Lex's post on Animacies

Mel Chen’s (2012) Animacies employs a transdisciplinary approach, asking readers to rethink the logics of biopolitics through tracing the “lifeliness and deathness” of objects and animals. In responding to an emerging field theorizing “materialities,” Chen’s contribution provides an analysis of power that searches out where governmentality exists, but also demonstrates how using animacies as an analytic can reveal spaces of resistance.

Chen’s substantive arguments are entangled with Chen’s methodological arguments. That is to say, inasmuch as she employs queer of color intersectional methodologies, her analyses of queer animality and toxic metals support and enact her contention that if animacy hierarchies are ontologies of affect, then these ontologies are understood best when the orders and groupings are mixed up. For instance, in Chapter 6, “Following Mercurial Affect,” Chen traces the contingent, somewhat upredictable and uncontrollable meanings and usages of toxicity. Through mapping this abstract concept, toxicity comes to life and death, both in citing Britney Spears’ lyrics, psychological self-help books, and in Chen’s phenomenological description of her experience with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.

Chen’s book not only provides an example of queer of color intersectional work, but also how to be “ontologically unfaithful” in questioning the affective potential and relationships of non-human entities. This book is in some ways a corrective to other work that focuses on ontologies, such as Annemarie Mol’s (2002) The Body Multiple. Mol, without saying so, animates the concept of a specific disease, tracing its practices and enactments. Mol does not, however, really address power in her analysis. When I read Mol’s book, I was pretty excited, since my project has a couple of players that might be considered inanimate. First, technology that performs/enables noninvasive prenatal screening, but also, the fetus that may or may not be born. But I've been struggling with how to talk about how objects interact with biopolitics. 

Chen briefly addresses the issue of fetal personhood, or lack thereof, in Animacies. This book has given me a way to talk about both the significance of fetuses as non-persons, or somewhere on the spectrum of animacy, while also attending to how the question of the fetus, particularly around health, might animate other objects, such as pieces of technology that are used to test for chromosomal anomalies. How might the fetal imaginary, its chromosomes, technology and potentially other inanimate objects come together in an assemblage?

Something I'd like to discuss in class: Chen spends a lot of time making the case for inanimate or nonhuman things/animals as having animacy-arguably, social beings worthy of attention, analysis and intervention. At the end of the book, though, she theorizes herself in the context of her own "unworlding" suggesting that the lack of sociality that she experiences marks her as queerly animate. So which is it? Is there a unique property that humans possess whereby their queerness is in the realm of the nonsocial, whereas for nonhumans, it is their interjection into the social that marks them as queerly animate? I'm sure Chen would have a good answer for this, were we to ask her. This is half a discussion question and half a clarifying question.