Mel Y. Chen Read Bio Collapse
Mel Y. Chen is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Chair of UGIS, Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, and Director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at UC Berkeley. They are the author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP, 2012), a forthcoming book, Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacies of Empire (Duke, 2023), and coeditor of Crip Genealogies (Duke, 2023). Besides publishing broadly in journals and arts venues, Chen coedits a Duke book series entitled “Anima,” enjoys teaching to the odd note, and is part of a small and sustaining queer/trans of color arts collective in the SF Bay Area.
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Death by a thousand cuts is the province of relentlessly exposed and/or targeted, otherwise compromised peoples who are wise to their desired or planned termination. It is also the province of thinkers richly equipped with a theoretical imagination toward a species terminus, one that has been rationally preordained by climate change’s inevitabilities, allowing that teleology to predominate all other narratives of vulnerability. But is a species terminus fairly labeled “death”?
