Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)

Chen, Mel Y.

ISBN 10: 0822352540 / ISBN 13: 9780822352549

Published by Duke University Press, 2012

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 0822352540-VB

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822352540
• ISBN 13: 9780822352549
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

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 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.

About the Author

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