Lecture by Mel Y. Chen, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, UC Berkeley, sponsored by CTE and Women's Studies
Prof. Chen's previous work, Speech Lost from Speech: On the Borders of Linguistic Self-Possession, appearing in articles and book chapters, explored the gendered, racialized, and nationalist politics of silence in language theories in order to reconsider linguistic subject and objecthood and to lay out the stakes and workings of linguistic reclamation. Her essay "Racialized Toxins and Sovereign Fantasies" (Discourse 29) considers industrial pollutants as altered disease vectors and asks how they can be racialized in the course of transnational migration. She is also tracing the ethical contours of a queer of color approach to human animality and non-human animacies. Prof. Chen has convened the group "Species Spectacles," currently in session at the UC Humanities Research Institute. These projects take part in Animacies, her current book manuscript.
Prof. Chen's short film Local Grown Corn (2007) explores interweavings of immigration, childhood, illness and friendship; it has screened at Asian and queer film festivals. |