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1AC
We begin our discussion of economic and diplomatic engagement in 1839
with the start of the Opium Wars widely considered the beginning of
Chinese modern history. Decades before the official war, the British
Empire had already forced itself upon China through the illegal exportation
of Opium to China as a counter-measure against the flow of British silver
into Chinese coffers. Chinese confiscation of British ships served as the
pretext for the remaking of the world through the forced opening of China
to European trade, thus did China enter on to the world stage. The story of
the opium wars reveals the toxic underside of the resolution poison as
the avenue and alibi for the purification of economic and diplomatic
relations. Opium, today so ironically grafted onto the Asian Other, attunes
us to the production of death worlds through the expansion of global
markets. We thus begin our engagement with the resolution by way of
toxicity the toxicity that is disavowed in order to secure the smooth flows
of capital even as the toxic other is contained, controlled, and eradicated.
Chen 15 [Mel, Assoc. Prof. Gender and Womens Studies and Vice Chair for Research, Dir. of
the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @ UC Berkeley, Unpacking Intoxication, racialising
disability, Med Humanit, 41, p. 26-7]
Following opium around its enactments in the British Empire yields important
counterpoints to the expected narrativisation of poisons and governance. We also know
that opium was exported by way of the East India Companys Indian sites to China under
Queen Victorias rule. Less than 30 years before Downs publication, Commissioner Lin Tse-Hsu, who set off the series of Opium
Wars, wrote a famous Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria in 1839, in exasperation at the
ruin the opium had laid in China. Lin wrote: We find your country is sixty or seventy thousand li from China. Yet there are
barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great
profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what
right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians
may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring
others. Let us ask, where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; that is because
the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then
even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries -- how much less to China! Of
all that China exports to foreign countries, there is not a single thing which is not
beneficial to people: they are of benefit when eaten, or of benefit when used, or of benefit when resold: all are beneficial. Is there a single article from China
which has done any harm to foreign countries? Now we have set up regulations governing the Chinese people. He who sells opium shall receive the death penalty and he

if the barbarians do not bring opium, then how can the

Chinese people resell it, and how can they smoke it? The fact is that the wicked barbarians beguile the
Chinese people into a death trap. How then can we grant life only to these barbarians? He who takes the life of even
one person still has to atone for it with his own life; yet is the harm done by opium
limited to the taking of one life only? Therefore in the new regulations, in regard to those barbarians who bring opium to China, the penalty
is fixed at decapitation or strangulation. This is what is called getting rid of a harmful thing on behalf of mankind.8 Lin called opium a poison in a
who smokes it also the death penalty. Now consider this:

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letter that explicitly connected barbarism (and its developmentally retarded implications) to England. By noting
Englands barbaric interest in both profit and poisoning, Lin drew attention to Englands
interest in the doing of harm onto other places and bodies than those it called its own.
The opium addiction, Lin seems to suggest, pulls English barbarians beguiling of the
Chinese into an intoxicating alliance with the addictive effects of the drug itself to drag
Chinese people towards a death trap. Lin accentuated the divides between national and
transnational policy, partly as a way to dramatise what he saw as the relative spiritual generosity of Chinas beneficial commodities and its trade
practices. Also of note is Lins rational economy of opium-delivered harm and the right to death or life. While Lin Tse-Hsu believed opium was illegal in England, at this
time it was not yet used recreationally in England, but we recall that it was conventionally used for the medical sedation or treatment of Downs institutionally housed clinical
patients a kind of chronicity. and here I refer to Elizabeth Freemans term citing agnosis rather than prognosis, what she describes as a phasal, iterative existence leading
neither to cure nor death, and not based upon a building up of wholeness in some ways the preferred biopolitical subject. While Freeman is interested in chronicity as a way of
occupying time,9 I would like to think about it primarily as simultaneously an occasion for thinking about the temporalities of disability and debility imposed from without. In the
case of opium, chronicity becomes the global and local reach of a toxin used to effect a kind of chronic suppression in two places at once, in two populations that are deemed
radically geographically separate but also, perhaps, constitutionally deserving of the same. RACIAL AND OTHER TUNING If we a priori concur that opium is a categorically
bad substance and that all research judgments of human actions should follow from it, we may lose something in the analysis. I am less advocating for value neutrality within
research than for analytically breaking up a terrain in which toxins, particularly within biomedical perspectives, would seem templatically and exclusively to cause damage. The
full range of contemporary opium derivativesopiatesstraddles the biopolitical divide between legitimised medical management and criminalised use, a divide that reflects in
significant part the competing interests of major stakeholders in healthcare industries, prison industrial complexes and welfare states, to take just a few; furthermore, the very
history of opium use is diverse. Finally, I wonder what it would mean to also say that opium has its own inhuman temporality when acting biochemically within human bodies.
Inhuman, certainly, being the condition of biochemically at work in a human; but also involuting human temporalities and percepts and other indexical orientations, and

Considering the affectivity of various substances, in and through

the bodies of their hosts, while applying a critically disabled perspective on the demand
to satisfy health and performance norms, opens some new possibilities of thinking about
governance, welfare, medicine and self-determination. What I hope to have shown above
necessarily brieflyis the range of hidden potentials that continue to reside in medicalised
concepts due to colonial logics of development, time, sexuality and race that reach
substantively into the contemporary period. A discursive and medical history of toxicity is beyond the scope of this paper; rather, its
goal is to exemplify the rich interanimations of toxins and toxicities, the repulsive
dynamics of racism, and temporalised modes of control (chronicities), whether in the clinic or in the
traffic of contentious transnationality. In all examples, it is a production of the toxic, whether or not specific chemicals are invoked, that
bears imagining in the whole; to only manage toxins as biochemical processes might be to unwittingly collude with the dynamics that produced them. I suggest that the
line between toxicity and intoxication not only should be addressed and rethought; in particular,
decentering a normative embodied temporality.

I suggest that intoxicationrather than toxicitys absence in the form of non-toxicbe considered the unmarked (as in, the ambient or default) variety of the living, in a way

To presume intoxication, rather than

nontoxicity, is to adopt an environmentalist presumption that not all can be known about the more or less universally shared condition of living with contaminants;
to reject clear divisions between body and mind; and to forego the tempting
categorisation of purity for subjects deemed healthful or exempt from the classification
of severity. This revision has consequences for the body norm of, on the one hand,
classed and racialised bodily purity (which comes in opportunistically, for instance, to supplement or haunt Western depictions of West
African communities affected by Ebola); and pharmaceutical tuning in the interest of capitalistic productivity, which works as a kind of companion to
that aligns however oddly with what is called neurodiversity in contemporary revisions of disability.10

intoxication within zones of privilege. In a general sense, we might see at play in the scenes above an assemblage of racial notions, temporalities and biochemical constituents

toxins

have a rich and mixed history

that I understand together as racial tuning. This is to reiterate that

, or poisons,
; they are curative, as in
vaccines; they are injurious to the health-desiring or health-exemplifying individual; they are biopolitically brought to bear on certain populations considered constitutionally

It is relevant here to consider temporal resonances between certain bodies and

the medicalised or pre-medicalised coercions upon those bodies: for instance, the queered
reproductivity of disabled women or women of colour or indigenous women who are
sterilised in the name of eugenic betterment (of obviously another population); the containment of alcoholisms and other
substance attachments as part of impoverished lifeworlds whose source is governmental, racist and
settler-colonialist rather than merely explainable by a constitutionally deserving gene understood in terms of, say, alcoholic proclivity among Native Americans.
deserving of them.

The possibility of a genetic explanation yielded decades of disproportionate genetic research on American Indian groups in ignorance of other critically important factors that
ultimately rejected genetic dominance; popular understanding continues to support this belief.11 The complicated dynamics of the increasing dominance of genetic models for
medicine as well as for issues such as indigenous sovereignty continue to be explored by a number of scholars in science studies including Kim Tallbear.12 Advocates of
prenatal testing will often privilege the fantasy of a nondisabled future by implicitly or explicitly positioning disability as the sloughed-off dredges of a perfect non-disabled future
world, as Alison Kafer and other disability theorists of futures have argued.13 Advances in technology are often explicitly tied to the elimination of a bodily or intellectual
difference that is templatically understood as undesirable. Recently, news of a new more reliable test for Down syndrome has emerged.14 Its politics of life and death and
comparative value, understood through the language of risk, were contradictory at first glance, then easily mappable from the point of view of critical disability studies. For this
new test, the possibility to abort an undesired fetus due to a reliable positive test result for Down syndrome for high-risk mothers was an advantage over other inferior tests that
had greater risk of miscarriagethat is, one would not want to abort a fetus that might have been healthy. That futurity also bears the weight of postraciality, one that we can

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identify in visions of the technophilic future that have been critiqued in afrofuturist scholarship as being implicitly about the cleansing of marked raciality. Along with the
burgeoning of sensing methods, as the detection of toxicity (as aerial pollution, as bodily intruder) becomes distributed in a number of senses: across a populace and
government (through neoliberalisation), and through time and space, what narratives of danger, expulsion, fatalism are built and what desires are they connected to? Ultimately,
what kinds of racialised, sexualised, temporalised acting citizens do these make, and what are or will be their investments in a fantasied future populace that looks and acts a

allowing ourselves to become, say,

intoxicated by the opiumtemporally ingesting and thinking with its inter-human
temporalities, its urgent demands, its soothings, its very pace. In practice, this means to approach not only the
critical boundaries of the toxic versus the non-toxic, but to explore the affects and other
categorical blurrings in that production of the toxic. For toxic assets as well as for
opium, this means to examine not only the toxicnon-toxic axis, but others of equal importance, such as disabilitydebility,
incidentchronicity, humaninhuman, constitution interconstitution, quickeningslowing. In every move
specific way and not others? INTOXICATED METHOD In closing, I wonder whether one lesson may be about

from a first to a second term, a sharply defined exceptional state shifts towards something much more complex, inviting estrangement from privileged values. What, above,
seems potentially an indulgence becomes more justified in the context of a critically disabled provocation to ask about the workings of our own memory and, more generally,
intellectual apparatus.15 If critical medical humanities calls for examining the knowledge forms of notions of health, illness and disability, one might be led to reflect on the
methods of medical humanities research, particularly given medical humanitiess early ethical motivation to humanise the scene of treatment in the clinic. In the case of toxicity,
what might it mean to design our own embodied approach, whether we call it witnessing, approximation, occupation, to the living or dead subjects of our study? What if we were
to consider, for instance, the iterativity of cognitive and perceptual effort that accompanies some forms of intoxication? This is not an attempt to advocate for a kind of sensory
cosmopolitanism as a way of understanding the lives of interest, but rather approximating a method that may converse with other peoples methods of survival and/or thriving,
to recognise, for instance, the trade in alternative temporalities and perceptions that may already be present. This provocation is of course tentative, but inflected by a deeper
reflection fostered by disability studies: that even while it is absolutely problematic to attribute a priori intellectual deficiency, it is equally problematic to assume that none
involved have been thinking in difference; both are the products of the radical segregation of the observer. And further: What does it mean to elect or enact a kind of cognitive
idealism in the work we do if or when we know this is not always our thinking home, not always a reliable capacity? And is this kind of struggle to perform cognitive idealism
different from the hard work required of any specialty? I would wager that it is. As a scholar with an illness that produces variable cognitive impairment, whose occupation is

to meditate on reigning presumptions of

the ways that idealities of scholarship value cognitive elaboration,
purity and clear thought. Disability theory urges the unravelling of ableist
methodologies; and besides the corporeal experimentation that we could describe as the practice of allopathic medicine, a decolonial
approach avoids the positing of hierarchies of medicating systems (for instance, the prioritising of allopathy over other entrenched
systems). A decolonial disability theory may ultimately avoid the positing of a particular,
idealised, uniquely temporalised cognition as one of its methodological givens and relax
into the dual modes of intoxication and intellectual difference.
temporally stringent enough to require my working during these variances of capacity, I have been led by necessity
research method, in particular on

If opium is animated in the service of nascent capitalism, the 2007 Chinese

Toy Scare reveals the manner in which lead is animated as a salve for US
anxieties around the crisis endemic to global neoliberalism. We hear in
this echo of a prior time and a prior poison a lesson in how world ordering
is enabled through the animation of word ordering. Just as inanimate
objects can be animated as a weapon, discourse is the animation of
concepts and biopolitical racial and gendered orderings which grant
coherence to our world view and thus, what politics we imagine as
available to us. Tracing lead through its toxic narrativization
deterritorizalizes liberal understandings of geo-politics and highlights the
violence used to securitize the nation against the excesses of transnational
capital.
Chen 12 [Mel, Assoc. Prof. Gender and Womens Studies and Vice Chair for Research, Dir. of
the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @ UC Berkeley, Animacies: Biopolitical Racial
Mattering and Queer Affect, p. 160-71]
a master toxicity narrative

The ensemble of images seemed to accelerate the explosive construction of

about Chinese products in general, one
that had been quietly simmering since the recalls in 2005 of soft Chinese-made lunchboxes tainted with dangerous levels of lead. Journalists, government offices, and parents
drew alarming connections between Chinese-made products and environmental toxins apace. Their lists now included heparin in Chinese-made medicines, industrial melamine
in pet food, even Chinese smog, which had become unleashed from its geographic borders and was migrating to other territories. The visual representations of Chinese
toxicities not related to lead that flourished in 2007 included rare-earth magnets haphazardly arrayed in the intestines of a childs X-rayed body; medicine vials; toothpaste tubes;
cans of dog food; lipstick tubes; dogs lying on veterinary tables; and Chinese female workers in factory rows, in what Laura Hyun Yi Kang has called one of the emblematic
images of the global assembly line.8 If rc2 shared legal responsibility for the lead found in Thomas the train, this fact seemed lost on the news media; it was the Chinese site of
assembly (and the U.S. child as the site of contact or ingestion) that received the lions share of attention.9 A generalized narrative

about the inherent

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health risk of Chinese products to U.S. denizens thus crystallized. But this narrative is a highly selective
one dependent on a resiliently exceptionalist victimization of the United States. Chinese residents are
continually affected by the factories called their own, through the pollution of water, air, food, and soil. A growing awareness of the regular failure of local and national
governments to strengthen protections for residents and workers from industrial toxins has led to a dramatic rise in commu165 nity protests, lawsuits, and organized activist
movements.10 These industries are deeply bound up with transnational industrialization, in which China has been a major participant for decades, as well as the vulnerabilities it
generates. According to David Harvey, the governments of industrializing nations are tempted to race to the bottom in their striving for participation in systems of transnational
capital. In the process, they are more than willing to overlook unjust labor remunerations or benefits and the lack of protection from adverse labor conditions. As a result, local
populations and industry workers, because they are deeply tied to the very environments in which these industries are animated, must forcibly consume (literally) the by-

mass media stories pitched Chinese environmental

threats neither as harmful to actual Chinese people or landscapes, nor as products of a
global industrialization that the United States itself eagerly promotes, but as invasive
dangers to the U.S. territory from other national territories. These environmental toxins
were supposed to be there but were found here. Other countries, including Mexico,
were named in relation to manufacturing hazards; yet, perhaps in proportion to its
predominance in world markets, China remained the focus of concern for the
vulnerability of the United States to consumer product toxicities. It seems no coincidence that just before
this year, in 2006, China overtook the United States in global exports, a fact documented by the World Trade
Organization and widely reported throughout 2006 and 2007.12 This rise in manufacturing led to fears about the trade deficit, fears hardly
products of those industries.11 Within the United States in 2007,

contained and in fact in some sense paradoxically fueledby Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrezs proclamation that the swelling Chinese output was not a threat.13
Alarm about the safety of Chinese products entered all form of discourse, from casual conversations to talk shows to news reports. In what might be called a new, shrewd form
of unofficial protectionism, Stateside citizens were urged to avoid buying Chinese products in general, even though such products are essentially ubiquitous given the longtime
entrenchment of trade relations between the United States and China. That an estimated 80 percent of all toys bought in the United States are made in China is the sign of such
entrenchment. An investigative reporter recounted that attempting to avoid anything made in China for one week was all but futile. He wrote, Poi166 soned pet food. Seafood
laced with potentially dangerous antibiotics. Toothpaste tainted with an ingredient in antifreeze. Tires missing a key safety component. U.S. shoppers may be forgiven if they are
becoming leery of Chinese-made goods and are trying to fill their shopping carts with products free of ingredients from that country. The trouble is, that may be almost
impossible.14 One lesson of this panic was that inanimate pollutants could now invade all kinds of consumer products, and other pollutants could always climb on board.

The Chinese toy panic in 2007 was a twist on an earlier theme in recent U.S. history
regarding the toxicity of lead. Since 1978, the year that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission banned residential paint containing lead,
there have been public-awareness campaigns and legislation regarding exposure from house paint. Lead-based paint is present in many buildings constructed before 1978,
though public-awareness campaigns and municipal abatement programs have been quite successful in reducing the threat of residential lead to the middle and upper classes.
More recently, however, environmental justice activists from polluted neighborhoods and public health advocates have insisted that lead toxicity remains a problem for children

among black children was thus figured as an epidemiological crisis linked

to the pollution of neighborhoods populated largely by people of color, including older
buildings whose once-widespread lead paint had not been remediated, and where leadpolluting industrial centers were located. But in 2007, news media coverage of this kind
of lead toxicity began to float and fade, overtaken by the heightened transnational
significance of lead. Toys from China quickly became the primary source of threat, displacing this previous concern.15 I thus
in impoverished neighborhoods. Lead poisoning

argue that a new material-semiotic form of lead emerged in 2007. This new lead was, despite its physiological identity to the old lead, taking on a new meaning and political

If the
spread of transnational commodities reached into all classes and privileges, how did
middle-class white children morph into the primary victims of this environmental lead,
when poor black children had previously been represented as subject to the dangers of
domestic lead? Why could only China, or occasionally a few other industrial sites not in the United States such as Mexico and India, be
167 imagined as leads source? Ultimately, what, or who, had this new lead become? Animate Contaminants At first glance, lead is not integral to the
character and becoming animated in novel ways. Why were painted trains and beaming middle-class white children chosen to represent the lead toxicity this time?

biological or social body. In the biomythography of the United States, lead is dead. Rather than being imagined as integral to life, and despite its occurrence in both inorganic
and organic forms, lead notionally lies in marginal, exterior and instrumental, and impactful relation to biological life units, such as organic bodies of value. The concept of
animacy suggests there can be gradations of lifeliness. If viruses, also nonliving, nevertheless seem closer to life because they require living cells for their own continued
existence, lead seems more uncontroversially dead and is imagined as more molecular than cellular. The meta-rubric of animacy theory proves useful here, as lead appears
to undo the purported mapping of lifeliness-deadliness scales onto an animate hierarchy. Not only can dead lead appear and feel alive; it can fix itself atop the hierarchy, sitting

lead deterritorializes, emphasizing its mobility through and against imperialistic

spatializations of here and there. The lead that constitutes todays health and
security panic in the United States is figured as all around us, in our toys, our dog food,
and the air we breathe, streaming in as if uncontrollably from elsewhere. Lead is not
supposed to, in other words, belong here. Even popular reports of the export of electronics waste to developing countries for
cozily amid healthy white subjects. Furthermore,

resource mining still locate the toxicity of lead, mercury, and cadmium away from here; their disassembled state is where the health hazard is located, and disassembly

Leads seeming return to the

middle and upper classes exemplifies the boomerang effect of what the sociologist
Ulrich Beck calls a risk society: Risks of modernization sooner or later also strike
happens elsewhere.16 Now, however, the new lead is here, having perversely returned in the form of toxic toys.

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those who profit from them. . . . Even the rich and the powerful are not safe from them. 17
The new lead thus represents a kind of involuntary environmental justice, if we read justice as not the extension of remedy but a kind of revenge.18 While the new lead fears
indicate an apparent progressive development of the interrelations of threat, biology, race, geographic speci168 ficity, and sovereign symbolization, leads present-day

It is instructive to trace leads imbrication in the rhetorics of

political sovereignty and globalized capital, remaining attentive to what is present and what is absent. If lead is at the present moment
embodiment may not be such an unusual admixture.

imagined to come from places outside the geographic Westin spite of the longtime complexity of transnational relationsand to threaten definitive U.S. citizenry, then how

its status against a history of race rendered as biological threat, and a present that intensifies the
possibilities of biological terrorism? How might we contextualize the panic around lead as a
hyper-stimulated war machine in which the U.S. government perceives and surveils
increasing numbers and types of terrorist bodies? And how does a context of an
increasingly fragile U.S. global economic power texture and condition this panic, one that sits
adjacent to discussions of contamination and contagion? While lead has long worn an identity as a pollutant, associated with industry and
targeted in environmentalist efforts, todays lead might first suggest a new development in the domain of
contagion discourse. Contagion can be invoked precisely because the touching and ingestion of lead represents, for children, a primary
route of exposure, just as with live biological agents. Yet there may be still further structural forces at play. Priscilla Wald, writing about
complex narratives of biological contagion, has shown how epidemiology itself can be informed by circulating
myths, understood as stories that are authoritative and serve to buttress
communitarian identity.19 One could argue that the black children who disappeared from the lead
representations did so precisely because the new lead was tied to ideas of vulnerable
sovereignty and xenophobia, ideas that demanded an elsewhere (or at least not interior North
America) as their ground. However, as I will argue later, black children did not quite disappear. In the
might we assess

United States, the genuine challenge of representing the microcosmic toxicity of lead and a human groups vulnerability to it defers to a logic of panics, falling back on simplified,
racially coded narratives. Such narratives, by offering ready objects, doubly conceal the deeper transnational, generational, and economic complexity of the life of lead. The
behavior of lead as a contaminating, but not technically contagious, toxin (but, again, not necessarily as a pollutant in wall paint or as an airborne dust) contains many of the
elements of Walds outbreak narrative, a contemporary trope of disease emergence involv ing multiple discourses (including popular and scientific) that has been present since
the late 1980s. Wald asserts that the specific form of the outbreak narrative represented a shift in epidemiological panics because it invoked tales that reflected the global and
transnational character of the emerging infection and involved the use of popular epidemiological discourses to track the success of actions against the disease. Lead, however,
is not a microbe, not an infectious agent; it does not involve human carriers like those profiled in Walds examples of outbreak narratives.

The lead panic

depends not on human communicability but the toxicity of inanimate objects, so it is technically not the stuff of contagion. What it does clearly and by
necessity involve, however, is transnational narratives of the movement of contaminants in the epidemiology of human sickness. In migration (the Pacific Rim) and source
(China), the lead story significantly resembles the sars epidemiological and journalistic trajectories of 2002, when the outbreak occurred. Finally, leads major route of
contamination is by ingestion, and it is epidemiologically mappable; when lead is attached to human producers, even if transnationally located far away, a kind of disease
vectoring still can happen, even if its condition is not (even transitively) communicable. Yellow Terrors There is in fact very little that is new about the lead panic in 2007 in the
United States. At least, we can say that it is not sufficient to turn to popular and scientific epidemiologys overapplied cry that contemporary ailments bear the mark of this
globalizing worlds heightened interconnectivities (a cry that says, for instance, that lead travels more than it used to, which would require us to accept, somehow, that lead came
only from China). In fact, anxieties about intoxications, mixings, and Chinese agents have steadily accompanied U.S. cultural productions and echo the Yellow Peril fears
articulated earlier in the twentieth century. That lead was subject to an outbreak narrative works synergistically with these anxieties, and these narratives may indeed have been
partially incited or facilitated by them. One wonders in particular about the haunted vulnerability of Western sites that Elizabeth Povinelli incisively describes as ghoul health:
Ghoul health refers to the global organization of the biomedical establishment, and its imaginary, around the idea that the big scary 170 bug, the new plague, is the real threat
that haunts the contemporary global division, distribution, and circulation of health, that it will decisively render the distribution of jus vitae ac necris, and that this big scary bug
will track empire back to its source in an end-game of geophysical bad faith. Ghoul health plays on the real fear that the material distribution of life and death arising from the
structural impoverishment of postcolonial and settler colonial worlds may have accidentally or purposefully brewed an unstoppable bio-virulence from the bad faith of liberal
capital and its multiple geophysical tactics and partners.20 Povinelli traces a kind of looming materialization, in the form of threatened health, of the latent affects of imperialist

The recent lead panic echoes, yet is a variation of, the turn-of- the- century Orientalized
threat to white domesticity, as detailed by Nayan Shah in relation to San Francisco Chinatown in the late
just deserts.

nineteenth century and early twentieth.21 Shah describes local investments in white domesticity in this period and its connection to nationalism and citizenship. Two perceived

in the form of activities believed to reside exclusively in Chinatown:

prostitution and opium dens. Significant among concerned white residents and policy
makers fears at the time was the contractibility of syphilis and leprosy, which was
imagined to happen in direct contact with the Chinese, whether this contact was sexual or sensual in nature. Notably, they
threats to white domesticity came

also worried that the passing of opium pipes from lip to lip was a major route of disease transmission; this image resonates with the licking scene of contamination of the leadcovered toys, a scene to which I return later.22 This indirect mode of imagined transmission resonates with the nature of the lead panic, for the relation of contamination in the
case of both the opium pipes (disease contagion) and the new lead (pollution, poisoning) is one of transitivity. While the imagined disease transmission mediated by an opium
pipe was more or less immediate and depended on proximity, if not direct contact, between human bodies, the new lead is imagined to be associated with national or human
culprits somewhere far away. Since the current reference to lead produces an urgent appeal to reject Chinese-made products, and since mentions of China arouse fantasies of
toxins such as lead, heparin, and so on, then in effect, lead has in this moment become just slightly Chinese (without being personified as such). That is to say, on top of the
racialization of those in171 volved, including whites and Chinese, lead itself takes on the tinge of racialization. This is particularly so because leads racialization, I suggest, is
intensified by the non-proximity of the Chinese who are responsible for putting the lead in the toys: that is, leads presence in the absence of the Chinese, in a contested space
of U.S. self-preservation, effectively forces lead to bear its own toxic racialization. As toys become threatening health risks, they are rhetorically constructed as racialized threats.

