“More Queer Materialism: A Review of Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect” (herring)

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Scott Herring

May 2013

“More Queer Materialism: A Review of Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect”

Queer theory has always been invested in conceptualizations of materiality.  Across various waves over the last two and a half decades, this ever-expanding field of inquiry has attended to how philosophical questions of materialism inform the sexing and gendering of the body as well as how embodiment itself—the matter of flesh and bone, cartilage and blood—is instrumental to considerations of transgender subjectivity.  This ongoing concern with bodily material has not, of course, been unconnected to historical materialisms of the more Marxist inflection.  Nor has the discipline’s interests in materiality neglected the ethics of social belonging: who matters—who counts—within geographies such a global city or a sparsely populated rural country, or material imaginaries such as a nation-state.  Hence queer theory since the late 1980s has been deeply invested in questions of how matter forges desire and personhood for both individuals and collectives, of how materialism informs social politics that enable and constrain interpersonal erotic and affective relations.

But what about stuff?  How has queer theory thought about material cultures?  My above examples focus on bodies, capital, and social formulae, but the question has recently been raised: what might queer theory contribute to “new materialisms,” those “new ways of thinking about matter and processes of materialization” invoked by social scientists Diana Coole and Samantha Frost in introductory remarks to their recent edited collection New Materialisms (2)?  In their opening salvo, the two call for “a critical new materialism” steeped in a “Foucauldian genealogy that describes how the minutiae of power develop and practically manage embodied subjectivities” (27).  Given how elemental Foucault’s thinking has been for queer theories of bodies, pleasures, relations, and stylizations, it makes sense that part of their wider project of recasting critical analyses of matter also longs for “a more materialist queer theory” (2).

But if, as I have suggested, queer theory has been broadly and extensively engaged in questions of materialism all along, it is safe to presume that this call for further queer materialism has, paradoxically, been answered by critics time and again.  Indeed, the “radical” revisions of materialist thinking that Coole and Frost request across the board of theoretical inquiry have been years in the making within the field of queer theory—even if scholars have not always framed this disciplinary development as such (3).  These innovations not only include the thematics cited above, but other work that has paid close attention to questions of science and environmentalism; immigration and objects; built environments and queer stylistics; and the erotics of insentient being.  I have in mind Stacy Alaimo’s readings of queerness in her Bodily Natures; Erica Rand’s critiques of heteronormative objecthood and the tourism of transnational migration in The Ellis Island Snow Globe; and art historian Richard Myer’s interpretations of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of domesticated leatherfolk.  This list could be expanded, and I highlight that these readings of modern queer materialisms have been matched by appreciations of earlier periods: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen on the sexualization of medieval stone, for instance, or Joseph Campana on the “queer materiality” of early modern writings (209).  Seemingly “new” queer theories of materialism have been out there for some time, and the interdisciplinary study of queer materialism has been in a perpetual state of novelty.  In place of the adjective “new”—an adjective that unnecessarily makes that which comes before rearguard—we would thus be better off if we substituted the word “more.”  This may not sound as sexy but it feels like a more accurate diagnosis.

             Mel Y. Chen’s 2012 Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect participates in this accretive intellectual labor of a more queer materialism.  A welcome addition to extant scholarship, its innovative engagements with critical strains of perverse materiality are explicit from its subtitle.  “Mattering,” Oxford English Dictionary informs us, is typically a noun that has been synonymous with the discharge of pus since the sixteenth century.  Chen does not mention this bodily fluid (she does spend some time on the politics of saliva), yet Animacies nevertheless traces how things enter and exit queer bodies as these corporealities are inflected by race, ethnicity, and historicity.  She consequently tracks “the queer socialities that certain other, nonhuman intimacies portend” across a variety of transcultural registers (207).   In so doing her work bridges earlier forms of queer materialism (say, Judith Butler’s 1993 Bodies That Matter) with subsequent takes on socialized matter and material cultures as they relate to Foucauldian biopolitics, and it makes sense that some of Chen’s arguments originally appeared in a special issue of the quarterly GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (the journal of record for the field) that focused on the topic of “queer bonds,” or non-normative relations between persons as well as things.  As it multi-tasks these achievements, the monograph also works within well-established disciplines such as linguistics as well as less institutionalized ones such as queer disability studies (a subfield that explores how the normativities of sexual identities and their departures overlap with the normativities of able-bodied persons and their queerings). 

