Chen’s Intro to Animating Animacy was a fascinating read, but I did find it difficult to wrap my head around. I appreciated the acknowledgement that the theoretical concepts are intentionally and even necessarily ‘slippery’ to students and experts alike. The strange moment of awareness and wakefulness (of both oneself and the processes governing how people think about bodies) while in a state of illness is one that is incredibly relatable for me as someone living with chronic and invisible illnesses. Chen speaks to the marking of ‘unproductive’, disabled, raced, and sexed bodies as passive in a way that makes me think about the problematic discourses surrounding mental illness. In our western popular imaginary it is very rare to have a mentally ill person represented as complexly, simultaneously, functional AND dysfunctional. Characters in pop culture or famous people are usually caught by the media in moments of frightening chaos and ‘madness’ which seems to permanently label this person inherently ‘crazy’. Alternatively, a valourized, untouchable, perfect, pedastalized persona is manufactured so an individual can talk about mental illness they have experienced in a past tense, tidy bundle. There doesn’t seem to be much room for high functioning people with chronic mental illness to concurrently inhabit and slip between illness and wellness. Inhabiting and crossing between a multitude of experiences and expressions seems to upset and trouble the status quo. As Chen states, animacy therefore helps theorize such anxieties around the production of binaries around humanness and liveliness (Chen 3). I would be interested to see what mapping these anxieties, thresholds, and mediations of boundaries entails seeing as prescriptive binaries are so imbued in how we conceptualize the world. I imagine it would be tricky to take note of the unexpected and unseen. Chen’s attempts to see affect as going beyond the body to multiple bodies and multiple sites seems to suggest these moments of disruption and the inbetweens are in fact more normal than rigid and contained boundaries (Chen