Rannie Animacies

In her book, Chen uses the concept of animacy and animacy hierarchies to connect animals, language and metals. Personally, I found this book both enjoyable and frustrating. I like that she uses gender, queer and racial concepts to describe many of the examples she presents in the book. This was particularly the case with the lead chapter, where the discourses surrounding Chinese lead threatening American, white, middle class children was very interesting to me. I especially enjoyed the examples that she presented and the distinction made by the media between what is ‘here’ and ‘there,’ such that lead in the United States is a danger to children, with no thought to how lead affects the Chinese that work in the toy factories or why production of cheap toys has been outsourced to China.

What I found frustrating was that the different parts of the book were not connected enough for me. I felt that in order to make the case that animacy was such a central characteristic to all of these different worlds, the author needed to continually use the animacy framework. I felt that instead of doing that, Chen often loses herself in describing examples in detail, with limited analysis and tying that example back to the idea of animacy. Perhaps this could have been resolved with more commentary or explanation between the examples and connect that with the idea of animacy. Also, because there were quite a few examples presented, at times it made the text quite dense and unapproachable.

I also felt that at times, Chen assumed that the reader was very well read in the theories and particulars of each field she was discussing. While I think this book will appeal to many queer and race scholars, I doubt that all of them will be familiar enough with theories of language, animals and metals to present them with such little explanation. I also take issue with Chen not defining the word biopolitics (at least so I noticed), given that it is such a central concept, unpacking it seems appropriate.

In her text, Chen uses examples from films, different media stories and advertisements to make her argument. This is probably not a method that I will ever use in my studies of violence against women. Also, the approach of searching out a single concept in many different parts of life is not one that I have seen very often. This potentially just speaks to me being more used to social science approaches than ones more commonly undertaken in the humanities. While I appreciate the novel approach and it can be interesting to get a new perspective on familiar things, it ended up somewhat of a disjointed read.

One thing I would like to discuss is how was Chen’s methodology reflected in her methods that she used for this book?