Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

Perverse Modernities

by Mel Y. Chen

In 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 toy 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.

Mel Y. Chen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Animacies is a book about 'reworldings,' as Mel Y. Chen traces the myriad ways that objects and affects move through and reshape zones of possibility for political transformation and queer resistance to neoliberal biopolitics. At the same time, Animacies itself generates such transformations: grounded in a generous, expansive understanding of queer of color and disability/crip critique, Chen's study reworlds or reorients disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, animal studies, affect studies, and linguistics. In all of these critical spaces, Animacies might be described as the breathtaking and revivifying book we have been waiting for."—Robert McRuer, author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability

"This ambitious transdisciplinary analysis of the relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and matter charts a compelling and innovative rethinking of the biopolitics of 'animacy.' Mel Y. Chen animates animacy, a concept of sentience hierarchy derived in linguistics, to offer a far-ranging critique that implicates disability studies, queer of color critique, and postcolonial theory. The generative result is a timely and crucial intervention that foregrounds the oft-occluded import of race and sex in the rapidly growing fields of posthumanist theory, new materialisms, and animal studies."—Jasbir K. Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction, Queer, Philosophy, Academic, Race, Academia

297 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

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

[Coral Opal · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book! It was certainly a rather difficult to read given my lack of significant background in various fields (affect theory, linguistics, to name a few), but I did generally enjoy it.


(Spoilers for theory ahead I guess??)


The particular highlight for me was chapter 3: Queer Animality because I find analyses of historical conceptions of race very interesting (cough The History of White People cough) and I also found it far easier to parse. I also thoroughly enjoyed chapter 5: Lead's Racial Matters and found Chen's assertion that lead is not merely associated with China but is racialized as Chinese super interesting.

I am also very much a fan of explicit rejection of neoliberal atomization and conceptions of human exceptionalism, so that was generally lovely.


However... this book was very hard to get through at some points. The density of the text made it a very difficult read without a ton of experience in myriad fields and I almost stopped after chapter 2 because of how rough it was (though I am glad that I didn't). Chapter 2: Queer Animation, though, is what I want to focus on though because I was so interested in it!!!! An exploration and analysis of reclamation from a partially linguistic standpoint while very much taking into consideration the increasing institutional palatability of "queer" as well as it's white, assimilationist tendencies is so interesting to me!!! But the execution of the chapter really made it a chore. (This is, of course, influenced by my lack of background in cognitive linguistics.) Chen's writing often felt simply impenetrable to me (and I certainly understand that in discussions of theory with which I am not familiar), but the inaccessibility to the linguistic discussion felt insurmountable. It also seemed very drawn out and sorta just words on the page? Like I don't particularly see the point of some of that focus or the means by which it was executed.


Overall, though, I enjoyed this book. I am happy I read it, and I largely had a good time doing so :)


Edit: looked at another review and realized something I has missed. Chen seems to try to take a neutral stance on mercury causing autism which is, y'know, not very cool. I found Chen's treatment of autism generally rather good, and I think I read her discussion more as an association with toxicity than an actual linkage? Something to be aware of.

Edit edit: something I had originally chosen not to mention, but want to now: Chen uses the phrase "he or she"? Like not in a quote?? I don't care enough to look back and find the instance (and there is of course the possibility that I misunderstood), but like????

Edit edit edit: I can't find this now? So maybe I imagined it? Idk

[Anh H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took Mel for Intro to Fem at Cal several years back. Interesting prof. Even after all these years, Im still trying to grasp with the inversion play of deconstructionist. In this case, it is about the inversion of life/death in the same vein as other binaries (gender, sex, race, ableism,etc). Animacy refers to indeterminate state of/or between lifeness and lifelessness, a force of biopolitics. The chapter on toxic animacies, when Mel traces the racialization, sexualization of lead is a better way to start the book, since it provides more contemporary analysis. I find the theorizing part in the beginning dense and requirea much rereading (and background reading on deconstruction, linguistics, and philosophy) to fully understand it. overall, this is a good dive into how critical study can bridge animal studies with gender/race/sexuality/differently able studies.

[Sarah Cavar]

Echoing Emmy Nordstrom Higdon's review –– loved this book up until Chen takes an apparently-neutral stance in the "debate" as to whether or not fetal exposure to toxicity and/or vaccines "cause" autism. This is, in short, completely inexcusable, from anyone, but especially from a critical disability studies scholar of Chen's stature. I do not expect ever to cite or recommend this text.

[Eugenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Thomas the Tank Engine chapter is excellent (no, I'm not trolling: there's a very clever and thoughtful analysis of the coverage of the 2007 scandal surrounding lead-tained paint in imported toys). The intro is more challenging than the chapters, and the final sections are more accessible still, in part because the linguistic analysis is so detailed and admirably technical that even the diagrams make it slow going.

