Wednesday, Aug. 28
6:00pm-7:30pm PST

In this workshop, co-directors Eric Stanley and Chris Vargas will screen their film, Criminal Queers (2020) then engage in an audience discussion about the making of the film, as well as its lessons for our present moment.

Criminal Queers is a DIY queer abolitionist comedy that visualizes a radical trans / queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, toward a world without walls. Remembering that prison breaks are both a theoretical and material practice of freedom, it imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal files become tools for transformation.

The film follows 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.

Eric A Stanley is the author of Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke UP, 2021) and co-editor of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2022)

Chris Vargas is a video maker and artist from LA. With Greg Youmans, he made the web-based trans / cisgender sitcom "Falling In Love…..with Chris and Greg." He is Executive Director of MOTHA, the Museum of Transgender History & Art.

To register for “Criminal Queers,” donate to Khalid (suggested donation $60 USD / 662 NOK, please donate more if you can!) then fill out the registration form.