This racialization of lead and other substances both replicates a fear of racialized immigration into the
vulnerable national body at a time when its economic sovereignty is in question and
inherits a racialization of disease assisted by a history of public health discourse. The
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corrupted Chinatown arguably still lives, albeit now understood as an entire nature covered in
irresponsible factories that spread their poisons far and wide. In the twenty-first- century lead panic, exogenous
(that is, unassimilated) mainland Chinese still stand to face the old accusations of ill hygiene and moral defect. Thus, todays images of toy-painting
laborers too readily attract narratives of moral contagion: they demonstrate irresponsibility toward our consumers and blithe ignorance of
the consequences of their work, properties that effectively reinforce their unfitness for American citizenship. This
is a moral standard that has already been increasingly imposed on the working class by legal and social expressions of U.S. neoliberalism.

The calculus of risk, race, and trade continually reproduces toxic expulsion
to Othered lands and peoples. US Empire simultaneously reproduces the
Asian other as a toxic contagion threatening from the outside while placing
under erasure the anti-black vectors of toxicity that naturalize lead to black
flesh. Biopolitical toxicity occurs through an assemblage of interwoven
with class, race, location, sexuality, and ability in the name of protecting
the white child, who must not come into contact with the lead infected toy,
and must not come in contact with the lead infected body. Through the
play of contamination and control, the reproductive future of US empire is
secured.
Chen 12 [Mel, Assoc. Prof. Gender and Womens Studies and Vice Chair for Research, Dir. of
the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @ UC Berkeley, Animacies: Biopolitical Racial
Mattering and Queer Affect, p. 173-85]
Leads Labors The

image of the vulnerable white child is relentlessly promoted over and

against an enduring and blatant background (that is, unacknowledged) condition of labor and of
racism: the ongoing exposure of immigrants and people of color to risk that sets them up
for conditions of bodily work and residence that dramatize the body burdens that projects of white
nationalism can hardly refuse to perceive. Blithely 174 overlookedor steadfastly ignoredare the toxic
conditions of labor and of manufacture, such as inattention to harmful transnational
labor and industrial practices that poison, in many cases, badly protected or unprotected
workers.33 Other persistent conditions include the invisibility within the United States of the working, destitute, or agrarian poor in favor of
idealized consumers who are white and middle or upper middle class; electronic wastes as extravagant and unattended exports of the United States to
countries willing to take the cash to mine it; the dumping of toxic wastes and high-polluting industries into poorer neighborhoods within municipalities;

the cynical
calculus of risk, race, and international trade continually reproduces a specific
configuration of toxic expulsion to othered lands or peoples. As Cheri Lucas Jennings and Bruce H.
Jennings report, the international economic director of the World Bank suggested that third-world countries
might be better off trading for the toxic waste of first-world countries, since poverty or
imminent starvation were a greater threat to life expectancy than the toxicity of the waste
they would receive.35 Within the United States, these authors point to the greater access to less
persistent toxins (such as pesticides) by those with economic privilege, leading to a bifurcated
distribution of greater and lesser toxic infusion along lines of both class and race. The
contemporary fears in the United States about lead contamination and mental
degradation are complexly interwoven with race, class, and cognitive ability, both as they
and common practices in the United States of exporting products of greater toxicity than is permitted within its own borders.34 Here,

externally manifest (that is, the racialization of imports from China) and as they dovetail with internal registers of classism and regional stereotyping.
Take, for example, one toy, Hillbilly Teeth, made in China and distributed by the company Funtastic (of Houston, Texas), which was recalled due to
concerns about lead in 2008 (figure 16). The recall notice of this product issued by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission singled out the gray
paint on the teeth as the source of lead.36 Though it was coded as threatening or harmful due to its potentially tainted plastic (which would by design
be placed in the childs mouth), one could equally find alarm in its perpetration of classed, ableist, and ruralized violence in its identity as a toy. The
packages cardboard backing depicts a smiling, presumably nonhillbilly white male child wearing the denture insert, and the 175 discolored, out of
proportion, and otherwise imperfect teeth are designated yucky, gross, and scary. An inset fake frame, labeled My Names Bubba, has a cartoon
speech bubble (Yaint I purdy?) that uses a distorted caricature of rural or Southern accents. The prefatory and framing Lets Get Goofy! resembles

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the youthful refrain Lets Get Retarded! and signifies a willful and temporary loss of rationality and cognitive measure. The extant class coding of the
bad teeth further builds on the myth of rural and working-class degradation by hinting at the acute dental issues that often accompany addiction to
methamphetamines (aka meth mouth). Methamphetamines are the most recognized drug problem in hillbilly country, that is, the rural South and
Midwest. The juxtaposition of Hillbilly and Teeth reminds us that both the urban gentrified center and the pastoral myths of the United States have their
own white undersides.37 Against such a consolidated scenario, the leaden gray-tinted tooth paint seems even more intent on the protection of a limited
few, the urban kids who 16. Funtastics Lets Get Goofy Hillbilly Teeth, made in China, recalled in 2008. Source unknown. 176 have the voluntary
luxury, every year on Halloween, of assuming the mask of fallen class and intellectual ability, only to snap it off later. A different toy, however, sat at the
center of the lead panic in 2007: the expensive toy series Thomas the Tank Engine, seen earlier. Thomas and his friends are immensely popular
objects and are accompanied by a range of lucrative tie-ins, including a television show, games, activity books, candy, and other merchandise bearing
Thomass characteristic blue body and round gray and black face. These are not only meant for children. The series is marketed to middle-class
parents who insist on high-status quality products, which in this case are tuned toward boys and quite explicitly direct their proper masculine
development. An article from the New York Times in 2007 explicitly associated the toys high prices with their presumed quality and safety. The article
bears one visual image, a photograph of the James Engine from the Thomas series, and a description of one member of the vulnerable population
(identified as children), a white four-year- old boy whose mother points to the expectation of quality for these toys and whose class membership
appears to be middle to upper middle class: The affected Thomas toys were manufactured in China. . . . These are not cheap, plastic McDonalds
toys, said Marian Goldstein of Maplewood, N.J., who spent more than $1,000 on her sons Thomas collection, for toys that can cost $10 to $70 apiece.
But these are what is supposed to be a high-quality childrens toy.38 Presumably, the cheap, working-class McDonalds toys are the toxic ground on
which the nontoxic quality toys are to be built and compared. Goldstein may have a point about the trains symbolic privilege, at least. Trains occupy an
iconic place in the mythology and economic actuality of the creation of the American West. Symbolically and materially, trains are intrinsically
connected to commerce and the circulation of economic goods as well as, in the United States, to a hidden history of Chinese labor. Both the extension
of railroad systems to the American West and the development of the Sacramento River Delta in California heavily depended on imported Chinese
labor that was rendered invisible in certain interested histories of labor.39 Narratives about lead toxicity in toys from China largely obscure the
conditions of Chinese labor in the production of these toy trains.40 Nevertheless, these narratives deploy the fact of labor obliquely, in an explication of
the pathway of toxicity (lead must be painted on). How to explain this incipient visibility? 177 An accusatory narrative in which Chinese are the criminal
painters of the toy Thomas trains sets things up differently from the story of the Chinese laborers who extended the railroads to the American West:
while the latter were made invisible in the interest of the white ownership of land, property, and history, for the toy painters the conditions of labor
needed to be made just visible enough to facilitate the territorial, state, and racial assignation of blame, but not enough to generally extend the ring of
sympathetic concern around the workers themselves.41 Indeed, I found very few instances among concerned parents or journalists in the United
States in which lead was also understood to be a source of toxicity for the immigrant or transnational laboring subjects who take part in the

the story of lead, a story of toxicity, security, and nationality, is also

necessarily about labor: when it is registered, and when it is hidden, and who pays what
kind of attention to whose labor. The regular erasure, or continued invisibility, in the lead narratives
of the textile sweatshops, device assemblers, and toy painters, who are largely young
women who have migrated into the Chinese cities from rural satellites, renders quite
ironic the care work that is so poignantly provided by the toysand transitively by the
women who make them. The transitive criminalization of Chinese toy assemblers is all
the more ironic when we consider the routinization of childcare inside the United States
by African Americans and immigrants from Central and South America, the Philippines,
South Asia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, for middle-class parents of all ethnicities.42 In
manufacture of the product. So,

some respects, the economy itself and changing kinship structures have increasingly meant that parents hire help while they work away from home, a
creep of the care crisis into higher echelons of society, as feminist labor scholar Evelyn Nakano Glenn notes.43 From the 1980s, middle-class mothers
increasingly joined the labor force as neoliberalism took hold in the racialized sphere of the care of children: as they increasingly left the house and

The
racial mapping of the desirable subjects in the United States thus occurs in the context
of the erasure of its disposable ones; I refer here to Grace Changs notion of (immigrant female) disposable domestics.45
their children, mothers had to accomplish more intimate care in less time, suggesting that care work be taken up by others in their place.44

Just as lead particles travel, so too does Thomas the train. It is a mobile vehicle, not only symbolically but also materially, one that has 178 journeyed
from England to the United States to China and back again. And indeed, a trip I took to China in 2010 revealed many knockoffs of Thomas, who is just
as popular there as he is in the United States. These packaged toys, puzzle books, and candies were immediately recognizable but had slightly
incorrect English spellings of his name, such as Tromas, or Tomas (figure 17), as if to match the impossibility of perfect translation. These illegal
copies show that, like the lead he allegedly carries with him on his back, Thomas is not containable within a given trajectory of movement and desire.
The global spread of this commodity complicates the one-way vector of contamination from China to the United States, indicating a multidirectional
flow. And yet, little is still known within the United States about how these toys may or may not harm Chinese children or the Chinese workers who
produce them. I referred earlier to a mode of transmissionfrom contaminated toy to childas one of transitivity. For the late-capitalist, highconsumption, and highly networked sectors of the world, transitivity has arguably become a default mode not only of representation but of worldrelating. The asymmetry of this world-relation is no barrier to the toxic effectivity of simmering racial panics. The sphere of the world that is well
rehearsed in the flow of transnational commodities, services, and communications has become the perfect host for such transitivity, or at least the
collapsing of transitive relations into conceptualizations of immediate contact. Patricia Clough, in her theorization of the complex, even nonhuman,
agencies and affects participating in television and computer-consuming information societies, aptly writes that even as the transnational or the global
become visible, proposing themselves as far-flung extensions of social structure, they are ungrounded by that upon which they depend: the speed of
the exchange of information, capital, bodies, and abstract knowledge and the vulnerability of exposure to media event-ness. 46 An advertisement on
the airport trolleys in Shanghai Pudong Airport (figure 18) in June 2010 demonstrates this relentlessly productive metonymic and economic transitivity.
The text reads, Your Eyes in the Factory! Book and Manage your Quality Control on www .AsiaInspection.com, in stark white letters on a red
background; below the website name is an icon of inspection, the magnifying glass. In an inset picture, a male workerpossibly an inspector, possibly
an assemblerhandles a product. The transitivity here is not between the Chinese workers and the toys they have assembled, but rather 17. Super
Tomas Series toy train set, outdoor market, Guilin, China, 2010. At lower right, the first three Chinese characters are to-ma- sz, a phonetic spelling of
Thomas. Photograph by the author. 180 of participants in production monitoring. It exists between the eyes of international corporate managers, the
advertisements English-reading addressees, and another set of eyes that is ambiguously either that of local Chinese inspectors or that of remote

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cameras that focus on Chinese workers. The ad further represents the interest in surveillance, glossed here as more benign quality control, that arose
after the toxicity of Chinese products illuminated Chinese production as a troubled site.47 Blackened Lead Some years ago, as I indicated earlier,
before the domestic narrative largely disappeared in favor of the Chinese one, the greater public was invited to consider the vulnerability of black
children to lead intoxication. What happened to this association? Did it simply disappear, as I first hinted? Or did it meaningfully recede? I turn here to
take a closer look at the medicalization of lead. Lead toxicity is medically characterized as at least partly neural; that is, it involves the nerve system,
most notably comprising the brain and nerve pathways throughout the body. Medical accounts of lead toxicity, including those in- 18. Airport trolley ad
for AsiaInspection. Photograph by the author, June 26, 2010. 181 voked in the toy lead panic of 2007, invoke its ability to lower the intelligence quotient
(iq) of a child. The iq measure bears a distinctly eugenicist history and remains the subject of controversy regarding whether it has adequately shed its
originary racial and socioeconomic biases.48 Indeed, to what extent might we imagine that lead-induced iq loss not only threatens the promise of
success in an information economy, but also involves subtle racial movement away from whiteness, where the greatest horror is not death but
disablement, that is, mental alteration and the loss of rational control? Julian B. Carters study of neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, and its
characterization in the 1880s by the neurologist George Beard as a specific property of genteel, sensitive, intelligent, well-bred whiteness (rather than,
it was assumed, as a property of the working or peasant classes) gives us a more specific backdrop against which to consider neurotoxicity and its
connection to the new leads poster boy, the white middle-class child. Carter argues that the very vulnerability expressed by neurasthenia as a property
cultivated primarily in privileged whites, both men and women, is what legitimated their claim to power in modernity, even as industrialization was

blackness has its own specific history with

regard to rhetorics of contamination, not least the one drop of blood policies against
racial mixing and miscegenation. Later policies of racial segregation in the Jim Crow South were also linked to white fears of
contamination. Referring to the debates in Plessy v. Ferguson, Saidiya Hartman writes of white concerns about the
integrity of bodily boundaries and racial self-certainty. She notes, As Plessy evinced,
sitting next to a black person on a train, sleeping in a hotel bed formerly used by a black
patron, or dining with a black party seated at a nearby table not only diminished white
enjoyment but also incited fears of engulfment and contamination.50 Lead contamination in the United
blamed as a cause of the condition.49 Within the United States,

States continues to be scrutinized for its racial bias, albeit unevenly. One recent contested conjunction of African American populations and lead was a
study led by the Kennedy Krieger Institute. This study, conducted between 1993 and 1995, tracked lead levels in the children of Baltimore public
housing occupants (primarily African Americans) who were exposed to various degrees of lead toxicity in residential paint, without adequate warning of
the dangers of that lead. A storm of debate erupted around 182 this study, in which healthy families were recruited to live in lead-contaminated houses.
(This experiment harked back to the notorious Tuskegee Institute study, conducted between 1932 and 1972, which monitored poor black men who had
syphilis but neither treated nor informed them in any way about the disease.)51 I have claimed that the year 2007 represented a year of transition, as a
new and imaginatively more dominant, exogenous Chinese lead was entering the public domain. In this very same year, National Public Radio
symptomatically both remembered and forgot received knowledge about domestic lead toxicity. First, a National Public Radio (npr) show called Living
on Earth updated its coverage of a longitudinal study on the urban poor and lead toxicity. That same year, another npr show noted the higher levels of
lead toxicity among African American children and pronounced these statistics puzzling, leaving it at that.52 Puzzling: this illogic or failure of
deduction occurred despite

all kinds of widely available evidence pointing to increased urban

regional pollution, lower access to information, and lower financial capacity to remediate
or conceal lead paint. This easy disregard explains how black children in representations of toxic lead
largely disappear and are replaced by white children: the national security project of the
United States is less interested in profiling African American children as victims of lead
poisoning, especially when the new lead is now situated as an externally derived
attack. Even the remembering of urban toxicity in the npr Living on Earth show in 2007 is of a certain kind. This show updated its audience on
an acclaimed longitudinal study on leads effects on children that was begun in the 1970s, led by Kim Dietrich of the University of Cincinnati, and
revisited over the years by npr. Dietrich reported that early exposure to lead toxicity can be linked to later criminal behavior. By design, the study
was focused on inner-city children, according to Dietrich, who are largely minority.53 In the npr update in 2007, which functions as a symptomatic

a stunning assemblage: poverty,

proximity of weapons, violence, lead, and poor nutrition together as collective
determining factors for inner-city criminality: Gellerman (interviewer): So if you look at inner cities, if you look at the
piling-up of racial constructs, Dietrich actively legitimated the interviewers prompts, gathering

poor, if you look at their exposure to weapons, you look at their exposure to violence, you look at their exposure to lead, and 183 their poor nutrition. Is
this sort of the perfect combination of factors for crime? Dietrich: Yes, its in a sense, the perfect storm. Uh, the environment provides a lot of incentives
for crime. The child is in a community where he or she sees violencethe availability of guns, the availability of illicit drugs. So I would say that the

is used to
characterize a latent violent criminality domestic to the United States , naturalized to an
urban underclass of color, using a co-construction of guns, ghettoes, and racialized
pathology. In some sense, it is an old story: to pump someone full of lead is to kill them. But the form
and objects of death have become molecular, and intentionality has shifted to neglect, and
inner-city environment provides the weapon, lead pulls the trigger. Lead pulls the trigger. This metaphor of weaponry

a fragile self-identification rather than potency reshapes the threat into the other person, conflated with the lead that afflicts them. Contrast this

the New York Times article on toxic Chinese drywall, The Enemy at Home, which
partakes of a war metaphor not because of some naturalizing co-construction of guns,
ghetto, and racialized pathology, but in relation to a transnational (that is, extra-domestic)
metaphor of weaponry to the title of

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exchange that simultaneously seems to threaten representative individual bodies and
criminalize Chinese trade participation. This enemy, that is, should not be at home, with this word understood both as a
generalized national body and as the domicile of family units (who are in a position to afford the construction of new homes). One wonders to what
degree any newfound alarmism about the vulnerability of black children to environmental lead can succeed, given the abiding construction of affinities
between racist constructions of blackness and those of lead, long integral to the American racial and gendered corporeal imaginary.54 A racial

construction of blacks as already unruly, violent, contaminated, and mentally deficient

lies inherent in the current neoliberal economy, which not only positions people of color
in a labor hierarchy that matches them with literally disabling forms of manual labor, but
is also conditioned and supported by a growing and incredibly powerful prison industrial
complex structured according to race, class, and gender.55 If lead exposure itself is
associated with cognitive delay, enhanced aggressivity, impulsivity, convulsions, and
mental lethargy, then we might read such characterizations of blackness as attributions, or
intimations, of disability, as much as we already understand them as damaging racial profiles.
Eric Lotts study of blackface minstrelsy relates the suturing of impulsivity or sudden bodily displacement to fears about black masculinity in this
performance culture in the United States. Lott reads Charles Dickenss account of the dancing in a New York blackface performance as stunned by its
spasticity: the whole passage reads as if Dickens did not really know what to do with such energy, where to put it.56 Would lead toxicity, hence
overdetermined with legacies of the negative characteristics of blackness, succeed quite so successfully as an imagined property of other racialized
bodies, such as the Mexican braceros of the Second World War and modern-day maquiladora workers, both of whom have suffered from lead toxicity?
57 If disability can be read into constructs of blackness, disability itself is also a critically important axis of difference. Scholars such as Nirmala
Erevelles and Andrea Minear point out the dangers of being both black and disabled; the authors suggest that within critical race feminism, while
disability is sometimes recognized, it can often analytically function for scholars as a nuance of intensity rather than its own structural difference,
leading to a loss of complexity in the reading: the omission of disability as a critical category in discussions of intersectionality has disastrous and
sometimes deadly consequences for disabled people of color caught at the interstices of multiple differences. These are just some ways in which
criminality, race, and disability can be mutually produced and reproduced. Thus, it is not necessarily correct to judge that African American youth are

in this pointedly transnational struggle

between major economic powers, black children are now the less-urgent population under threat. It is, instead, as if
black children are constructed as more proximate to lead itself, as naturalized to lead ; they serve as new ground to
the newest figure. In the case of the Thomas trains, lead toxicity is racialized, not only
because the threatened future has the color of a white boy, but also because that boy
must not change color. The boy can change color in two ways: First, lead lurks as a dirty toxin, as a pollutant, and it is persistently
racialized as anything but white. Second, black children are assumed to be toxic; and leads threat to
white children is not only that they risk becoming dull and cognitively defective, but
precisely that they lose their class-elaborated white racial cerebrality, and that they become suited
racially to living in the ghettoes.58
now no longer viewed as vulnerable to lead. Rather, it is easier to imagine that

Anxieties about the health of trade hinge on a capacity/debility binarism

that requires the dumping of toxic assets and death of toxic populations
even as it expropriates value from them. Likewise, resolutional coherence
is only achieved through the disavow of toxicity which is everywhere
contaminating its conceptual narcissism. We refuse the intellectual
homeostatsis in which we understand the economic, the diplomatic, and
the political as discrete categories free of historical and bodily
contamination.
Chen 15 [Mel, Assoc. Prof. Gender and Womens Studies and Vice Chair for Research, Dir. of
the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @ UC Berkeley, Unpacking Intoxication, racialising
disability, Med Humanit, 41, p. 25-6]
NON-TOXIC FINANCE My starting point for a meditation on the strange interanimations of temporality, disability and race occurs in a place far from
medical humanities storied clinic: recent
21st-century US financial crisis

crises in finance capital. For all the abstraction of contemporary economics, the early
put into relief finance capitals reliance on imputations of health and

toxicity, and this seemingly metaphorical overlay and the dynamics it afforded were more than fanciful, for it had ramifications that were
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obviously materially consequential. Within this crisis, it is striking that the term toxic assets was commonly used to apply to deregulated and
dehistoricised mortgage products that, in their unmanageable volumes, insecurely guaranteed massive amounts of debt and were hence afforded
primary blame for the crash. As

a registration of the dominance of abstract-free trade entities over

the geography of national borders, this crisis bore significantly global effects. Historically, the
toxic asset began as financial terminology referring to an asset with a market value far below its book value, making it unable to be sold. In practice,
such assets needed to be written off the books as soon as possible, as their values declined so precipitously that a corporations health might be
irrecoverable. Capitalisms ironies, the opposing interests of its parties, enflesh a seeming conflict within the term; specifically, how does the toxic
asset, this contradictory blend of positivity (asset) and negativity (toxic), come to flag the means for a local recapacitation of a financial body whose
concomitant debilitation of other bodies is erased by the naturalisation of finance capital? I will address this dynamic in the pages to follow. By the
intentional use of body and capacity, I mean to generously expand the stage for a medical humanities approach that will link actual and figural
connections among individual human bodies (the common stage actor of medical scenarios, the patient) and larger, often corporatised, abstract
bodies whose effective materiality ironises even the word corporatise as well as the idea that literal bodies must be medically central. The use of
language such as health was remarkably present in discussions of the economic crash; this will also be explored below. This article strives to
delineate what it suggests is an integral fabric of racialisation within dominant disability and illness narrations and representations, even within scenes
seemingly remote from the clinic. As is true of racialisation in general, effects are never merely figurative, but materially consequential. Along the lines
of the naturalising work that the imputation of health does, and its concomitant systems models, we note as well the importance of homeostasis within
finance capital. Indeed, nation

states like the USA and corporate entities seated in the global North
have grandly benefitted from a trusted homeostasis of an international financial body
within which the USA understands itself as fundamentally active. This is a seeming
homeostasis built upon the naturalisation of the free movement of capital and,
correspondingly, the invisibilising tricks of World Trade Organization and North American
Free Trade Agreement policies and rationalising frameworks. These meta-corporate,
metanational organisations incur their own swaths of debility through combinations of juridical challenges to
environmental, labour and public health protections; the assembly of transnational industrial dependencies under corporate direction; and the usual
accumulation of profit/impoverishment. This accumulation can be understood as a capacity/debility dyad that is linked dynamically. Here I am using
Jasbir K. Puars development of debility, which she uses to oppose disabilitya more atomisable list of conditions viewed as specific to the individual

debility points to a broader,

biopolitical mapping of both actual and fictionalised capacities and debilities lent to
statistics and that can be shared by populations, and it functions as a way to begin to
understand the grave transnational consequences of actions that can ironically be
wedded, for Puar, to neoliberalised nationalisms going by the name of gay or disability
rights.1 Chen MY. Med Humanit 2015;41:2529. doi:10.1136/medhum-2014-010648 25 Critical medical humanities Downloaded from
body, most compatible with Euro American identity-based rights formulations. Instead,

http://mh.bmj.com/ on March 16, 2016 - Published by group.bmj.com Whereas finance capital has long been naturalised as a core system not only
transnationally but also within the US body, it has come increasingly to seem remarkably unnatural, particularly under the cold light of recent
representations by Occupy visionaries, but also by certain figures within government. Under this destabilisation, its proper affects as well as its implicit
investments begin to come into relief. And here it is useful to note that part of this imbalancethe USAs extended economic event of 20072012has
been blamed on a flush, like a bad algae bloom, of toxic assets linked to the real estate market. From the point of view of the system, toxic assets
besides their identity as disconnected in actual value from their book value and thus unsellableare financial entities that are products of uncertain and
untraceable genealogy, thus in some sense queer, and racially unmoored. Perhaps in part because of this ranging queerness, and certainly because
they function contagiously by being resolutely negatingyou have to get it out of your system or you might diethe vital logics of finance capital
demand that they must be sequestered if at all possible. From the point of view of individuals, the loans were rickety by-products of a
multiadministration effort to encourage broad-spectrum homeownership while delivering unequal costs of this implementation: a racialised and classed
distribution of safer to less secure loans was administered such that, once packaged and once collectively failing, the less secure loans became
macrotoxins in the larger system. The language of disability is explicit, including the idea that balance sheets can become impaired, banks can pass

toxic assets themselves are alternatively called impaired assets and, being illiquid, they
are deemed mobility-impaired, against which we should meaningfully juxtapose the
willed free movement of capital. Already we have a concern about contradictions between the imagined neoliberal national body,
stress tests and then be deemed healthy, even the

against which toxic financial products threaten ill health, and the metonymic subpopulation of the toxic that must be alienated from the accepted flow of

the poor and working class seemed

unmentionable, or discursively toxic, within President Obamas invocations of the health of the
economy. They become the background spectators of a system that resolutely wishes to
overlook them while assuming the windfall of their expropriated assets. At the same time,
under the rubric of crisis, corporations retreat and retool, creating new classes of
unemployed and unemployable. Given the already disproportionate ableism of an
economy in which disabled people are labelled non-productive, the reach of debility here
alone is quite astounding; disability and poverty increasingly touch one another, and
biopolitically they have been rendered proximate. In the financial world, the
classed/raced people exposed to the bad loans disproportionately then come to
capital for that nations own security; it is remarkable, for instance, that

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represent, stand in for, the toxic asset. They are glossed by Laura Kangs invocation of the racialized figure of undeserving
and undisciplined subprime borrowers in the US housing market.2 And yet the importance of their health, financial or otherwise, was negligible in
relation to that of the institutions, which were restored, with stress tests and redoing the books. In 2013, it was reasoned that Spain should get
European help to quarantine toxic assets by bringing them off of banks balance sheets. Note the language used by Spanish Budget Minister Cristobal
Montoro: A first very important policy is to clean up the banking system we need to segregate from those balance sheets the assets that are
damaged by the crisis.3 If the language repeatedly invoked to define the fearful attitude towards these toxic assets is that of dirt and contagion, we

finance capital.4 The European Unions

governing logic of how to handle its trouble countries mirrors US decisions about its own banks, and reminds us that countries
have long been fantastically produced as independent even when the system of
international capital defies this fantasy. Transnational capital is a debility/capacity
machine at work. A framework of toxicity, understood in its capacious, expanded sense,
allows the exploration of repulsive political affects and dynamics wrought through a
fantasy of chemical exchange. In this framework, substances, even nonmaterial but
deeply consequential entities such as the bodies of finance capital, are carriers of
political meaning and, in their effectivity and rationalisation and their shared occupation of medicalised
discourselend themselves to embodied logics, sharing more with what are understood as actual toxins rather than less.
might also consider the semantics of laundering, in this case the rewhitening of property as

Furthermore, distinctions between intoxication and toxicity reveal themselves to be non-neutral differences that articulate through affects and
temporalities, and that structure privilege. The above example considered the material, racialised and classed, as well as disability/debility implications
of what at first glance seemed a mere metaphor for finance: the toxic asset. The ensuing example is set chronologically more than a century earlier, at
a time when disability and race more baldly (if arguably no more substantively than today) traded in colonial imagination, but the section shares the
same goal of expanding a lens beyond a local scene to consider the mutual imbrications of larger phenomena. I consider one particular substance
often, but not always, considered a toxin, while it is (unlike the toxic asset) afforded status as a real thing in the world: opium, in two sites of its situated

Tracing its involvement in clinical usage and governmental response

permits us to further unpack the meanings of toxicity and intoxication as having situated substances
that appear inside and outside of human bodies, as well as a set of political dynamics that involve such
divergent phenomena as medical or healing practices, race, temporality and trade.
usage in the 19th century, and selected effectivities of the drug.