Overall, the book seeks to activate a queer theory of animacy, or what Chen initially defines as “the quality of liveness, sentience, or humanness of a noun or noun phrase that has grammatical, often syntactic, consequences” (24).  This term, Chen notes, is taken from her originary discipline of cognitive linguistics.  The book’s intellectual inspiration comes from Chen’s expansion of this keyword into matters of “linguistic politics” that inform the nominalizations of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century queer theory, philosophies of language articulated by J. L. Austin, and recorded racial slurs from conservative politicians such as former U.S. Senator George Allen (65).  The cumulative effect of this rearticulation is a novel conceptual apparatus that advances what Chen terms “animacy theory” (106), one that works against the “exceptionalism” of the human as it traces how political discourses cut across language, mankind, animals, objects, and even periodization to queer various populations (210).

As it constructs this theoretical framework, Animacies divides itself into three distinct yet interconnected registers: “Words,” “Animals,” and “Metals.”  Its case studies are many (sometimes a few too many).  They include an infamous scene of Senator Allen referring to S. R. Sidarth as “macaca”; critical usages of the word queer in AIDS activism; Austin’s arguably racialist claims for failed performative utterances; the Orientalism of the Fu Manchu stereotype; “Octomom” (Nadya Suleman); the artwork of Xu Bing; the transmogrification of Michael Jackson; the traumatic death of Travis (a television chimpanzee); moral panics over Chinese toys; and numerous other sites including Chen’s personal memoir.  As this lengthy list attests, Animacies’s archives are far-ranging and in keeping with recent trends in queer cultural studies.  While there is sometimes a sense of case study overload, this reader nevertheless found refreshing how unapologetic Chen remains regarding this disciplinary and transcultural mash-up.  In the book’s introduction, in fact, Chen calls for scholars to engage in practices of “thinking and moving ferally”—roaming freely across fields of inquiry in order to trace patterns of animacy that inform a variety of living and non-living phenomena (18). 

As noted, this methodology aligns itself with other recent texts in queer theory such as Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s 2011 The Queer Art of Failure. Cited by Chen, Halberstam’s book also surveys a vast array of cultural objects—Pixar animation films such as Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo; novels such as Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother; and visual art by individuals such as Attila Richard Lukacs, to name but three cultural arenas.  Adamantly, Halberstam refuses to nestle into one disciplinary niche and calls on subsequent scholarship to promote an “antidisciplinarity,” or what he defines as “modes of thinking that ally not with rigor or order but with inspiration and unpredictability” (10).  While this divide may be too clean-cut for some, Chen’s book similarly pulls off a rigorous reading full of unpredictable sources.

Given such expansiveness, one of Animacies’s central contributions to queer theory is to further widen the purview of what counts for queerness and for a queer subject of study.  Like other scholars working within materialist critique, she too takes everyday objects and reads their queer potential for contemporary politics.  The best example of this occurs in a wickedly perverse scene where Chen examines the racial, sexual, national, and material anxieties of American children licking supposedly foreign-made toys.  This moment connects to a larger reading of fears surrounding lead-laden playthings, and Chen finds that “one aspect of the threat of lead toxicity is its origin in a forbidden sexuality, for the frightening originary scene of intoxication is one of a queer licking” (185).  In an analysis akin to Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, the image of a child pleasurably running his or her tongue along the mold of a toy—a playfully dangerous meeting of saliva, metal, and taste buds—gets to the core of Animacies’s novel takes on what we can define as queer.  Simultaneously, it provides an inspirational take on how we can redefine mattering—not just early modern pus, but the queer matter of bodily fluids and forms that are embedded within twentieth-century and twenty-first-century political histories of racialization.

