Toxicity Incorporated:
Toxic Assets, Privileged Bodies, and
the Affects of Toxic Management
Inaugural Guest Social Justice @ UBC Lecture by
Dr. Mel Y. Chen (Berkeley)
Jan. 21, 4-5:30pm
Liu Institute Multipurpose Room
Appeals to the “toxic” are pervasive today, whether leveraged in a medical, environmental, economic, or social sense. While toxicity is seemingly given transparent responsibility for actual effects in human (often privileged) bodies – the incidence of cancer in those copresent with certain toxic elements in given quantities – it is also, I suggest, performative: consonant with the flexible demands of risk society. Toxicity thus produces both the threatening nature and the externality of proximate objects. The talk proceeds by “following” several seemingly incommensurable discursive and material sites in which toxicity is animated, paying particular attention to the financial entity called a “toxic asset,” and tracking their affective dynamics. Throughout, I attend in particular to the racial, sexual, and economic registers of toxicity, suggesting that they deeply inform toxic notions rather than being incidental to them.
Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at U.C. Berkeley and is affiliated with the Center for Race and Gender and the Haas Institute LGBTQ and Disability Studies Clusters. Recent publications include: Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP, 2012) Discourse, GLQ, Women in Performance, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Amerasia and examine the complex intimacies of toxins and their hosts, the gendered ramifications of animal representation in cinema, and the interaction between disability and racialized valences of “silence” within political protest.
Social Justice Theory Workshop with Dr. Chen
January 22, 2-4pm,
Social Justice @UBC, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice,
Eligibility: Graduate students and faculty carrying out research that has a substantive theoretical component, with an interest in global, queer and critical race theory, affect theory, aesthetics and the “new materialism”…
Workshop spaces are limited so RSVP first-come first reserved mary.bryson@ubc.ca
Dr. Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at U.C. Berkeley and is affiliated with the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences, and the Science, Technology, and Society Center as well as the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society’s LGBTQ and Disability Studies Clusters. Mel’s earlier work explored the gendered, racialized, and nationalist politics of silence in language theories in order to consider the stakes and workings of linguistic reclamation. Recent publications in Discourse, GLQ, Women in Performance, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Amerasia (forthcoming) examine the 2007 lead toys panic, the complex intimacies of toxins and their hosts, the gendered ramifications of animal representation in cinema, and the interaction between disability and racialized valences of “silence” within political protest. In Fall 2012, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, was published with Duke University Press in the Perverse Modernities Series. Mel’s new project is a multi-sited investigation of toxicity with regard to the complex intertwinings of sexuality, ability, nationalism, race, and sociality. Workshop TITLE: “Who (and what) is new to Matter?: Reasons for Feral Method” Workshop BLURB: This informal workshop explores the interaction of queer of color analytics and perspectives with contexts of ‘new materialism’ as a way of asking after the ways in which certain theoretical developments might unwittingly perform certain structural condescensions and misapprehensions towards their objects. We’ll also have an open discussion of what we each, in our particular disciplinary contexts, might consider to be ‘feral method’ and ask what its merits and compromises are for our work.
Workshop Event co-sponsored by Critical Studies in Sexuality, the Jane Rule Endowment for Human Relationships