Ash S.- Animacies

While reading Animacy, my immediate reference point concerned conversations about the ways in which individuals are “caged” while in prison. From my experience on prison tours and reading through literature, comparisons are always made about prisons as spectacles in reference to zoos. These comparisons often lie between many factors. Some of these factors are the inhumane housing units of prisons, the cells inmates are forced to live in, and the touristic nature of observing inmates in a controlled environment. There is also a lot of horrific discussion about the “animalistic nature” of inmates in these settings. 

As I was reading this book, I began to think about the “conceptual and affective mediation between human and inhuman, animate and inanimate, whether in language, rhetoric, or imagery” (p10). The author kind of lost me at the beginning with the discussion and debates about the definitions of animacy, but throughout the text, I was able to develop a connection. In the introduction, Chen states that, “this book focuses critically on an interest in the animal that hides in animacy, particularly in the interest of its attachment to things like sex, race, class, and dirt” (p11). When people talk about inmates in zoos as if they are animals to be observed, I think that Chen’s discussion of animacy can help us articulate the nuances in these observations with respect to sex, race, and class. 

Prisons in the United States are filled with black and brown bodies. When we continue this rhetoric of “animalistic nature” to talk about marginalized people, we can use Chen’s analysis to talk about the racialized animality. On page 94, Chen discusses J.L. Austin’s model about “the assumption that communication is “normally” goodwilled and relies on the proper positioning of that person delivering the performative” (p94). After reading this passage, I began to think about the positions of people participating in prison tours in relation to the people who are housed in prisons. This human versus inhumane dichotomy expressed in language like this reflects the positions of all actors participating, as well as the power dynamics at play. Not only do these types of comparisons reflect continued images of people of color being inhumane, but they also reinforce the ‘insider vs outsider’ models. This model being that those people- “immigrants, people of color, laborers and working-class subjects, colonial subjects, women, queer subjects, disabled people, and animals” (p95)- are not considered human and these power dynamics must be reinforced. 

With a very intense linguistic approach and understanding power dynamics, I can further investigate how often discussions of ‘zoos’ and ‘animalistic nature’ and ‘spectacle’ are discussed in prison tourism literature. Chen’s reading helped to give me a starting point to discuss the racialzed, classed, and gendered articulations of these conversations.