Hashim Ali--- Animacies

Mel Chen’s monograph Animacies is an ambitious study that explores the contours of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics that privileges human bodies by centering the relationality between animals, metals and plants. Chen’s work is an interdisciplinary work encompassing queer studies, disability studies and race studies. Chen argues: “the anima, animus, animal and animate are not vagaries or templatic zones of undifferentiated matter, but in fact work as complexly racialized and indeed humanized notions” (Chen, 7).

It might be her background in linguistics but I found her method of elaborating and defining her analytical optics to be very effective. For instance, in defining queer optic, she points out: “I do not imagine queer or queerness to merely indicate embodied sexual contact among subjects identified as gay or lesbian, as occurs via naïve translations of queer as the simple chronological continuation or epistemological condensation of a gay and lesbian identitarian project; rather, I think in terms of the social and cultural formations of “improper affiliation” so that queerness might well describe an array of subjectivities, intimacies, beings, and spaces located outside of the heteronormative” (Chen, 104).

While I really appreciated her incorporation of Deluzian model of affect but she might have placed too much emphasis on the mobility aspect.

Question:

From the disability studies perspective, how might Chen’s emphasis on mobility and vitality in her discussion of affect be problematic? What are some of the ways that we can approach it differently?