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. Chen’s research areas include queer and gender theory, critical race theory and Asian American studies, disability studies, and critical linguistics. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2012) articulates a vigorous new materialist study of the concept of “animacy,” and offers a compelling look at the multifaceted ways how animacy is defined as “an acknowledgment of a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, and liveness”