Jozi Chaet - Animacies

Relevance to the Text Generally

Mel Chen’s investigation concerning sexuality, race, and affect over the course of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect is one that examines the way in which matter that is considered to be immobile, deathly, or insensate impacts or animates cultural lives (Chen 2012). In particular, Chen explores the way in which/the extent to which the difference between animate and inanimate undergirds almost every pressing issue within contemporary society, including meanings of queerness, social loves of illness, environmental concerns and problems, and questions concerning animal rights. While the following post cannot successfully engage with the specificities that contribute to the strengths of Chen’s argument, this post attempts to think through the primary intentions guiding Chen’s work over the course of Animacies, and the impact of that work in the context of this class. In turn, the following post focuses on Chen’s general argument concerning animacy and the methodologies Chen employs in an attempt to construct that analysis, and endeavors to address the ways n which Nash’s application of particular methodologies potentially relates to my own emerging research.

Over the course of her discussion, Chen attempts to broadly explore the “rangy, somewhat unruly construct called animacy” (Chen 2012, 18) through an investigation of the ongoing debates regarding sexuality, race, the environment, and affect in an effort to interrogate “how the fragile division between animate and inanimate…is relentlessly produced and policed and maps important political consequences of that distinction” (Chen 2012, 2). In doing so, Chen attempts to extend the linguistic division between animate and inanimate in several ways, and thus develop “some tentative significations pertaining to materialization, negativity, passion, [and] liveliness” (Chen 2012, 3). By extending the notion of animacy and employing it as a central concept, then, Chen is able to establish an analytic framework that is useful to reproduce here in its entirety –

“Using animacy as a central construct…helps…theorize current anxieties around the production of humanness in contemporary times, particularly with regard to humanity’s partners in definitional crime: animality…[,] nationality, race, security, environment, and sexuality. Animacy activates new theoretical formations that trouble and undo stubborn binary systems of difference…[and i]n its more sensitive figurations, animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, engendering different communalisms and revising biopolitical spheres, or, at least, how we might theorize them” (Chen 2012, 3).

In order to accomplish that goal, Chen organizes the book into three separate sections that each endeavor to “investigate a questions about kinds of animacy, and each [exhibit]…the result of letting it object animate, that is…letting it breathe, gender itself, or enact ‘animus’ in its negativity” (Chen 2012, 12-13, italics in original). As a result, each chapter reflects an attempt to “seek a transdisciplinary method” (Chen 2012, 13), which might, “in their animate crossings and changing disciplinary intimacies, be plumbed for a certain kind of utility, particularly to the extent that each is engaged in some way with questions of race, sexuality, and disability” (Chen 2012, 13). In turn, Chen builds upon extant literature in a number of disticnt academic fields, including queer studies, women’s/feminist studies, and linguistic, literary, and political theory (Chen 2012, 16-18). As a result, Chen relies upon “close readings of films, illustration, archival research, linguistic evidence, newspaper accounts, and popular media coverage” (Chen 2012, 18), or what she herself labels as a “shifting archive” (Chen 2012, 18). Thus, Chen makes use of intersectional methodologies, as well as those presented by Puar, Eng, and Ferguson (queer of color methodologies, assemblages) and those outlined by Cotera and Smith (women of color methodologies).

Applications to Real or Imagined Projects

While my emerging and developing work deals with questions that are slightly different than those addressed by Chen over the course of animacies, insofar as I am interested in asking questions about the state, activism, social movements, and female advocacy in Jordan, the work presented by Chen (like Nash’s analysis) provides a clear representation of the way to apply some of the methodologies that we have discussed throughout this semester. In particular, Chen weaves together an analysis of several different sources of information; in my own work, I plan to engage with a number of different archives in addition to ethnographic sources, and as a result, Chen’s use of a number of layered methodologies in her exploration of archival information is useful to my own emerging work. Additionally, as my central research questions have shifted and changed in order to elicit a manageable project, I have been thinking about questions regarding the way in which national political interests, the desire for state control, and the establishment of legitimation strategies impacts the potential for activism and civil society, particularly in relation to the women’s movement in Jordan. Chen’s discussion of biopolitics and Agamben’s conception of the state of exception (and the related understanding of exclusive inclusion/inclusive exclusion and the way in which inclusion in the state results in less autonomy/greater susceptibility to state control) is useful to consider in relation to the questions that have become the ones central to my own developing work.

Discussion Question(s)

My questions for this week are very much in line with those that I posed in relation to Nash’s work, as I feel that they are applicable to the text for this week as well –

Chen, unlike many of the scholars that we have read, does not spend much time discussing positionality or accountability in relation to her work – When undertaking textual projects/materially-based projects of this sort, is the same level of self-reflexivity/self-awareness not needed? In what ways does this impact her work?