Paige Sweet Week 13 Animacies

In Animacies (2012), Mel Chen investigates hierarchies of animacy, or modes of lifelieness. Animacy as a concept, Chen argues, is “queer” because it blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. To conduct this analysis, Chen must use a far-reaching archive, relying on linguistics in some sections of the book, while turning to human-animal cultural relations in others (advertisements and films, e.g.), and to political/health panics in other sections (Chinese lead panic). The following sentence about the purpose of Chen’s book dovetails nicely with the methodology: “I am interested in exploring the means by which animal figures, in their epistemological duties as ‘third terms,’ frequently also serve as zones of attraction for racial, sexual, or abled otherness…” (102). In other words, Chen detaches the figure of the animal from its usual place in academic analysis (e.g. as an exemplar of the “natural,” as an opposite to “human”) and asks how it becomes “other,” along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. So, how might we characterize Chen’s methodology, based on this analytic project? Chen characterizes the work as a queer of color project, which involves mapping race and sexuality in “unlikely” places.” In addition, traversing research sites – cultural productions, linguistics, health promotion programs, just to name a few –invokes what Chen calls “transdisciplinarity.” Here, Chen challenges the idea of a “proper” archive and advocates for moving “ferally” across knowledge-sites. Perhaps we could think of this methodology as unfaithful.

Chen’s sprawling and complex archive is provocative and forces me to think about my project in new ways. In particular, while I expect that my focus will be on interviews and historical feminist anti-violence movement archives, I wonder if it would be useful to analyze cultural products (e.g. film, spoken word poetry) in my work. After all, one of the cultural “figures” that I’m interested in is the domestic violence victim – who she is made to be, what exclusions she is made to perpetuate, what “truths” she instantiates. Like Chen, I could detach that figure from her usual moorings and “map” the racialized, gendered, and sexualized meanings that she invokes. In this sense, I too could be “unfaithful” to a conventional sociological methodology, one that is motivated by strict empiricism. At the same time, this would allow me to be “unfaithful” to liberal feminist understandings of violence against women, which read this problem as de-racialized, as hetero, as de-contextualized from larger politico-economic structures. However, this “unfaithful” methodology leads me to wonder, how could I investigate this type of archive without losing focus on my actual research participants, whose voices I will want to highlight and to some degree, allow to speak for themselves? Perhaps this is a question for queer and cultural studies more generally, especially those studies that employ linguistic, deconstructionist, and cultural studies methods – how can you employ this type of meta-theoretical analysis and remain “faithful” to the lives discussed?