Thus we affirm an intoxicating engagement with the resolution.

We think the resolution does more than simply demand that we accept the
normative framings of nation, economics, politics, self and other which can
reproduce the proper world view to make us subjects fit for biopolitical
investment. Rather, we think of the resolution in terms of toxicity and
animation the resolution is an invitation for queer wording and worlding
animating new configurations of thought that make us unready for
investment and make us invest in how we can think US economic
engagement with China differently. Our method of intoxication reorients
our relationship to geopolitics and capitalism.
Chen 12 [Mel, Assoc. Prof. Gender and Womens Studies and Vice Chair for Research, Dir. of
the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @ UC Berkeley, Animacies: Biopolitical Racial
Mattering and Queer Affect, p. 185-8]
Queer Licking Let me return to the visual symbolic of media coverage of lead toxicity. The florid palette of toy-panic images yielded two prominent and
repeating icons. The media representations favored a pairing of images: on the one hand, the vulnerable child, more frequently a young, white, middle-

The iconic white boys lead toxicity must

be avoided: he should not be mentally deficient, delayed, or lethargic. His intellectual
capabilities must be assured to consolidate a futurity of heteronormative (white)
masculinity; that is to say, he must not be queer. This is not only because one of leads
toxicities reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reproductive disability
and infertility; I suggest here that one aspect of the threat of lead toxicity is its origin in a
class boy; and on the other hand, the dangerous party: Thomas the Tank Engine.

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forbidden sexuality, for the frightening originary scene of intoxication is one of a queer licking. Here
again is the example of the white boy, who in the threatening and frightening scene is precisely licking the painted train, a train whose name is Thomas,
a train that is also one of the Wests preeminent Freudian phallic icons.59 This image of a boy licking the train, though clearly the feared scene of
contamination, never appears literally, or least I have not found it appearing literally; rather, if a boy and a train are present, the boy and the train are
depicted proximately, and that is enough to represent the threat (the licking boy would be too much, would too directly represent the forbidden). But
suggestions are sometimes loaded onto the proximities. In one representative image from a website alerting its readers to rc2s recall of Thomas the
Tank Engine trains, we see the head and chest of a blond boy lying alongside a train that is in the foreground. The boys moist lips are parted and
smiling, his eyes intent and alert; he grasps a dark-hued train car with his right hand, gazing slightly upward at it. The other cars, receding toward the
camera, fall out of focus. The scene isat the very leastphysically and emotionally intimate, pleasurable, and desirous.60 On its website, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a fact sheet about lead, including the following statement under 186 the heading how your child
may be exposed: Lead is invisible to the naked eye and has no smell. Children may be exposed to it from consumer products through normal handto- mouth activity, which is part of their normal development. They often place toys, fingers, and other objects in their mouth, exposing themselves to
lead paint or dust.61 The language here, which means to reassure anxious parents, twice uses the word normal in describing childrens orality: their
handto- mouth activity is normal . . . part of their normal development. This redundancy betrays a nervousness about children, with its language of
proper development and its delineation of what is or is not permissible in normal play. Returning to that fantasy that images could only approximate:
what precisely is wrong with the boy licking the train? Two things are wrong: one, the boy licking Thomas the Tank Engine is playing improperly with the
phallic toy, not thrusting it forward along the floor, but putting it into his mouth. Such late-exhibited orality bears the sheen of that retarded stage of
development known as homosexuality. I am invoking the impossible juncture between the queernesses naturally afforded to children and the fear of a
truly queer child.62 I recently had a conversation with a British man in his seventies about the lead panic within the United States. With a twinkle in his
eye, he said, We had that lead in toys when I was young! Perhaps we just didnt suck them? To me, his comment highlights the kind of temporal
limitations on some kinds of national memory, the invested forgetting that is necessary for such a lead panic to become so enlivened. Given that leads

the scene of the child licking his toxic train slides further
into queerness, as queer and disabled bodies alike trouble the capitalist marriage of
domesticity, heterosexuality, and ability. The queer disability theorist Robert McRuer writes of the development of
domesticity within capitalism that the ideological reconsolidation of the home as a site of intimacy and heterosexuality was also the
very threat is that it produces cognitive disabilities,

reconsolidation of the home as a site for the development of able-bodied identities, practices, and relations.63 Exhibiting telltale signs of

toxicity alike is simultaneously to alert a protected, domestic sphere to the threat of

disability. One could say that lead itself is queered here as a microcosmic pollutant that, almost of its own accord, invades the
body through plenitudes of microcosmic holes (a childs skin), sites the state cannot afford to
acknowledge, for the queer vulnerabilities they portend. 187 Animacy theory embraces the ramified sites and
homosexuality and lead

traces of shifting being. It claims first that the tropes by which lead threatens to contaminate healthy privileged subjects relies fundamentally on
animacy hierarchies. Lead can drag vulnerable people down, through variously lesser positions of animateness, into the realms of the vegetable or

anxieties about lead

toxicity microcosmically, and very compactly, demonstrates that race, class, sexuality, and ability are
unstable. These are not assured categories or properties that could operate
intersectionally in a binary analysis, but are rather variably mattering participants in
dominant ontologies that cannot therefore securely or finally attach to any body.
Animacy theory objectifies animate hierarchies, assessing their diverse truth effects
against the mobilities and slippages that too easily occur within them, and asks what
paths the slippages trace. The next chapter focuses on the peculiar affective mediations wrought by toxicity, expanding beyond the
the nonsentient. At the same time, it has already weighed on some bodies more than others. The strength of

paranoid images of altered bodies and minds produced by the fearful ensembles of U.S. biosecurity that are recounted in this chapter. Notwithstanding
my claims about leads racialization in relation to a Chinese context, lead is of course not always specific to China. Rather, like any toxin, perhaps
especially because it is not alive, it can be detached and reattached to diverse cultural and biological forms. This means that it is readily racialized, but
with a set of preferences provided by the discursive structures it inhabits. Lead as a toxin, more generally, has already become in this global context
racialized in excess as nonwhite; for instance, Mexican lead-tinged candy also received much media attention in 2007.64 Yet leads attachment
preferences are perhaps not so flighty as one might first think; the yellow hue of todays lead seems to swirl in with the brown and black layers of
leads naturalized image. I have suggested here that the mediation of lead in and around categories of life in turn undoes leads deadness by
reanimating it. In other words, lead has the capacity to poison definitively animate beings, and as such achieves its own animacy as an agent of harm.

By examining the signifying economies of health, imperialism, and degradation that paint
race onto different bodies, and by directing attention to the multiplicity of contact
zones of those engaging leadfrom working on the assembly line, to using the new
products that contain them, to the downstream use of the products, to the recycling and
mining of themwe witness the inherent brokenness of races, geographics, and
bodies as systems of segregation, even as they remain numbingly effective in
informing discourses of combat, health, and privilege. An environmental history of toxic
objects must minimally register the gendered, laboring, and chronically toxically
exposed bodies of globalized capital, which systematically bear less frequent mention in

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narratives of toxicity than the cautionary warnings from the seat of U.S. empire. With this
registration, leads spectacle remains connected to the possible forging of justice.

Intoxication reconfigures the neoliberal economy of affective investments

in order to forge a different future. Refusal of neoliberalisms promise
project produce transnational and trans-positional solidarities and
resistances
Agathangelou, et al 08 [Anna M., Associate Professor, York University, Postcolonial
theory, Feminist Political Economy, STS and Decolonial justice movements, M. Daniel
Bassichis, and Tamara L. Spira, Assistant Professor of Queer Studies in Fairhaven College and
the American Cultural Studies Department at Western Washington University. Intimate
Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire. Winter 2008.
Pg. 137-139]
Global lockdown thus functions as one of the looming underbellies and con- ditions of possibility of the (un)freedoms and
(non)futures being promised by neo-liberal empire. Consigning

the collective traumas of slavery and

colonization to a remote and irrelevant past while drawing on their logics to instantiate
its rule, global lockdown shows itself to be neither cruel and unusual nor exceptional,
but rather as foundational. Importantly, these (un)freedoms and (non)futures carry very
different promises and pleasures depending on our relationship to the human surplus
motor-ing the global political economy. Global lockdown, then, is not simply the newest outside, but quite literally
the material redefining off what life can even mean in the wake of so much necessary death. We have thus far argued that

across diffuse spaces and moments the homonormative turn, the neoliberalization of
the economy, the war on terror, and global lockdown we see different dimensions of a
promise project, which is also a project forever seeking to (re)consolidate empire. On the one
hand, there are those for whom subjectivity, capital, and satiating pleasures and rights
are being forever promised. This occurs, we argue, at the expense of compliance with, or perhaps
distraction from, the larger structural underpinnings of social relations and processes.
On the other hand, there are the (non)subjects for whom the same promise has not been
issued, the abject(s) whose lives and deaths are completely nonspectacular within the
dominant imaginations. Adding to this contradiction is the dimension that even the promises themselves are tenuous:
indeed, as elite queers privilege homonormativity over more radical political and economic praxes, neoconservative forces continue
to criminalize queerness. While first and foremost queers outside this elite or national racial strata are produced as exterminable
sodomites, the category of the abject and killable always threatens even elite queers in first world spaces. This is part of the politicoeconomic and affective logics that have fueled a frenzied search for an end to pain: continue imperial soldiering in exchange for a
mirage of security, or spend your energies fighting other queers for a prized space as most radical. With such a paucity of choices,

our energies are directed away from building solidarities and exhausted by fixing on
individualized solutions and fueling the (re)production of neoliberal, neoconservative,
homonormative, and ultimately heteronormative worlds. If the neoliberal turn has been
part of a larger strategy of counterinsurgency mobilized in the wake of revolutionary
decolonization movements threatening capitalism, (hetero)sexism, and white supremacy,
it is important to pause on some of the impacts of that (counter)mobilization. In this paper we
have worked to foreground the affective logics that function on the level of feeling and
desire in the service of a neoliberal project of a world remade. To begin to articulate the
ways in which our most intimate sensibilities our fears, desires, mourning, and yearning are being
mobilized by a regime of global lockdown is to make urgent the production of solidarities
not premised upon exploitation, profit, or death. For those engaged in movements
dismantling the prison industrial complex and any form of imperial violence, it is precisely these
affective economies to which we must be attentive. If we do not work to articulate the
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ways in which we become libidinally and erotically invested in the status quo of mass
lockdown in effect, the various promises that the prison issueswe run the risk of reproducing the
racialized and sexualized economies of benevolence and exploitation that fortify so
much of conservative, liberal, and even radical praxis. However, as we have sought to argue, the price of
such dismissals is nothing less than participation in imperial violence that, ultimately,
impacts us all. Amidst the many affective callings and seductive offerings we are issued,
we must continue the work of imagining alternative ways to feel, be, and love in this
moment of intensified empire-building. To become completely drawn into challenging homonormativization
without attention to the larger structural underpinnings of social relations and processes may ultimately prove unproductive as it
misses the larger imperial logics that may be embodied differentially in other sites. Moreover, it becomes impossible to discern the

Foreclosing
potential and increasingly crucial solidarities, we are drawn into our own corners and
ultimately diverted from the possibilities of massive, cross-bordered mobilizations,
movements and revolutionary projects. In the place of this vision, we offer first and
foremost a disruption of complicity, a refusal of empires promise project. The series of
relationship between our own struggles and the set of promises and nonpromises offered to other others.

wars in which empire asks us to participate are utterly genocidal , rather than
constituting processes that enable our security and healing. As members of different and overlapping
communities and struggles, the authors have each grappled personally with this process. As activists and intellectuals who are
engaged in struggles around war, migration and traficking, labor and homelessness, mass imprisonment, and state violence against
queer and transgender communities, we are confronted with the seductive yet ultimately murderous promises that are
described in this essay. Moreover, as

members of the academy at different levels (undergraduate student,

graduate student, and faculty member), we have witnessed how the strategies of promise and
nonpromise projects have worked to fragment, divide, and conquer people of color,
working-class people, queers, transgender people, postcolonial subjects, and others
within powerful academic zones of knowledge production. Recognizing that we can
never be outside empires seductive offerings, we engage these questions out of rage,
hope, and the desire to form life-sustaining solidarities and intimacies. We strive with
others toward a politics that enables intimacies as both means and ends, as a strategy of
movement-building in which relationships are formed not to instantiate empires
incessant production of internal and external enemies, but to disrupt it. This is a politics
that would challenge histories that dichotomize and fragment our worlds, and instead
offer praxes of erotic resistance in which we might be able to glimpse a breathing space
for reconstituting connections and relations based in collectivity and healing. With this
analysis in mind, all attempts to separate and make discrete strug- gles for social justice and transformation those working for
prison abolition, sexual and gender freedom, decolonization, and the end to war, for example prove unsuc- cessful. They are
always already imbricated in one another. When

one struggles to resist coercive sexual or gender regimes

heternormativization as well as homonor- mativization one is already engaging in a politics deeply
implicated in the wars on terror, poverty, and drugs, and in the (neo)slaveries of the prison
industrial complex. This is true not only because of the devastating impacts these wars have had on queer communities and
sexually aberrant (non)subjects locked away, and because of the ways in which a racializing sodomoti cation is drawn on to
produce the crimi- nal and the terrorist. Indeed, the

violence and death that we authorize and face

operate through and within our libidinal, erotic, and affective investments, investments
that we must engage directly and rigorously if we are to disrupt the seductive workings
of power in their most intimate dimensions. If, then, all queer politics are already organizing around and
implicated in the buildup of global lockdown and imperialist war, the question is not if a praxis of decolonization and abolitionism is
pertinent to queer struggles, but how and why it is. If

it is true that our deepest desires, feelings, and

arousals are tapped into for imperial production, it also becomes crucial to ask how we
might organize, mobilize, and form alternative intimacies and desires. These alternatives,
which continue to be nurtured in radical and revolutionary movements and collectivities,
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are forged as a disruption to individualized, consumptive, and privatized erotics in the
name of broader collective projects of freedom and transformation that cultivate the pleasures of substantial connection and the production of more egalitarian relations. These
are the intimacies that form the core of decolonizing imaginaries, those that understand
sexual freedom only through collective self-determination. It is only when we engage the
traumas as well as the yearnings of our pasts and our futures that we might be able to
seize the possibilities increasingly foreclosed by empires seductive promises.

Our knowledge production intervenes in the life/death, human/inhuman

axis upon which biopolitics turns, challenging heteronormative
temporalities and pointing toward a horizon of new discursive-material
practices
Chen 12 [Mel, Assoc. Prof. Gender and Womens Studies and Vice Chair for Research, Dir. of
the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @ UC Berkeley, Animacies: Biopolitical Racial
Mattering and Queer Affect, pp. 217-21]
But what is a toxic body, after all? How

can we reconceptualize a harmful body when our bodies are

themselves deemed harmful to others? It is useful here to turn to queer theorys uptake of the toxic, where it
retained a certain resonance and a certain citational pull. Eve Sedgwicks use of toxic to describe an expellable interiority (one that
shameful elements are not, since they are proper terms of ones identity) is taken up in Muozs Disidentifications to refer to
discursively toxic elements, the toxic force of illicit desire, and images and stereotypes toxic to identity, all uses that seem to repeat

For Muoz, disidentification represents the

willing uptake of toxic elements to pose new figurations of identity and minoritarianmajoritarian politics. Taking Muozs suggestions further, and taking toxicitys ontological shape-shifting from mercury to
traumatic sociality seriously, I believe that we can, in a sense, claim toxicity as already here, already
a truth of nearly every body, and also as a biopolitically interested distribution (the
deferral of toxic work to deprivileged or already toxic subjects). Such a distribution, in
its failure to effectively segregate, leaks outside of its bounds to return, and it might
allow a queer theoretical move that readily embraces, rather than refuses in advance,
heretofore unknown reflexes of raciality, gender, sexuality, (dis-) ability.57 In assuming
both individual and collective vulnerability, it suggests an ulterior ethical stance.58 If we
were to release toxicity from its own stalwart anti-ness, its ready definition as an
unwelcome guest, it has the possibility to intervene into the binary between the
segregated fields of life and death, vitality and morbidity. Toxicity straddles
boundaries of life and nonlife, as well as the literal bounds of bodies (quite
independently of toxicitys immunitary representation), in ways that introduce a certain
complexity to the presumption of integrity of either lifely or deathly subjects. Using the worldly
ontologies described earlier, we might consider reframing the terms of intimacy itself, so that it might not be
Sedgwicks ultimately exterior, or alienated, quality of toxicity.56

restricted to operating between only human or animate entities. Intimacy is, furthermore, temporalized, in the sense that it is cognate
with intimation. Intimacy might be thought of as a temporalized notion insofar as it might provide a hint or prediction of the future. In
these final paragraphs, I connect

the aberrant socialities implicated within discourses of

toxicity to those suggested in queer (political) futures. What futurity might such a
present suggest, particularly if we read these futures back into politically sexualized and
racialized maps of desirability and repulsion? Here I draw inspiration from the feminist disability theorist Alison
Kafer, whose book theorizes a queer-crip approach to disability, one that, in its disentangling of the discourses of morbidity and
sexual exile that contain and fix dis/abled bodies, refuses the grim imagined futures associated with them and moves toward a
resolutely optimistic futurity.59 According to J. Jack Halberstams In a Queer Time and Place, above and beyond the temporal
closures and fissures wrought by (the U.S. advent of ) aids, the queer

life narrative necessarily has a trajectory

very different from heterosexual, heteronormative, reproductive time.60 Such a notion of queer
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time can be worked to emphasize its racial and gendered dimensions. On the racial dimension of
time, or racialized temporality, David Eng has argued that it was Freuds attempt to negate the primitive that fundamentally
motivated and underlaid his developmental narrative of sexuality, as well as his rendering of homosexuality.61 The idea that
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny replicates itself teleologically in science and in public life alike, for instance, in the notion that child
is to adult as primitive is to modern. Thus, the animalization of (queer) children cannot be divorced from the vote-bearing African

Interracial frameworks
whether human or animal or stone (which bears the mark of nature)are constantly haunted by the
possibility of anachronism. Within global capitalisms racialized arrangements of labor,
the racially marked body in the contemporary or modernist moment is a freaky subject
of unacceptable temporal transit. It is not coincidental that in the United States the animality of childhood, in which a
child represents an animalizable early evolutionary stage, is the only (marginally) acceptably queer one. Thus, both queer and
racial temporalities are a kind of shimmering presence. They are less easily bound to
capital or to any other regimented time; or perhaps we could say that the time of capital is also no longer in the
form it might have once been. And so queer and racially marked bodies are present (that is, in the present
time) but strangely so, embracing anachronism and touching the past (to evoke the historian
American figure in the nineteenth-century Harpers Weekly cartoon considered in chapter 3.

Carolyn Dinshaw).62 Heather Love suggests in her introduction to Feeling Backward, an exploration of literary texts that circle
around queer suffering, that the contemporary juncture of affect studies and queer studies is attentive to the possibility that it is
presently at a turning point, asking how to articulate or assume a queer political vision (within and beyond scholarship) that must do
something with its history of shame, stigma, embarrassment, and pain. She describes this as the emphasis on damage in queer
studies.63 Recent work has engaged a turn toward the embrace of acknowledgment of abjection as a site of work and healing in
domains such as literature, the creative arts, and sexual practices, particularly in relation to queer of color proximities to racial
abjection. Juana Mara Rodrguez theorizes the importance of politi220 cally incorrect desire, exercised in sexual fantasy, as one
kind of utopic practice: she advises that we must learn to read submission and service differently, even ifor aswe find
ourselves occupying sexual positions written through with painful histories.64 Indeed, the antipathy toward submission or service in
and of itself does seem to collude too neatly with the autonomous urges of neoliberal culture, and would do well to think through the

Toxicity, at least in its mode of

intoxication, embraces the ambivalent, in Loves words, abject/exalted combination proper
to queerness itself. (She even uses the words damage and toxicity to refer, as Muoz and Sedgwick do, to the
arguments for interdependence articulated within disability theory and activism.

stigmatization of queerness and the painful affects associated with the recuperation of historical texts that represent tear-soaked
accounts of same-sex desire.)65 Negativity and death, of course, also attach to disabled bodies with terrible regularity, and they
appear in different valences. But affective nuances are informative. Ato Quaysons literary study Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability
and the Crisis of Representation focuses on doubt: he traces a notion of skeptical interlocution through a number of literary works,
suggesting that there is always an anticipation of doubt within the perceptual and imagined horizon of the disabled character in
literature, and that this doubt is incorporated into their representation.66 Quaysons study suggests a complication of sociality by a
negating affect. In view of the attempts of these works to suggest a future politics, or the recommendations for politics that might be
extracted from them, toxic affect is certainly not suggested as a panacea. It is a (re-) solution to the question of what to do with the
ambivalence of queerness only to the extent that it does not represent a choice: it is already here, it is not a matter of queer political
agency so much as a queered political state of the present. If toxicity is ambivalently constructed by a barely tenable political
community, that fragility is not acknowledged. Nevertheless,

an uptake, rather than a denial of, toxicity

seems to have the power to turn a lens on the anxieties that produce it and allow for a
queer knowledge production that gives some means for structural remedy while not
abandoning a claim to being just a little bit off. The growing acknowledgment of a shared
condition of toxicity within the United Statesnot only in terms of citing numbers of toxins present in peoples bodies,
toxins whose hospitality toward the body is uncertain (or toward whom the body doesnt know whether it should be hospitable), but
also in terms of the resigned acknowledgment that toxic assets were part of the fabric of U.S. capitalism is

not just
evidence of a fall, or a radical shifting of political and economic fortunes. It is also
evidence that the interstices of the otherwise suffocating cultures of neoliberalism may
be engaged, productive, and immensely meaningful. Thus, toxicity, as a queer thing or
affect, both is and is more than horizon, which is unpredictable and, furthermore, synchronically traceable only to
the extent that we not remain ontologically faithful. Toxicity fails over and again to privilege rationalitys
favorite partner, the human subject, rather defaulting to chairs, couches, and other sexual
orientations, but we might be wrong to disavow its claim to rationality altogether. If we let
affect fall to object life, or to the interanimation that surrounds us, one example of which toxicity illuminates very precisely, then

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perhaps there is a chance to take up (not revive, as it is far from old and tired) queer as something
both like itself and yet also entirely different.

