Mel Chen

• University of California, Berkeley

This recounting of early years of training in linguistics, queer theory and feminism around the time of the 1996 Berkeley Women and Language Conference examines the role of simultaneities and resonances in the formation of a critical, productive if still inchoate transdisciplinarity. Such a transdisciplinarity managed to thrive in and around instit...

This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality’s (GCWS) series Feminisms Unbound. The introduction maps the history and structure of the GCWS series and highlights how its rigorous commit...

Opening The pandemic of COVID-19 and its relation to contagion would seem to call upon our identities as scholars who maintain research interests germane to these phenomena. In some way, to respond in a scholarly journal is directly in line with the habits of our disciplines and our situation as academic thinkers. What to do? To write. However, in...

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. Oct...

In this paper I would like to bring into historical perspective the interrelation of several notions such as race and disability, which at the present moment seem to risk, especially in the fixing language of diversity, being institutionalised as orthogonal in nature to one another rather than co-constitutive. I bring these notions into historical...

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', assessi...

The article inquires to what degree what is dismissively or apologetically called “brain fog,” or other cognitive states of difference, must be excluded from the presumed activity of cripistemology, given its active suppression particularly within academic spaces, including disability studies. In turning to cripping partiality, it attends to the co...

I open with a typical poster from a hospital emergency room that advises on contingent measures taken to prevent the spread of H1N1, showing calm, gently smiling eyes behind a biological mask secured around a blue surgical cap (fig. 1). The poster reassures us—acknowledging that the sight of a mask could be frightening—that masks, benevolently, not...

This essay suggests that thinking, and feeling, with toxicity invites a recounting of the affectivity and relationality—indeed the bonds—of queerness as it is presently theorized. Approaching toxicity in three different modes, I first consider how vulnerability, safety, immunity, threat, and toxicity itself are sexually and racially instantiated in...

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 inst...

How might one properly represent a toxin or infectious agent, and what directives inform that propriety? How might toxins take on characteristics well beyond their physical properties? This essay meditates on extended meanings of toxicity, using the 2007 U.S. case of "lead panic" about toxic toys associated with China. I label the lead case a panic...