[Lyra Montoya · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first 2 chapters on linguistics were interesting but not particularly my preference for approach though I understand their presence and inclusion in the beginning. The following portions on animals and then queer and trans affect was really interesting, in particular with the through line of neutering/ the neuter/ a neuter. The continuation of this into the discussion of lead and its reidentification around the 2008 lead painted toys and the related anxieties around homosexuality and faggotry in conjunction/collusion/ confusion with cognitive impedement was a particularly strong link following the inquiry into the animacy of the queer/homosexual/transexual. Toxicity as a concept in the final chapter read as a strong connector between queer affect and forms of embrace and embodiment of the grotesque in various manners.

While reading the book, I felt that the logic and organization and structure of the writing was all very clear yet very subtle in its affect, yet when I tried to describe it to a friend the subtleties somehow escaped me and my capacity to convey them.

[Etienne RP · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kiss That Frog

“Inanimate objects, have you then a soul / that clings to our soul and forces it to love?,” wondered Alphonse de Lamartine in his poem “Milly or the Homeland.” In Animacies, Mel Chen answers positively to the first part of this question, although the range of affects she considers is much broader than the lovely attachments that connected the French poet to his home village. As she sees it, “matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise ‘wrong’ animates cultural life in important ways.” Anima, the Latin word from which animacy derives, is defined as air, breath, life, mind, or soul. Inanimate objects are supposed to be devoid of such characteristics. In De Anima, Aristotle granted a soul to animals and to plants as well as to humans, but he denied that stones could have one. Modern thinkers have been more ready to take the plunge. As Chen notes, “Throughout the humanities and social sciences, scholars are working through posthumanist understandings of the significance of stuff, objects, commodities, and things.” Various concepts have been proposed to break the great divide between humans and nonhumans and between life and inanimate things, as the titles of recent essays indicate: “Vibrant Matter” (Jane Bennett), “Excitable Matter” (Natasha Myers), “Bodies That Matter” (Judith Butler), “The Social Life of Things” (Arjun Appadurai), “The Politics of Life Itself” (Nikolas Rose),“Parliament of Things” (Bruno Latour). Many argue that objects are imbued with agency, or at least an ability to evoke some sort of change or response in individual humans or in an entire society. However, each scholar also possesses an individual interpretation of the meaning of agency and the true capacity of material objects to have personalities of their own. In Animacies, Mel Chen makes her own contribution to this debate by pushing it in a radical way: writing from the perspective of queer studies, she argues that degrees of animacy, the agency of life and things, cannot be dissociated from the parameters of sexuality and race and is imbricated with health and disability issues as well as environmental and security concerns.

Intersectionality

Recent scholarship has seen a proliferation of dedicated cultural studies bearing the name of their subfield as an identity banner in a rainbow coalition: feminist studies, queer studies, Asian American studies, critical race studies, disability studies, animal studies… In a bold gesture of transdisciplinarity, Mel Chen’s Animacies contributes to all of them. The author doesn’t limit herself to one section of the identity spectrum: in her writing, intersectionality cuts across lines of species, race, ability, sexuality, and ethnicity. It even includes in its reach inanimate matter such as pieces of furniture (a couch plays a key part in the narrative) and toxic chemicals such as mercury and lead. And as each field yields its own conceptualization, Mel Chen draws her inspiration from what she refers to as “queer theory,” “crip theory,” “new materialisms,” “affect theory,” and “cognitive linguistics.” What makes the author confident enough to contribute to such a broad array of fields, methods, and objects? The reason has to do with the way identity politics is played in American universities. To claim legitimacy in a field of cultural studies, a scholar has to demonstrate a special connexion with the domain under consideration. As an Asian American for instance, Mel Chen cannot claim expertise in African American studies; but she can work intersectionally by building on her identity as a “queer woman of color” to enter into a productive dialogue with African American feminists. The same goes with other identity categories: persons with disabilities have a personal connexion to abled and disabled embodiment, while non-disabled persons can only reflect self-consciously about their ableism. Even pet lovers, as we will see, have to develop a special relationship with their furry friends in order to contribute to (critical) animal studies.

Using this yardstick, Mel Chen qualifies by all counts to her transdisciplinary endeavor. She identifies herself as Asian American, queer, and suffering from a debilitating illness. She gives many autobiographical details to buttress her credentials. She mentions that her parents were immigrants from China who couldn’t speak proper English and used singular and plural or gendered pronominal forms indifferently. She grew up in a white-dominated town in the Midwest and was used to hearing racist slurs, such as people yelling “SARS!” at her—this was before a US president publicly stigmatized the “Chinese virus.” She shows that prejudice against the Chinese has a long history in the United States. The book includes racist illustrations dating from the nineteenth century featuring Chinese immigrants with a hair “tail” and animal traits that make them look like rodents. Chen analyzes the racial fears of lead poisoning in the “Chinese lead toy scare” of 2007 when millions of Chinese exported toys made by Mattel were recalled due to overdoses of lead paint. She exhumes from the documentary and film archives the figure of Fu Manchu, a turn-of-the-century personification of the Yellow Peril, and proposes her own slant on this character that is said to provide “the bread and butter of Asian American studies.” Mel Chen’s self-reported identity as queer is also documented. She mentions her “Asian off-gendered form” when describing herself, and frequently refers to her own queerness. In an autobiographical vignette, she designates her partner as a “she” and puts the pronoun “her” in quotes when she refers to her girlfriend (Chen’s own bio on her academic webpage refers to her as “they”). Her scholarship builds on the classics of queer studies such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and she feels especially close to “queer women of color” theorizing. She exposes to her readers some unconventional gender and sexuality performances, such as the category of “stone butch” designating a lesbian who displays traditional masculinity traits and does not allow herself to be touched by her partner during lovemaking (to draw a comparison, Chen adds that many men, homo or heterosexual, do not like to be penetrated.)

