A review by jenna0010
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen

5.0

This is my second read of this fantastic book and gosh it still holds up. How bodies, human/nonhuman, racialized, gendered, queer, toxic, are mapped into biopolitical categories of liveliness, of animality, of disposability, waste... Just so much is opened up here- her "feral archive" of toxic children's toys made in China and oil spills, of "sticky" words and representations of "yellow peril". The string of questions that work horizontally to name, unravel, but leave leaky and generative in the possibilities for thinking, activisim, and being in the world that this project offers.