Promotional Information

Rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Animating Animacy 1
Part I * Words
1. Language and Mattering Humans 23
2. Queer Animation 57
Part II * Animals
3. Queer Animality 89
4. Animals, Sex, and Transsubstantiation 127
Part III * Metals
5. Lead's Racial Matters 159
6. Following Mercurial Affect 189
Afterword: The Spill and the Sea 223
Notes 239
Bibliography 261
Index 283

About the Author

Mel Y. Chen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

"Animacies is a book about "reworldings," as Mel Y. Chen traces the myriad ways that objects and affects move through and reshape zones of possibility for political transformation and queer resistance to neoliberal biopolitics. At the same time, Animacies itself generates such transformations: grounded in a generous, expansive understanding of queer of color and disability/crip critique, Chen's study reworlds or reorients disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, animal studies, affect studies, and linguistics. In all of these critical spaces, Animacies might be described as the breathtaking and revivifying book we have been waiting for." Robert McRuer, co-editor of Sex and Disability "This ambitious transdisciplinary analysis of the relations between humans, non-human animals, and matter charts a compelling and innovative rethinking of the biopolitics of "animacy". Chen animates animacy, a concept of sentience hierarchy derived in linguistics, to offer a far-ranging critique that implicates disability studies, queer of color critique, and postcolonial theory. The generative result is a timely and crucial intervention that foregrounds the oft-occluded import of race and sex in the rapidly-growing fields of posthumanist theory, new materialisms, and animal studies." Jasbir K. Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times