"Lethal sweetness socks tots": animating theory, animating a cereal box

Probably what I've outlined below is too ambitious, even for advanced undergraduates-- I welcome y'alls input on that.

If I wanted to teach Mel Chen’s "Toxic Animacies", I think the first thing I would have to do is spend some time discussing the points in the article that I think would be difficult for an undergraduate reader: namely, Chen’s prose is dense, and several of her lines of argumentation push at the boundaries of what we expect to see in an article. 

I think it’s worth it to try to show students how to be patient with texts like this. For me, this involves reading them with the kind of critical eye we bring to science fiction (or any fiction), rather than asking if the world described in theory matches up with our experience. In other words, I think that (from a pedagogical perspective) it would be useful to treat theory as requiring a readerly logic of “what if?” rather than one of “what is?"

So instead of starting with the Chen piece, I would start with “Heat Death of the Universe” and a discussion of genre. 

• This short story has actually been the source of a lot of debate about genre: it was published in a science fiction magazine, but the SF community is split on whether it is SF or not. What do you guys think?

I've seen this particular question asked in classes before. It tends to create interesting debates about genre.

I’d spend a couple of minutes on how science fiction is defined at various points by various theorists:

• a sort of ‘predictive’ logic of SF (beginning with the early pulps)
• which was reframed by New Worlds (the magazine in which this story appears): editor M. Moorcock tries to move from intensive engagement with technology, the future, and “outer space” to an engagement with speculative approaches to “inner space.” 
• Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement”: 
• meaning that it deals with unfamiliar/strange objects, situations, and locations (estrangement), 
• but it is possible to approach these instances of “strange newness” using a cognitive approach, making sense of the relationship between them and the “real world”

Then I’d ask what aspects of Zoline's short story are speculative, in the sense of creating estrangement and cognition. I'd take a few responses before moving on, once I got a sense that students understood the concepts outlined above.

Transitioning to ‘Toxic Animacies,’ I would encourage students to think of this piece of theory in a similar way— what kind of world would we have to imagine for the theory to make more sense? As I was saying before, I feel like there are parts in Chen's piece that use complex language and are hard to parse, and then other parts that may be easier to understand but might be either emotionally uncomfortable or hard to believe.

Two such moments, at least for me, are:

(1) The section in which Chen riffs on the idea of "black children licking the peeling walls of their unmaintained dwellings" and the (unrepresentable, but surely there?) image of a little white boy licking Thomas the Tank Engine, “playing improperly with the phallic toy” (270-1). For me at least, this was a tiny bit unconvincing, if deliciously controversial. I have never envisioned either of these scenes!

In discussing this with students, I would try to guide them to the idea of looking at this image as a stylistic device. The the idea of interpenetration, permeability, and radical vulnerability to others (and the assault on traditional white masculinity this implies) seems to hold up even if we don't buy the queerness of licking Thomas the Tank Engine. 

• “If this were a kind of science fictional representation, we wouldn’t say 'I’ve never seen a two-headed alien in real life’, and stop there. We would ask what the author is DOING with the two-headed alien— why are they depicting it, rather than ‘is it possible?’. Instead of asking if it’s plausible, lets ask what Chen is trying to represent with this image."

(2) This might lead us into the section in which Chen writes personally about her experiences with multiple chemical sensitivity. Here I think it would be good to give students time to express their responses to Chen’s description of intoxication and vulnerability. 

• Who among us has never used scented laundry detergent, deodorant, cigarettes or skin cream? How should we feel addressed by this section of the paper? I for one feel guilt and anxiety about being toxic, which threatens to slide into frustration and anger at her “sensitivity” to me.

• What kind of world does Chen live in, and what does it draw her attention to? Her experiences may seem “estranged” from our own (or maybe not?), but they DO let us see the “real world” differently.

Finally, time permitting, I would bring us back to “Heat Death,” and ask students if we can find scenes that help us understand what Chen means by ‘animacy.’ She writes that while "animacy has no single definition," part of it is "a quality of agency, sentience, or liveness." She encourages us to "ask not 'who is alive, or dead,' but 'what is animate, or inanimate, or less animate'; relationally, we can ask about the possibilities of the interobjective, above and beyond the intersubjective” (280). 

As a candidate passage for finding “animacy” in “Heat Death,” (should students be less than forthcoming), I would turn to the description of a box of frosted flakes which participates in the kind of narratives of toxicity Chen describes. I’ve included an image of the passage below, instead of a big block of text, so I can pretend this entry is shorter than it would be otherwise.

I wish I could conduct a detailed close reading of this passage for you all now, but I’m really pushing myself to stop at two pages, for all of our sakes. So suffice it to say that I think the way that the box is designed to “appeal” to children begins to bleed over into a sort of animacy. The box undergoes a transformation here from being “appealing,” (i.e. having properties of classical sculpture) to launching a series of appeals, a “blatted” discourse with the children (to which they enthusiastically respond). And then there is this maternal paranoia about why the cereal box is so communicative: Sarah already hears "the decay set in upon the little white milk teeth, the bony whine of the dentist's drill,” and fears the cereal must cause a “special cruel cancer in children.”

 (animating a box of frosted flakes, p.1 )

 (a special, cruel cancer p.2)

There's more than enough here for chewing through some of the Chen, though admittedly it diminishes her point about differential risk exposure: I'd have to bring that up specifically, perhaps by noting the brilliant moment where she talks about the NY Times' assumption that cheap McDonalds toys certainly may be toxic, expensive trains should not be.