Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections

Abstract

This essay suggests that thinking, and feeling, with toxicity invites a recounting of the affectivity and relationality—indeed the bonds—of queerness as it is presently theorized. Approaching toxicity in three different modes, I first consider how vulnerability, safety, immunity, threat, and toxicity itself are sexually and racially instantiated in the recent panic about lead content in Chinese-manufactured toys exported the United States. This analysis, while seeming at first to hover somewhat outside queerness, is completed in the next section, where I interweave biopolitical considerations of immunity into an account of the peculiar intimacies and alienations of heavy metal poisoning, rendered in the first person. The essay ends by suggesting that the queering and racializing of material other than human amounts to a kind of animacy. Animacy is built on the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification. Theorizing this animacy offers an alternative, or a complement, to existing biopolitical and recent queer-theoretical debates about life and death, while the idea of toxicity proposes an extant queer bond, one more prevalent today than is perhaps given credit. Such a toxic queer bond might complicate utopian imagining, as well as address how and where subject-object dispositions might be attributed to the relational queer figure.

Fables of Response-ability: Feminist Science Studies as Didactic Literature

“…Recent literature in feminist science studies is rich with stories about how we are constituted by and in relation to (sometimes toxic) chemicals (e.g., Murphy, 2008;Hayward, 2010;Chen, 2011;Haraway, 2012;Hustak & Myers, 2012;Murphy 2013;Agard-Jones, 2014;Davis, 2015;Shotwell, 2016). Drawing on the environmental justice movement, disability studies, queer theory, and Indigenous studies, this literature offers narrative resources that help us account for uneven geographies of exposure that enable certain forms of life and disable others (Murphy, 2016).…”

Continuing Presence of Discarded Bodies: Occupational Harm, Necro-Activism, and Living Justice

“…Any imagination of the enabling possibilities of technology needs to recognize the racialized, classed, cripped, and gendered material labor involved in the making and disposing of it "without equating disability with injustice" (Clare, 2017, p. 56); at the same time, any repudiation of debilitations and deaths needs to reckon with the continuing subjectivity and material presence of "the discarded" in late capitalist society, watching out for the effects of being incorporated into the state management of disability and incapacity. Rather than reifying healthiness as a precondition for health justice claims, crip feminist technoscience lets us recognize different modes of presence in "animate and inanimate lives and nonlives" (Fritsch, 2017, p. 376;Chen, 2011), continuing after violence and resisting closure. The condemnation of the injustice in debilitating marginalized people should also interrupt the imagination of the just world as that of healthy, able-bodyminded people.…”

Vital Wheels: Disability, Relationality, and the Queer Animacy of Vibrant Things

“…Assertions of wheelchair inanimacy also take on political significance in the context of the conventional association between disability and dependency. Drawing critical attention to the cultural assessment of disabled (and racialized) bodies as particularly and problematically reliant upon others, Chen argues, “the question then becomes which bodies can bear the fiction of independence and of uninterruptability” (Chen , 274). In ableist discourse, a state of profound dependence is often figured as the end of a meaningful life.…”