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

The acknowledgments signal that Animacies is unconventional. Mel Chen dedicates the first “heartfelt thanks,” not to the intellectual community at UC-Berkeley where Chen is a professor of gender and women’s studies (though that comes later), but to toads. Chen’s vivid description of the toads prepares the reader to jump into a text that takes many surprising theoretical leaps. In the introduction, Chen describes how a period of illness provided the motivation to reconsider the very categories of “life” and “death.” “Animacy” is the degree to which something is considered “live.” Challenging what is considered “alive” or “lively” evokes contemporary philosophical movements such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology, two fields that reject the privileging of human existence over nonhuman objects, and reevaluate why “matter” matters. As a queer feminist linguist, Chen thinks intersectionally about what is privileged when human life is defined against the animal or the object, and how these distinctions take on racialized, classed, and ableist dimensions.

Animacies is ambitious in scope, intervening in the fields of queer theory, critical race theory, and disability studies. Although primarily targeted toward academics, the analysis of pop culture and use of personal narrative broaden the book’s appeal. The text provides useful formulations for thinking through an array of complex issues, but at times this very multifacetedness might make a reader’s head spin. Chen fires examples and illustrations at the reader in rapid succession, drawing from an eclectic archive of “apes, theories, turtles, sensoria, cartoons, mercury particles, airborne skin, signifying lexemes, and racialized humans” that Chen claims are linked by the “animate affinities” that bring bodies together (234).

Chen describes the methodology in Animacies as “feral,” unbounded by any particular archive (literary, cinematic, pop cultural) and open to a range of disciplinary approaches (e.g., linguistics, cultural studies). I think this “feral” strategy is particularly effective for shaking up the field of queer theory, a discourse once defined by its disruptive potential, but experiencing an identity crisis as it becomes institutionalized within the academy. Chen devotes a lengthy passage to defining and historicizing the word “queer,” both inside and outside of academia, while pointing to current and future ways the discipline can be enlivened by queer-of-color scholarship and more interdisciplinary approaches.

Animacies is divided into three sections: “Words,” “Animals,” and “Metals,” each of which take up the themes of embodiment, racialization, and the destabilizing effects of theorizing animacy. The first section, “Words,” draws on Chen’s training as a linguist. We are introduced to the concept of the “animacy hierarchy,” originally developed by cognitive linguists and essentially a “great chain of being” with the human at the top, above the animal, and the insensate at the bottom. Chen explains that though the animacy hierarchy may be unspoken, it informs language, and how sentences make sense. A classic example is the phrase, “the hikers that rocks crush,” which is difficult for English speakers to process. This syntax attributes sentience and agency to the stone (as opposed to the phrases “the hikers who crushed the rock” or “the rock that the hiker crushed”) (2). Chen’s innovation is to challenge the hierarchical logic of language, pointing out that by prioritizing the human subject, animacy hierarchies also privilege the adult white able-bodied male. We can see this any time people are dehumanized or objectified, in hate speech such as racial slurs comparing people to animals, or when disabled bodies are equated with vegetables. The second section “Animals” further elaborates on “the racial politics of animality” and their connections to sexuality and colonial history. Steel yourself for appearances by a flesh eating chimpanzee, the recurring image of Fu Manchu, and the elusive phallus of Michael Jackson as each are subjected to Chen’s critical gaze.

The final section, “Metals,” is the most cohesive, as the pace slows and the focus shifts to “toxins” and their ability to blur the boundary between body and...