Feeling Toxic

But it is on her medical condition that Mel Chen provides the most details. Moving to the “risky terrain of the autobiographical,” she mentions that she was diagnosed as suffering from “multiple chemical sensitivity” and “heavy metal poisoning.” This condition causes her to alternate between bouts of morbid depression and moments of “incredible wakefulness.” She makes a moving description of walking in the street without her filter mask and being in high alert for toxins and chemicals coming her way: navigating the city without her chemical respirator exposes her to multiple dangers, as each passerby with a whiff of cologne or traces of a chemical sunscreen may precipitate a strong allergic reaction. In such condition, which affects her physically and mentally, she prefers to stay at home and lie on her couch without seeing anybody. But Mel Chen doesn’t dwell on her personal condition in order to pose as a victim or to elicit compassion from her readers. Firstly, she feels privileged to occupy an academic position as gender and women studies professor at UC Berkeley: “I, too, write from the seat and time of empire,” she confesses, and this position of self-assumed privilege may explain why she doesn’t feel empowered enough to contribute to postcolonial studies or to decolonial scholarship. More importantly, she considers her disability as an opportunity, not a calamity. Of course, the fact that she cannot sustain many everyday toxins limits her life choices and capabilities. But toxicity opens up a new world of possibilities, a new orientation to people, to objects and to mental states. As we are invited to consider, “queer theories are especially rich for thinking about the affects of toxicity.”

This is where the love affair with her sofa comes in. When she retreats from the toxicity of the outside world, she cuddles in the arms of her couch and cannot be disturbed from her prostration. “The couch and I are interabsorbent, interporous, and not only because the couch is made of mammalian skin.” They switch sides, as object becomes animate and subject becomes inanimate. This is not only fetishism: a heightened sense of perception of human/object relations allows her to develop a “queer phenomenology” out of her mercurial experience. New modes of relationality affirm the agency of the matter that we live among and break it down to the level of the molecular. Mel Chen criticizes the way Deleuze and Guattari use the word “molecularity” in a purely abstract manner, considering “verbal particles” as well as subjectivities in their description of the molar and the molecular. By contrast, she takes the notion of the molecular at face value, describing the very concrete effects toxic molecules have on people and their being in the world. These effects are mediated by race, class, age, ability, and gender. In her description of the Chinese lead toy panic of 2007, she argues that the lead painted onto children’s toys imported to the United States was racialized as Chinese, whereas its potential victims were depicted as largely white. She reminds us that exposure to environmental lead affects primarily black and impoverished children as well as native Indian communities, with debilitating effects over the wellbeing and psychosocial development of children. Also ignored are the toxic conditions of labor and manufacture in Chinese factories operating mainly for Western consumers. The queer part of her narrative comes with her description of white middle-class parents panicking at the sight of their child licking their train toy Thomas the Tank Engine. In American parents’ view, Thomas is a symbol of masculinity, and straight children shouldn’t take pleasure in putting this manly emblem into their mouth. But as Chen asks: “What precisely is wrong with the boy licking the train?”

Queer Licking

In addition to her self-description as Asian, queer, and disabled, Mel Chen also claims the authority of the scholar, and it is on the academic front, not at the testimonial or autobiographical level, that she wants her Animacies to be registered. Trained as “a queer feminist linguist with a heightened sensitivity to the political and disciplinary mobility of terms,” she borrows her flagship concept from linguistics. Linguists define animacy as “the quality of liveness, sentience, or humanness of a noun or noun phrase that has grammatical, often syntactic, consequences.” Animacy describes a hierarchical ordering of types of entities that positions able-bodied humans at the top and that runs from human to animal, to vegetable, and to inanimate object such as stones. Animacy operates in a continuum, and degrees of animacies are linked to existing registers of species, race, sex, ability, and sexuality. Humans can be animalized, as in racist slurs but also during lovemaking. “Vegetable” can describe the state of a terminally-ill person. As for stones, we already encountered the stone butch. Conversely, animals can be humanized, and even natural phenomena such as hurricanes can be gendered and personified (as with Katrina.) Language acts may contain and order many kinds of matter, including lifeless matter and abject objects. Dehumanization and objectification involve the removal of qualities considered as human and are linked to regimes of biopower or to necropolitics by which the sovereign decides who may live and who must die.

