Chen+Cites

The florid palette of toy-panic AND of the categories of life and death is itself in crisis.
 * “To tell a ghost story means being willing to be haunted.” This fundamental dilemma exposed by Jack Halberstam is central to liberal politics, where US empathy always has a limit. Since the 2007 lead scare, Chinese toys have been feared as invisibly dangerous, threatening the domestic good life. All of Chinese economic engagement is foregrounded by this perverse heteronormativity that reifies Chinese cities and African American neighborhoods as sites of toxic non-humanity **
 * Chen 11 ** [Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at U.C. Berkeley and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. Mel is also an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Science and Technology Studies Center, and the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences, “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” GLQ; A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Duke University Press, p. 269-273]

Each of these examples involves AND and killing in the name of vitality and living.
 * The Chinese worker thus is relegated to the status of non-subject, whom we avoid and let die, preserving the good of the “here” by creating zones of death out “there.” The prison, the leaded neighborhood, the toxic outsiders exist within death worlds, full of slow living death and deathly subjects. Biopolitics works here for the good of the liberal sphere of the human, and necropolitics produces phobia, abandonment and death towards the outside. **
 * Lamble 14 ** Sarah Lamble, “Queer Investments in Punishment” in Queer Necropolitics, pg. 161

Words more than signify; they affect and effect. AND animacy has been figured and redeployed.
 * “The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.” This repression relates to China through animacy, the possibility for a linguistic object to act upon the world. The inherent instability of animacy is something that can be seized against the hierarchy of meaning that sustains the violence of animacy, renders it the object against which the subject of the west is stabilized. **
 * Chen 12 ** [Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at U.C. Berkeley and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. Mel is also an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Science and Technology Studies Center, and the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences, //Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect,// Duke University Press, p. 54-55]

Animacy is conceptually slippery, even to its experts. AND queer of color mappings of race and sexuality in "unlikely" places.
 * “We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.” In a world where toxins are queered and racialized, death and delinquency becomes the norm of the impoverished neighborhoods that sustains the norm of life and able-bodiedness of the hetero good life, where economic engagement with China is haunted by the specter of competing narratives of the model Chinese railroad builder and the accursed painter of lead toys, it becomes more important than ever to study the link between discourse and reality. Queering these tropes surrounding Chinese economic engagement and domesticity subverts said tropes, opening up to pure animacy, potentiality unleashed with no beginning or end. **
 * Chen 12 ** [Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at U.C. Berkeley and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. Mel is also an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Science and Technology Studies Center, and the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences, //Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect,// Duke University Press, p. 9-12]

Wall Street; Madison, Wisconsin; Spain; Egypt; AND social sciences, as well as practices of governance and economy.
 * Beneath coherent and obedient forms of subjectivity there lies an anarchic pulsing, a viral contagion that is rupturing the discursive tropes that dominate identity in the political present. A political praxis of viral, toxic assemblages can unleash the virtual against the racializing death machine of the animacy hierarchy **
 * Clough and Puar 12 **[Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar, “Virtuality,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2012) Introduction p. 13-16]

But what is a toxic body, after all? How AND both like itself and yet also entirely different.
 * Toxicity is already here, the subject of politics is always already permeated by the air it breathes, the food it eats. Use the toxicity of the aff to rupture the hierarchy of meaning, identity and politics that precludes it, opening up to futurity, materiality, a turn to the aesthetic and self-fashioning here and there, within and without life and death **
 * Chen 12 ** [Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at U.C. Berkeley and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. Mel is also an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Science and Technology Studies Center, and the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences, //Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect,// Duke University Press, p. 217-221]