Our scholarship is key white supremacy is maintained through the

control and erasure of the body of color from educational spaces in order
to render the classroom a pollutant free zone. We must return the question
of the raced body to scholarship in theory and practice
Reid-Brinkley 08 [Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, "THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING
BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION
THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE" pp. 14-5]
Particularly, I

am interested in the speaking body of the other, that body that pollutes, or
darkens the purity of the holistic social body. Post-structural education theorist John Warren describes
schooling in terms of the institutional maintenance of purity.55 Schools represent at their best, a pollutant and
contaminant free environment, as critical to the educational and social maturation of
student minds. Warren notes that "the body is perceptually rendered absent in an effort to center perceptual attention on the
mind."56 In other words, in the school environment the presence of the body is a social pollutant
of the educational space. The body must be invisible in order to focus on the mind. The
educational system attempts "to erase the impact of the body."57 Warren suggests that bodies of color, in particular,
exceed attempts to render them absent.58 For cultural theorists Homi Bhabha and Franz Fanon, the colored, or
more specifically, the black body signifies a difference from white bodies that makes the colored body significantly more visible in
majority white societies.59 The black body represents dirt or a stain, or to use symbolic anthropologist Mary Douglas' language, a
pollutant, on and in the social body, one that must be controlled and contained. Color is written on the skin, encrusted on the
flesh of the body at the surface level.60 The Deleuzian metaphor of a body without organs is particularly useful here. For it is the
flesh that signifies, not the internal processes of the body. And, yet the flesh signifies on internal processes of the biological body.
The colored body signifies a biological difference, an inherent difference, from non-colored or white bodies. In other words, despite
the fact that significant gains have been made in reducing the social belief in 15 the biological difference between the races,
American public and social discourse tends toward that belief, while political correctness reduces the ways in which such beliefs can
be expressed. Such an ambivalent stance results in the shading of the consistencies between all human bodies, resulting in a body

The fact that bodies of

color remain present despite the fact that they are supposed to be absent "is exactly
what maintains white privilege.61 Educational structures may or may not be directly
racially discriminatory, "rather, they take the form of cultural values, methods of learning,
styles of interaction, and other educational rituals that continually reinforce the culture of
power.62 In essence, Warren suggests that bodies of color represent a bodily contaminant that
can only result in a systemically cycling psychosis as these bodies can never fully be
rendered absent. Thus, if the body can never be rendered fully absent then it is
exceedingly relevant to the racial signification process in educational spaces and public
discourse about those spaces. The speaking subject is a talking body. The body becomes critical in understanding
and evaluating what the speaking subject says and what is said about the speaking subject. Thus, a rhetorical
consideration of the representation and performance of black people in a majority white
environment, must engage the body as rhetorical. Rhetoric and argumentation scholar Melanie
without organs, where the surface level of the skin comes to (re)present biological difference.

McNaughton's essay, "Hard Cases: Prison Tattooing as Visual Argumentation," suggests that Given daily contact with the bodies of
others, understanding the ways that bodies argue visually is important to understanding the operations of rhetoric in our lives.63

the body as an integral site of

rhetorical voice problematizes our current emphasis in the field of rhetoric toward
ignoring the body in favor of a focus on verbal discourse. If the body speaks, whom does it speak to and
For McNaughton who is interested in visual argumentation through prison tattooing,

what might it be saying? McNaughton's study leads us toward theorizing the body as argumentative, and yet her study does not
really look to the body as argument, as much as it looks to the style or the styling of the body as argument. Tattoos are an overlay
on the surface of the body, and while certainly difficult and painful to cover or remove, they simply cover the body and are not of the
body. While tattooing may represent and signify violence to the average onlooker, according to McNaughton, that violence is

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indicative of a cultural affiliation and not an inherent state of that marked body. In other words, the tattoo wearer could signify other
than a violent subjectivity were the tattoo not there. Thus, tattooing might still clearly fit under the more traditional rubric of style or
performance.

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Terror Discourse Advantage

Chinese panics are generate terror discourse to consolidate white
neoliberal homonationalisms
Chen 12 [Mel, Assoc. Prof. Gender and Womens Studies and Vice Chair for Research, Dir. of
the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @ UC Berkeley, Animacies: Biopolitical Racial
Mattering and Queer Affect, p. 171-3]
Chinese lead panics are sticky; they are generated by, and further borrow from, many
already interlaced narratives. The spread of war discourse within the West and of the
imaginary fount of bioterrorist plotting, dramatized by the U.S. government in its second Gulf
war, was a convenient additive to narrations about toxins.23 Bioterrorism involves the intentional
use of toxic agents that are biologically active, even if not live themselves, against populations.
They often cannot be perceived by the naked eye. While bioterrorist intentionality cannot be
attached to the lead narrative (the China case might more aptly be called bioterrorist
negligence), it is nevertheless fairly easy to read the discourses on lead as a biosecurity threat,
conflating the safety of individual bodies with the safety of national concerns.24 Other
biosecurity threats have also been recruited as Asian, in the case of contagious diseases such
as sars and bird flu. Consultants and safety advocates deemed red and yellow colorsprecisely
those colors used to indicate heightened levels of security threat in U.S. airportsto 172 have
particularly dangerous levels of lead and suggested color as an effective criterion (profile) by
which toys should be identified and returned.25
Thus, lead was an invisible threat whose material loci and physical provenance, much like a
terrorist sleeper cell, needed to be presumed in advance and mappednot only
geographically but sensorily, sometimes through visual coding schemes like color itself (recall
the Abotex lead test color chart which codes faint yellow the least toxic, black the most).26
Popular responses both in the United States and in other countries affected by the China toy
recall bore this out; one blog entrys title, for instance, was the indignant Why Is China
Poisoning Our Babies?27 News about heparin contamination in pharmaceuticals originating
from China became particularly explosive when it was thought to be deliberate, highlighting the
sense of insidious invasion in the same way that bioterrorism does.28 Given the apparent, blithe
disregard or dysfunction of both the Chinese and U.S. governmental safety controls along the
way, the sign of biosecurity and protection falls on the head of a young child who wishes to play
with a toy, and by implication, that childs parents. Indeed, the body of the young white child
using a toy train is not signified innocently of its larger symbolic value at the level of the nation;
its specific popularity suggests this metonymic connection.
The last few decades have seen a strengthening of affects around terrorism, associating it with
radical extranationality as well as nonstate agentivity. Jasbir Puar has incisively examined the
escalating agitation around purported terrorism, particularly its potential to consolidate
national interests (including white and neoliberal homonationalisms) in the face of such a
perceived threat.29 Indeed, nonstatehood, while always potentially unstable, has come into a
mature relationship with the imagined possibility of terrorism. This is evidenced, for example, by
the fact that in 2010, Senator Joe Lieberman proposed that Congress enact the revocation of
citizenship from those who demonstrate financial support or other forms of allegiance to
organizations deemed terrorist by the United States. Under these conditions, the invisible
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threat of cognitive and social degradation in the case of lead meant that the abiding,
relatively more methodical, and diversified work of environmental justice activists on lead
toxicity was here transformed into something that looked less environmental and
increasingly like another figure in the war on terror, a war that marked the diffuseness,
unpredictability, and sleeper-cell provenance of enemy material and its biological
vectors.30
This war on terror was doubly pitched as a neomissionary insistence on the dissemination of
the American way, including its habits of free choice and its access to a free market at its core
defined by the proliferation of consumer products. Thus, the very title of a New York Times
article by Leslie Wayne published in 2009 about corrosive drywall for new homebuilding sourced
from China, The Enemy at Home, betrays toxic drywalls coding as a biological threat
metaphorized as war (itself not at great notional distance from biological warfare). 31 The idea
of this enemy at home makes lead into a symptomatic signifier of a war of capital
flows , particularly the struggle over trade protectionism and the Chinese resistance to
allow the Chinese yuan to float against the dollar, a resistance that has only recently seen a
measured lessening as of this date of writing (2011). Lead is animated to become
simultaneously an instrument of heightened domestic panic, drawing from and recycling
languages of terror, and a rhetorical weapon in the rehearsal of the economic
sovereignty of the United States. A story by the financial-interest magazine Forbes at the
height of the toy recall made these slippages baldly evident: Chinese Toy Terror.32
What are blended in this collapse of narratives, and what are of particular interest here for
animacy, are precisely the subjects and objects, recipients and perpetrators, terrorists and
innocents, of lead toxicity. In other words, the fused stories about lead displace the normal
agents of the contagion narratives and scramble the normal pairings between protector and
protected and self and other. As such, they cannot rhetorically function as effectively as they
might strive to function. This easily recognizable failure of boundaries may be the sole
rehabilitative counterthrust of the new lead panic.

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China Threat Con Advantage

Western literature throughout history has framed China as an exploitable
other, either as a mystical land filled with unknown wonders or later as a
primitive society in need of western help. It is through these
representations that imperialism towards China has been justified
MARTNEZ-ROBLES 08, (David, David Martnez Robles obtained a PhD in History from
Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in 2007 and a degree in Philosophy from the University of
Barcelona (UB) in 1996. He has been a senior lecturer in the Arts and Humanities Department
of the Universitat Oberta de Cataluny ,The Western Representation of Modern China:
Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism. In: Carles PRADO-FONTS (coord.).
Orientalism Digithum. No. 10. UOC. 20/7/16
<http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/martinez.pdf,WGC)
Ever since the mediaeval period, China has been an empire of mythical characteristics in
the European imagination: the utmost representation of the so-called Far East. Marco Polo had defined a
number of traits that would remain unaltered for centuries in the European portrayal of the Chinese
world: the luxury and refinement, the culture of exoticism, the mysterious nature of the
women, the unheard-of ingenuity and invention, etc. make China an unknown, distant
and mysterious world, yet one that is admired and attractive, as suggested by one of the titles of the
work by the Venetian, The Book of Wonders. 2 The lack of direct contact between the two ends of the
Eurasian continent, as a consequence of the fall of the Mongol Empire, which had managed to unify this vast area,
contributed to the reification of these ideas, which were applied to everything that extended from the east of the
Mediterranean, beyond the known world. The 16th century represented a point of inflection in this trend.
The Portuguese route that had led Vasco da Gama to the coast of India skirting the African continent and which continued
as far as the ports of Japan and China brought Europe and East Asia into contact once again. And it
was by this route, which was completed by the one that the Spaniards opened up through America and the Philippines,
that not just goods but cultural products and ideas, including religious ones, circulated. For
almost two centuries, the Catholic missions acted as the utmost exponent of the
relations between the Chinese Empire and Europe. The missionaries, especially those of the Society of
Jesus, became high-level cross-cultural agents, to the point where some of them attained a position of privilege and entered the
court of the emperor as astronomers, engineers or painters.3 Thus, they

offered China the friendlier face of the

European world, that of the arts and sciences, which they used as an advertisement to spread Christian doctrine among
Chinese intellectuals, at the same time conveying to the West a benevolent and friendly view of the Chinese world, interested in
justifying their mission and their method. The

Jesuits believed that the most effective way of entering

the Chinese world meant first converting its governors to the Christian cause; the people
then converting should only be a question of time. To do this, they had to adapt to an
elaborate and complex culture like that of the Chinese. Consequently, they abandoned their religious
habits to adopt the ceremonial robes of the Chinese officials, they learned cultured language, they studied Chinese history and they

We should not be surprised, then, that the treatises that

they wrote about the Chinese world were extremely well documented and that, moreover,
they often portrayed the reality of East Asia in sincerely laudatory terms. Confucianism,
for example, reached Europe as a moral philosophy that predated the values of
Christianity, an idea that was very well received among some 17th-century intellectuals
analysed and translated the Confucian classics.

who began to preach the need for a natural religion outside the domain of the Church and who saw in Chinese thought a source of
inspiration. (Zhang, 1988, p. 118). This

perception gave birth to the Sinophile thought of the 17th

and early 18th centuries, which boasted representatives of the intellectual stature of Leibniz, Wolff, Rousseau and
Voltaire, who, in their works, praised very diverse aspects of the Chinese world, such as the language, the political system and

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education. In their works, China

became a country governed by a philosopher king with the

assistance of literati who are selected by taking into consideration nothing more than
their intellectual and moral standing. The respect for laws, the tolerance in ideas and the
political excellence are virtues that eclipse the shortcomings which, nevertheless, did not go
unnoticed by some of these thinkers. However, circumstances changed radically in the second half of
the 18th century, in both Europe and China, and the Western portrayal of the Chinese
world underwent a radical volte-face. On the one hand, the method of the Jesuits of fitting in with Chinese culture
was strongly criticised by the other orders, giving rise to the so-called Rites Controversy: the Society of Jesus ended up being
dissolved by the Papacy, and the less tolerant Catholic orders expelled by the Chinese emperor. Meanwhile, in Europe the ideas of
rationalism gave way to the crystallisation of the enlightened thought of modernity, with its faith in progress. Leibniz and Voltaire
were concerned with showing the universality of reason and China was an ideal example of their proposals. Yet, from this point on,
enlightened Europeans submitted China to their ideas on historical progress: the stability that had previously been interpreted as an
example of the virtues of its political system would become regarded from the mid-18th century onwards as a sign of its lack of
evolution and modernity.4 One

of the most classic formulations of this Sinophobic thought is

seen in J. G. Herder, who in his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity
(1787) said: The [Chinese] empire is an embalmed mummy painted with hieroglyphics
and wrapped in silk; its internal life is like that of animals in hibernation (XIV, p. 13).5 For
Herder, Chinese culture is one that has not evolved for centuries, the vestiges of a
distant past, a country without a present, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, which belong to a
dead culture. And it was this stereotyped vision that, reproduced and amended,
resonated throughout the work of most European intellectuals at the end of the 18th
century and throughout the 19th century, from Adam Smith to Marx. However, the one who best
defined it was Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1840), in which he dedicated an entire section to
China. Hegel feels that China represents the starting point of the history of humanity, in a
formulation that we can consider one of the intellectual bases of the Orientalist
representation of Asia: The History of the World travels from East to West; for Europe is
absolutely the end of History, Asia is the beginning (Hegel, 2004, p. 13). And he adds: Early do we
see China advancing to the condition in which it is found at this day; for [] every
change is excluded, and the fixedness of a character which recurs perpetually takes the
place of what we should call the truly historical. China and India lie, as it were, still outside
the Worlds History, as the mere presupposition of elements whose combination must be
waited for to constitute vital progress. (Hegel, 2004, p. 29) Hegel clearly defines the
mechanisms of representation of the Chinese world and East Asia, which remained in force
for many decades: China is an empire that remains outside historical processes, with neither
evolution nor progress, inert, passive and unable to assume Western modernity by itself.
And it is the West that can make the Chinese emerge from this lethargy. The Western
world, therefore, becomes a factor a necessary and sufficient factor in the
transformation of East Asian countries, which becomes the intellectual justification for
the colonial actions of the great Euro-American powers in the Pacific and Asia. All the
texts which, from the second half of the 19th century, attempt to analyse the modern
history of China share this epistemological paradigm, which turned China into an
apprentice of the civilising lessons of Western countries.6 China and East Asia in
general is always described as the passive and feminine part in the relationship it has
with the civilised and masculine West (Guarn, 2005). And it is from this perspective that, in
the colonial context of the nineteenth century, the Chinese are described as inferior and
barbarous, narrow-minded and xenophobic. This is how one of the few texts of the time published in Spain
about China describes them, introducing the Fu Manchu stereotype that first literature and then cinema would feed off for decades:
El carcter [of the Chinese] en la apariencia es muy afable, humano y modesto; en realidad son vengativos y crueles. Son muy
ceremoniosos y corteses, y sobre todo observadores exactos de sus leyes, sobre lo cual se vela con mucha severidad; su genio y
talento son vivos, espirituosos, animados y penetrantes, y poseen ms que ninguna otra nacin el arte de disimular sus

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sentimientos y deseo de venganza, guardando tan bien todas las apariencias de humildad que se los cree insensibles a todo
gnero de ultrajes; pero si se les presenta la ocasin de destruir a su enemigo, se aprovechan de ella con ahnco y precipitacin
hasta lo sumo. (lvarez, 1857, pp. 93-94)7 Despite everything, critical voices could be heard regarding the colonial actions in East
Asia, which attempted to overcome this strongly Eurocentric, even racist, view and during the last decades of the 19th century and
first decades of the 20th an effort was made to transform China into an object of academic study. Oxford University, to offer a
distinguished example, was the first to offer Chinese classes in 1876.8 The first lecturer was James Legge, a Protestant missionary
who led an ambitious translation project of the great Chinese classics and is the embodiment of the erudite Western figure who
approaches Chinese culture with honesty and passion.9 These first Sinologists, despite the fact that they do not actively participate
in the colonial intellectualism defined by Said, do unconsciously assume the epistemological categories that drive the colonial
discussion of the age in which they lived. It is significant, for example, that the renowned translation by Legge of the Chinese
classics should be financed by Joseph Jardine, a member of one of the most important British merchant clans working in China in
the 19th century, whose fortune was linked directly to the lucrative opium trade.10 These experts in the Chinese world, of which
Legge is only an example, take on a dual function of representation: on the one hand, they become the authorised ambassadors in
the West of Chinese civilisation, spokespersons and often defenders of the cultural principals that they take from the Chinese world,
even though, on the other hand, they do so always clinging to their own almost pedagogical stance as standards of Western
enlightened ideals. This is how a figure still around today was born: that of the expert in the Chinese world, which constitutes a
discipline different form apart from the other academic disciplines, which generally left the Chinese and the non-Western world
beyond their sphere of research. The

study of Chinese history in the early decades of the 20th

century was in the hands of these Sinologists, missionaries, diplomats and functionaries who knew the
Chinese world in person, in the hands of more or less well intentioned representatives of
the imperial powers in Asia. It is a history that is clearly centred on the actions of the
Western countries in the Chinese world, which are interpreted, albeit often critically, as
the unleashing that allowed the Chinese to enter modernity, admitting the technological
and scientific superiority of the West, which emerges as a civilising model and
pedagogue. The same historical processes are sought in Chinese history that affected the Western countries: for this reason,
these historians reflect on the non-development in China of a European-style industrial revolution or on the reasons for the lack of
capitalist-oriented forms of economic organisation. The West, then, is the norm and yardstick of historical progress, and in this
comparative perspective, Chinese history shows a series of shortcomings and anomalies in its development.11 In spite of
everything, however, this paradigm that we could call imperialist makes China a historical object in its own right and, therefore,
overcomes the Sinophobic thought that we can still find in some writers at the start of the 20th century.

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Solvency Extensions

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Queer World Making

Toxic queer worlding re-conceptualizes heternormative world ordering and
animacy hierarchies foundational to biopolitical governance
Chen 12 [Mel, Assoc. Prof. Gender and Womens Studies and Vice Chair for Research, Dir. of
the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @ UC Berkeley, Animacies: Biopolitical Racial
Mattering and Queer Affect, p. 190
Here I move from exploring toxicitys contemporary pervasiveness as a notion, to exploring its purported and experienced mechanisms in the human body. This shift concerns
the role of metaphor in biopolitics, since the seemingly metaphorical productions of cultural expressions of toxicity are not necessarily more concrete than the literal ones, which
are themselves composed of complex cultures of immunity thinking. Reflecting on the ambiguous subject-object relations of toxicity, I use animacy theory to ask how the flexible

subjectness or objectness of an actant raises important questions about the

contingencies of humanness and animateness. These contingencies are eminently
contestable within critical queer and race and disability approaches that, for instance, disaggregate verbal
patients from the bottom of the hierarchy. Since, as I argued in chapter 1, animacy hierarchies are simultaneously
ontologies of affect, then such ontologies might benefit from a reconceptualization of
the order of things, particularly along unconventional lines of race, sexuality, and
ability.3 Toxicitys Reach Toxins have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds. A politician will decry the
toxic political atmosphere;4 Britney Spears will sing Dont you know that youre toxic / And I love what you do;5 an advice columnist will caution us to keep a healthy distance
from toxic acquaintances.6 One book is written for workers suffering the ravages of a toxic personality, describing what they do as poison, corrupt, pollute, and
contaminate. . . . We define the toxic personality as anyone who demonstrates a pattern of counterproductive work behaviors that debilitate individuals, teams, and even
organizations over the long term.7 Thus, toxic people, not just chemicals, are appearing in popular social discourse, suggesting a shift in national sentiment that registers an
increasing interest in individual bodily, emotional, and psychic security. For the rhetoric of security inevitably has ramifications not simply related to health: as the previous
chapter delineated, recent concerns about the toxicity of lead were especially charged in terms of race, sexuality, ability, and nation. Let us probe the affective dynamics of one
example in detail, the paradoxical conceit of the now-popular phrase toxic assets, associated with policies of financial deregulation in the United States that entered a new
phase in the early 1990s. Notably, the toxic assets of significance that originated at that time and that are held responsible for global economic fallout are the financial products
composed of grouped mortgages tied to a hypervalued and unstable residential real estate market. We might say that this complex financial product, this toxic asset, is a
good precisely because it entails capital value; yet it has unfortunately becomeconsidering the discourse in which toxic asset has meaningnot only toxic but also
perhaps untouchable (as an affective stance), unengageable (as tokens of exchange with limited commensurability), and perhaps even disabling (that is, it renders the
corporation that buys it up also invalid). The term toxic assets thus reflects an effort to externalizebut also to indict for their threatening closeness (to home)corrupt layers of
financial organization. These examples illustrate that there seems to be a basic semantic schema for toxicity: in this schema, two bodies are proximate; the first body, living or
abstract, is under threat by the second; the second has the effect of poisoning, and altering, the first, causing a degree of damage, disability, or even death. In English, this
adjectival meaning of toxicof or related to poison, which means that a body or its blood could be harmed by an external agenthas endured since the 1600s, according to the
oed, and it was concretized into the noun toxin in 1890; it is debatable when the metaphorical use emerged. If we are willing to assign literal to toxicitys application to the
human body and metaphoric to all others, then these metaphorical mappings are not always very sound. Linnda Durre, author of Surviving the Toxic Workplace, identifies
certain personalities as toxic; among them is one she dubs The Delicate Flower: If someone is sitting there constantly saying: Youre wearing perfume. Im going to have an
allergy attack, or: Youre eating meat. Thats so disgusting, its like grinding, grinding, whining, whining every day of your life.8 Durre would rather expunge the workplace of
such complaints; she fails to consider that the design of a workplace might well place certain people, including those susceptible to allergy attacks, at a radical disadvantage. If

the definition of toxin has always been the outcome of political negotiation and a
threshold value on a set of selected tests, its conditionality is no more true in medical discourse than in social discourse, in which ones definition of a toxic irritant
coincides with habitual scapegoats of ableist, sexist, and racist systems. Toxicitys first (under threat) and second (threatening) bodies are thus in the eye of the beholder.

the contemporary culture of the United States is witnessing both the

notional release and proliferation of the metaphor of toxicity, while also marking its biopolitical
entrainment as an instrument of difference. While the first seems important for allowing a kind of associative theorizing, it is
simultaneously important to retain a fine sensitivity to the vastly different sites in which toxicity
involves itself in very different lived experiences (or deaths), for instance, a brokers relation to toxic bonds versus a
Faced with toxicitys broad and hungry reach,

farm workers relation to pesticides. Furthermore, the deployment of the first can leave untouchedor even depend onthe naturalized logic of the second. Disability scholars
have discussed the deployment of disability as a trope that ultimately reconsolidates ability; David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have elucidated the idea of narrative prosthesis,
a kind of narrative deployment of disability that entrenches a kind of ableist idealization of privileged subject positions. 9 Indeed, we might argue that the workplace psychologist
Linnda Durre is doing just that in her formulation of The Delicate Flower. As Michael Davidson reminds us, we cannot consider the prosthesis only at the level of narrative
trope, given the widespread problems around access to such essential medical devices; he writes, sometimes a prosthesis is still a prosthesis.10 Think about how often culture
recruits languages of disability: the corporation was crippled; dont use me as a crutch. The toxic people debated in self-help guides and pop songs should not be detached
from an understanding of how toxins function in, and impair, actual bodies and systems. Furthermore, such impairment, as some scholars and activists assert, should be

All cultural
productions of toxicity must be rethought as an integral part of the affective fabric of
immunity nationalism. When immunity nationalism is individuated through biopower, in a culture of
understood as a societal production, and not (only or even) as a problem proper to an individual that must be cured or corrected. Immunitary Fabric

responsibility, self-care, anxious monitoring, and the like, toxicity becomes a predictable figure. The apprehension of a toxin relies minimally on two discourses: science and
the body. Science studies and feminist studies have worked to study and materially reground these two figures which often stand as both ontologically basal and hence

Butler engages the biological insofar as she asks us to reconsider

the discursive pinning of sex to biology and of gender to the realm of social and cultural life;
unindictable. In Bodies That Matter, Judith

but as she warns us, assigning originary status to sex or biology obfuscates genders contribution to (and ontologizing of ) sex; that is, both gender and sex matter.11

Rather than displacing the extant materiality of the body, she focuses on its partially
ontologizing figurations. It is often hard to get a grip on what, precisely, the body is supposed to mean and what we ask it to do, and on how we
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Questions of the body become particularly complex
when taking into account the various mixings, hybridizations, and impurities that accompany
contemporary bodily forms, from genetically modified food to the cyborg triumphed by Donna Haraway.12 What, indeed, becomes of life now that
demand of it so much symbolically, materially, and theoretically.

