Alison Kopit- Hierarchizing Animacies

Alison Kopit

Hierarchies in Animacies- Mel Y. Chen

In their fascinating interdisciplinary work Animacies, Mel Y. Chen (2012) explores the many dimensions of the concept of animacy and the way that meaning is constructed from it. They discuss that, “Using animacy as a central construct…helps us theorize current anxieties around the production of humanness in contemporary times” (3). Throughout the book, Chen explores a wide variety of ways that “animacy” enters the cultural milieu, navigating the way that it is constructed, hierarchized, raced, and queered, and the ways that notions of sentience, liveness, agency, mobility, and ability are bound up in it. Thus, animacy is not something/someone either has or does not have, but animacy is stratified, and this stratification or hierarchizing exists in a mutual feedback loop with the discourse associated with it. In the blog post that follows, I will focus on this hierarchized nature of animacy and the way that this drives conversations about disability and what it means to be human. To engage those concepts with my work, I will apply Chen’s concepts to the film representation of John Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980), and the conversations surrounding the film that I have had with undergraduate students that are indicative of the implications that hierarchizing animacy holds for disability representation—and in turn, how these representations feed misconceptions about disability and the value of the disabled life.

“I am not an animal! I am a human being!” is the climax of the film, The Elephant Man. An otherwise quiet, demure character, this is John Merrick’s one outburst in the film, and the one time that he finally speaks up about his mistreatment. Through language, medicalization, and representation of disability, the filmmakers construct a narrative logic that somehow makes this moment shocking and evocative. But how can this be shocking? Is it not obvious? This is the hierarchy of animacy at work, and the language of exclaiming one’s humanity is manipulative—is it not obvious? However, using Chen’s framework, Merrick is treated as a human (not an animal)—because he is a human, and humans are treated in a wide range of ways. Chen calls the phrase, “treated me like a dog” to be “one of liberal humanism’s fictions” (89). In making a generalization about the way that “humans are treated” and a separate one about how “animals are treated,” a linguistic division is created that further reifies the human/animal divide. However, the film utilizes this “fiction” to individualize Merrick’s situation, instead of making a larger commentary—although it is very common for disabled people to be medicalized, abused, and objectified, Merrick’s utterance frees him, in a sense, and the viewer sees him in a new way.

In Elephant Man, Merrick is protected by Dr. Treves and found to be worthy of better treatment, when Treves “discovers” Merrick’s intelligence and kindness. This concept of discovery is related to Chen’s analysis of the way that the colonization process, shrouded in illusions of “discovery,” is a process of objectification (49). On the “scale of relative sentience” (89), Merrick is not presumed to be at the same level as humans. He has to be “discovered.” Ironically, as Treves “discovers” Merrick’s intelligence, and then decides to treat him “as a human being,” Merrick is, in a sense, domesticated.

Students often embark on their own process of “discovery” alongside Dr. Treves (the white, non-disabled guide of the film). They write about this discovery process, explaining that Merrick has sentience and intelligence, and so he didn’t deserve to be treated so poorly. I often push them to think more critically: why does it matter that he is intelligent? What if Merrick was not smart, innocent, and likeable? What does it mean that disabled people must prove themselves to simply not be abused? However, cognitive and emotional intelligence animate Merrick and place him on a higher level of the hierarchy of animacy.

On a broader level, this way that many students react to The Elephant Man is indicative of the way they view disability, and the journey they take in our 100-level Disability in American Film course. We often receive evaluations at the end of the course that say, “I learned that disabled people are human.” It’s disturbing, confusing, and microagressive: what did they think we were? (Lizards, maybe.) Are we supposed to take that as a compliment? A testament to our good teaching? I have often tried to figure out what they actually mean, and after reading this book, I have reframed the way that I think about the students’ statement. There is a conversation about the way that disabled people are affected by constructions of animacy. We need to prove ourselves to move up in the hierarchy of animacy. We are not rocks, but we exist in that non-human in between space, and language, representation, and the constellation of texts surrounding us (legislation, media, language, etc.) contributes to the ways in which we are considered, both consciously and subconsciously. By teaching this course, we are, in effect, proving ourselves. I am fully rolling my eyes at this thought, but maybe teaching the class is really just the equivalent of Merrick shouting, “I am not an animal! I am a human being!”  

Discussion

The Elephant Man application makes me think also of the other side of this issue. What might it mean for human people (especially disabled people, queer people, and people of color) to take up the non-human as a reclaiming practice? My first introduction to this was the way that Donna Haraway takes up the cyborg in “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991). It did not make sense to me in the beginning, but as I have developed my identity and academic work (and sat through more exhausting and microagressive conversations about “what it means to be human”), I have continued to work with this concept. I am on the editorial board of a magazine by and for disabled women and disabled non-binary folks called Monstering. I was drawn to this magazine, because it embraces the non-human within us. It comes from an angle of acknowledging that “humanity” has never served many of us, so we reclaim the inhuman, but with fierceness and subversion. What does it mean to claim, willingly, a lower level of stratification on the animacy hierarchy? What does it mean to claim creature over human and to willingly reject the hierarchy, or to embrace “the underworld”?

On a general note, this book blew my mind.

Works Cited

Chen, Mel Y. Animacies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, 149-182.

The Elephant Man. Directed by David Lynch, Paramount Pictures, 1980.