Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

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. Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within linguistics, animacy has been described as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen emphasizes how language differentiates the animate from the inanimate and argues that animacy underpins much of contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns. The book combines queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory to analyze dehumanizing insults, meanings of queerness, animal protagonists in Asian/American art and film, toy panics, and environmental illnesses. It rethinks agency, health, toxicity, productivity, and stillness, challenging common sense understandings of the world.