Marla ~ Animacies

In Animacies, Mel Chen “draws upon recent debates about sexuality, race, environment, and affect to consider how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise ‘wrong” animates cultural life in important ways” (2). With a “feral” approach to disciplinarity, the self-described queer feminist linguist also employs disability and postcolonial studies to explore the concept of animacy across three domains—words, animals, and metals.

The key concept in the first chapter is the animacy hierarchy, which conceptually arranges the living and nonliving in order of value and priority. For Chen, the insult serves as an exceptional form of this political grammar, “a move of representational injury that implicates language as capable of incurring damage” (13). In the third chapter, Chen reads a selection of visual media to explore the ways queerness, miscegenation, and racism render certain bodies “less animate” and “how controversies around citizenship in the United States…were displaced onto the figure of the ‘dumb’ animal, which was both raced and sexed for rhetorical effect” (14-15). In the fifth chapter, lead becomes animate in a panic in the U.S. over paint on toys manufactured in China. Racialized as Chinese, while its potential victims were white children, Chinese lead was “rendered...the backhanded threat of a previously innocent boon of transnational labor whose exploitive realities are beginning to draw on the popular subconscious of the United States…effectively replacing domestic concerns about black and impoverished children and their exposures to environmental lead” (15-16).

I was immediately drawn to the concept of animacy as an alternative to agency, and really wanted to draw parallels to debates among environmental historians seeking an alternative to agency in order to show the diverse qualities of nonhuman forces at play in history. However, animacy—as a product of the employment of language and representation—is a human construct. Unlike nonhuman forces, animacy is not something that is, but something that…becomes? Is bestowed or granted, and therefore can be limited or taken away?

According to Chen, certain bodies can be rendered “less animate,” and I’m wondering if that isn’t what is done to children and young adults. Or, is it that the animacy of children and young adults is actively limited—maybe even denied—by the liberal state, particularly the animacy of children and young adults from families and communities rendered problematic? 

Although, that still seems too coupled with agency. Perhaps the better question is, how might the liberal state shape the animacy of bodies within its national borders, and for what purposes?

If the insult serves as an exceptional form of the political grammar that is the animacy hierarchy, than what about labels like “delinquent” and “potentially delinquent,” even if such labels are employed under the guise of protection and/or the provision of social services? Within the American liberal state, aren’t those needing social services somehow less animate?