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Join the Pozen Center and the Human Rights Lab as Eric Stanley, Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, discusses Tourmaline’s 2017 film “The Personal Things.” The film documents Miss Major’s decision to change her identification documents from “M” to “F” then back to “M” as a way of marking herself as, in her words, “a transgender woman.” While surveillance technologies and their metrics expand through and beyond gender’s racial contours, Major’s narrative charts an alternative path of disruption that is not moored to representational coherence. As a fugitive on the run from classical recognition, Major illustrates the fierce strategies necessary to become, as Denise Ferreira da Silva suggests, a “nobody against the state.” By reading the film with theories of anarchism and the legal category of “unruliness” this talk proposes that an anti-state analysis is, and has been, central to the possibility of trans life. Cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

View photos from this event.