Critical Pet Studies

According to “Critical Pet Theory” (there appears to be such a thing), scholars have to demonstrate a special bond with their pet in order to contribute to the field of animal studies. Talking in abstract of a cat or a dog won’t do: it has to be this particular dog of a particular breed (Donna Harraway’s Australian shepherd ‘Cayenne’), or this small female cat that Jacques Derrida describes in The Animal That Therefore I Am. Talking, as Deleuze and Guattari did, of the notion of “becoming-animal” with “actual unconcern for actual animals” (as Chen reproaches them in a footnote) is clearly a breach in pet studies’ normative ethics. Even Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species scholarship when he failed to become curious about what his cat might actually be doing, feeling, or thinking during that morning when he emerged unclothed from the bathroom, feeling somehow disturbed by the cat’s gaze. Mel Chen’s choice of companion species is in line with her self-cultivated queerness: she begins the acknowledgments section “with heartfelt thanks to the toads,” as well as “to the many humans and domesticated animals populating the words in this book.” The close-up picture of a toad on the book cover is not easily recognizable, as its bubonic glands, swollen excrescences, and slimy texture seem to belong both to the animal kingdom and to the realm of inert matter. Animacy, of course, summons the animal. But Mel Chen is not interested in contributing to pet studies: she advocates the study of wild and unruly beasts or, as she writes, a “feral” approach to disciplinarity and scholarship. “Thinking ferally” involves poaching among disciplines, raiding archives, rejecting disciplinary homes, and playing with repugnance and aversion in order to disturb and to unsettle. Yes, the toad, this “nightingale of the mud” as the French poet would have said, is an adequate representation of this book’s project.

[samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction: Animating Animacy
• “threshold of ‘recovery’”
• I began to reconsider the precise conditions of the application of “life” and “death,” the working ontologies and hierarchicalized bodies of interest.
• If the continued rethinking of life and death’s proper boundaries yields surprising redefinitions, then there are consequences for the “stuff,” the “matter,” of contemporary biopolitics—including important and influential concepts such as Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, the “living dead,” and Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life.”2
• This book puts pressure on such biopolitical factors, organized around a multipoint engagement with a concept called animacy.
• Animacies interrogates how the fragile division between animate and inanimate—that is, beyond human and animal—is relentlessly produced and policed and maps important political consequences of that distinction
• Animacy as that which has gone “undertheorized”
• It is a generative asset that the world animacy…bears no single standard definition
• How does animacy work linguistically?
o What if nonhuman animals, or humans stereotyped as passive, such as people with cognitive or physical disabilities, enter the calculus of animacy: what happens then?
• Using animacy as a central construct, rather than, say, ‘life’ or ‘liveliness’ helps us theorize current anxieties around the production of humanness in contemporary times, particularly wrt humanity’s partners in definitional crime: animality (as its analogue or limit), nationality, race, security, environment, and sexuality.
• Animate, Latin etymology: “ad. L. animātus filled with life, also, disposed, inclined, f. animāre to breathe, to quicken; f. anima air, breath, life, soul, mind.”
• We might find in this lexical soup some tentative significations pertaining to materialization, negativity, passion, liveness, and a possible trace of quickened breath OKAY
• Construals of life and death
o Aristotle’s De Anima subtly presages the precise status of animals and things, proposes that “soul” could be an animating principle for humans, animals, vegetables, but not “dead” matter such as stones
o Such an animating principle avowedly refused a priori divisions between mind and body
o I will insist in this book that stones and other inanimates definitively occupy a scalar position (near zero) on the animacy hierarchy and that they are not excluded from it altogether and are not only treated as animacy’s binary opposite.
o Jane Bennett, in her book Vibrant Matter, extends affect to nonhuman bodies, organic or inorganic, averring that affect is part and parcel, not an additive component, of bodies’ materiality
o Recent critical theory has considered the believed-to-be-given material world as more than provisionally constituted, illusorily bounded, and falsely segregated to the realm of the subjective.
o what are the creditable bodies of import, those bodies whose lives or deaths are even in the field of discussion? If we should rethink such bodies— and I argue that we should—then how might we think differently if nonhuman animals (whom both Haraway and Latour point out have been ostensibly, but in fact not neatly, bracketed into “nature,” de- spite already being hybrids) and even inanimate objects were to inch into the biopolitical fold?
o If contemporary biopolitics is already troubling the living with the dead, this book, in a way, continues to crash the party with protagonists which hail from animal studies (monkeys) and science studies (pollutant molecules), bringing humanism’s dirt back into today’s al- ready messy biopolitical imbroglio.
o Jasbir Puar has revisited questions of life and death while working along the lines of what she calls a “bio-necro” political analysis which “conceptually acknowledges [Foucauldian] biopower’s direct activity in death, while remaining bound to the optimization of life, and [Mbembe’s] necropolitics’ nonchalance toward death even as it seeks out killing as a primary aim.” In this, she provides potent revising of the place of new homonormativities in geopolitical negotiations of biopolitics. Indeed, the givens of death are already racialized, sexualized, and, as I will argue, animated in specific biopolitical formations.
o Since biopower as described by Michel Foucault is thought in two ways—at the level of government, and at the level of individual (human) subjects—how inanimate objects and nonhuman animals participate in the regimes of life (making live) and coerced death (killing) are integral to the effort to understand how biopower works and what its materials are.
o The anima, animus, animal, and animate are, I argue, not vagaries or templatic zones of undifferentiated matter, but in fact work as complexly racialized and indeed humanized notions.
• Animate Currents
o The stakes of revisiting animacy are real and immediate, particularly as the coherence of “the body” is continually contested.
o Yamamoto’s definition of animacy
 The concept of “animacy” can be regarded as some kind of assumed cognitive scale extending from human through animal to inanimate. In addition to the life concept itself, concepts related to the life concept—such as locomotion, sentiency, etc.—can also be incorporated into the cognitive domain of “animacy.” . . . A common reflection of “animacy” in a language is a distinction between animate and in- animate, and analogically between human and non-human in some measure. However, animacy is not simply a matter of the semantic feature [+-alive], and its linguistic manifestation is somewhat com- plicated. Our cognition of animacy and the extent to which we in- vest a certain body (or body of entities) with humanness or animate- ness influence various levels of human language a great deal
o AFFECT DEF: For the purposes of this book, I define affect without necessary restriction, that is, I include the notion that affect is something not necessarily corporeal and that it potentially engages many bodies at once, rather than (only) being contained as an emotion within a single body. Affect inheres in the capacity to affect and be affected. Yet I am also interested in the relatively subjective, individually held “emotion” or “feeling.” While I prioritize the former, I also attend to the latter (with cautions about its true possessibility) precisely because, in the case of environmental illness or multiple chemical sensitivity, the entry of an exterior object not only influences the further affectivity of an intoxicated human body, but “emotions” that body: it lends it particular emotions or feelings as against others. I take my cue from Sara Ahmed’s notion of “affective economies,” in which specific emotions play roles in binding subjects and objects.
• it is my intention and design that the archives themselves feralize, giving up any idealization about their domestication, refusing to answer whether they constitute proper or complete coverage. At the same time, I take care to contextualize (whether temporally or geopolitically) the “thing” under discussion, since I have no interest in running roughshod over historical particularity.
• Thinking and moving ferally constitutes a risk, both to the borders of disciplinarity and to the author who is metonymically feralized along with the text. FERLIZE THE ARCHIVE
Chapter 1: Language and Mattering Humans
• Chapter is about the alchemical magic of language as that which animates. Language’s fundamental means, I suggest, is something called animacy, a concept most deeply explored in cognitive linguistics.
• Introducing Animacy
o For linguists, animacy is the quality of liveness, sentience, or human- ness of a noun or noun phrase that has grammatical, often syntactic, consequences. Bernard Comrie calls animacy an “extralinguistic conceptual property” that manifests in “a range of formally quite different ways . . . in the structure of different languages.”
o Mutsumi Yamamoto notes that, by necessity, no treatment of animacy can be limited to the linguistic, for animacy lies within and without.
o Does animacy slip out of language’s bounds, or does language slip out of animacy’s bounds? In this book, the slippage of animacy in relation to its successive co-conspirators will be a repeating, and in my view most productive, refrain.
o Many scholars credit animacy’s first serious appearance in linguistics to Michael Silverstein’s idea of an “animacy hierarchy,” which appears in a comparative study of indigenous North American Chinookan, Australian Dyirbal, and other indigenous Australian languages published in 1976.
 Ergative languages: the subject of a transitive verb receives ergative case marking, unlike the object of the transitive verb or the subject of an intransitive verb.
 Accusative languages
 But many ergative languages have a split wherein both ergative and accusative markings are possible; certain expressions can be rendered either way
 This split might be the result of animacy: Silverstein observed that less animate subjects were more likely to receive special ergative marking, in a kind of communicative reassurance that such types of subjects could indeed possess the agentive or controlling capacities required to do the action provided by the verb.
