”
― Eric A. Stanley, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable

“HIV is now generally understood to have first multiplied in pre-independence Kinshasa (then Leopoldville) in the Congo, perhaps moving there from Cameroon, where simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) jumped to humans, creating a new zoonotic disease. While the Belgians' vast atrocities mark the sum of their colonial administration, their procedures of engineering and conquest also proliferated the virus. HIV is both discursively and materially a condition of colonial geographies, as it spread internally via infrastructure projects, namely the expansion of the railroad, while it was also somewhat contained within the colony because of its restrictions on movement. The project's scale demanded a mass labor pool of enslaved and conscripted workers who were trafficked deep into the jungle and fed bushmeat indiscriminately as it was the only readily available and free protein. This, coupled with increased sex work that accompanied the railroad's construction, is the condition under which SIV is believed to have become HIV.”
― Eric A. Stanley, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable