Animacies is a book about embodiment that deals with
animation: how people move that causes a ripple effect, affecting all things,
and vice versa. Chen takes looks at the relationship between human and nonhuman
things and the extent to which they impact one another. Bodies can never be
disengaged from bodies, and bodies cannot be separated from other forms that
they constantly come into contact with.
Chen explores the way that, historically, people were
“animalized” in order to make them less than – it delegitimizes their political
claims of – impacting people of various racial groups, immigrant populations
and sexual minorities. Animacy is “often racialized and sexualized means of
conceptual and affective mediation between human and inhuman, animate and
inanimate, whether in language, rhetoric, or imagery (10).
Chen investigates animacy hierarchies and investigates the
extent to which linguistic grammar shape social-cultural understandings and
hierarchies. Animacies is a “craft of the senses; it endows our surroundings
with life, death, and things between (55). Chen relates this to queering, which
she argues, “is immanent to animate transgressions, violating proper
intimacies” (11). Animacies is a way to “trouble the binary of life and nonlife
as it offers a different way to conceive of relationality and intersubjective
exchange (11).
To be honest, this book was hard for me to grasp. This is my
second reading of it – the first in a reading group with Claire Decoteau – and I
still am not sure I understand the underlying argument more than peripherally.
I am excited to engage in discussion this week to understand how this work can
be actively applied to my own research as a methodology.
I especially appreciated Chen’s use of historical analysis
to encourage the reader’s understanding of the ways in which nonhuman meanings
were given to certain populations in order to disenfranchise them. How can this
be applied to what is happening currently in the political climate we face
today?
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