Haraways vision has in some regard prevailed? Though her Manifesto for Cyborgs is over twenty-five years old, it has proved eerily prescient in its view of the ever-seamless
integration of machines, humans, animals, and structures of capital. Human bodies, those preeminent containers of life, are themselves pervaded by xenobiotic substances and

Toxicity becomes significant now for reasons beyond the pressing

environmental hazards that encroach into zones of privilege, beyond late-transnational
capitalism doing violence to national integrities. Because of debates around abortion (such as those about when life is
technically said to begin) and around the lifeliness or deathliness of those in persistent vegetative states, not only can we not tell what is alive or dead, but the
diagnostic promise of the categories of life and death is itself in crisis, not least when thinking
through the necropolitics that Achille Mbembe proposes for postcolonial modes of analysis.13 For when biopolitics builds
itself upon life or death or even Agambens bare life14much like kinship notions
that build only upon humans and hence fail to recognize integral presences of nonhuman
animalsit risks missing its cosubstantiating contingencies in which not only the dead
have died for life, but the inanimate and animate are both subject to the biopolitical hand.
Nan Enstad notes that toxicity forces us to bridge the analytical polarization of global and local by
placing the body in the picture and to consider commodities in new ways in the context
of global capitalism, for instance, capitalisms remarkable success at infusing lives and
bodies around the world with its products and by-products. 15 Yet, considering the reach
of toxicity thinking described earlier, I would like to expand her fairly concrete take on
the body (for all the discursive complication she admits) by suggesting that many bodies are subject to the
toxiceven toxins themselvesand that it is worth examining the toxicities that seem to trouble more
than human bodies. Indeed, it is one way for us to challenge the conceptual integrity of our notions of
nanotechnologies.

the body. For biopolitical governance to remain effective, there must be porous or
even co-constituting bonds between human individual bodies and the body of a nation, a
state, and even a racial locus like whiteness. This is especially salient within the complex political, legal, and medical developments of
immunity. For toxicitys coextant figure is immunity: to be more precise, threatened immunity.
Immune systems are themselves constituted by the intertwinings of scientific, public, and political cultures together.16 Even further, we know that the medicalized notion of
immunity was derived from political brokerages. It is no surprise that discourses on sickness bleed from medical immunity discourse into nationalist rhetoric. Ed Cohens A Body
Worth Defending details the history of immunity as a legal concept, tracking its eventual adoption into medicine, a step that eventually enabled people to speak of immune
systems with a singular possessive, as in my immune system.17 Cohens historicization of immunity gives insight into the breadth of contemporary expressions of immunity
and toxicity, and their many affects in relation to threat. Analyzing the period after this discursive migration, Emily Martins anthropological study of twentieth-century immune
systems, Flexible Bodies, details a twentieth-century shift in contemporary thinking about immunity to something private or personal maintained by internal processesaway
from a previous focus on public hygiene, in which immunity was seen as related to unconnected factors from the outside.18 This internalization, even privatization, of immunity
helps to explain the particular indignation that toxicity evokes, since it is understood as an unnaturally external force that violates (rather than informs) an integral and bounded
self. This is what Cohen calls the apotheosis of the modern body, the aban195 donment of humans integral relation to their environments and the insistence on a radical
segregation of self and world fueled by a bellicose antagonism. We can further consider the Italian political philosopher Ricardo Espositos elucidation of the ways in which

immunity seems to work as a kind of destructive negative protection of life.19 In Espositos

immunizing paradigm, immunity is contracted on a poisoned affect of gratitude (on the basis of membership in a community) that undercuts the final possibility of individual
immunity. Esposito identifies the shaky prescription of the introjection of the negative agent as a way to defend against its exterior identity. Intriguingly, through poisoned affect,
or an affect of gratitude that is somehow fatally compromised, toxicity thus sneaks into Espositos elaboration of immunity in the realm of affect rather than as a formal object; it
is thus never fully addressed beyond the given questions of negativity in relation to immunity. This may not be surprising, as the history of immunity does not confirm that toxicity

It could be productive, I think, to use this theorization of

immunity to ask questions of the absence or presence of toxicity (both are here) as a means of approaching
immunity, and particularly to take the consideration of poisoned affect and its compromise
to individual immunity further. I suggest that toxicity incontrovertibly meddles with the relations
of subject and object required for even the kind of contractual immunitary ordering that Esposito suggests. Thus, while the threat of toxicity is held to a clear
was there from the start. But if it was not there, then what was?

subject-object relation, intoxication (of an object by a toxin) is never held to an advantageous homeopathic quantity (in light of the biopolitical interjection of negativity): indeed,
this is the function of poisoned affect seen fully through. Not only is political immunity challenged, the very nature of this alteration cannot be fully known. Who is, after all, the
subject here? What if the object, which is itself a subject, has been substantively and subjectively altered by the toxin? Could we tell a history of intoxication in relation to political
immunity that sits next to Espositos? There are clearly many more questions than answers here about the history of the political affect of immunity. Toxic Worlding Recall that
matters of life and death have arguably underlain queer theory from the early 1990s, when radical queer activism in relation to aids blended saliently with academic theorizing
on politics of gender and sexuality. More recently, Lee Edelman takes up a psychoanalytic analysis of queernesss figural deathly assignment in relation to a relentless

life and death economies that place some queer subjects in the
privileged realm of a biopolitically optimized life, while other perverse subjects are
consigned to the realm of death, as a result of the successes of queer incorporation into
the domains of consumer markets and social recognition in the postcivil rights, late
reproductive futurism.20 Jasbir Puar points to

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twentieth century.21 Similar affective pulses of surging lifeliness or morbid resignation might reflect the legacy of the deathly impact of aids in queer
scholarship. Suggesting a horizonal imagining whose terms are pointedly not foretold by a pragmatic limitation on the present, Jos Esteban Muoz in Cruising Utopia
offers a way around the false promise of a neoliberal, homonormative utopia whose
major concerns are limited to gay marriage and gay service in the military: lifely for a few,
deathly for others.22 To enact a method that prioritizes a queer reach for toxicitys
worlding, I want to interleave considerations of toxicity and intoxication with a toxic
sensorium: a sense memory of objects and affects that was my felt orientation to the
world when I was recently categorized as ill. It seems never a simple matter to discuss
toxicity, to objectify it. It is yet another matter to experience something that seems by
one measure or another to be categorized as a toxin, to undergo intoxication,
intoxification. This difference raises questions about toxic methodology, which in some way inherits
anthropologys question about what can be done to respond to crises of objectivity. While no simple solution exists, it is my interest to attenuate
the exceptionalisms that attain all too easily in, for instance, the previous chapters assessment of lead toxicitys discursive range: it is
possible for a reader to comfortably reside in a certain sense of integral, nontoxic security in that analysis. To intensify toxicitys intuitive
reach, I engage toxicity as a condition, one that is too complex to imagine as a property
of one or another individual or group or something that could itself be so easily
bounded. I would like to deemphasize the borders of the immune system and its
concomitant attachments to life and death, such that the immune systems aim is to
realize and protect life. How can we think more broadly about synthesis and symbiosis,
including toxic vapors, interspersals, intrinsic mixings, and alterations, favoring
interabsorption over corporeal exceptionalism? I will not address these questions from a point of view of mythic health. Rather, I
will tell a tale from the perspective of the existence that I have recently claimed, one that has been quite accurately considered toxic. In other words, I move now from a
theoretical discussion of metaphors about threat into what feels, for me personally, like riskier terrain, the terrain of the autobiographical. As academics are often trained to avoid

I theorize toxicity as it has profoundly

impacted my own health, my own queerness, and my own ability to forge bonds, and in
so doing, I offer a means to reapproach questions of animacy with a different lens. This
theorization through the personal is not intended as a perfect subjectivity that opposes
an idealized objectivity. Rather, it is meant as a complementary kind of knowledge
production, one that in this context invites both the sympathetic ingestion (or
intoxication) of what remains a marked experience, and the empathetic memory of past
association. It centers on a set of states and experiences that have been diagnosed as multiple chemical sensitivity and heavy metal poisoning, and can be used
to think more deeply about this condition and what it offers to thinking about bodies and affect. As such, my repository of thoughts,
experiences, and theorizations while illones that queerly and profoundly changed my
relationship to intimacycould be considered a kind of archive of feelings, to use Ann Cvetkovichs
important terminology. 23 These are feelings that are neither exclusively traumatic, nor exclusively
private, nor a social archive proper to certain groups: they are feelings whose publics
and intimacies are not clearly bounded or determinable. Such feelingsand their
intimaciesoffer a way to come at normative affects margins. Where Lauren Berlant notes,
of less institutionalized interactions, that intimacy names the enigma of this range of
attachments . . . and it poses a question of scale that links the instability of individual
lives to the trajectories of the collective, I mean to destabilize where the toxic and its
affects can be located.24 I have for the last few years suffered from the effects of mercury toxicity, perhaps related to receiving for a decade in my
childhood weekly allergy shots which were preserved with mercury, and having a mouth full of metal fillings which were composed of mercury amalgam. That said, I am
not invested in tracing or even asserting a certain cause and effect of my intoxication, not
writing in anything resembling a confessional mode, such a turn is fraught with ambivalence.

least because such an endeavor would require its own science studies of Western medicines ambivalent materialization of heavy metal intoxication as an identifiable health

Rather, I wish to chart such intoxications with and against sexuality, as both of these
are treated as biologized and cultural forms with specific ethical politics. In early-twentyfirst- century U.S. culture, queer subjects are in many ways treated as toxic assets,
concern.

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participating in the flow of capital as a new niche market, yet also threatening to
dismantle marriage or infiltrate the military, and thus potentially damaging the very
economic and moral stability of the nation. But what happens when queers become
intoxicated? Recall the earlier secondary Oxford English Dictionary meanings of queer as both unwell and drunk, the latter of which is now proclaimed to be
obsolete; such meanings shadow queerness with the cast of both illness and inebriation. While Muoz meditates on the possibilities
of ecstasythe drugas a metaphor for pleasurable queer temporalities, 25 I explore an
intoxication that is not voluntary, is potentially permanent, is ambivalent toward its own
affective uptake, and produces an altered affect that may not register its own pleasure or
negativity in recognizable terms. Let me get specific and narrate what my toxic cognitive and bodily state means, how it limits, delimits, frames,
and undoes. Today I am having a day of relative well-being and am eager to explore my neighborhood on foot; I have forgotten for the moment that I just dont go places on
foot, because the results can be catastrophic. Having moved to a new place, with the fresh and heady defamiliarization that comes with uprooting and replanting, my body has
forgotten some of its belabored environmental repertoire, its micronarratives of movement and response, of engagement and return, of provocation and injury. It is for a moment
freein its scriptless version of its futureto return to former ways of inhabiting space when I was in better health. Some passenger cars whiz by; instinctively my body retracts
and my corporeal-sensory vocabulary starts to kick back in. A few pedestrians cross my path, and before they near, I quickly assess whether they are likely (or might be the
kind of people) to wear perfumes or colognes or to be wearing sunscreen. I scan their heads for smoke puffs or pursed lips pre-release; I scan their hands for a long white
object, even a stub. In an instant, quicker than I thought anything could reach my organs, my liver refuses to process these inhalations and screams hate, a hate whose intensity
each time shocks me. I am accustomed to this; the glancing scans kick in from habit whenever I am witnessing proximate human movement, and I have learned to prepare to
be disappointed. This preparation for disappointment is something like the preparation for the feeling I would get as a young person when I looked, however glancingly, into the
eyes of a racist passerby who expressed apparent disgust at my Asian off-gendered form. I imagined myself as the queer child who was simultaneously a walking piece of dirt
from Chinatown. For the sake of survival, I now have a strategy of temporally displaced imaginations; if my future includes places and people, I pattern-match them to past
experiences with chemically similar places and chemically similar people. I run through the script to see if it would result in continuity or discontinuity. This system of
simultaneous conditionals and the time-space planning that results runs counter to my other practice for survival, an investment in a refusal of conditions for my existence, a
rejection of a history of racial tuning and internalized vigilance. To my relief, the pedestrians pass, uneventfully for my body. I realize then that I should have taken my chemical
respirator with me. When I used to walk maskless with unsuspecting acquaintances, they had no idea that I was privately enacting my own bodily concert of breath-holding,
speech, and movement; that while concentrating on the topic of conversation, I was also highly alert to our environment and still affecting full involvement by limiting movements
of my head while I scanned. Sometimes I had no breath stored and had to scoot ahead to a clearer zone while explaining hastily I cant do the smoke. Indeed, the grammatical
responsibility is clear here: the apologetic emphasis is always on I-statements because there is more shame and implicature (the implicit demand for my interlocutor to do
something about it) in the smoke makes me sick, so I avoid it. Yet the individuated property-assignation of I am highly sensitive furthers the fiction of my dependence as
against others independence. The question then becomes which bodies can bear the fiction of independence and of uninterruptability. I am, in fact, still seeking ways to effect a
smile behind my mask: lightening my tone, cracking jokes, making small talk about the weather, or simply surging forward with whatever energy I have to connect with a person
on loving terms. I did this recently when I had to go with a mask into Michaels crafts shop, full as it is of scents and glues and fiberboard. The register clerk was very sweet, very
friendly, and to my relief did not consider the site of our intersubjectivity to be the two prominent chemical filter discs on either side of my mask. Wearing the mask with love is
the same way I learned to deal with a rare racial appearance in my white-dominated hometown in the Midwest, or with what is read as a transnationally gendered ambiguity. It

Suited up in both racial skin and chemical

mask, I am perceived as a walking symbol of a contagious disease like sars, and am
often met with some form of repulsion; indeed, sars! is what has been used to
interpellate me in the streets. As many thinkers have noted, the insinuation or revelation of a disability,
particularly invisible disability, dovetails interestingly with issues of coming-out
discourses of sexuality and passing. Both Ellen Samuels and Robert McRuer have discussed the ways in which coming out as disabled
seems the result I receive in return is either love or hostility, and it is unpredictable.

provocatively overlaps with, and also differs from, coming out as queer.26 How does a mask help interrupt the notion of passing? How does it render as damaged (or, at

I look
well when I am maskless in public, at least until I crumple. The use of the literal mask as an essential prosthesis for
least, vulnerable) a body that might otherwise seem healthy? Not wearing a chemical mask counts as a guise of passing, of the appearance of non-disability:

environmentally ill subjects is notable in light of Tobin Sieberss deployment of masquerade as an exaggeration of disability symbols to manage or intervene in social schemas

This dialogic friction between actual mask as facial appurtenancethe

masks literal locus on the faceand mask or masquerade as a racial, non-disabled, or
sexuality metaphor points to the central significance of face as intersubjective locus, and
it exemplifies the expropriability of a facial notion of embattlement to the rest of the
(human) body or to social spheres of interaction;28 but it also points to the complexities
that emerge when the actual facial signification of disability rubs up against the facial
mask metaphor. Arguably, a chemical mask can serve as its own masquerade, but it also slips and slides into orthogonal significations. Its reading
as exaggeration, in particular, competes with its reading as racializing and masculinizing toxic
threat, where the skin of the mask ambivalently locates the threat on either side of it. The
same ambivalence may be attributed to the skins of some toxic bodies, whereas the
synecdochal attribution of toxicity applies either to the (rest of the) toxic body itself (the mask standing for
the human sars vector) or to an exterior, vulnerable body that renders it so (Fanons skin, which
the mask covers, standing in for the colonial racialized visualities that render his
blackness toxic to a white collective). 29 Is, then, the toxic body the disabled body? Or is the toxic body that collective body that
about ability and disability.27

biopolitically inoculates itself against a stronger toxin by affording itself homeopathic amounts of a negative toxin (disabled bodies) while remaining in a terrible tension with
these negated entities? Given my condition, I must constantly renegotiate, and recalibrate, my embodied experiences of intimacy, altered affect, and the porousness of the body.
The nature of metal poisoning, accumulated over decades, is that any and every organ, including my brain, can bear damage. Because symptoms can reflect the toxicity of any
organ, they form a laundry list that includes cognition, proprioception, emotion, agitation, muscle strength, tunnel perception, joint pain, and nocturnality. Metal-borne damage to

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the livers detoxification pathways means that I cannot sustain many everyday toxins: once they enter, they recirculate rather than leave. I can sometimes become autismspectrum in the sense that I cannot take too much stimulation, including touch, sound, or direct human engagement, including being unable to meet someones gaze, needing
repetitive, spastic movements to feel that my body is just barely in a tolerable state; and I can radically lose compassionate intuition, saying things that I feel are innocuous but
are incredibly hurtful. The word mercurial means what it meansunstable and wildly unpredictablebecause the mercury toxin has altered a self, has directly transformed an
affective matrix: affect goes faster, affect goes hostile, goes toxic. Traditional psychology here, I suspect, can only be an overlay, a reading of what has already transformed the
body; it cannot fully rely on its narratives. Largely two quarters of the animated agents of the metropolis that is, motor vehicles and pedestrians, but not the nonhuman animals
or the insectscan be toxic to me because they are proximate instigators. The smokestacks, though they set the ambient tone of the environment, are of less immediate
concern when I am surviving moment to moment. Efficiency is far from my aim; that would mean traversing the main streets. Because I must follow the moment-to-moment
changes in quality of air to inhale something that wont hurt me, turning toward a thing or away from it correspondingly, humans are to a radical degree no longer the primary
cursors of my physical inhabitation of space. Inanimate things take on a greater, holistic importance. It also means that I am perpetually itinerant, even when I have a goal; it
means I will never walk in a straight line. There are also lessons here, reminders of interdependency, of softness, of fluidity, of receptivity, of immunitys fictivity and attachments
impermanence; life sustains evenor especiallyin this kind of silence, this kind of pause, this dis-ability. The heart pumps blood; the mind, even when it says, I cant think,
has reflected where and how it is. Communion is possible in spite of, or even because of, this fact. To conclude this narration of a day navigating my own particular hazards: Ive
made it back home and lie on the couch, and I wont be able to rise. My lover comes home and greets me; I grunt a facsimile of greeting in return, looking only in her general
direction but not into her eyes. She comes near to offer comfort, putting her hand on my arm, and I flinch away; I cant look at her and hardly speak to her; I cant recall words
when I do. She tolerates this because she understands very deeply how I am toxic. What is this relating? Distance in the home becomes the condition of these humans living
together in this moment, humans who are geared not toward continuity or productivity or reproductivity but to stasis, to waiting, until it passes. In such a toxic period, anyone or
anything that I manage to feel any kind of connection with, whether its my cat or a chair or a friend or a plant or a stranger or my partner, I think they are, and remember they
are, all the same ontological thing. What happens to notions of animacy given this lack of distinction between living and lifely things? I am shocked when my lover doesnt
remember what I told her about my phone earlier that day, when it was actually a customer service representative on a chat page, which once again brings an animating
transitivity into play. And I am shocked when her body does not reflect that I have snuggled against it earlier, when the snuggling and comforting happened in the arms and back
of my couch. What body am I now in the arms of ? Have I performed the inexcusable: Have I treated my girlfriend like my couch? Or have I treated my couch like her, which
fares only slightly better in the moral equations? Or have I done neither such thing? After I recover, the conflation seems unbelievable. But it is only in the recovering of my
human-directed sociality that the couch really becomes an unacceptable partner. This episode, which occurs again and again, forces me to rethink animacy, since I have
encountered an intimacy that does not differentiate, is not dependent on a heartbeat. The couch and I are interabsorbent, interporous, and not only because the couch is made
of mammalian skin. These are intimacies that are often ephemeral, and they are lively; and I wonder whether or how much they are really made of habit. Animate Objects,
Inanimate Subjects By its very definition, the toxin, as much as it may have been categorized as inanimate, is more than mere matter, for it has a potency that can directly
implicate the vulnerability of a living body. Prototypically, a toxin requires an object against which its threat operates. This threatened object is an object whose defenses will be
put to the test, in detection, in fighting off, and finally in submission and absorption. But some confusion occurs when we note that the object of toxicity, its target, is an animate
oneand hence potentially also a kind of subject and that the toxin, the subject of toxicity, is inanimate. Thinking back to the linguistics of animacy hierarchies detailed in

In a
schema of toxicity, likely subjects are equally likely objects, despite their location in very
different parts of the animacy hierarchy. In a scene of human intoxication, for toxins and
their human hosts, the animacy criteria of lifeliness, subjectivity, and humanness (where
the human wins) come up short against mobility and sentience (where the toxin wins). And
this is before even considering what occurs in that moment and the ensuing life of intoxication; toxicity becomes us, we become the
toxin. The mercurial, erethic, emotionally labile human moves toward quicksilver, becomes it. There is, indeed, something unworlding
that might be said to take place in the cultural production of toxic notions. A normal
worlds order is lost when, for instance, things that can harm you permanently are not even visible to the naked eye. Temporal orders
become Moebius strips of identity: How could it do this to me? And yet in that instant,
the me that speaks is not the me before I was affected by it. Recent attention to inanimate objects, from
chapter 1, we note that in this case, various categories of assessment, particularly of worthiness to serve as agents or patients of verbs, tell opposing stories.

Jennifer Terrys work on the love of inanimate objects such as the Eiffel Tower and the Berlin Wall to news coverage of men having serious emotional relationships with their
dakimakura pillows, represents certain kinds of reversals of expectation regarding a kind of vitality that objects are afforded within human worlds.30 Thinking beyond the rubric
of fetishism, it is useful to build upon this work to ask questions of the subjects facing these objects and to consider how to mark their subjectivity as such or why we do so.

my relationality is made possible only to the degree that I

am not in possession of human sociality. We might indeed let go of an attachment to the
idea that social states or capacities are possessed by one animate entity and think rather
in terms of transobjectivity.31 Transobjectivity releases objectivity from at least some of
its epistemological strictures and allows us to think in terms of multiple objects
interspersed and in exchange. Stacy Alaimos term transcorporeality suggests we think beyond the
terms of the bodily unit and affirm the agencies of the matter that we live among. 32 The sentience
Consider, for instance, the example of my couch, with which

of the couch, in our meeting and communing, then becomes my own sentience as well. Nikolas Rose, in The Politics of Life Itself, has observed the impact of recent dramatic
changes in the field of biology, particularly in the life-making capacities of genetics and the role of pharmaceuticals in vital self-management. 33 To Rose, these shifts constitute
an epistemological and technical event, and he pronounced that contemporary biopolitics must now be considered molecular in character. This focus on molecularity is
important when thinking about neurotoxicities, which I consider less a part of the spread of pharmaceutical self-management than a sign of the mediations we must now make
about toxins between environmental givens (that toxins surround us) and self (that toxins are us). In particular, what are the affectations or socialities attributed to toxicity, and
what is the affect attaining between a toxin and its host? I consider two different senses of molecularity, one of which takes the notion of a particle at face value, the other of
which leaves behind a strict biological or physical schema and considers a particles affective involvement on radically different scales. I also want to make more explicit a
relationship between xenophobia and xenobiotics; xenobiotics are substances understood to be not proper to the human body, that is, inherently alien to the body, whether or
not they are recognized as such by it. Both lead and mercury are chemically classified as metals. They are often further described as heavy metals, a category whose
chemical definition remains contested since heavy variously refers to atomic weight and molecular density. Heavy metal toxins have sites of entry, pathways of action, and
multiple genres of biochemical-level and organ-specific reaction in the body. Lead and mercury are both classified as neurotoxic, which means that they can damage neurons in
the brain. Sensory impairment correlated to mercurys neuronal damage, for instance, can include loss of proprioception, nystagmus (involuntary eye movement), and
heightened sensitivity to touch or sounds. But their effectivity is potentially comprehensive: Like most other toxic metals, lead and mercury exist as cations, and as such, can
react with most ligands present in living cells. These include such common ligands as sh, phosphate, amino, and carboxyl. Thus they have the potential to inhibit enzymes,
disrupt cell membranes, damage structural proteins, and affect the genetic code in nucleic acids. The very ubiquity of potential targets presents a great challenge to
investigations on mechanisms of action.34 The ubiquity of potential targets further informs us that the transformation by a toxin and its companions can be so comprehensive
that it renders their host somewhat unrecognizable. Furthermore, to state perhaps the obvious, research on contemporary toxicitiesor indeed, to broaden our field of inquiry,
on

historical intoxicationconfirms for us our experiences: that under certain conditions, some of them enduring or
social beings can also become radically altered in their sociality, whether due to brain-specific

seemingly permanent,

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Although the bodys interior could be
described as becoming damaged by toxins, if we were willing to perform the radical act
of releasing the definition of organism from its biological pinnings, we might from a
more holistic perspective approach toxicity with a lens of mutualism. The biologist Anton de Bary, who
damage or not. They are overcome, overwhelmed, overtaken by other substances.

developed a theory of symbiosis in 1879, defined three types: commensalism, mutualism, and parasitism. Thinking of toxins as symbiotesrather than, for instance, as

toxic
affectivity but enables me to shift modes of approach. Ultimately, amountsthat is, scalesare
inconsequential here; it is affectivity that matters, and the distinction between parasite and symbiosis is irrelevant. It is worth noting
here that my thinking bears some resemblance to Deleuzian interspersal and symbiosis. Deleuze and Guattari write substantively about molecularity in relation to
becoming-animal, referring to particles as belonging or not belonging to a molecule in relation to their proximity to one another; but such molecules
are defined not by material qualities but rather more so as entities whose materiality is
purposefully suspended.35 Thus, they compare verbal particles to food alimentary particles that in a schizophrenics actions enter into proximity with
one another. Deleuze and Guattaris thinking is useful in the sense that I attempt not only to accentuate proximal relations among
categorically differentiated entities (across lines of animacy), but equally to emphasize the insistent segregations of
material into intensified condensations (affective intensities) of race, geography, and
capital. In this light, the toxicities tied to heavy metals function as a kind of assemblage of biology,
affect, nationality, race, and chemistry. And yet, their analysis leaves little room for
distinctions between actual and abstract, particularly in their creative distinction
between molecularity and molarity. Thus, I find it useful to hold on to a certain concrete
materiality here, insofar as it offers a potentially critical purchase for thinking through
queer relating and racialized transnational feeling, and further because mere metaphors,
as we have seen, can sometimes overlook their own effectivity in literal fields.36 Queering Intimacy
There is a potency and intensity to two animate or inanimate bodies passing one another, bodies that
have an exchangea potentially queer exchangethat effectively risks the implantation
of injury. The quality of the exchange may be at the molecular level, airborne molecules entering the breathing apparatus, molecules that may or may not have violent
parasites which seem only to feed off a generally integral being without fundamentally altering it (which would perhaps be our first guess)not only captures some

bodily effects; or the exchange may be visual, the meeting of eyes unleashing a series of pleasurable or unpleasurable bodily reactions, chill, pulse rush, adrenaline, heat, fear,
tingling skin. The necessary condition for toxicity to be enlivenedproximity, or intimacymeans that queer theories are especially rich for thinking about the affects of toxicity.

