HATCH, in collaboration with Cultural Studies Colloquium series and Department of Anthropology presents

Mel Y. Chen

"Agitating Conditions"

Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Their 2012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP, MLA Alan Bray Award), explores questions of racialization, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life” through the extended concept of animacy. Chen’s second book project concerns the relationships among the conceptual territories of toxicity and intoxication and their involvement in histories of the shared interanimation of race and disability. Writing on cognitive disability and method, the racialization of pollution, and more can be found in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Discourse, Women in Performance, Australian Feminist Studies, Medical Humanities, and GLQ. From 2013-2016, Chen served on the Board of Directors for the Society for Disability Studies. They coedit, with Jasbir K. Puar, a book series entitled “Anima,” highlighting scholarship in critical race and disability post/in/humanisms at Duke University Press. They are part of a small and sustaining queer/trans of color arts collective in the Bay Area.

More information:  http://hatch.ucdavis.edu/