 More animate subjects did not need this marking and could receive regular nominative (unmarked) case.
 His observations resulted in a suggested “hierarchy of animacy” from inanimate to third, second, and first personhood
o Humans:
 adult > nonadult; male/masc gender > female/fem gender; free > enslaved; able-bodied > disabled; linguistically intact > pre- linguistic/linguistically impaired; familiar (kin/named) > unfamiliar (nonkin/unnamed); proximate (1p & 2p pronouns) > remote (3p pronouns).
o Animals:
 higher/larger animals > lower/smaller animals > insects; whole animal > body part;
o Inanimates:
 motile/active > nonmotile/nonactive; natural > manmade; count > mass;
o Incorporeals:
 abstract concepts, natural forces, states of affairs, states of being, emotions, qualities, activities, events, time periods, institutions, regions, diverse intellectual objects.
o Studies of linguistic animacy tend to culminate in the idea that for all of animacy’s many component features, their significance is collective: it is their derivation, or the contextual importance of some fac- tors over others, that results in the most likely effector of the possible action denoted by the verb. EFFECTOR OF THE POSSIBLE ACTION DENOTED BY THE VERB
o That is to say, I read this hierarchy, treated by linguists as an avowedly conceptual organization of worldly and abstract things with grammatical consequence, as naturally also an ontology of affect
• Making Macaca
o In what follows, I examine how the semantics and pragmatics of objectification and dehumanization work through and within systems of race, animality, and sexuality. Insults, shaming language, slurs, and injurious speech can be thought of as tools of objectification, but these also, in crucial ways, paradoxically rely on animacy as they objectify, thereby providing possibilities for reanimation
o Senator calls a videotaper “macaca” the means he chose to do so were un- mistakably vicious (and apparently fatal, in the case of his candidacy).
o Animacy figures in this event in several senses, from the animality implied by the insult itself, to the “viral” nature of the incident’s clip on the Internet, which took on (as is said about such widely dispersed videos) a life of its own. OKAY VIRAL
o For all its facets, this very brief interchange precisely hinged on the racial politics of animality
o (macaca is a type of monkey)
o For his part, Sidarth (videographer) summed up the dense interchange with Allen by addressing the salience of the nonhuman animal at its center: he submitted a three-word “essay” to a selective seminar at the University of Virginia: “I am macaca.” (He did not write “I am Macaca,” which would have the effect of individuating the type into a proper name.) This declarative statement, referring to a positive identification with a previous nomination that became a public event, an identification that confronts its racist deployment while being categorically false, gets simultaneously at the dizzying is-and-is-not politics of the reclaiming of insults, as well as at the shared taxonomic heritage of humans and macaques. It also invites us to reconsider the structures that make that simple equation either work or falter.
• Turtle’s Eggs and Other Nonhumans
o I turn now to another example to further illustrate how dehumanizing insults hinge on the salient invocation of the nonhuman animal.
o Jimmy Lai calls Li Peng (Chinese Premier) a turtle’s egg (implies a bastard provenance); patently absurd.
o “UTTERANCE”
o In effectively being urged by Lai (or the citation of Lai) to consider Li Peng the “son of a turtle egg with zero iq,” a conceptualizer (regard- less of desire) is prompted to reconcile the two, that is, to form a cognitive blend between “Li Peng” and the conceptualization prompted by the noun phrase “son of a turtle egg with zero iq.”
• A note on Diagrams
o Viewed as suspect in its association with positivist science, or at best eccentric, and understood as comparatively coercive, final in intent, and static in meaning, the diagram occupies a peculiar place
• Being Vegetable: Animate Subjects and Abject Objects
o What is “macaca”? What is “I”? What, finally, is it to be “human”?
o We have seen two examples of dehumanization by way of juxta- position and blending with relatively animate and (arguably) inanimate substances, a macaca and a turtle’s egg
 what background assumptions or structures must be present, or serve as support, for these dehumanizations to do their imaginative work?
 perhaps the most unsparing dehumanization is an approximation toward death. Critical disability and feminist studies have raised biopolitical questions about certain living states of being that have been marked as equivalent to death: death was one of the many “bleak” futures prescribed by strangers, doctors, and fellow patients to the critical disability theorist Alison Kafer upon apprehending her body.
 A second form of dehumanization is transformation (or, indeed, imaginative transmogrification: the transformation into a grotesque or fantastic appearance, which I consider in the “Animals” part of this book), though each form (removal of qualities and active transformation) readily imputes the other in the extended analysis.
o Thought and Cognition
 I refute the recent moves to evacuate substance from language, for in- stance, the notion that language is simply dematerialized
 Language is as much alive as it is dead, and it is certainly material.
Chapter 2: Queer Animation
• How might a term cast off its dehumanization? That is, how might a historically objectifying slur like queer be reanimated?
• A queer word
o we have to ask whence the queer that got “reclaimed.”
o Butler’s discussion of queer’s iterability in and through its traumatic history
o OED relies on documented written use
o But there is also political-linguistic histories drawn by queer scholarship
o in 20c it exists as noun and then adjectivally to mean “strange, odd, peculiar”
o But in criminals slang it did mean bad, contemptible worthless
o Two lexemes emerge: these two words are homophones or otherwise semantically remote
 raises questions about the social, ontological, and interpretive gaps between normative language and “criminals’ slang”
o Increased nominal senses of queer
• Fraught Institutionalizations, Fraught Reclamations
o Gloria Anzaldúa explicitly refused to separate queerness from race, preferring mestiza queer. She had an incisive critique of the term’s relations: both queer and mestiza( je) are crossroads, but queer can erase race.
 she observes that queerness is not threatened by inspecificity but by whiteness itself
o Sedgwick alleged that queer’s denotative meaning cannot simply be treated independently of its many connotations (what she calls “social and personal histories of exclusion, violence, defiance, excitement”).
o Given this complexity, to say that queer was “reclaimed” (as one might say in an introductory queer studies or sociolinguistics course), regardless of its status in either institution or populace, is not only somewhat reductive; it is to promulgate a certain kind of linguistic politics. It raises the questions: what event denotes the achievement of that reclamation? Its first attempts? Its widespread use by younger generations of a group? The quality of its affectivity? Its use by the largest possible population beyond the group’s borders?
• Lexical Acts
o It is a flattening aspiration to hope for a conclusory stage of the past participial “reclaimed” to describe the linguistic neutering success of an entire population
o David M. Halperin writes, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.”
o In linguistic terms, we might say that adjectival queer’s function is to modify an attached (implicit or explicit) noun concept, in particular, to select the peripheral aspects of meaning of, say, concepts such as heterosexuality or sexuality.
o Adjectival queer therefore acts to shift meaning to the side of a normative interpretation, away from meanings associated with the NOTIONAL CENTER
• Tracking Queer Animacies
o queer becomes at once a noun and an adjective here, as well as an action VERB. If queer was previously understood to be a “dehumanizing” slur figuring its subjects as abject or “lesser than,” this formerly “objectifying” term has taken a life of its own, with the power to animate some other object
• Queer’s Many Senses, or Grammars of Forgetting
• I want to end by insisting on queer beyond its affectively neutralized—neutered—senses. What are the possibilities of rejoinder, or re- vitalization, for this contested term if it still has the capacity to galvanize but also to damage? And who or what is given the power to do such a speaking-back-to?
Ch 3 Queer Animality
• This chapter considers in particular how animality, the “stuff ” of animal nature that sometimes sticks to animals, sometimes bleeds back onto textures of humanness.
• Animal language
o Given the segregating terms of linguistic animacy, it is important to understand how the sentience of animals is assessed, especially with regard to its primary criteria: language and methods of communica- tion. For instance, Derrida’s famous essay “And Say the Animal Re- sponded?” explores the possibility of nonhuman-animal “response” as distinguished from “reacti

