Mel Y. Chen

Unpacking intoxication, racialising disability

This article examines concepts whose strictly medical applications have only partly informed their widespread use and suggests that demonstrably shared logics motivate our thinking across domains in the interest of a politically just engagement. It considers exchanges between the culturally complex concepts of ‘toxicity’ and ‘intoxication’, assessing the racialised conditions of their animation in several geopolitically—and quite radically—distinct scenarios. First, the article sets the framework through considering the racial implications of impairment and disability language of ‘non-toxic’ finance capital in the contemporary US financial crisis. Shifting material foci from ‘illiquid financial bodies’ to opiates while insisting that neither is ‘more’ metaphorically toxic than the other, the article turns to address the role of opium and temporality in the interanimations of race and disability in two sites of 19th-century British empire: Langdon Downs clinic for idiocy, and Chinas retort on opium to Queen Victoria. The article concludes with a provocation that suggests yet another crossing of borders, that between researcher and researched: ‘intoxicated method’ is a hypothetical mode of approach that refuses idealised research positions by ‘critically disabling’ the idealised cognitive and conceptual lens of analysis.

A questionnaire on materialisms

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

Animals without genitals: Race and transsubstantiation

How might one think about modes of trans-ness in conjunction with animality? “Trans-animality” can simultaneously refer to gender and species, while sexuality, geopolitics and race remain in full scope. This trans-generic thought piece invokes the theoretical lens of a Deleuzian “body without organs,” bringing into suggestive resonance several instances of cultural production from the last few decades of the twentieth century. Each discursive instance ostensibly opposes non-human animals to humans in ways that crucially, and perhaps unusually, implicate the presence or absence of sex: film (Oshimas Max, mon amour), contemporary art (Xu Bing), and language philosophy (J.L. Austin). I argue that each plumbs animals’ symbolic force as a third term, bearing its own particular imprint of racialization and sexualization in a shared era of geopolitical contestation and postcoloniality. In doing so, I consider the epistemological lessons made possible by thinking about trans-animality in terms of sex.

EVERYWHERE ARCHIVES: Transgendering, Trans Asians, and the Internet

Scene 1: The Oprah show. Thomas Beatie and his wife, Nancy, sit down before Oprah Winfrey for a television interview. The show has advertised the meeting: pictures flash by of a Eurasian or Asian man, ‘34, happily married’, (beat, pause), picture of shirtless Beatie holding apparently pregnant belly, ‘and pregnant’. His first television interview: ‘When did you first decide to get pregnant’ (Oprah), ‘the cameras capture it all’. Multiple voices of authority (Oprah’s presenting voiceover, Oprah’s voice in archived excerpts being replayed, the hyperproduction, music, swooping god’s eye mounted mobile cameras).

Asian American Speech, Civic Place, and Future Nondisabled Bodies

The essay explores the temporal and bodily politics of “Silent No More” slogans, asking in particular about the role of metaphor in the relation between vocality and citizenship.