Jasbir Puar

Jasbir K. Puar
Alma mater	Rutgers University (B.A.) University of York (M.A.) University of California (Ph.D.)
Known for	Queer theory Race studies
Scientific career
Institutions	University of California San Francisco State University New York University Rutgers University
Thesis	"Transnational Sexualities and Trinidad: Modern Bodies, National Queers"  (1999)
Doctoral advisor	Norma Alarcón
Website	www.jasbirkpuar.com

Jasbir K. Puar is a U.S.-based queer theorist who has worked as an associate professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University since 2000. Puar is author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. She has written widely on South Asian disaporic cultural production in the United States, United Kingdom and Trinidad, LGBT tourism, terrorism studies, surveillance studies, biopolitics and necropolitics, disability and debilitation, theories of intersectionality, affect, and assemblage; animal studies and posthumanism, homonationalism, pinkwashing, and the Palestinian territories.

Academic career

Puar has an M.A. in Women's Studies from the University of York and completed her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at University of California at Berkeley in 1999.

In "Queer Times, Queer Assemblages", published in 2005, Puar analyzes the War on Terror as an assemblage of racism, nationalism, patriotism, and terrorism, suggesting that it is "already profoundly queer". Her focus is on terrorist corporealities in opposition to "normative patriot bodies", and she argues that "discourses of counterterrorism are intrinsically gendered, raced, sexualized, and nationalized". Through an analysis of the American response to the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse in 2004, she contends that contemporary discourses of Muslim sexuality only mask and reproduce an underlying belief in American exceptionalism. She also rearticulates the body of the suicide bomber as "a queer assemblage that resists queerness-as-sexual-identity", a force with the power to converge, implode, and rearrange time, space, and body. Finally, Puar focuses on the archetypal Sikh terrorist, turban and all, in order to posit that her examination of queerness as an assemblage calls attention to "epistemology in tandem with ontology".

Puar draws from the "assemblage" approach developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This is a way of viewing social and political phenomena as a combination of biological and cultural factors. She critiques the deployment of homonationalism in the United States as a justification to violently implement the doctrine of American exceptionalism embodied in the War on Terror. The United States flaunts its supposedly liberal openness to homosexuality to secure its identity in contradistinction to sexual oppression in Muslim countries. This oppression serves as an excuse for the United States to “liberate” oppressed women and sexual deviants in these countries, simultaneously papering over sexual inequality in the United States. United States exceptionalism and homonationalism are mutually constitutive, blending discourses of American Manifest Destiny, racist foreign policy, and an urge to document the unknown (embodied in the terrorist) and conquer it through queering its identity, hence rendering it manageable and knowable.

Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, published in October 2007, describes connections between contemporary "gay rights" discourse, the integration of gay people into consumerism, the ascendance of "whiteness", and Western imperialism and the war on terrorism. Puar argues that traditional heteronormative ideologies now find accompaniment from "homonormative" ideologies replicating the same hierarchical ideals concerning maintenance of dominance in terms related to race, class, gender, and nation-state, a set of ideologies she deems "homonationalism". Some reviewers have associated with argument with the "queer Marxism" of Kevin Floyd.

Controversy

On February 3, 2016, Puar delivered a lecture at Vassar College, "Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters", in which she highlighted Israeli policy toward Palestine, and particularly Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Puar reportedly claimed that Israel had deliberate policies of "maiming" and "stunting" the Palestinian people as a means of biologically crippling the Palestinian population, debilitating its capacity to resist Israeli occupation while keeping them alive as workers or subjects of Israeli experimentation.

Mark Yudof and Kenneth Waltzer accused Puar of "hatred of Jews and Israel" and "updating the medieval blood libel against Jews". On the substance of her argument, Liel Leibovitz wrote:

"Why would Israel spare the lives of its foes? If it is indeed, as Puar repeatedly argues, a colonialist project, won’t it seek to emulate its predecessors and either destroy the indigenous people it was dispossessing, enslave them as cheap labor, or urge them to assimilate? Security and demographic considerations negate options two and three, which makes it very hard to understand, on Puar’s own terms, why and how Israel benefits from shooting to maim instead of to kill."

Historian David Berger has argued that Puar's contention is "the rough equivalent of the blood libel."

Works

• Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), Durham: Duke University Press, ISBN 9780822341147; 10th Anniversary Edition (2017) Durham: Duke University Press ISBN 9780822371502; translated into French as: Homonationalisme. Politiques queers après le 11 Septembre (2012), Judy Minx (translator,), Paris: Editions Amsterdam, Maxime Cervulle, ISBN 9782354801076
• "The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability", (2017), Duke University Press.

Further reading

• Chatterjee, Piya; Maira, Sunaina (2014). The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780816680900.