by Mel Y. Chen

About Mel Y. Chen

Mel Y. Chen (they/them) is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect and “Agitation” in South Atlantic Quarterly.

Matter

book Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies

The phrase Black Lives Matter (BLM), from the movement originating in 2013, shifts between a critique of Black lives taken as matter (understood as inhuman or subhuman) and the sense that Black lives, with queer and trans lives at their center, have consequence. These statements suggest two of the definitions used for materiality itself—one, a Marxist analysis pointing to the potency of a proletariat class under racial capitalism, for instance, and two, the racialization of a seemingly ordinary relationship between life and its material constituents.