Thinking and feeling

with toxicity invites us to revise, once again, the sociality that queer theory has in many
ways made possible. As a relational notion, toxicity speaks productively to queer-utopian
imagining and helps us revisit the question of how and where subject-object dispositions
should be attributed to the relational queer figure. But even further, queer theory is an
apt home for the consideration of toxicity, for I believe the twoqueerness and toxicity
have an affinity. They truck with negativity, marginality, and subject-object confusions;
they have, arguably, an affective intensity; they challenge heteronormative
understandings of intimacy. Both have gotten under the skin. Yet queer theorys
attachment to certain human bodies and other human objects elides from its view the
queer socialities that certain other, nonhuman intimacies portend. What are the
exceptionalisms that can haunt such theorizing? Let us revisit the scene from the previous chapter of the child who
At the same time, queer theories can further benefit from the lessons of disability theory, particularly by rethinking its own others.

inappropriately licks his lead-toxic painted train, the scene that is constantly conjured as one that must be avoided at all costs. The mobility of ingestible air and the
nonemptiness of that air demonstrate that the act of lead licking is a fantasy of exception. It is not only a fantasy that not-licking is a viable way to contain heterosexuality in its
bounds, but it is also a fantasy that not-licking is a viable way to contain the interconstitution of people and other people, or people and other objects. Look closely at your childs
beloved, bright-red train: you may choose to expel it from your house, for the toxins that the sight of it only hints at; but you will pay the cost of his proper entrainment. What
fingers have touched it to make it so? How will you choose to recover your formerly benign feelings about this train? Love has somehow to rise above the predetermined
grammar of such encounters, for the grammar itself predicts only negative toxicity. So how is it that so much of this toxic world, in the form of perfumes, cleaning products, body
products, plastics, all laden with chemicals that damage us so sincerely, is encountered by so many of us as benign or only pleasurable? How is it, even more, that we are doing

There is a relation ship

between productivitys queers (not reproductivitys queers, that is) and hidden, normative intoxications.
Those who find themselves on the underside of industrial development bear a
disproportionate risk, as environmentalists and political economy scholars alike have
shown.37 In her article Akwesasne: Mohawk Mothers Milk and pcbs, environmental justice activist Winona LaDuke describes a multipronged activist project led by the
this, doing all this, to ourselves? And yet, even as the toxins themselves spread far and wide, such a we is a false unity.

Mohawk midwife and environmentalist Katsi Cook.38 Cook developed the Mothers Milk pcb-monitoring breast milk project, begun in 1984 and ongoing today, in response to

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the demonstrated toxic levels of pcbs on the Akwesasne reservation, which straddles the border between the United States and Canada and is located very close to a primary
emitter of pcbs, a General Motors site established in 1957 which is now a Superfund site. This proximityand gms improper disposal practicesmeant that both the St.
Lawrence River and the Akwesasne wells, the sources of water on which the Mohawks relied, had toxic concentrations of pcbs. Indeed, Akwesasne is one of the most highly
polluted Native American reservations. Cook emphasizes strengthening womens health so that their critical role as the first environment of babies be taken seriously for
existing and future bodily toxicity. These molecular intimaciesparticles passed on via breast milk to babiesare implicated in regimes of gendered labor and care. Cooks
activism connects the poisoning of the turtles to the fate of the Mohawks in a cosmology that reiterates the shared potency of live turtles and earthly support. Turtles are critically
important in the Mohawk cosmology, which connects them to the earth itself; LaDuke mentions that North America is called Turtle Island, which comes from a common Native
American origin story. Such a cosmology does not depend, for instance, on the narrow ecology of edibles that informs mainstream U.S. food safety advocacy (wherein bigger
animals eat smaller animals, a logic that articulates the threat of ocean fish to humans). It serves as a reminder that to the degree that mainstream animacy frameworks have

interruptions demand
recognizing the contradictions within matter itselfwhether through accepting that
worldviews (and their cosmologies) are legitimately contestable, especially in a time of
problematization and retrenchment diagnosed as posthuman, or through revitalized
understandings of matters own complexity that can cross the discursive boundaries of science.
become dominant law, such law could potentially be recodified if the animate orders on which it depends were interrupted. The

Cosmologies, of course, are as much written into Western philosophies as they are in Akwesasne cultures, and the life and death hidden within their objects has a binding effect
on their theoretical impulse. In her important book Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed gives extensive, unabashed attention to tables, at one point writing extensively about her
orientation (in a larger discussion of sexuality and orientations) toward a table of hers and that tables orientation toward her. She writes, we perceive the object as an object,
as something that has integrity, and is in space, only by haunting that very space; that is, by co-inhabiting space such that the boundary between the co-inhabitants of space
does not hold. The skin connects as well as contains. . . . Orientations are tactile and they involve more than one skin surface: we, in approaching this or that table, are also
approached by the table, which touches us when we touch it.39 Ahmed works here with an important and profound assertion by Maurice Merleau-Ponty that sensory
engagement binds sensing and sensed objects to one another; in this way, my skin is simultaneously the skin of the world. Yet, if we were to stretch this intercorporeality further,
it appears that Ahmed still presumes the proper integrity of her body and of the table, an exclusion of molecular travel that permits her to position one thing against another.
Ahmed is talking mainly about the perception of integrity; but I wonder what happens when percepts are to some degree bypassed, for instance, by the air itself. When
physically copresent with others, I ingest them. There is nothing fanciful about this. I am ingesting their exhaled air, their sloughed skin, and the skin of the tables, chairs, and
carpet of our shared room. Ahmeds reading thus takes the deadness and inanimacy of that table as a reference point for the orientation of a life, one in which the table is moved
according to the purposes and conveniences of its owner. And while it would be unfair to ask of her analysis something not proper to its devices, I do wonder how this analysis
might change once the object distinctions between animate and inanimate collapse, when we move beyond the exclusionary zone made up of the perceptual operands of
phenomenology. The affective relations I have with a couch are not made out of a predicted script and are received as no different from those with animate beings, which,
depending on the perspective, is both their failing and their merit. My question then becomes: What is lost when we hold tightly to that exceptionalism which says that couches
are dead and we are live? For would not my nonproductivity, my nonhuman sociality, render me some other humans dead, as certainly it has, in case after case of the denial
of disabled existence, emotional life, sexuality, or subjectivity? And what is lost when we say that couches must be cathected differently from humans? Or when we say that only
certain couches as they are used would deserve the attribution of a sexual fetish? These are only questions to which I have no ready answers, except to declare that those
forms of exceptionalism no longer seem very reasonable. Indeed, the literary scholar John Plotzs careful review essay on new trends in materiality theories, Can the Sofa
Speak? A Look at Thing Theory, itself never arrives at confronting the possibility of the sofas speech, seeming to presume that the question of sofas remains at the level of
humorous titular play, no explanation needed.40 It seems that animacy and its affects are mediated not by whether you are a couch, a piece of metal, a human child, or an
animal, but by how holistically you are interpreted and how dynamic you are perceived to be. Stones themselves move, change, degrade over time, but in ways that exceed
human scales. Human patients get defined, via their companion technologies, as inanimate, even as they zip right by you in a manual wheelchair. And above and beyond
these factors related to the power of interpretation and stereotype, there is the strict physicality of the elements that travel in, on, and through us, and sometimes stay. If we

animacy comes to appear as a category itself held in

false containment, insofar as it portends exteriorized control relationships rather than
mutual imbrications, even at the most material levels. Nancy Tuana, reading New Orleans
after Hurricane Katrina in terms of interactionist ontology, writes, There is a viscous
porosity of fleshmy flesh and the flesh of the world. This porosity is a hinge through
which we are of and in the world. I refer to it as viscous, for there are membranes that
affect the interactions.41 Furthermore, the toxicity of the queer to the heterosexual
collective or individual body, the toxicity of the dirty subjects to the hygienic State, the
toxicity of heavy metals to an individual body: none of these segregations perfectly
succeeds even while it is believed with all effort and investment to be effective. In
perhaps its best versions, toxicity does not repel but propels queer loves, especially
once we release it from exclusively human hosts, disproportionately inviting dis/ability,
industrial labor, biological targets, and military vaccine recipientsinviting loss and its
losers and trespassing containers of animacy. We need not assign the train-licking boy
of the previous chapter so surely to the nihilistic underside of futurity or to his own termination, figurative
or otherwise. I would be foolish to imagine that toxicity stands in for utopia given the explosion of
resentful, despairing, painful, screamingly negative affects that surround toxicity. Nevertheless, I am reluctant to deny the queer
productivity of toxins and toxicity, a productivity that extends beyond an enumerable set
of addictive or pleasure-inducing substances, or to neglect (or, indeed, ask after) the
pleasures, the loves, the rehabilitations, the affections, the assets that toxic conditions
induce. Unlike viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they are
better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to
bear on lives and nonlives. If we move beyond the painful antisocial effects to consider
the sociality that is present there, we find in that sociality a reflection on extant
ingest each others skin cells, as well as each others skin creams, then

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socialities among us, the queer-inanimate social lives that exist beyond the fetish,
beyond the animate, beyond the pure clash of human body sex.

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Scholarship Key
Debate must be a space for academic engagement
Reid-Brinkley 12 [The Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley Interview. 2/13/12 Dr. Shanara ReidBrinkley on Scholars in Debate and More. http://globaldebateblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/drshanara-reid-brinkley-on-scholars-in.html.]
Then we have a much better
argument to make to our administrations about the significance of our programs, we can
start connecting debate tournament final rounds to whats going on in public policy
research institutions. What we produce could literally provide an entrance for our
arguments to actually affect public policy because of the intellectual power our
community holds. Why are we not making use of the things that would get our programs
support? It doesnt make sense to me. Thats why debate is collapsing to this very small
small small society. Once that collapse between the NDT and CEDA happened, have you watched the community shrink
over time? It just has gotten smaller. And it will continue to get smaller, because we will continue to
disconnect ourselves from the academy. But why are we not in conversations on a
consistent basis with our authors? Duh!? This is why whats happening in black debate. Is more fascinating than
what is happening anywhere else. Im really interested in Spurlock interviewing Spanos about
debate. Im interested in the fact that Damiyr & Miguel, members of the Towson squad, me
and some other black debate people got invited by Dylan Rodriguez to appear at the
American Studies Conference to talk about whats happening in debate and activism and
scholarship around blackness in issues like prison, etc. Im interested in that, because
these scholars are like woah, yall are talking about this stuff here? and they are like watching video
Dr. Reid-Brinkley: Yeah, thats how I feel about it, like duh! Know what I mean?

links of the students debating, and like theyre on our Resistance homepage. I have created a Facebook Resistance page thats
private that all of the movement and its coalition members are on. So, I get requests, I put you on if you are a coalition member,

And, we justthats
what debate should look like. Academics should be participating, they shouldnt control
it, but you should be able to come talk to us in our theories about the topic. How about that?
Wilderson is on there, Dylan Rodriguez is on there, Sexton is on there, you know what I mean?

You dont need to write evidence for you about the Arab Spring for me to describe to you why my work on African American culture

I simply am teaching you to chain

my theory through another example. Thats how you write an academic paper. You take
and hip hop are relevant to thinking about whats going on in the Arab Spring.

somebody elses theory, and you dont just map it exactly on to what it is that you are
working on. You have to figure out what the relationship is between the two. Thats the
kind of stuff we could produce as a community, every year, on topics. We just are not
taking advantage of that. And, in that process, because of how we have defined debate, it
is exclusionary. We do have these ideal debaters who look like white males, white
straight men with money and class, and those white men who dont fit that, are few and
far between. They often get up there, but they still is sort of like a little weird, because you dont perform white masculinity
middle to upper class in an appropriate manner, so they are cool with you, but youre still freaky. We make those kinds of
judgments because we are just so insulated. Our thinking is so small. Smaller than it
what we should and could be. And, thats my debate future . Thats my vision of what it could look like,
my dream that lets me walk around at tournaments and be okay with the fact that supposedly Im despised by the elites, higher-ups
in the community, and people that used to be my friends, and that would speak to me on a regular basis and that I would run up to
and hug, avoid my eyes in the hallway. Or that Im not qualified to write about debate, but neither is Spanos because he was an
outsider, but Im not qualified to write about it because Im an insider. But, Casey Harrigan, and Jarrod Atchison, and Pannetta are
there is no question of their qualifications. Im sorry, I thought I got a PhD from the number one program in rhetoric in the country.
Im sorry, I thought that was the case. I thought I was a national award winning scholar, for my writing, published writing. I thought

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that was the case, and that would make me somehow qualified to talk about debate a little bit but, clearly not. But, once your
black. Once you say your black, then your biased.

Normative knowledge making practices crowd out alternative knowledge

production our performance offers multiple perspectives
Reid-Brinkley 08 [Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, "THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING
BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION
THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE" pp. 84-5]
The process of signifyin engaged in by the Louisville debaters

is not simply designed to critique the use

of traditional evidence; their goal is to challenge the relationship between social power
and knowledge. In other words, those with social power within the debate community are able
to produce and determine legitimate knowledge. These legitimating practices usually
function to maintain the dominance of normative knowledge-making practices, while
crowding out or directly excluding alternative knowledge-making practices . The Louisville
framework looks to the people who are oppressed by current constructions of power. Jones and Green offer an
alternative framework for drawing claims in debate speeches, they refer to it as a three-tier process: A
way in which you can validate our claims, is through the three-tier process . And we talk
about personal experience, organic intellectuals, and academic intellectuals . Let me give you
an analogy. If you place an elephant in the room and send in three blind folded people into the room, and each of them
are touching a different part of the elephant. And they come back outside and you ask each different person they gone
have a different idea about what they was talking about. But, if you let those people converse and bring those three
different people together then you can achieve a greater truth. Jones argues that without the three tier

process debate claims are based on singular perspectives that privilege those with
institutional and economic power. The Louisville debaters do not reject traditional evidence per
se, instead they seek to augment or supplement what counts as evidence with other forms
of knowledge produced outside of academia. As Green notes in the double-octo-finals at CEDA Nationals,
Knowledge surrounds me in the streets, through my peers, through personal experiences,
and everyday wars that I fight with my mind. The thee-tier process: personal experience, organic
intellectuals, and traditional evidence, provides a method of argumentation that taps into diverse forms of knowledgemaking practices. With the Louisville method, personal experience and organic intellectuals are placed

on par with traditional forms of evidence. While the Louisville debaters see the benefit of academic
research, they are also critically aware of the normative practices that exclude racial and ethnic minorities from policyoriented discussions because of their lack of training and expertise. Such exclusions prevent radical solutions to racism,
classism, sexism, and homophobia from being more permanently addressed. According to Green: bell hooks talks about
how when we rely solely on one perspective to make our claims, radical liberatory theory

becomes rootless. Thats the reason why we use a three-tiered process. Thats why we use alternative
forms of discourse such as hip hop. Thats also how we use traditional evidence and our personal narratives
so you dont get just one perspective claiming to be the right way. Because it becomes a
more meaningful and educational view as far as how we achieve our education. The use of
hip hop and personal experience function as a check against the homogenizing function
of academic and expert discourse. Note the reference to bell hooks, Green argues that without alternative
perspectives, radical libratory theory becomes rootless. The term rootless seems to refer to a lack of
grounded-ness in the material circumstances that academics or experts study. In other words,
academics and experts by definition represent an intellectual population with a level of
objective distance from that which they study. For the Louisville debaters, this distance is
problematic as it prevents the development of a social politic that is rooted in the
community of those most greatly affected by the status of oppression.

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Bringing the debate back to race in education is critical to educational

opportunities
Reid-Brinkley 08 [Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, "THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING
BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION
THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE" pp. 14-5]
Contemporary racism is reproduced and maintained through discursive
constructions that are circulated through ideologies. Ideologies help to make
stereotypical representations intelligible to an audience. As long as racism
remains a social phenomenon in our society, racial ideologies will likely remain a
critical tool by which racial difference is signified. All racial ideologies do not
function the same way; they are often complicated by intersections of class,
gender, sexuality and context. And, as ideologies often function to dominate, they
also create circumstances for resistance. This project seeks to engage both
dominance and resistance; how racial ideologies reproduce social dominance, and how
those affected by that dominance attempt to resist it. The rhetoric surrounding race
and education offers one space from which to analyze the social reproduction of
racial dominance. Looking to specific contexts through which we analyze the
significance of racial ideologies allows us as scholars to map out the forces of
power active through racial difference. Specifically, a rhetorical focus can map the
public discursive maneuvers that (re)produce and resist these social ideologies.
The rhetoric surrounding race, culture, and performance within educational
discourse is of critical importance to the future course of educational opportunity
in American society. We need to understand the strategies of signification that are
most persuasive and powerful to the general public audience. What representations of
racial others are most intelligible to the public and how might racial others respond to
that intelligibility? As our previous discussion of the acting white thesis and the rise of
cultural explanations of racial difference indicate, contemporary ideological
representations of race have changed and in some ways remained the same. We must
interrogate the use of ideological representations of race, gender, class, and
sexuality as rhetorical strategy in public deliberations. And, it is important to read
the social actors involved and watching as embodied.

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AFF Answers

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AT: Framework
Language shapes the material. Securitization of meaning creates
hierarchies that are then grafted onto bodies, rendering them toxic, and
therefore closer or equivalent to objects
Chen 12 [Mel, Assoc. Prof. Gender and Womens Studies and Vice Chair for Research, Dir. of
the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @ UC Berkeley, Animacies: Biopolitical Racial
Mattering and Queer Affect, pp. 2-3]
consider the phrase the
hikers that rocks crush: what does this mean?5 The difficulty frequently experienced by English speakers
in processing this phrase has much to do with the inanimacy of the rock (which plays an agent role
in relation to the verb crush) as compared to the animacy of the hikers, who in this scenario play an object role.
How does animacy work linguistically? To take one popular example involving relative clauses,

The hikers that rocks crush thus violates a cross- linguistic preference among speakers. They tend to prefer animate head nouns
to go with subject- extracted relative clauses (the hikers who __ crushed the rock), or inanimate head nouns to go with objectextracted relative clauses (the rock that the hiker crushed __). Add to this that there is a smaller plausibility that rocks will agentively

an animate hierarchy of possible

begins to take shape. Yet more contentious examples believe the apparent obviousness of this hierarchy, and
even in this case, it is within a specific cosmology that stones so obviously lack agency or
could be the source of causality. What if nonhuman animals, or humans stereotyped as
passive, such as people with cognitive or physical disabilities, enter the calculus of
animacy: what happens then?
crush hikers than that hikers will agentively crush rocks: a conceptual order of things,
acts,

AT: Limits/dialogue Their limits enclose potentiality itself the demand

for legibility enacts a futural whiteness that constrains political thought
Winnubst 7 [Shannon, Prof. Womens Gender and Sexuality Studies @ Ohio State,
Queering Freedom, p. 23-5]
As the fences in my gentrifying, whitening neighborhood grow higher and higher, the political, economic, and personal functions of limits in cultures of
phallicized whiteness become more and more clear. Limits

constitute property and propriety. Demarcating a body

or subject from the vagueness of backgrounds, conditions, cultures, or histories, they serve as the site of individuation. They
circumvent an entity, orienting us toward the criterion of wholeness, a primary demand of
legibility in cultures of phallicized whiteness. Not unlike the rituals of urination contests among male dogs, limits mark out our
territories. They ground our deep senses of ourselves as individuals, our narratives of ahistorical autonomous self-determination, and the many cultural
forms of that self- determination. In a slightly different mode,

limits also function as internal and external

constraints of possibility that frame personal, social, or even economic fields. We understand ourselves, for example, as limited
internally by our social and cultural backgrounds or as constrained by our financial resources. Or, externally, limits also function as thresholds that
stand at the outer limit of experiences and cannot be trespassed, exercising an external authoritative restraint that
expresses itself as a prohibition. For example, nations (most nations, at least) are restrained and limited by international law; or, more locally, I may
simply realize that, with age encroaching, my limit is three drinks. In all of these, limits function as that which one (a social attitude, a political entity, a
person) cannot or must not go beyond. They indicate thresholds of experience, forming the contours of our desire and subjectivity, whether internally or
externally imposed. When framed as prohibitions, they incite our desire: death and drugs, along with sex and love, are the most commonly explored
limit experiences. Across all of these functions, a common operation is at work. From the function of limits as internal conditions of possibility or
external boundaries of restraint to the demarcations of wholeness and individuation, limits constitute legibility. One belongs to ones cultural
background, gaining identity and direction from its historical particularity; nations that disobey international law are imperialist or rogue states,
depending on their economic might; I am a hung-over sop, not an interesting person, the morning after an evening of more than three drinks; and,
fundamentally to all of these, a true individual is he or she who can clearly stake his or her own identitypsychologically, politically, economicallyin
the chaotic world. It is this last phenomenon, the demarcating of the individual and all its permutations, that I want to explore and develop, rooting it
particularly in the modern

political projects of classical liberalism and their attendant concepts of freedom. The logic
of the limit thus expresses itself in two fundamental registers: as enclosure and as prohibition. These two registers are
dialectically related. The demarcating of entities (persons, experiences, ideas, institutions) clearly and distinctly from other entities and from historicocultural backgrounds enacts a mode of separation that leads us to frame desire as the careful negotiationand prohibitionof boundaries. For

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introduce ownership on the model of private property into the social field when we
conceive of an entity as individuated on the basis of its enclosure and containment by clear boundaries. This model of ownership,
grounded in a fundamental preference for labor that enacts a futural temporality, in turn initiates an economics
of scarcity into the field of social relations. We demand that we must demarcate that which is properly ours. Private
property comes to dominate our senses of the worldof our selves, others, objects, and all possible relations therein. Each
becomes a quantifiable unit. As the social field is reduced to modes of ownership, scarcity comes to dominate the kinds of relations
that obtain therein. The fear of encroachment begins to override any desire to cross these clear and distinct boundaries. And the
crossing of boundaries, whether between persons, classes, sexes, races, nations, or relig- ions, becomes
prohibited. Boundaries differentiate us; individuation becomes our most precious value; and the crossing of boundaries is forbidden, creating
example, we

that tantalizing social realm of fetish and taboo. The two registers of the logic of the limit, enclosure and prohibition, are thereby analytically distinct, but

whiteness and its domination of the social field in cultures of late modernity
depend on these subtle, often unnoticed if not invisible, dynamics. Both enclosure and prohibition collude to ground the
fundamental values of freedom and individualism, all bound by the model of private property and the fundamental value
of labor that enacts a futural temporality, in cultures of phallicized whiteness.
functionally intertwined. The resilience of phallicized

Their framework produces what will and will not qualify as a viable
speaking subject, eliminating dissent and true deliberation
Butler 4 [Judith, PhD; Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature
and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Precarious Life The Powers of
Mourning and Violence]
Dissent and debate depend upon the inclusion of those who maintain critical views of state
policy and civic culture remaining part of a larger public discussion of the value of policies and politics.
To charge those who voice critical views with treason, terrorist-sympathizing, anti-Semitism, moral relativism,
postmodernism, juvenile behavior, collaboration, anachronistic Leftism, is to seek to destroy the credibility not
of the views that are held, but of the persons who hold them. It produces the climate of fear in which to voice a certain
view is to risk being branded and shamed with a heinous appellation. To continue to voice one's views under
those conditions is not easy, since one must not only discount the truth of the appellation, but brave the
stigma that seizes up from the public domain. Dissent is quelled, in part, through threatening the

speaking subject with an uninhabitable identification. Because it would be heinous to identify as

treasonous, as a collaborator, one fails to speak, or one speaks in throttled ways, in order to
sidestep the terrorizing identification that threatens to take hold. This strategy for quelling
dissent and limiting the reach of critical debate happens not only through a series of shaming tactics
which have a certain psycho-logical terrorization as their effect, but they work as well by producing what will
and will not count as a viable speaking subject and a reasonable opinion within the public domain. It is
precisely because one does not want to lose one 's status as a viable speaking being that one does not say what one
thinks. Under social conditions that regulate identifications and the sense of viability to this degree, censorship
operates implicitly and forcefully. The line that circum-scribes what is speakable and what is livable also functions as
an instrument of censorship. To decide what views will count as reasonable within the public domain, however, is to
decide what will and will not count as the public sphere of debate. And if someone holds views that are not in line with
the nationalist norm, that person comes to lack credibility as a speaking person, and the media is not open to him or
her (though the internet, interestingly, is). The foreclosure of critique empties the public domain of

debate and democratic contestation itself, so that debate becomes the exchange of
views among the like-minded, and criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy,
becomes a fugitive and suspect activity. Public policy, including foreign policy, often seeks to restrain the public
sphere from being open to certain forms of debate and the circulation of media coverage. One way a hegemonic
understanding of politics is achieved is through circumscribing what will and will not be admissible as part
of the public sphere itself Without disposing populations in such a way that war seems good and right and
true, no war can claim popular consent, and no administration can maintain its popularity. To produce what
will constitute the public sphere, however, it is necessary to control the way in which people see, how they
hear, what they see. The constraints are not only on content certain images of dead bodies in Iraq, for

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instance, are considered unacceptable for public visual consumption but on what can be heard, read, seen,
felt, and known. The public sphere is constituted in part by what can appear, and the

regulation of the sphere of appearance is one way to establish what will count as reality, and what will not. It
is also a way of establishing whose lives can be marked as lives, and whose deaths will
count as deaths. Our capacity to feel and to apprehend hangs in balance. But so, too, does the fate of the
reality of certain lives and deaths as well as the ability to critically and publicly about the effects of the war.

Stylistic norms enforced by framework are white supremacist and reward

only those who can act white
Reid-Brinkley 08 [Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, "THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING
BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION
THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE" pp. 60]
The stylistic norms of the policy debate community are inextricably attached to
the social performance of identity. In other words, if the stylistic norms privilege
the stylistic choices of white, straight, economically privileged males, as is clearly
indicated by their statistical representation at the heights of competitive success,
then difference marks one as other unless the individual performs according to
those stylistic and identity-based norms. Racially and/or ethnically different
bodies must perform themselves according to the cultural norms of the debate
community. For UDL students it can often mean changing ones appearance,
standardizing language practices, eschewing cultural practices at least while
participating in debate. In essence, students of color are performatively whitened
in order to have an opportunity for achieving in debate competitions. Acting
black or brown is problematic because those performative identities are not
privileged in terms of successful participation. In fact, they signify a difference, an
opposite, a negative differential. It is not that the debate community actively
operates to exclude based on race, instead it is an exclusion based on racial
performance, i.e., how the differentially colored body chooses to style itself. So, if
the stylistic procedures and practices of the national policy debate community
function to exclude those considered other, then engaging style might be a
tactical attack on the viability and maintenance of the traditional system. Once
Warner became critical of the UDL he made the difficult choice of rejecting the traditional
debate practices he had heretofore participated in and developed new methods of
debate competition, judging, and coaching.

