Queer/ Violence (2/6)

Tuesday February 6, 2007 8:00 pm
film screening
“Queer/ Violence”
Chris Vargas and Eric Stanley
Social Science two Room 75 UCSC

In these times of never ending wars, fence post lynching, and the continuing
HIV/AIDS genocide; violence and its relationship to queerness is a site of critical urgency. From resisting war through an anarchist critique of the State to new reading of the ‘Holocaust’ and AIDS genocide, the Queer/ Violence program provokes, instigates and explores queer (un)doing. The screening is comprised of the Maggots and Men (2006 Tredwell) trailer, By Any Means Necessary (1994 Wentsiy), Mentalitet (2001 Stojanovski) and Homotopia (2006 Vargas, Stanley).

About Homotopia:
Set sometime in the future-present Homotopia chronicles a group of radical queers dedicated to exposing the trouble with gay marriage, dismantling the State, undoing Empire, while looking totally fierce. Woven into the story of Yoshi's adventures in love, resistance, and sex, is a critique of the crushing violence of homonormativity and its deadly perpetuation of US patriotism, conservative kinship structures and affective accumulation. Homotopia holds cinematic assumptions hostage through its motley assemblage of never-passing crew. Race, gender, ability and desire are reworked through an anti-colonial take of queer struggle creating a visual rhythm of melancholic utopianism that knows there may be no future but still hopes today is not their last. Love revolution, not State delusion, Homotopia.

Chris Vargas is an independent scholar and filmmaker living and working in Oakland, California.

Eric Stanley is a graduate student in the History of Consciousness program at UCSC.

http://www.homotopiafilm.net

Sponsored by The Network