Trans* Film Fest Stockholm, in collaboration with ABF Stockholm & Södertörn University, presents a public lecture & panel discussion with Dean Spade on Saturday 28 May 2016 in ABF Stockholm.

Dean Spade, Associate Professor of Law, Seattle University, USA, teaches Administrative Law, Poverty Law, and Law and Social Movements. Among Spade’s publications are Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (South End Press, 2011; 2015), and “Queer Politics and Anti-Blackness”, co-authored with Morgan Bassichis, in Queer Necropolitics (2014). Spade is one of the founders of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of colour.

Dean presents the lecture: “Can We Survive Mainstreaming? On the New Visibilities and Invisibilities of Trans Politics”. Due to the efforts of vibrant social movements, attitudes have been changing in the US about queer and trans people’s lives and about the criminal legal system. Reform efforts aimed at increasing justice and survival for queer and trans people and populations targeted by police have become more visible. In this talk, Dean, as a law professor and an activist and writer who works on queer and trans justice issues, discusses how these different reform efforts are being evaluated by social movements. How can we tell what will work to improve lives and what will just be lip service or good public relations for existing systems? What should we do about reform approaches that leave some groups of people behind? Dean shares some approaches being used by activists confronting these challenging questions.

This talk is followed by an interesting & engaging panel discussion reflecting on the Swedish & European contexts with Yolanda Bohm (Vice-President, RFSL Ungdom), Micah Grzywnowicz (International Advocacy Advisor, RFSL), Josephine Krieg (Independent Scholar, performer & activist), & Dean Spade, moderated by Iwo Nord from Södertörn University.

Thanks to Kooperativet Levande Video for their support.