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ne of the possible charges we were given for this conversation/dossier/exchange was simple - to select a passage and respond to it - and though I have marked so many dense compactions of the devastating and also thriving logic that courses throughout this book, ultimately I have selected this one, from the Coda:
If the attempt to fashion a more perfect democracy is also the order under which its deadly force expands, then ungovernability becomes an abolitionist way of life. The charge of ungovernability, a behavior recast as being, disturbs not just the social but the social’s coherence that designates some existence as beautiful disruption. Sylvia Rivera’s 1973 climb to the top of a TERF-swarmed stage and her exasperated “Revolution now!” was not just another politic. It opened, by way of desecrating the political, toward a post-politic.
I choose this passage in part because Rivera shines forward. The temporal trajectory here, both in its diagnosis and its revelation, is one of present and also past futurity (the “more” of the perfection of this democracy, and the enactment of a post-politic in 1973 when its squeeze was already insupportable); and the method is one of a meaningful equivalence between a way of life, abolitionism, and one of Stanley’s key investments, ungovernability. I am humbled by – or rather, humble before (because knowing their previous work, I certainly didn’t enter it with selfproud expectation, rather an interest in learning with) – Stanley’s clear-eyed determination to not only reevaluate the queer/trans station within/for and without the immanently violent social, but to aver “our” – as I join, with an intake of breath and a slow exhale, transsectionally into their rightly demanding “we” – call to “figure the ease of living now.” Or/and, to revisit the presumptions of “clear-eyed”: Valuing as I have come to value nonce blurriness and indeterminacy, in part because of a conviction that disability – of sorts, perhaps both visual, visualist, gestural, and cognitive – lives within the wayward surges of expression and of living embodiment of trans/queer and of Black, Brown and Indigenous (thinking particularly of Munoz’s (2020) The Sense of Brown here, taking care around where segregatable Asian lives reside) lives – makes for a revolutionary and ungovernable potency all the greater – since the ungovernable and the agitated do traffic intimately with the failure or absence of (coherent) recognition. Rivera’s “riotous theory in action” lends riot to the level discrimination of ordered (social) action. The entanglement of disability with trans-queer life, as Stanley registers, needs ever more plumbing as we ask questions of these lives and the very entrainments and also nonentrainments of the unruly improvisational.
Along with the ungovernable comes the untamed affective that rejects proper feeling, “even in” or near death or its perverse companion, near life. It is not Stanley’s most prioritized mapping and it is not consequential in the method, yet I caught a word here and there and am still captivated, we have our attentions. The inexhaustible, impossibly yawning scale of the trans/queer teen Seth Walsh’s farewell invocation of, not just the anti-liberal humanist universe which Stanley reads beautifully in their extended staying-with the surround and event of Walsh’s death, but also the word “pleasure” – “It’s been a pleasure” “This life was a pleasure, mostly having you guys to pull me through the pain”– sits alongside Miss Major’s directed provocation past administrative rigor and towards the love of transpeople: In Tourmaline’s The Personal Things. Assessing her own authorially changing M-F-M gender markers in documented names for the state (what Stanley calls “collective indeterminacy”, Miss Major says, “I want people to know I’m a transperson and love me for that.” At the conclusion of the book I am ruined by the steady illuminative holding of queer/trans murder and its conditions, and also summoned by love, not necessarily for me, but as an injunction of sorts, a methodologized offer that need not be written as such.
Love in the book lives in Stanley’s consistent focus and in their affirmation. And I return to the love in Rivera’s words – her exasperation, or Miss Major’s administratively fogging gesture - as a kind of extension, or binding offer, of a collective, irrefutable strength that does not banish those who may deserve it, even if the forces they represent are genocidal and even if/as they genocide. It’s important to write this now as law’s own revoluting leans toward ever more explicit terror. Rivera summoned what it took to throw the words with some kind of care, and produce a necessary mess of ungovernability at the heart of democratic self-articulated and directionally delimited urgency, and to ask what now.
Mel Y. Chen is Richard and Rhoda Goldman UGIS Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at U.C. Berkeley. Books include Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2012), Intoxicated: Race, Disability and Chemical Intimacies of Empire (2023), and the coedited Crip Genealogies (2023), also with Duke.
