Intoxicated

“Intoxicated thinks about and through molecular intimacies. We are all chemically restrained, either structurally or voluntarily, some more the former than the latter. We are all too slow (or intoxicated), too fast (or agitated), and never quite right. ‘Take my hand,’ Mel Y. Chen invites the reader, ‘and slump, stumble, shake, and tumble with me.’ These alternate forms of cognition and movement promise new ways of knowing in the academy and beyond.” - Cynthia Wu, Professor of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies, Indiana University

“In the interlaced archives of toxicity, disability, and race, Mel Y. Chen brilliantly agitates the past and helps us unlearn and redistribute these key terms. The book gifts us with profoundly reorienting paths that undo, rather than reify, toxicity, pointing readers toward an alterwise of vibrating noninnocent transecologies of intoxicated intimacy.” - M. Murphy, author of The Economization of Life

"Taking an impressively expansive, interdisciplinary approach, Chen situates the book within critical ethnic and race studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory, but the work also has clear historical, historiographical, and autobiographical impulses. ... [A] strange, but eminently brilliant and enjoyable, book."

"[Intoxicated] deserves to be read by historians of science, specifically those who write about medicine, disability and colonialism. It is an important addition to the growing literature combining critical race theory and queer, disability and animal studies and will surely challenge the ideas and enrich the vocabulary of historians of science for some years to come." - Thomas Parkinson, British Journal for the History of Science

“Weaving between theoretical lineages including queer, Black, disability, East Asian, decolonial, and posthumanist studies, Intoxicated makes important contributions to these fields while also carving its own space between and beyond them.”