Implementation, deliberation, and expertise disappear bodies of color

through abstraction and normalization we must return the body to
discussions of public deliberation
Reid-Brinkley 08 [Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, "THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING
BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION
THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE" pp. 86-9]
The use of hip hop and personal experience function as a check against the homogenizing
function of academic and expert discourse. Note the reference to bell hooks, Green argues that without
alternative perspectives, radical libratory theory becomes rootless. The term rootless
seems to refer to a lack of grounded-ness in the material circumstances that academics or

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experts study. In other words, academics and experts by definition represent an intellectual
population with a level of objective distance from that which they study. For the Louisville
debaters, this distance is problematic as it prevents the development of a social politic that
is rooted in the community of those most greatly affected by the status of oppression. The
use of hip hop by the Louisville debaters signifies on the normative construction of expertise. Hip
hop and rap artists are hardly considered intellectuals. And yet, the Louisville debaters dub
hip hop practitioners organic intellectuals. A phrase taken from Mari Matsuda, the use of organic
intellectuals as a basis for evidentiary claims repeats the significance of evidenced based
claims, but revises by making hip hop artists experts on race and racism in America. In
Greens First Negative Constructive or 1NC in the double-octo-final round against Emory Universitys Allen and
Greenstein (ranked in the sweet sixteen), she argues: Mari Matsuda, a Hawaiian American discusses

her connections and parallels to the African American community and concluded that
when we approach change, she felt that listening and opening up space for organic
intellectuals are key ways in which we can begin to construct knowledge in a different
way.62 According to Matsuda and the Louisville debaters, it is the intermingling of alternative
knowledge practices with current practices that can lead to different methods of
knowledge construction. For them, the introduction of organic intellectuals into the
normative processes of knowledge production is a critical tool in developing new
methodologies. Green notes further: Not only do you open up space but you listen to them and
follow some of their approaches, follow some of their methods. They have the power to
construct a counter- hegemonic discourse to challenge power relations that is not through
academia that is just as powerful at dismantling walls of institutional racism through their
dissemination of subversive ideas.63 That Green distinguishes opening up space for
organic intellectuals and actually listening to and following their methods, is a crucial
discursive choice. Within debate rounds that are oriented toward critical interrogations of
policy, debaters often argue for the importance of opening up space for those
individuals and voices that might normally be excluded from policy discussions. However,
simply opening space for those individuals to participate is often a maneuver by which
dominant discourse can maintain itself. In other words, you can open up space within a
dominant discourse for those who have been excluded to speak, but such an action does
not necessitate that the dominant discourse respond to the call of the new voices. Signifyin
on the Body and the Speaking Flesh. Throughout this project I have argued that the bodies of debaters of color
are critically relevant to their engagement in public argumentation . In this section of this chapter I
want to turn our attention more directly to the raced and gendered bodies of the Louisville debaters. In chapter one, I
argued that bodies signify to onlookers within particular cultural contexts. As we've discussed , the race and gender

constructions attached to bodies are critically important in defining and determining

success and achievement in educational contexts. Specifically, recall Warren's discussion of the purity of
educational environments where the body is invisibilized in favor of a focus on the mind. Thus, as Warren argues , the
black body exceeds the purity of that social space as that body can never be fully hidden.
The Louisville debaters find themselves in a space of public deliberation and education
where the body is deemed irrelevant in favor of a dependence on the power of the mind.
Yet, only those bodies that can remain un-marked, or unremarkable, in its social and
competitive space can remain relatively invisible thus maintaining purity. Black bodies in
particular are notable in these spaces if only because they are so few. Their bodies cannot
be hidden or ignored, they exceed attempts to constrain them. However, these bodies can
go through a process of purification by which the black body attempts to signify itself
within and through the normative discourses that marks one as an in-group member . This is
the process of integration and at its extremes, assimilation. The Louisville debaters engage the normative
practices of the community by resisting attempts to capture and purify their colored
bodies. In other words, they make their bodies more visible. They signify on their bodies,
bringing them forth to participate within competition and public deliberation, crowding out
the visual normativity of whiteness. Other scholars have noted that body rhetoric has been

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a critical strategy of confrontation amongst radical or protest groups. 64 Deluca argues that it is
an absolute necessity that social movement scholars analyze "the body when attempting
to understand the effects of many forms of pubic argument, especially social protest
rhetoric."65 Deluca's essay speaks specifically to protest movements that have the ability to gain television coverage.
Thus, it is critically important for those protest groups to use their bodies to effectively
make arguments within a very small window of media coverage. While this type of study of
the uses of the body in protest rhetoric are important to the study of rhetoric in the media
age, it is equally critical that those studying the rhetoric of the body engage in the analysis
of the body in social protest that occurs without broad media coverage . As Richard Jensen and
John Hammerback note, communication scholars have studied large scale movements and protests or the rhetoric of
particular national figures or leaders resulting in a limited understanding of social movements and protest rhetoric, with the
Civil Rights Movement as their specific example.66 Thus, they argue that communication scholars must concern
themselves with local, grassroots examples of social movements for these are the building blocks of larger, more visible
movements. While the Louisville Project has received some media attention, that it is not a nationally visible movement
makes it no less useful for critical and theoretical analysis. Even without media attention, the Louisville debaters find their
bodies to be useful spaces of public argumentation. That is not to say that the project has not been represented through
mediated discourse. College Station Televison (CSTV) produced documentaries of the NDT between 2004 and 2006
which were aired on their station. Jones and Green in particular are featured in the documentary in 2004.

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AT: Ableism K
Disability cannot be separated from the animacy heiarchies which render
some populations disabled and suture disability to race
Chen 15 [Mel, Assoc. Prof. Gender and Womens Studies and Vice Chair for Research, Dir. of
the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @ UC Berkeley, Unpacking Intoxication, racialising
disability, Med Humanit, 41, p. 26-7]
DOWN SYNDROME AND THE LOGIC OF DEVELOPMENT Opium enters this story a bit later: I came to it through a research
project that pursues the legacies, and the fascinating series of logics, by which an English clinician named Langdon Down came to
understand the phenomena he observed in his young patients as mongoloidism or mongoloid idiocy. Downs influential approach
to developmental disabilities has persisted, if perhaps only in a ghostly nominal lay remainder (medical practice stopped usage of
this term after repeated objection in the mid-20th century); but it also partakes of racialised and temporalised developmental logics
that remain robust today. In the years prior to 1866, a number of English children with identifiable and yet unmapped disabilities
presented Down, who understood these descriptively as congenital mental lesions, with an explanatory opportunity for his studies
of idiocy that were popular at the time. Influenced

by Friedrich Blumenbachs division of the worlds

human races into five essential groups,5 including the Mongol, the Malay, the Ethiopian, the Caucasian and the
Native American, and also by contemporary ideas of racial temporalisation, Down devised a theory that his young
white research subjectsdistinguished by not only cognitive, but phenotypical characteristics such as an epicanthic fold
must have reverted, atavistically, to an earlier racial stage, which he described as
Mongolian, or alternatively as Mongoloid idiot or imbecile. Mongoloid thus became a term to describe
people with Down syndrome, which survives to this day in significant numbers despite no longer being
accepted as a clinical term. I note here that Down syndrome is today often referred to as Trisomy 21, referring to the particularising
characteristic of three copies of chromosome 21 in every cell for most but not all people with Down syndrome, signalling a shift
towards genetic accounts of disabilities. Down believed he could identify atavistic eruptions of earlier racial (Mongoloid)
characteristics in the otherwise European descended child. He wrote straightforwardly and yet swept over exception: A very large
number of congenital idiots are typical Mongols. So marked is this, that when placed side by side, it is difficult to believe that the
specimens compared are not children of the same parents. The hair is not black, as in the real Mongol, but of a brownish colour,
straight and scanty. The face is flat and broad, and destitute of prominence. The cheeks are roundish, and extended laterally.6 I
note here that Down almost viewed the down phenotype as more selective than race: that all these childrens images are such that
they must be of the same parents rather than of the same race. With this brief aside, Down suggests something of a queer
reproduction of this congenital condition in such a way that it might be inadequate to simply label Downs description as racialised.
Alternatively, we could say that he imagined non-white parentage as having itself a queer density. The normativity being expressed
here is the use of a nonwhite race as a zone of deferral and marking, which accounts for the other kind of difference (as they
interarticulate). To follow my interest in not only intoxication and its effects, but also its governmentality, I learned a further detail:
Down used opium to sedate some of his patients in his English clinic. I intend to research in what ways this sedation could have
been induced for one or many reasons: in the schema of standard treatment of a condition, the controlled synchronising of an
institutionalised population, or a temporal calibration of developmentally delayed patients understood to be in some sense outside of
time. Rife

contemporary examples of racist labelling of nondisabled East Asian individuals

as mongoloid not only mark the potent legacy of Down, but also speak to the sticking
power and attraction of the embodied metaphor as well as of the collapsing of
developmental time. One of the correlates of the racial description of disability, such as
mongoloidism, is precisely that disability resides in the description of races, and may
well reside in the defining theme of race itself as a colonial trope of incapacity. Such
exposition can be found in sheer terms, for example, in Jonathan Metzls work Protest Psychosis on the racialisation of a new
variety of schizophrenia by white psychiatrists for black men in Civil Rights-era USA who were by any account appropriately imbued
with political agitation and protest feeling in the deepest sense.7 Thus, the racist enjoyment of certain kinds of onstage gawky or
lumbrous Asian failure may obliquely have to do with a double presentation of social disability in the form of nerdiness, as well as a
hardly suppressed image of Down syndrome. The

white supremacist racial fictions about cognitive

disability, morality and pace of living that frame some racial groups as slower than
others, suggest a compact expression of temporality, race and chemistry:
constitutionally deserving of (or suited to) the same. Within and away from the USA, the
temporalised characterisations of delay have been variously applied to indigenous
people and to racialized inheritors of histories of labor and enslavementa broad swath that
includes anyone less securely anchored to the leading edges of modernity. With a non-atomised approach to either disability or

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race, I am inclined to think their intertwining is more the usual case than exceptional, and not only because of the vast continued
reach of eugenics history and thinking in contemporary technologies of enhancement and reproduction. For instance, the
association of certain racial characteristics with cognitive deficiency continues insidiously in the USA and elsewhere both below and
above the surface.

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AT: Academy K
Perm refuse the call of the academy by being in it but not of it the 1AC
does not position us as researchers but as subversive intellectuals disloyal
to disciplinarity and binarisms in thought and practice
Halberstam 13 [Jack, Prof. English @ USC, The Wild Beyond: With and For the
Undercommons in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, p. 8-9]
refuse what they term the call to order. And what would it
to call others to order, to refuse interpellation and the
reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and
more importantly, we allow dissonance to continue when we enter a classroom and we
refuse to call it to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps,
disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the
room. Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an
Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to
mean, furthermore, to refuse

instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that
happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when

we refuse the call to

order the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for
silence, the torturer tightening the noose we refuse order as the distinction between
noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth. These kinds of examples get to the heart of
Moten and Harneys world of the undercommons the undercommons is not a realm where we rebel and we
create critique; it is not a place where we take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them. The
undercommons is a space and time which is always here. Our goal and the we is always the
right mode of address here is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those
particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed. Moten and Harney refuse the logic that
stages refusal as inactivity, as the absence of a plan and as a mode of stalling real
politics. Moten and Harney tell us to listen to the noise we make and to refuse the offers we
receive to shape that noise into music. In the essay that many people already know best from this volume,
The University and the Undercommons, Moten and Harney come closest to explaining their mission. Refusing to be for
or against the university and in fact marking the critical academic as the player who holds
the for and against logic in place, Moten and Harney lead us to the Undercommons of the
Enlightenment where subversive intellectuals engage both the university and fugitivity:
where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still
black, still strong. The subversive intellectual, we learn, is unprofessional, uncollegial,
passionate and disloyal. The subversive intellectual is neither trying to extend the
university nor change the university , the subversive intellectual is not toiling in misery and from this place of
misery articulating a general antagonism. In fact, the subversive intellectual enjoys the ride and wants it to be faster and wilder;
she does not want a room of his or her own, she

wants to be in the world, in the world with others and

making the world anew. Moten insists: Like Deleuze. I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it
all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be
in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But thats beyond me, and even beyond me and Stefano, and out into
the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon
refusal of the academy of misery.

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We do not reify the academy we subvert it the affirmative is an exercise in

subversive intellectualism which allows affirms toxicity as the failure to
achieve subjecthood and contaminates the regulatory forces of biopolitics
Moten and Harney 13 [Jack, Prof. English @ USC, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning
& Black Study, p. 26-7]
To the university Ill steal, and there Ill steal, to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would
surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This
may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the
United States: it

cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be

accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions
one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to
spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of this is the path
of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. Worry about the university. This is the
injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or
Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to
you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company,
among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses,
with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs
what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She
disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into
the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets
subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong. What is that work and what is its social
capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the
work of the university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of that onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the state that
Jacques Derrida calls the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters,
to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and
thereby erased by it. It is not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of
teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a
commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before

there are
grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being
taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate
students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent
reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of
pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book,
teaching happened. The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken
to be a stage, as if eventually one should not teach for food. If the stage persists, there
is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the
stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the
stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage self-incurred
minority. He tries to contrast it with having the determination and courage to use ones intelligence without being guided by
another. Have the courage to use your own intelligence. But

what would it mean if teaching or rather

what we might call the beyond of teaching is precisely what one is asked to get
beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those minorities who refuse, the tribe
of moles who will not come back from beyond (that which is beyond the beyond of teaching), as if
they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the
perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them
as waste. But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the enlightenment. The waste
lives for those moments beyond teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase unexpected, no one has asked,
beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the enlightenment truly better than this? Perhaps the biopower of the

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it depends on
these moles, these refugees, it will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive,
unprofessional. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmatic why steal when
one can have it all, they will ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees
nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the university, into the
Undercommons this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at the same
time, the only possible act. In that undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching
versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualisation of research. To enter this space is to
inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive
enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the
life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the
refuge gives commons. What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not
completing; its about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion
and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the
kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot
initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is
enlightenment knows this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But even as

not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own
organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet
can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the
university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The
undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.

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AT: Anti-Blackness K
Perm we must think blackness uncontained and queerness uncontained
together challenge neoliberal terror their kritik links to disciplined
gayness not the toxic queerness of the AFF
Agathangelou 13 (Anna.M, Professor Agathangelou teaches in the areas of international
relations and women and politics. Some of her areas of expertise are in global politics,
international feminist political economy and feminist/postcolonial and decolonial thought,
Neoliberal Geopolitical Order and Value: QUEERNESS AS A SPECULATIVE ECONOMY AND
ANTI-BLACKNESS AS TERROR, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2013 Vol. 15, No.
4, 453 476, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.841560,7/21/16,WGC)
Stephen Dillon provides a theoretical framework to start this analysis, asking: If slaverys antiblack technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live in the operations of
the market? (Dillon 2012: 114). His article suggests that the emerging international
discourse on gay rights and its displacement in Africa and blacks is a bar on the prison
of blackness as well as a technology of slavery. Dillon considers how the necropolitics
of slavery inhabit and drive the biopolitics of neoliberalism (2012: 115) even in the
governance of historically marginalized subjects (i.e., gays and lesbians, immigrants, aboriginal
peoples). I contend that the (disciplined) queer is a newer technology in world politics,
where a promotion of a specific notion of the queer (i.e., among those subjects who
possess a capacity and a will to become self-enterprising subjects, indeed their own brand),
along with the protection of that queer, is being used to further a narrative of the
superiority of US law as an international white dog (Dayan 2011), white supremacy,
neoliberal democracy and imperialism by rupturing black life. In this view, slavery is the
condition of economies of blackness (i.e., it is blackness) as openness to gratuitous terror.
The terror that both makes blacks and is enacted upon blackness in the afterlife of the
historical institution of slavery is a rupturing of the flesh, the evacuation of the black
psyche, the practice of empathic identification and an acknowledgment that blackness is
only made visible through a discourse and narrative afforded a positioning within civil
society (such as queerness) (Pak 2012: xiv). Paks analytical intervention enables us to
recognize the ways that transatlantic slavery constituted blackness as outside sexual
civil society relations and outside of sovereign sexual protection is in the now (The
Smiths 1984) therefore this is what also makes possible the segregation of sex from
race and the practice of sex as terror. While the slave has no-value as a being, a body
and sexually, it is also a usable and utilized assignation (Barrett 1999: 207). The institution
of slavery instantiates itself in the subordination, torture and terror of blackness in the
worlding of (i.e., global and local) politics global (and local) politics (see Dillon 2012: 121) in
the now rather than in some vague and atemporal historical imaginary. Conjuncting the
temporal structures of blackness and queerness is my way of considering them as
thinking zones, where politico-economic and erotic claims about insurgent sensualities
as everyday expressions and performative declarations of what we are and where we live
our lives are articulated. By global insurgent sensualities I mean those queerest (i.e.,
blackness uncontained) sexualities (uncontained) that do not use their energies in
transforming the fact of terror into value and a mode through which to reproduce a
deadly structure (Lorde 1997: 55; Sharpe 2010). In the words of Lorde (1981: 39): For within
living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings
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were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our
feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But
women have survived. As poets. Instead, these poets insurgent sensualities or what Sharpe
calls monstrous intimacies rupture the pure narrative of (white), heterosexual,
reproductive sexualities serving (if sometimes nonchalantly) both a Darwinian mission of
natural selection and a Christian directive of marital sexuality as reproductive. In the narrative
wherein an imperial global structure of white supremacy protects the gays from the
blacks, insurgent sensualities are robbed of their content as radical alterities and
expressions and deployed as tools of imperium. Moten describes these tools of crisis as
an infinite rehearsal of generative capacity within the open field of a generative
grammar ... which reveal[s] the sclerotic constraints ... fostered by an empiricist attitude
whose structuring force ... can be traced back to a certain valorisation of the grasp
(Moten 2011: 2). A crisis of gay rights, like other human rights and democracy crises
before them, holds in Marxs account an occult ability to add value to itself (see Marx 1976:
255). Indeed, these crises or negotiations which are themselves undertaken at the points of
difference (e.g., queers vs. blacks, queers vs. heterosexual Africans, slaves vs. gays and
lesbians, queers vs. gays and lesbians, queers as beings vs. blacks as non-beings), are relays
that result in the suturing and coherence of international structures and worlding
projects. As such, far from being disassociated from the global crisis of capitalism, these
pro-gay rights discourses and the neoliberal straightjacket of sexuality turns into the
location of that global crisis of capitalism. It is a multi-layered violence: of sexuality as
disciplined, of blackness as seemingly sexually repressive and of the two combined as a
first-order (selling sexuality) and second-order (signifier of market merit) market force

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AT: Cap K
We must refuse monolithic representations of capitalism this is itself a
product of capitalism that reifies instrumental/affective binaries at the heart
of Empire and dooms the alt to failure
Rofel 11 [Lisa, Prof. Anthropology, Feminist Studies, and East Asian Studies @ UC Santa
Cruz, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 18:1, pp. 128-9]
Lisa Rofel: Keywords for global capitalism: value, need, profit, exploitation, universal, uniform.
Keywords for a queer hermeneutics: unstable boundaries, unstable identities, bodies that speak
worlds, heterogeneity, abjection. And desire. Brought to bear on global capitalism (and its
attendant crises), a queer hermeneutics, especially one that is based in a postcolonial,
postnationalist politics, leads us to grasp global capitalism not as a universal, unified
phenomenon but as heterogeneous, interconnected practices whose coherence and
universalism are asserted in the Euro-American metropoles but undone by the
difference, the specific histories and unequal positionings of the postcolonies. This
queer hermeneutics allows us to move beyond the instrumental/affective dichotomy that
has plagued analyses of capitalism, a dichotomy that ironically is itself one of the main
products of capitalism. This queer hermeneutics allows us to see that the value-form lies
not just in material objects but in bodies deemed differentially worthy of a valuable life,
that capitalism is about needs but also about desires (which are not the same), that desires
take myriad forms and are materialized in the relationship between eroticism and the
mundane labor it takes to get through life. A queer hermeneutics that takes seriously the
need to analyze how boundaries are shored up over and against what they try to exclude
will refuse to draw the border of queer studies within the framework of the United States
for considering the question of how to value queer lives. The assumption of the
American nation-state as the realm that signifies a universal capitalism, within which we
demand rights, assert the importance of queer lives, and otherwise challenge discourses
of power, supports the ideology that America can address itself without reference to its
empire. A postcolonial, postnationalist queer studies refuses such inadvertent collusion
with American empire.

Marxist analysis can only recognize capitalism as a problem but fails to

provide a solution beyond economic rationality we inject our analysis
with feminist and critical race scholarship to reframe capitalism as an
ethical dilemma in order to locate possible sites of intervention
Winnubst 12 [Shannon, Prof. Womens Gender & Sexuality Studies @ Ohio State University
and co-editor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, The Queer Thing About
Neoliberal Pleasure: A Foucauldian Warning, Foucault Studies n. 14, Sep. pp. 80-1]
Led particularly by astute work by feminist

and critical race theorists, this scholarship is calling out one of the
central ethical dilemmas of our neoliberal timesnamely, the structured production of
gendered and racialized poverty, along with horrific human rights violations, by the widespread embrace of neoliberalisms
economic mantras of deregulation and privatization. Early neoliberal theorists, most famously perhaps Milton Friedman, argued that a truly free market
and the triumph of pure entrepreneurial opportunity would ultimately erase any such structural poverty.3 For overdeveloped countries that have
embraced these neoliberal practices and principles,

the exposure of these structured socioeconomic disparities

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presents an aporiaa true failure of neoliberal modes of reflection to address, much less solve, the
fundamental violence against human lives exposed by the scholarship. These examples of structural violence are, rather,
viewed in exactly the manner that early neoliberal theorists conceptualized such problemsnamely, as merely contemporary misfortunes that the long-

the structural deleterious effects of

neoliberal practices, principles and cultures as specifically ethical, I argue that it indicates a fundamental erasure
of valuing human life by any measure other than the interest-maximizing barometer of
neoliberalism; even more strongly, I argue that this erasure is integral to the neoliberal valorization of
market rationality and its duty to maximize ones interests at all costs. I call this out as a crisis in ethics
to attempt to demarcate this elision of all values into market valuesan elision that is not reducible to economic or political epiphenomenon. I mark
this as a problem of ethics to mark the collapse of all values, especially those that might
govern our relationships to ourselves and others, into the neoliberal barometer of
success. I thereby attempt to address a central lacuna at work in the majority of this scholar-ship exposing these structural deleterious effects of
neoliberalism. Most often constrained by an implicitly Marxist framework, a great deal of the
scholarship that exposes these structural and violent effects advances an ideological
analysis that conceptualizes neoliberalism strictly within the confines of the economic
and the political.4 Consequently, while it ex-poses these ethical problems of structural
deleterious effects, it fails to offer any resources for engaging them explicitly as ethical
problems. This essay is part of a much larger project attempting to address these lacunae. By situating my reading of Foucault in this context, I
hope to show how his lectures on neoliberalism, especially when read alongside his ongoing work on sexuality and
pleasure, offer signposts for crucial archaeological and genealogical work on the
historically un-precedented categories operating in neoliberal cultures, practices, and
values. The work of excavating these categories sharpens our focus on possible sites of
intervention in this current milieu of neoliberalism, which is simultaneously exacerbating
ethical problems around the world and undermining our abilities to frame them explicitly
as ethical problems. With a focus on the kind of non-normative social rationality that Foucault locates in neoliberal theorists, I argue that
fungibility becomes the primary barometer for all evaluative judgments, including those
regarding social difference. I then conclude with a sketch of what this means for dominant trends in queer theory, especially the antiterm work of the free market will eventually solve. By naming this failure to admit

social turn and queer of color critique.

