Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen (review)

As part of Duke University Press’s Perverse Modernities series edited by Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe, Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect—a tour de force of theoretical work bridging Asian American feminist, queer of color, disability, and critical animal studies—explores the various “forces” animating human and nonhuman life. Building on the specific insights of scholars in material culture and affect theory, such as Jane Bennett, Nicole Shukin, and Sianne Ngai, Chen proposes to rethink humanness and nonhumanness as fundamentally racialized, sexualized, and political agencies. Humans and nonhumans gain these agencies, or in Chen’s words “animacies,” through their semantic role and/or through their representation in visual media. Her first book publication is a complex, interdisciplinary bricolage: sustained close examinations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century film and popular culture accompany theoretical reflections on racialized, queered depictions of animality, toxicity, and illness.

Chen’s theories on human and nonhuman agency follow in the foundational lineage of existential philosophy, which affirms that essence is created through one’s actions or doings. However, she departs from this mode of thinking to assert that essence and subjectivity—whether they be of humans or nonhumans—are products of their semantic role in a sentence or speech-act. Animacies argues that essence is generated through what these human or nonhumans do linguistically in response to neoliberal, biopolitical discourses. Chen extends this argumentation to caution against seeing essence as a static subjectivity. In her logic, if one were to racialize inanimate things (such as sinicizing lead-tainted toys) or if humans were represented in film as animalized characters, then essence is less what someone or something does and more what this person or thing embodies by virtue of semantic or aesthetic manipulation.

The author organizes Animacies into three sections: “Worlds,” “Animals,” and “Metals,” each containing two chapters. The first chapter within section 1, titled “Languages and Mattering Humans,” reconsiders the so-called animacy hierarchy that categorizes life on biological levels. Chen suggests the existence of a semi-permeable hierarchy that categorizes animals, objects, and social structures based on their agency rather than on their biological or material statuses. The top level of this hierarchy houses the most animate (and thus most agential) life or nonlife form, whereas the least “alive” forms reside at the bottom. Chen sees the necessity of collapsing the clean boundaries separating humanness from nonhumanness to stress that certain outside factors—most notably race, queerness, and disability—map agencies onto humans, nonhumans, and sociopolitical systems. These agencies animate life and nonlife forms that, like ascending and descending elevators, move from one hierarchy to another depending on how the speaker employs the entities semantically.

Evocative of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2003) and Ann Cvetkovich’s (2012) examinations of “feeling” through negative affects like shame or depression, Chen sees how statements that pejoratively racialize humans are underwritten by political subtexts. In this regard, she cites two appropriate examples from US Senator George Allen and from political dissenter Jimmy Lai, who injuriously associate an Asian body with monkeys and turtle eggs. Chen addresses larger concerns on dehumanization and on the “politicized linguistic” qualities de-animating humans within colonialist, capitalist, and feminist contexts (42, 47–49). Chapter 2, “Queer Animation,” asserts that certain “things” that slide down the animacy hierarchy include concepts themselves; this chapter is concerned primarily with the concept queer. Chen advances that demoted, de-animated concepts like queer can reanimate themselves by embodying political agencies. She regards queer as a linguistic object to examine the ways in which its lexical uses and institutionalizations, in both academic and political discourses, prompt positive and negative neoliberalist reforms.

The first chapter of the middle section, titled “Queer Animality,” explores the permeable boundaries between humanness and animality by articulating notions of racialized and queered animacies. As Chen demonstrates by using visual advertisements depicting racist nineteenth-century representations of Chinese and African American...