[Narges]

"Animacies offers a dizzying array of field engagements and approaches to writing. If early in the introduction Chen describes the book’s novel contribution as bringing the concept of animacy in relation to “queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory,” the text also reveals the author’s engagement with performance studies, psychoanalysis, affect theory, medical anthropology, security studies, science studies, and linguistics."
Who is the audiece for this book?

[saizine · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Recently, after reaching a threshold of “recovery” from a chronic illness… I found myself deeply suspicious of my own reassuring statements to my anxious friends that I was feeling more alive again. Surely I had been no less alive when I was more sick, except under the accountings of an intuitive and immediately problematic notion of “liveliness” and other kinds of “freedom” and “agency”.'

A fascinating work, drawing on disability studies, animal studies, queer theory, biopolitics and linguistics to expand cultural studies. A vast amount of theoretical work is included here, sometimes at such a speed that you almost miss intricacies, but going back and re-reading sections is a pleasure. I particularly enjoyed the chapters “Queer Animation” ('How might a term cast off its dehumanization? That is, how might a historically objectifying slur like queer be reanimated? And… why are some people (including academics) still using queer with regularity?'), the subsections “Transmogrification” and “Trans-connections” from “Animals, Sex, and Transubstantiation”, and especially the sections on metals, “Lead’s Racial Matters” ('It is instructive to trace lead’s imbrication in the rhetorics of political sovereignty and globalized capital, remaining attentive to what is present and what is absent') and “Following Mercurial Affect” ('This shift concerns the role of metaphor in biopolitics, since the seemingly metaphorical productions of cultural expressions of toxicity are not necessarily more concrete than the literal ones, which are themselves composed of complex cultures of immunity thinking').

[Katie King]

Wonderful book, drawing all the threads of our semester together!

[Eileen]

Hmph ... I'm a little sad to say this but this book was honestly kind of disappointing. Big topics but I feel like the case studies and analysis were either so general that they were obvious or so specific that they came off as a stretch. Everything's written in that particular academic language / tone that makes things way more convoluted than they actually are.

In their introduction, Mel writes that the book "draws upon recent debates about sexuality, race, environment, and affect to consider how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise 'wrong' animates cultural life in important ways." Okay, straightforward enough. But then they begin to explain the term "animacy" and there's such a slurry of definitions and qualifications that by the end I wasn't even sure what it was at all, other than a convenient way to spotlight slipperiness in theory and trouble liberalism's life / death binary (as well as its historically raced and gendered animal hierarchies). Maybe that was the point? Or maybe I'm missing something. Either way, it could've been said far more succinctly.

Part I ("Words") is almost exclusively linguistic. There's an interesting historical account of the term "queer," but other than that the section is fairly basic. Part II ("Animals") is more like what I initially expected of the book, as it addresses how questions of animacy are often entangled with questions of race and sexuality but again — it's not all that revelatory. Some of Mel's more contentious arguments (e.g. that "neutering or spaying animals is a preeminent queering device") are unfortunately underdeveloped, brought up more as punchy afterthoughts than concepts to be fully excavated.

