num_pages: 297
description: 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 stillnessand 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 DisabilityThis 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
language: English
title: Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect
publisher: Duke University Press Books