Homotopia
Set sometime in the future-present Homotopia chronicles a group of radical queer’s 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.
With Eric Stanley, Vargas co-directed the movie Homotopia (2006) and its feature-length sequel Criminal Queers (2016) which have been screened at Palais de Tokyo, LACE, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, and the New Museum among other venues. 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.
Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer aesthetics, theories of state violence, and anticolonial struggle. Along with Chris Vargas, they directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2016). A coeditor of the anthology Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011/2015), Eric’s other writing can be found in the journals Social Text, American Quarterly, Women and Performance, TSQ as well as in numerous collections.