Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire

by Mel Y. Chen

In Intoxicated Mel Y. Chen explores the ongoing imperial relationship between race, sexuality, and disability. They focus on nineteenth-century biopolitical archives in England and Australia to show how mutual entanglements of race and disability take form through toxicity. Examining English scientist John Langdon Down’s characterization of white intellectual disability as Asian interiority and Queensland’s racialization and targeting of Aboriginal peoples through its ostensible concern with black opium, Chen explores how the colonial administration of race and disability gives rise to “intoxicated” subjects often shadowed by slowness. Chen charts the ongoing reverberations of these chemical entanglements in art and contemporary moments of political and economic conflict or agitation. Although intoxicated subjects may be affected by ongoing pollution or discredited as agents of failure, Chen affirmatively identifies queer/crip forms of unlearning and worldmaking under imperialism. Exemplifying an undisciplined thinking that resists linear or accretive methods of inquiry, Chen unsettles conventional understandings of slowness and agitation, intellectual method, and the toxic ordinary.

Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

Published December 8, 2023

About the author

Mel Y. Chen is an academic whose scholarship intersects many fields, including queer theory, gender studies, animal studies, critical race theory, Asian American studies, disability studies, science studies, and critical linguistics.

Reviews

[endrju]

What I appreciated most was not the case studies, but the fact that Mel Y. Chen had the courage to question the very basis of academic writing, the complex web of authority, methodology, epistemology and ontology that determines who can write what. So what happens when you approach race and disability from within cripistemology? More than a welcome collapse of linear time (of narrative) and hierarchy (in all its forms). While the writing is sometimes nebulous (says my philosophy training) and hard to follow (says my form of neurodivergence), the experiment (or rather, necessary form of future writing) is a success and I can't wait to see what Chen creates next.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of particular interest to those who, like me, are exploring the limits of language & the possibilities / frustrations of/“over”/with opacity. Chen provides a set of perspectives that center racial capitalism, climate violence, and settler colonialism in what we call “cripistemology” while also challenging readers to question the centrality of the thinkable and thought - the cognitive itself - in “scholarly” discourse. Everything is unmoored.

[Sara Hosseini]

همون اوایلش تو دلم گفتم اوه اوه اینکه مث باتلر اعصاب‌خردکنه خوندنش. فرداش کاشف به عمل اومد شاگرد باتلر بوده.

[Cana McGhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

i don't think this book worked for me?

i appreciate the deliberate experimentation with writing style and organization as Chen threads several needles around porosity and the multiple biocultural/political valences of terms like toxic, toxicity, and intoxication. but im honestly still not totally sure what "chemical intimacy" (the key terminological intervention) entails and how Chen intends for others to embrace their term. my main issue is that a lot of the explanations of work and ideas expressed by Chen's peer thinkers feels really compressed (it's a short book) and jumpy, such that things get blurry, but not in what i find to be a generative way. the moments where Chen slowed down and wrote through their personal anecdotes or described particular phenomena/histories in more depth more proved more impactful and encouraged you as a reader to embrace the "slow time" endorsed in chapter 2. i have both so many thoughts and no thoughts at all. kind of a borderline alienating reading experience.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first non fiction read in a while - one that had a lot of promise for me but ultimately had too much to say!

Chen’s discussion of slow development having resonances across economic/cultural colonial development, and also childhood development and intellectual disability, had huge resonances for me and was kind of a lightbulb moment. I thought the discussion of the children with Down syndrome and the way they were assumed to be genetic throwbacks from a previous “”more primitive “” Asian race was also illuminatory into western racial science at that time (1870s). Chen also has an interested but unjudgemental view into things like drug use I also liked the discussion of Zombies as disabled beings - shuffling, unable to excrete or speak, a threat to healthy bodied normal people !
However in between there was just too much!! And it’s a short book so we kept moving on! The most interesting parts continuously were the texts referenced, and I came out not knowing really what chemical intimacy was, or wishing we’d spoken less about intoxication and more about environmental racism…
Chen also committed my personal worst crime which is to call things Queer when, why??? A list of things called queer: Predatory mortgage lending practices of the early 00’s, miscegenation between Australian Aboriginal and Chinese people, zombies . ….

Redeemed by an afterword which had some of the best writings on Covid-19 I’ve read yet. It’s hard to write about it even though the Event should be part of our cultural fodder by now!

[Nora]

liked the general idea of this but chapter 3 was kinda poorly chosen as our reading for the class i read this for, bc there was so much background that was referenced to but had been given in chapter 2.