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Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
In this path-breaking work, Jasbir K. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics serve to incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted queers from their construction as figures of death (the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies replicating narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These "homonationalisms" are deployed to distinguish upright "properly hetero," and now "properly homo," U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes--especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs--who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court's Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.
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| Pretentious rubbish |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
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For a brilliant denunciation of the ridiculous academic jargon that this book is written in, see the Times Literary Supplement for December 7 2007 (page 32). More and more it is clear that the 'Women's and Gender Studies' departments of universities are simply collections of individuals undergoing group therapy at public expense. Close them all down and save the English language!
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| A rare gift! |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Jasbir K. Puar offers an unusually inspired diagnosis of today's war machines and the politics of knowledge-making in an era of counter/terror. "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times" is a smart and deeply disturbing account of recent realignments of race, gender, sexuality, nation, class and ethnicity in the context of contemporary forces of counterterrorism, nationalism and securitization. Wielding an expansive methodological and theoretical toolkit, Puar puts her sharp analytic to excellent use, offering timely criticisms on a vast range of key concepts within contemporary transnational cultural studies. With a lyrical prose that is at times hauntingly poetic, if mildly "Deleuze-ional," Puar remains consistently astute in her political and cultural commentaries. The text follows recent scholarly works that: critically reassess the epistemologies of secular-liberal imaginaries; extend the affective turn in post-structuralist theory; and strengthen the transnational turn in queer studies. For these and many other reasons, the book has garnered critical back-cover acclaim from the likes of Rey Chow, Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed. Entirely deserving of their praise, Terrorist Assemblages is sure to make waves in transnational feminism, South Asian and Arab American studies, queer studies, counter/terrorism and security studies, affect studies and postcolonial critique. In short, Puar's book is a rare gift for young scholars invested in exposing and undermining the links between race, sexuality and counter/terrorism, and for its archival strength alone, it will stimulate our diverse fields for years to come.
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