Criminal Queers
with Q&A by co-director Eric Stanley
Criminal Queers video still
Join the SFAC for a screening of Criminal Queers (2015, 63 min, dirs. Eric Stanley and Chris Vargas) followed by a Q&A with Eric Stanley.
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, Eric is a 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."
Chris E. Vargas is a video maker & interdisciplinary artist currently based in Bellingham, WA whose work deploys humor and performance in conjunction with mainstream idioms to explore the complex ways that queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical & institutional memory and popular culture. Vargas is also the Executive Director of MOTHA, the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, an arts & hirstory institution highlighting the contributions of trans art to the cultural and political landscape.
