Animacies

biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect Perverse modernities

English language

Published April 9, 2012 by Duke University Press.

ISBN:
978-0-8223-5254-9
Copied ISBN!

View on OpenLibrary

No rating (0 reviews)

In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly, animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this construct, Chen argues that animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns.Chen's book is the first to bring the concept of animacy together with queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory. Through analyses of dehumanizing insults, the meanings of queerness, animal protagonists in recent Asian/American art and …

1 edition

Subjects

  • Comparative and general Grammar
  • Animacy
  • Biopolitics
  • Perception
  • Ontology
  • Sex role

Lists