Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer AffectIn Animacies, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this construct, Chen argues that animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns. Chen's book is the first to bring the concept of animacy together with queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory. Through analyses of dehumanizing insults, the meanings of queerness, animal protagonists in recent Asian/American art and film, the lead in toys panic in 2007, and the social lives of environmental illness, Animacies illuminates a hierarchical politics infused by race, sexuality, and ability. In this groundbreaking book, Chen rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness—and demonstrates how attention to the affective charge of matter challenges commonsense orderings of the world. |
Contents
Animating Animacy | 1 |
Part I Words | 21 |
Part II Animals | 87 |
Part III Metals | 157 |
The Spill and the Sea | 223 |
Notes | 239 |
| 261 | |
| 283 | |
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affective African American American animacy hierarchy Asian Austin autism biological biopolitical body body without organs chapter China Chinese cognitive cognitive linguistics colonial complex concept consider contemporary critical cultural death dehumanization disability discourses economic environmental example feminist figure film Fu Manchu gender grammatical heteronormative human identity imagined immunity inanimate instance intimacy J. L. Austin kind labor language lead toxicity lead’s lesbian linguistic living macaca macy masculine material matter means mercury monkey narrative neoliberal neutering nominal nonhuman animals normative noun objectification objects ontologies political Ponyo possibility Puar Queer Animality queer of color queer studies queer theory questions race racialized refer relation representation sense sentience sexual shift Sidarth simultaneously social specific structure studies suggests things thinking threat tion toxicity toxins toys trans transgender transnational transsexuality transsubstantiation United verb visual word writes Xu Bing