Part III ("Metals") was probably my favorite. The first chapter in this section covers the 2007 "lead scare" involving Chinese-manufactured toys, which was super fascinating. How the "victims" were white American consumers rather than the low-wage factory workers who made the toys, how lead poisoning is set against the IQ scale (a pseudoscientific, racist thing in itself), how the origins of the crisis were traced to some abstract notion of "China" rather than the capital flows that made such products ubiquitous in the first place (e.g. US manufacturers offshoring labor). Would been fruitful, I think, to put this in conversation with the 2014 Flint water crisis, but Animacies was published in 2012, so ...

A nugget of insight from Mel's afterword: "Well beyond rejecting either secularism or spirituality, I wish for an ethics of care and sensitivity that extends far from humans' (or the Human's) own borders." I've been thinking about this a lot, the potential dangers of humanist discourse. Like, what does it mean to build our politics around "human rights," for instance, when the designation of humanity (and also of "rights," for that matter) is so fraught?

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Animacies is one of the denser books on new materialism and adjacent fields that one can pick up, which is not an inherently bad thing. Chen's training in linguistic really shows through though and makes some sections of the text feel more difficult. I was enjoying this text until, as some reviewers point out, the end of chapter 6, which made me wonder whether Chen has since reflected on and considered the impact of citing three texts about mercury in vaccines causing autism that have been famously debunked. In fact, that entire subsection, "Affective Futures", felt uncomfortable to read, in part because the obscure wording often resulted in a struggle to understand what Chen was endorsing. The conclusion was another weak point of the book, the relationship between an oil spill and Ponyo felt unconvincing, or at least unclear. There are many ideas in the text that I will definitely carry forward in my thinking, but it is an imperfect text that I think needs to be more critically discussed than it seems like it has been thus far.

[Wei Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting expansion of the idea of queerness from its origin in queer communities to the much wider concept of animacy. I think the book also functions as a really good argument - through the different ways in traces animacies from the level of language to bodies and even molecules - for thinking about queer theory beyond the context of its origin.

Sometimes the writing was a bit difficult to follow, but maybe it's part of Mel Chen's experiment in writing in a way that works more like a picture than straighforward language (which makes me think of the diagrams they use and argue for in the early chapters).

Overall, though, I really liked the book's transdisciplinary approach - I never thought I would find linguistics interesting, for instance. The chapter on toxicity is a huge highlight.

[Kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

there are aspects of Animacies that are really important contributions, and this book advances the conversation on animacy, animality, and race quite significantly. I will definitely be drawing on Chen's work in the future. But the conversation concerning "materialism" (and the wide net of engagement with "new materialisms") just seems really out of place to me and quite messy conceptually. The book's methodology is pretty much in the range of Foucauldian discourse/media analysis and conversations concerning biopolitics, and I think I would have been more convinced if it had stuck with a theoretical scaffolding that more readily fit with that approach.

[amyleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second read of this fantastic book and gosh it still holds up. How bodies, human/nonhuman, racialized, gendered, queer, toxic, are mapped into biopolitical categories of liveliness, of animality, of disposability, waste... Just so much is opened up here- her "feral archive" of toxic children's toys made in China and oil spills, of "sticky" words and representations of "yellow peril". The string of questions that work horizontally to name, unravel, but leave leaky and generative in the possibilities for thinking, activisim, and being in the world that this project offers.

[Janice]

Want to support Asian (American) theorists but this book doesn't really deliver. Or you don't need an entire book to describe what is assemblage and the coming together of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and species in the concept of animacy.

[laurent · Rating 3 out of 5]

fucking took about a whole year to finish this lol. i was like i have no energy to read... then i broke up with this mf and was like OHHH checks out... for the entire duration of this rs i had no energy to read. anyway the actual book was aite

[jess liu]

one of the densest things i've ever read! most compelling in its discussion of contagion and toxicity (lead chapter best chapter), terrible autism section, a great pointer to other texts — i.e. critical pet studies... wish MYC would write about algorithms

[RJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read this for a queer theory course. i am not in linguistics nor are the other 15 students in the class. we were all confused. :)

[aerialxav · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intro and chapter 5

[17CECO · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Chen does it all--looping together disability studies, race, sexuality, affect, and object oriented ontologies in this cross-disciplinary powerhouse. What stuck with me were those moments where mid-analysis on something like lead toy trains Chen makes leaps from one lens to another--race to sexuality and back--in ways that light up both. My only complaint is that this blockhead could use some simpler foundational definitions. I get that Chen wants Animacy to have a sort of proliferative definition, an A AND B (or Not A OR B) kind of thing, but the closest Chen gets is saying that "Animacy...[is] characterized by family resemblances" and that it falls between X and Y. Maybe this means I just need to sit with it longer. But, hey, also, maybe someone can explain it to me? Loved this book.

[Analouise · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense but brilliant book, and important proof that "feminist new materialisms" are more complex and multicultural than typically realized. this book could easily have been two, or even three, books.

[Cameron Kunzelman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chen analyzes the ways in which humans frame and interact with nonhumans in the world.

[Mills College Library]

302.1 C51841 2012

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing, transformative

[Selena · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't understand this book which is unfortunate, since I'm researching Japanese American disability history.

[Clementine Morrigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully cross-disciplinary. Rich analysis.