Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies) [Paperback]

Jasbir Puar (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 082234114X | ISBN-13: 978-0822341147 | Publication Date: October 26, 2007

In this pathbreaking 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 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 many queers from their construction as figures of death (via 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 that replicate 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times is a refreshing and much-needed addition to this recent queer scholarship. . . . Her argument is essential for critics looking for a way to better understand the linkages between sexuality and antiterrorism.” - Robert Diaz, Criticism

“Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times is a powerful, energetic, and highly insightful read. The book absorbs a surprising amount of intellectual, political, and emotional labour. . . . [R]eaders can have that rare and golden experience of emerging from these pages transformed. Indeed, the demands that Puar places on her reader are substantial, but the rewards well worth it. Cutting, courageous, and prescient, Terrorist Assemblages is well worth the read.” - Deborah Cowen, Antipode

“A profound and challenging book that should be read widely and repeatedly, Puar’s latest work contains revelations about contemporary power that offer avenues for transforming academic knowledge and our own subjectivities.” - Liz Philipose, Signs

“Terrorist Assemblages is brilliant, hyperkinetic, and perhaps, most of all, ferocious. It is ferocious in its analysis and critique not only of networks of control over and unrelenting superpanopticism of queer, racialized bodies but also of queer, feminist, and critical race theory and activism.” - Victor Roman Mendoza, Journal of Asian American Studies

“[Terrorist Assemblages] makes an original and important contribution to feminist scholarship.” - Alyson M. Cole, Women’s Review of Books

“By articulating terrorism, patriotism, and U.S. exceptionalism not only to race but also to homophobia, heteronormativity, and queerness, Terrorist Assemblages offers a trenchant critique of contemporary bio- as well as geopolitics. As an author on a hotly debated topic, Jasbir Puar is as gracious about acknowledging other authors’ contributions as she is unyielding in her interrogations of secular-liberalist epistemic conventions. This is a smart, admirably researched, and courageous book.”—Rey Chow, author of Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility

“I could not stop reading this outraged, meticulous, passionate, and brilliantly-visioned book. Jasbir K. Puar’s analysis of the neoliberal, imperial, sexual, and racist present reaches into the U.S. academy and multiple transnational publics and is critical of them all, even when she has solidarity with them. It’s been a long time since I read something so smart and so thorough in its storytelling.”—Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“In this powerful book, Jasbir K. Puar offers a stunning critique of ‘homonational’ politics. She rethinks intersections as assemblages, as networks of affect, intensity, and movement. The very rigor of her critique suggests an unflinching optimism about what is possible for queer politics.”—Sara Ahmed, author of Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

About the Author

Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (October 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082234114X
• ISBN-13: 978-0822341147
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,860 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #27 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rare gift!, December 4, 2007

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This review is from: Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies) (Paperback)

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 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.