Class based analyses fail the alternative produces colorblind analyses

that produce internally racist political movements. Must address racial
capitalism, not colorblind capitalism.
Ross 2k [Marlon Ross; Commentary: Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of
Belonging; New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 4. Page 840-841]
Although in his contribution Eric Lott targets Professor Michaels's comments and his own
recent feud with Timothy Brennan (who unfortunately is not included in this volume)
rather than Ken's argument, what Eric says about "left and liberal fundamentalists" who
"simply and somewhat penitently" urge us to "'go back to class'" could also be directed at
Ken's conclusion. Ken writes, "Crafting a political left that does not merely reflect existing
racial divisions starts with the relatively mundane proposition that it is possible to make a
persuasive appeal to the given interests of working and unemployed women and men,
regardless of race, in support of a program for economic justice." On this one, I side with
Eric, rather than Tim and Ken. Standing on the left depends on whose left side we're
talking about. My left might be your right and vice versa, because it depends on what
direction we're facing, and what direction depends on which identities we're assuming
and affirming. Eric adds, "Even in less dismissive [than Tim's] accounts of new social
movements based not on class but on identities formed by histories of injustice, there is
a striking a priori sense of voluntarism about the investment in this cause or that
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movement or the other issue as though determining the most fundamental issue were a
matter of the writer's strength of feeling rather than a studied or analytical sense of the
ever-unstable balance of forces in a hegemonic bloc at a given moment." I agree, but I'll
risk mangling what Eric says by putting it more crassly. Touting class or "economic
justice" as the fundamental stance for left identity is just another way of telling everybody
else to shut up so I can be heard above the fray. Because of the force of "identity
politics," a leftist white person would be leery of claiming to lead Blacks toward the
promised land, a leftist straight man leery of claiming to lead women or queers, but, for a
number of complex rationalizations, we in the middle class (where all of us writing here
currently reside) still have few qualms about volunteering to lead, at least theoretically,
the working class toward "economic justice." What Eric calls here "left fundamental ism,"
I'd call, at the risk of sounding harsh, left paternalism. Of the big identity groups
articulated through "identity politics," economic class remains the only identity where a
straight white middle-class man can still feel comfortable claiming himself a leading
political voice, and thus he may sometimes overcompensate by screaming that this is
the only identity that really matters which is the same as claiming that class is beyond
identity. Partly this is because Marxist theory and Marx himself (a bourgeois intellectual
creating the theoretical practice for the work ers' revolution) stage the model for workingclass identity as a sort of trans-identification, a magical identity that is transferable to
those outside the group who commit themselves to it wholeheartedly enough. If we look
back, we realize even this magical quality is not special to a history of class struggle, as
whites during the New Negro movements of the early twentieth century felt that they
were vanguard race leaders because they had putatively imbibed some essential
qualities

Race gender and sexuality are integral to capitalism the bracketing of

identity out of the analysis dooms the alt
Contaz 12 [Juan, Industrial Workers of the World member in Minneapolis who writes about
work life, organizing and his experience in various groups and movements, Institutional
Struggles over the meaning of anti-oppression politics, libcom.org,
https://libcom.org/library/institutional-struggles-over-meaning-anti-oppression-politics]
We do not believe that autonomous groups will be able to sustain themselves without
creating non-state based support networks and without recognizing the mutual
implication of white supremacy with capitalism and patriarchy. Undocumented immigrants confront a
vicious, coordinated, and entirely mainstream ICE, police, and civilian assault which is, to be absolutely clear, a nativist anti-Latin@
movement committed to patrolling the borders of a nation understood as fundamentally white. Intensifying anti-immigrant racism is
not unrelated to capitalism, and just a national but an international phenomenon, fueled by the success of capitalist globalization, by
the profits which could be realized through debt and structural adjustment programs, US agribusiness subsidies, free trade
agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, and through multinational industries inevitably searching for lower labor costs through the
fragmentation of global supply chains. Austerity

means women, and particularly poor black and

brown women, are being forced by the state and their husbands, boyfriends, and fathers to make up for
the cuts in services and wages through additional domestic and reproductive labor they
have always performed. As a recent W.A.T.C.H. communique from Baltimore puts it, We know that economic crises
mean more domestic labor, and more domestic labor means more work for women. Dreams of a mancession fade quickly when
one realizes male-dominated sectors are simply the first to feel a crisis and the first to receive bailout funds. The politics of crisis
adds to the insult of scapegoating the injury of unemployment and unwaged overwork. And the nightmare of fertility politics, the ugly
justification of welfare and social security reforms. Saving Americas families, the culture war rhetoric that clings to

Crisis translates politically to putting

women in their place, while demanding queers and trans people pass or else. And the worse
heteronormativity, to patriarchy, in the face of economic meltdown.

this crisis gets, the more the crisis is excused by a fiction of scarcity, the more the family will be used to promote white supremacy

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by assaulting womens autonomy under the guise of population control. The old Malthusian line: its not a crisis, theres just not
enough for them. Capitalism

can neither be reduced to the predatory practices of Wall Street

banks nor is it something which intersects with race, gender, and sexual oppression.
Capitalism is a system based on a gendered and racialized division of labor, resources,
and suffering. Violence and deprivation, premature death, and rape, are structural
aspects of an economic system which requires that some work and some do not, some
receive care and some do not, some survive, and some die. To say that poor people of
color, queers, or immigrants are not interested or not profoundly impacted by the
economy, and instead interested only in reaffirming their identities within existing
hierarchies of power, is to work within a rigged zero-sum game for the liberation of a
particular oppressed identity at the expense of all the others. In the US in particular, the celebration of
cultural diversity, the recognition of cultural difference, the applauding of women and queers entering the workplace, and the relative
decline of overtly racist or sexist beliefs among younger generations, has not improved but instead masked a dramatic deterioration
of the material circumstances of racialized populations. Massive

accumulation through dispossession of

native lands; racialized enslavement, murder, and incarceration; constant, intimate, and
intensive exploitation of womens unpaid labor, both in the home and as indentured
domestic work, and always violently stratified according to race all of these form the
naturalized and invisibilized underbelly of capitals waged exploitation of workers. The
cumulative economic impact of centuries of enslavement, genocide, colonialism,
patriarchy, and racial segregation is not simply peripheral but integral and fundamental
to the nature of the global capitalist economy. The US economy reproduces racial,
gender, and sexual inequality at every level of American societyin housing, healthcare,
food sovereignty, education, policing, and prison. And also endlessly recreated in these
very same sites are the categories man/woman, normal/abnormal, able/disabled,
legitimate/illegitimate, citizen/illegal, and a series of stigmatized populations who
always interfere with the smooth functioning of the national economy. The natural,
harmonious relationship between citizens, patriots, taxpayers, owners, workers, rich,
and poor, are disrupted by illegals, welfare queens, faggots, freaks, careless
promiscuous teens, and so on. The category of race is materially recreated and
endlessly renewed through these institutions which organize the lives of the
undocumented, the imprisoned, the residents of aging ghettos which increasingly
function as open-air prisons. Speaking of capitalism as though it were somehow
separable from racist exploitation, gendered violence, and the gamut of complex
oppressions facing us in this world, confines antiracist and antipatriarchal struggle to
the sphere of culture, consciousness, and individual privilege. The current dominant form of antioppression politics in fact diminishes the extent to which racialized and gendered inequalities are deepening across society despite
the generalization of policies promoting linguistic, cultural, gender, and sexual inclusivity. Without attacking the material
infrastructure which agglomerates power in the hands of some (a process whose end result is now called privilege), the
equalization of privilege and the abolition of these identity-based oppressions in class society is a liberal fantasy.

Neoliberalism appropriates identity only insofar as it can render everything

fungible through the erasure of historical specificity. Our AFF engages in
queer of color critique which interrogates the racialized and historicized
forms of identity formation that break down the foundations of capitalism.
Winnubst 12 [Shannon, Prof. Womens Gender & Sexuality Studies @ Ohio State University
and co-editor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, The Queer Thing About
Neoliberal Pleasure: A Foucauldian Warning, Foucault Studies n. 14, Sep. pp. 94-7]

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neoliberalisms dominant categories that I have developed here, the non-normative rationality that sets neoliberalism apart from other objects
of Fou-caults genealogiesmadness, criminality, sexuality turns out to be driven by the formal condition of fungibility. That is, insofar
as neoliberalism extends the economic calculation of enterprising, entrepreneurial
interests into all domains of social, political, personal and even ethical life, it formalizes
all objects of evaluation. Whether racial difference, music genre, healthcare provisions,
incarceration rates or sexual orientation, the only question for neoliberalisms nonnormative rationality is the quantifiable: how many fungible units are increased or
decreased? Lisa Duggans trenchant formulation of homonormativity thus becomes the problem of homoneoliberalism.60 That is, identity politics
and histories be-come fodder for the fungible machine of enterprise only on the condition that all
sexual practices and pleasures are also formalized, shorn of historical and social
differentiation. Rather than fall back on a Marxist ideological analysis, however, Foucaults
analysis allows us to sharpen the site of intervention: the formalizing of social relations
and difference into fungible units. Placing this intervention in Foucaults overarching argument that neoliberalism emerges as an intensification
of classical liberalisms values, practices and categories, I em-phasize that this formalizing process turns on an erasure of
history. That is, in the parti-cular concepts of social difference that concern me most (racial, gender, sexualityall of which occur differently),
the neoliberal aestheticizing of difference can only occur through a flattening out of the
intense histories of xenophobia and violence that attach to each of these categories in liberal
In the archaeology of

cultures. The tools of neoliberal cultures here are dizzying: contorted rhetorical strategies of amnesia and repression; selective historical narratives that feed feel-good

The histories of violence that attach to each of

these categories of social difference must not circulate if the work of fungibility is to feed
the neoliberal marketing of pleasure, freedom, and truthof ethics. It thus becomes worrisome to find that the
multiculturalism; savvy eye candy that markets and celebrates diversity; and so on.

central trend of queer theory that engages the domain of pleasures as the radicalizing horizon for queer lives is also suspiciously ahistoricalnamely, the infamous anti-social
turn. From the early work of Leo Bersani to the more recent work of Lee Edelman and Tim Dean, the move to distinguish queer pleasures as escaping or even undercutting the
normalizing grip of the social (or the political) also turns out to be a distancing from the historical.61 Having constituted the social as endemically normative, anti-social
theorists argue that the exquisite and distinctive pleasure of sexual jouissance grants a singular access to transgressiveand hence resistanthorizons of experience. For
example, as an experience of pleasure that, la Bersani, shatters the self, jouissance has been and continues to be positioned as the singular horizon of experience that
cannot be subsumed into the heternormative, reproductive logic of the social and the political. But it does so precisely through the ecstatic kernel of jouissance that places it
outside of time and placeoutside of historical and social registers of meaning. The anti-social turn claims its place as the quintessentially radical, resistant mode of living
precisely in and through its ahistorical character. Ironically, this focus on jouissance continues to strike me as a promising mode of resistance to the fungibility machine of
neoliberalism. The characterization of jouissance as a pleasure so intense that it becomes indistinguishable from pain may well constitute a sub-stantially different experience
that resists the flattened out, hyper-stimulated, endlessly streaming acts of consumption that neoliberalism sells (quite successfully!) as pleasure. Jouissance cannot be
maximized or intensified, tweaked or manipulated: it is not an object of willful choice. As Tim Dean puts it, jouissance indicates that rare experience of pleasure that radically
disarms the self, not the identity-confirming, self-enhancing domesticated pleasure that saturates neoliberal cultures.62 Consequently, because jouissance resists the

The
anti-social turn of queer theory is thereby correct to grasp the resistant character of this substantially
different kind of pleasure. The cruel irony, however, is that this branch of queer theory embraces jouissance precisely as neoliberalism also positions it
namely, as an experience evacuated of any possible social meaning. And in so doing, it may turn out to be
one of neo-liberalisms best songs, subtly turning alleged social transgression into yet another site of entrepreneurial enterprise. Queer theory,
formalizing demand at the heart of the neoliberal enterprising rationality, neoliberalism must foreclose the possibility of such an experience taking on any social meaning.

as anyone teaching or writing or reading it can quickly tell you, is a hot commodity: it continues to be quintessentially cool. I am not giving up on the possible reservoir of

To engage it as a way to intervene in the rationality

of fungibility, however, one must insistently and vigilantly engage it in its historicized forms.
intervention into neoliberalism in the experience and concept of jouissance.

Even more explicitly, as an experience of sexual pleasure in cultures still deeply shaped by classical liberalism and its various xenophobias, we
must engage it in its racialized forms. The history that wants to be forgotten here is the
history of racism at the heart of classical liberalism: homonormativity also translates into
homonationalism for longstanding historical reasons, as Jasbir Puar has shown.63 Thankfully, there are scholars forging
these paths. For example, Roderick Ferguson shows how homosexual pleasure is simultaneously con-ceptualized as both excessive and racialized in the early sociological
work of the 1930s and, in her nuanced reading of lesbian eroticism and pleasures in South Asian films, Gayatri Gopinath gives a striking example of how jouissance is both
racialized and threatening to a heteronormative social order.64 In similar veins, the work of Jacqui Alexander, Cathy Co-hen, Ladelle McWhorter, Nayan Shah and Ethne

If we are to
continue this line of inquiry into sexuality and sexual pleasures as exemplars of nonfungible limits to the enterprising rationality of neoliberalism, we must do so only in their
specific historical manifestations. And, in these neoliberal times of racia-lized amnesia
and the adamant celebration of diversity, we must do so in their specific racialized
manifestations. The histories of violence that attach to each of these categories of social differencesexuality and racemust not circulate if the work of
Lubheid, among others, have all excavated crucial histories of the racialized character of the regulation of sexual pleasures and sex-uality.65

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The work of queer of color critique thereby
operates on at least two registers: its historicizing work resists the neoliberal fungibility
machine, while the racializing work excavates resources to think through the ethical
aporia of neoliberalisms structurally damaging effects.
fungibility is to feed the neoliberal marketing of pleasure, freedom, and truth.

Their root cause/ origin claims destroy all resistance to domination,

freezing us in history instead of understanding it as a dominating force.
Successful critique must be based on both nuance and linkage of
oppression, not reductionist teleology.
Rich 76 [Adrienne Cecile, American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of
the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the [20th] century."[1] Adrienne
Rich taught at City College as well as Rutgers University until 1979. She moved to Western
Massachusetts with her partner, Michelle Cliff, in the early 1980s. Ultimately, they moved to
Northern California, where Rich continued her career as a professor, lecturer, poet, and
essayist. Rich taught and lectured at Scripps College, San Jose State University, and Stanford
University during the 1980s and 1990s. http://www.medmedia.org/review/numero2/en/art3.htm]
Much of what is narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a longing for certainty even
at the cost of honesty, for an analysis which, once given, need not be reexamined. Such
is the deadendedness-for women-of Marxism in our time.5 And it has felt like a dead end
wherever politics has been externalized, cut off from the ongoing lives of women or of
men, rarefied into an elite jargon, an enclave, defined by little sects who feed off
each others' errors. But even as we shrugged away Marx along with the academic
Marxists and the sectarian Left, some of us, calling ourselves radical feminists, never
meant anything less by women's liberation than the creation of a society without
domination; we never meant less the making new of all relationships. The problem was
that we did not know whom we meant when we said "we". Living for fifty-some years,
having watched even minor bits of history unfold, I am less quick than I once was to
search for single "causes" or origins in dealings among human beings. But suppose that
we could trace back and establish that patriarchy has been everywhere the model. To
what choices of action does that lead us in the present? Patriarchy exists nowhere in a
pure state; we are the latest to set foot in a tangle of oppressions grown up and around
each other for centuries. This isn't the old children's game where you choose one strand
of color in the web and follow it back to find your prize, ignoring the others as mere
distractions. The prize is life itself, and most women in the world must fight for their
lives on many fronts at once.
She Continues I've been thinking a lot about the obsession with origins. It seems a
way of stopping time in its tracks. The sacred Neolithic triangles, the Minoan
vases with staring eyes and breasts, the female figurines of Anatolia-weren't they
concrete evidence of a kind, like Sappho's fragments, for earlier woman-affirming
cultures, cultures that enjoyed centuries of peace? But haven't they also served as
arresting images, which kept us attached and immobilized? Human activity didn't
stop in Crete or atal Hyk. We can't build a society free from domination by fixing
our sights backward on some long-ago tribe or city. The continuing spiritual power of an
image lives in the interplay between what it reminds us of- what it brings to mind-and our
own continuing actions in the present. When the labrys becomes a badge for a cult of
Minoan goddesses,when the wearer of the labrys has ceased to ask herself what she is
doing on this earth, where her love of women is taking her, the labrys, too, becomes
abstration-lifted away from the heat and friction of human activity.
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Capitalism is based on fungibility not class. Class based analyses fails to

challenge RACIAL CAPITALISM. Only our examination of racialized
capitalism which can challenge the social ordering of workers and labor.
Agathangelou 2013 [Anna M., Prof. Pol. Sci. & Social and Political Thought @ York Univ.,
Toronto, and co-director of Global Change Institute, Nicosa, Neoliberal Geopolitical Order and
Value: Queerness as Speculative Economy and Anti-Blackness as Terror, International Journal
of Politics, 15:4, pp. 467-8]
The neoliberal imperium draws on fungibility as its major principle of ordering subjects,
characterizing the worker (and, thereby, the self) as an enterprise to be invested in (with
nutrition, education, training and affection) and to discover new inventions as well (by
endeavouring to produce surplus value) (Foucault 2008: 225). Winnubst argues: Neoliberalism
[is] the formalising of social relations and difference into fungible units . . . inequality is
essential to stimulating market competition . . . [it] must be intensified and multiplied
until the social fabric becomes a conglomeration of diffuse, fungible differences (2012:
934). In this view, sex becomes not sex, but a tool of social relations and difference to be
operated on and deployed by markets an erasure of history of the sexuality (and
pleasure) of sex (Winnubst 2012: 95). This argument becomes the foundation for a critique of
the neoliberal order based on fungibility, where sexuality and sexual pleasures [appear] as
exemplars of non-fungible limits to the enterprising rationality of neoliberalism (Winnubst 2012:
97). While sexual pleasure betrays the myth of fungibility, however, a critique of the
current neoliberal order cannot stop here it must also show the ways in which the myth
of fungibility invisibilizes racialized and sexualized violences and pits sexual freedom
(which is, of course, not at all free) against those outside the limits, the uncreated source of
creation (Bourdieu cited in Barrett 1999: 29), of white supremacys power and legal
protections. It is not only the worker and his/her/its sexuality that are fungible;
racialization is also employed as a signification of inferiority, colonization, the capitalist
underclass and the lawless. Winnubst characterizes this as yet another of
neoliberalisms structurally damaging effects (2012: 97). In this view, the world is facing
imminent rupture that comes from a major tension in capitals infinite desire to expand
everywhere, anywhere, and all the time all the while reasserting limits by articulating that
its crises sexual and otherwise can be transcended through institutional and moral
changes. Rhetorical focus on institutions and morality evades the penetration of
frontiers to constitute, capture and kill new spaces, sex and flesh for reconstructions and
profit. Capital regimes require new forms of subjugation, centralizing sex and gendered
technologies while sapping their erotic energies, capacities and life sources. Yet, any
attempt to query this neoliberal imperiums series of events, discussions, and pushes from
the vantage point of blackness (in Sextons words, blackness as theory) reveals an
anatomization of fungibility and accumulation as terror foundational to capitalist
formations. More so, drawing on blackness as the analytical lens allows us to see the
systematic ways that the generation of value is terror even when its ineluctable violence
is sublimated by fetishizing boundaries (i.e., between queerness and race) all the while
denying the original mechanism [terror and direct force] by means of which valuation
initiates (Barrett 1999: 28) as blackness and with flesh. In conversation with Barrett and
Sexton, I argue that the path to understanding sexuality as a commodification, as a
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resource of value and as an enslavement technology of blackness can provide a route to
understanding the insurgent social life as radical orientations that challenge and
ruptures the neoliberal and white supremacist imperiums reproductive and generative
approaches that embrace inheritance and trasubstantiation of death into heritage. To that
end, I ask where (and how) does the generation of value in the form of queer sexual service
capacity emerge? What is its value (if any) in the reproduction of a racialized global political
order whose fundament is slaughter? What are the subjects, objects, the inert matter and
processes that the order relies on for its reconstructions?

The 1ACs interrogation of commodities that speak disrupts the animacy

hierarchies of capitalism and reconfigures value
Moten 3 [Fred Moten; Prof. English @ Duke; In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition, p. 14]
The value of the sign, its necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a
universal) language, is only given in the absence or supercession of, or the abstraction from,
sounded speech its essential materiality is rendered ancillary by the crossing of an
immaterial border or by a differentializing inscription. Similarly, the truth about the value of the
commodity is tied precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity
could speak it would have intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain
value given not from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value
that it is not intrinsicthat Marx assigns it. The speaking commodity thus cuts Marx; but
the shrieking commodity cuts Saussure, thereby cutting Marx doubly: this by way of an
irruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic,
rematerializing inscription. That irruption breaks down the distinction between what is intrinsic
and what is given by or of the outside; here what is given inside is that which is out-from-theoutside, a spirit manifest in its material expense or aspiration. For Saussure such speech is
degraded, say, by accent, a deuniversalizing, material difference; for Chomsky it is degraded by
a deuniversalizing agrammaticality, but Glissant knows that the [scarred] spoken imposes
on the slave its particular syntax. These material degradationsfissures or invaginations
of a foreclosed universality, a heroic but bounded eroticismare black performances. There
occurs in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one disruptive of
the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter. It moves by way of the (phonophoto-porno-)graphic disruption the shriek carries out. This movement cuts and augments the
primal. If we return again and again to a certain passion, a passionate response to passionate
utterance, horn-voice-horn over percussion, a protest, an objection, it is because it is more than
another violent scene of subjection too terrible to pass on; it is the ongoing performance, the
prefigurative scene of a (re)appropriationthe deconstruction and reconstruction, the
improvisational recording and revaluationof value, of the theory of value, of the theories of
value.13 Its the ongoing event of an antiorigin and an anteorigin, replay and reverb of an
impossible natal occasion, the performance of the birth and rebirth of a new science, a
phylogenetic fantasy that (dis)establishes genesis, the reproduction of blackness in and as (the)
reproduction of black performance(s). Its the offset and rewrite, the phonic irruption and rewind,
of my last letter, my last record date, my first winter, casting of effect and affect in the widest
possible angle of dispersion.

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AT: Pain Narratives Bad

Trauma is political we must attend to it
Carter 15 [Angela M., 6th year PhD Candidate in Feminist Studies @ the University of
Minnesota. Ronald E. McNair scholar, BA in English and Womens Studies, MA in Feminist
Studies. Teaching with Trauma: Disability Pedagogy, Feminism, and the Trigger Warnings
Debate The Society for Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol 35, No 2, 2015.
http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/4652/3935 JChou]
Furthermore, trauma

must also be understood as unequivocally political. As with all disabilities, living with
trauma means negotiating life in a world established by and for bodyminds that do not
experience the affect of trauma. The sociopolitical inequalities surrounding race, class, gender, and
citizenship undoubtedly shape the unequal access to healthcare and other resources needed to live with
and/or through trauma. In fact, the ability to be recognized as a person living with trauma is in many ways a political
privilege.13 Furthermore, while traumatic experiences can certainly be accidental, the vast majority of potentially traumatizing
experiences are rooted in systems of power and oppression. The forces of racism/white supremacy,
colonization, and global capitalism continuously instigate enumerable violences worldwide. As legal scholar Dean Spade argues, it
is often the administrative systems themselves that traumatize and disable us the most by "distributing life chances and promoting
certain ways of life at the expense of others, all while operating under legal regimes that declare universal equality" (103). Indeed, it
is not by accident that the organizing that originated trigger warnings arose alongside a feminism proclaiming, "the personal is
political" (Smith). By depathologizing trauma, and approaching it through Kafer's political/relational model, trauma stands along with
other disabilities "as a potential site for a collective reimagining" (9). In this debate on trigger warnings in the classroom,

situating trauma within this framework of disability allows educators and students to collectively
reimagine what education can look like.

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AT: Realism
IR theory perpetuates colonialism appropriating the knowledge resources
and bodies of those which it must capture and disavow, creating
necropolitical death worlds
Agathangelou AND Ling 04 [Anna M. Agathangelou, co director of Global Change
Institute, Associate professor @ York University. L. H. M. Ling, PhD in Political Science
@Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor of International Affairs, Milano School of
International Affairs. The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism
International Studies Review, Vol 6, No 4, Dec 2004. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3699724?
seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents JChou]
Specifically, IR comes to resemble a colonial household. Its singular, oppositional
perspective (I versus You) stakes out an establishment of civilization in a space that
is already crowded with local traditions of thinking, doing, and being but proclaimed, in
willful arrogance, as a state of nature plagued by fearful anarchy and its murderous
power politics. The House seeks to stave off such disorder by imposing order. But
the House does so by appropriating the knowledge, resources, and labor of racialized,
sexualized Others for its own benet and pleasure while announcing itself the sole
producer the father of our world. Others qualify as innocent children, wards, or servants at
best, or unteachable barbarians at worst. In either case, Others must wait faithfully for their
admittance, if ever, into the House of IR. Directing Others with declarative statements, the
House assumes that it knows both the problem (power) and its solution (more power). Such
suffocation of Self and Other leaves a multigenerational legacy similar to the actual colonial
households: that is, erasures and violences that ip the households original intent. Order turns
into disorder, repulsion into desire, purity into hybridity. In the House of IR, especially,
another practice rules: to treat power as empire, regardless of public devastations or secret
indulgences.

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AT: State Good

The state is straight up evil and cant be used as a mode of change
Agathangelou and Killian ,06 (Anna.M, Professor Agathangelou teaches in the areas of
international relations and women and politics. Some of her areas of expertise are in global
politics, international feminist political economy and feminist/postcolonial and decolonial
thought, Kyle.D,Clinical Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Health Psychology PhD
Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics, Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement, December
2006, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 459483, Web, file:///C:/Users/wgcar/Downloads/2006__Anna_M_Agathangelou__EpistemologiesofPeacePoeticsGlobalizationandtheSoc[retrieved_2016-06-02].pdf,
7/21/16,WGC)
Historical understandings of what constitutes peace in democratic societies are
problematic (Kant, 1983; Carr, 2001; Campbell, 1993, 1998). Focusing on state practices for peace,
western-centric theories of international relations and peace studies have not fully
captured the nuances of epistemological efforts toward this goal taken up by both
grassroots organizations and individuals in the civil society (Notes from Nowhere, 2003; Marcos,
2001). Some critical and feminist theorists (Enloe, 1983, 1993, 2000; Whitworth, 2004; Razack, 2004)1 have
critiqued this state focus, pointing out that capitalist-patriarchal institutions assume a
monopoly over all direct violence (Mies, 1998). Examples of such institutions include the state, in the public and
private realm, corporate and financial powers, and the individual patriarch(s) in the everyday realms of family relations. Basic
human rights, as proclaimed and upheld by all democratic constitutions, are biased
against women, people of color, and the working class (Ebert, 1996; Mies, 1998; Alexander and Mohanty,
1997; Davis, 1981). Within these institutions, the inviolability and integrity of the bodies of
women, nonwhite people, and the working class cannot be guaranteed because the
peaceful terrain of such democratic and civilized societies is really grounded in everyday aggressions
and civilizing missions, which take direct and indirect forms. Recognizing structural and institutional
violences as methods/technologies of governmentability to keep uppity women, people
of color, the working class, and on the global stage, nation-states, in their place, we
must turn to alternative epistemological frameworks and methods toward social justice.

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