Speaking of lead panics: besides queer tongues, Chen also presents an insightful analysis of the queerness of toxicity.  As Animacies outlines the “queer productivity of toxins and toxicity” that couples with moral panics over lead and other metals (211), Chen moves beyond cultural anxieties that swirl about the epidermalization of racialized subjects—the raced body’s visible exteriors—and plumbs the pulmonary systems, inner organs, and immune systems that contribute to the body’s overarching ecologies.  In this regard, the book turns queer of color theory (the intersectional analysis of race, ethnicity, and sexuality) inside out by expanding it into the cavities of bodies as one inhales and exhales the transnational and ideological ecologies of racism that continue to haunt U.S. commodity cultures and quotidian psycho-social encounters.  This is what Chen deems the “interabsorption of animate and inanimate bodies,” and it is a convincing analysis (11).  While the monograph could better tease out its links to scholarship on queer environmental studies at this moment—I especially have in mind recent writings by Timothy Morton, but I acknowledge that Animacies does cite Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson—this wish may be for later critics to take on as they build upon the theorizations established over the course of the book.

In keeping with previous studies of queer materialism, this overarching focus on destabilizing the boundaries between marked human and inhuman bodies also explicitly refuses the primacy of human-to-human interactions, and here we find yet another contribution as Chen turns to the queer roles that things and objects play in quotidian biopolitics—anticipating, in effect, the request that Frost and Coole make for a Foucauldian queer materialism.  Building off scholars such as Jane Bennett and Jennifer Terry, the monograph reveals the social violence inherent in “violating proper intimacies (including between humans and nonhuman things)” (11).  Chen deems this “transobjectivity” (204), a term as valuable as “animacy theory” for scholars interested in the materiality of queer habitus.  Again, a passing moment in the book best exemplifies this project, as Chen self-describes as “a walking piece of dirt from Chinatown” in a childhood self-fantasy (199).  In so doing, Animacies traces “the queer socialities that certain other, nonhuman intimacies portend” within a variety of potentially hostile environments (207).  Queer mattering becomes a way of stifling potential counterpublics, and social belonging is shown—literally and figuratively—to be shot through with questions of objectification and objectivity.

With a critical scale that ranges from interiors to exteriors, from macro to micro, across and between US borders and bodies, Animacies successfully reveals the “consequences for the ‘stuff,’ the ‘matter,’ of contemporary biopolitics” (1), and it offers “new ways of thinking racially and sexually about biopolitics, particularly around governmentality, definitions of population, health regimes, and deathly life” (7).  The book’s accounts of “radical thingness” (235) and its attention to the “queerings of objects and affects accompanied by political revision, [and] reworldings that challenge the order of things” extends ongoing conversations regarding material culture, materiality, matter, and the human-nonhuman ecologies that make up (and tear apart) our present worlds (237).  Given its wide range of disciplines and objects of study, Animacies queers this great chain of contemporary being.  This is something that critics inside and outside the registers of queer theory can and should embrace in ongoing investigations of what currently goes by “new materialism”—a “new” discourse that may not exactly be novel, but most certainly keeps stirring the theoretical pot of stuff.   Like the many that came before it, Chen’s book productively begs for more inquiry into its subject matter.

Works Cited

Chen, Mel Y.  Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect.  Durham:

Duke UP, 2012.

Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost, eds.  New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and

Politics.  Durham: Duke UP, 2010.  

Alaimo, Stacy.  Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. 

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010.

Bennett, Jane.  Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.  Durham: Duke UP, 2005.

Butler, Judith.  Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”  New York:

Routledge, 1993.

Campana, Joseph.  The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of

Masculinity.  New York: Fordham UP, 2012.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Stories of Stone.” postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural

Studies 1 (2010): 56-63.

Halberstam, Judith.  The Queer Art of Failure.  Durham: Duke UP, 2011.

“Mattering, n.”  OED Online.  Oxford UP, March 2013 (accessed 24 May 2013).

Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Bruce Erikson, eds.  Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature,

Politics, Desire.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010.

Morton, Timothy.  “Guest Column: Queer Ecology.”  PMLA 125.2 (2010): 273-82.

Myer, Richard.  “Mapplethorpe’s Living Room: Photography and the Furnishing of

Desire.”  Other Objects of Desire: Collectors and Collecting Queerly.  Eds. Michael Camille and Adrian Rifkin.  Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.  130-49.

Rand, Erica.  The Ellis Island Snow Globe.  Durham: Duke UP, 2005.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond.  The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth

Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. 

Terry, Jennifer.  “Loving Objects.”  Trans-Humanities 2.1 (2010): 33-75.