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.
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