Mel Chen’s Animacies is stimulating discussion across a wide range of academic disciplines, and rightly so. Winner of the Modern Language Association’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, awarded for an outstanding book in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and/or queer studies, Animacies speaks across multiple fields and promises to engage with queer studies, disability studies, animal studies, critical race studies, the new materialisms, cognitive linguistics, biosecurity studies, affect theory, and environmental studies. This range of reference indicates the sheer scope and ambition of the study, and Chen makes critical and ethical interventions that genuinely enhance each of these areas. The book centres around the concept of animacy, a term used in linguistics to classify the levels of ‘agency, awareness, mobility, and liveness’ (2) possessed by any particular entity. Human languages are underpinned grammatically by ‘animacy hierarchies’, assumptions about relative degrees of sentience and agency, which usually dictate that humans are the most animate beings – and some human beings (male, adult, non-disabled, white) more so than others – followed by non-human animals, vegetables and inanimate ‘matter’. The way that these assumptions are encoded in grammar make it difficult to express alternative ways of being, Chen explains in Chapter 1; languages have rules about subjecthood and objecthood, and about who is allowed to act upon – to affect – whom, and sometimes language does not make sense if the assumed order of things is disrupted. Chen’s starting point is that animacy hierarchies are overtly biopolitical and tied up with multiple types of privilege, developing through ‘Aristotelian categorizations, Christian great chains of being, Linnaean typologies, biopolitical governances, capitalisms, and historical imperialisms’ (233). Her enquiries in Animacies centre on the crucial question: ‘What if nonhuman animals, or humans stereotyped as passive, such as people with cognitive or physical disabilities, enter the calculus of animacy: what happens then?’ (3). Those groups whose animacy is undervalued, she contends, ‘animate […] cultural life in important ways’ (2), and the book goes on to undercut established hierarchies by queering our understandings of ‘lifeliness’ and ‘deathliness’ (193) and thus of who, and what, matters in contemporary society.
Animacies focuses on US culture but has a global reach: it is alert to transnational movements and circuits, particularly in relation to East Asia. Its archives are ‘shifting’ (18) – Chen analyses cultural phenomena from Fu Manchu films to racial insults to the 2007 lead-poisoning panic in America – and its approaches are ‘feral’ (18), as Chen puts it (with a nod to Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell’s use of the term in Cultural Locations of Disability), drawing on a formidable array of perspectives and methodologies. The book is divided into three parts, with a fascinating Afterword that examines how animacies function in relation to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Part I, ‘Words’, makes use of Chen’s training in cognitive linguistics to unpack the language of objectification and dehumanization and then to trace, historically and culturally, the various ways in which the term ‘queer’ has been animated. Chen is interested in how such a term might ‘cast off its dehumanization’ and become ‘reanimated’ (57; original emphasis). This section is technical in its linguistic analysis and lays firm foundations for the rest of the book by demonstrating how central language is to power relations and hierarchical thinking. The second section, on ‘Animals’, brings queer theory into conversation with animal studies, and it is in this mid part of the book that Chen begins to delineate ‘animacy theory’ (115). She explores how categories of race, sexuality, and animality intersect in contexts including early-twentieth-century cartoons dealing with Chinese immigration to the United States, pet neutering, art installations, and Michael Jackson videos. The aim here is to extend ‘biopolitical thinking to stretch around humans, animals, and human animality’ (135), and in doing so Chen sets up a radical politics of care that operates across racial and species boundaries.
Part III, ‘Metals’, was for me the most fascinating and at times moving section of the book. It deals with toxicity, focusing on lead in Chapter 5 and mercury poisoning in Chapter 6. In examining the lead panic associated with Chinese-produced toys, where white middle-class children were presented as being at risk from foreign bodies, Chen makes an emphatic case for how popular discourses about toxicity and fear of disease are racialized and classed. This analysis strays into the territory of biosecurity, and it is easy to see how Chen’s critique could have meaningful applications in that area. In Chapter 6, Chen changes methodology and embarks upon a frank and illuminating personal narrative of her experience of multiple chemical sensitivities. The aim here, she states, is to ‘theorize toxicity as it has profoundly affected my own health, my own queerness, and my own ability to forge bonds' (197), and in sharing this ‘unworlding’ (203) with the reader, Chen powerfully reworks what we understand as lifeliness. ‘For would not my nonproductivity, my nonhuman sociality’, she writes, ‘render me some other human’s “dead,” as certainly it has, in case after case of the denial of disabled existence, emotional life, sexuality, or subjectivity?’ (210; original emphasis).
This narrative makes clear that Animacies contains a wealth of material to interest disability scholars. The exploration of environmental health is the most obvious connection, but disability concerns are refreshingly present throughout: Chen includes American Sign Language renderings of ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ in her linguistic discussion of ‘queer’ (81–82); she considers so-called ‘persistent vegetative states’ (41–42) in light of animacy hierarchies; autism is related to ‘mercurial affect’ (211–216); and the associations explored between lead poisoning, class, race, and IQ draw on rich disability histories. Chen sets out in this book to take intersectionality seriously, and the concept of ‘animacies’ provides a framework for intersectional analysis that is immensely enriching. Chen writes that she wishes ‘for an ethics of care and sensitivity that extends far from humans’ (or the Human’s) own borders’ (237). The achievement of Animacies is that it enacts this ethics of care in ways that prompt the reader into caring about things – even inanimate objects – in ways we may not have even considered doing before reading it.
School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
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© 2014, Clare Barker
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.931644