#terrorist assemblages

[orfeolookback]

Jasbir K. Puar, (2007). Ensamblajes Terroristas, El homonacionalismo en tiempos queer. Ediciones Bellaterra, Madrid, España.

[jewish-microwave-laser]

none of y'all know what pinkwashing means btw. jasbir puar would be very disappointed

[aliteraryprincess]

October Wrap Up:

Featuring Butters being a curious kitty! (After I got this photo, he proceeded to knock off some letters off the board. Typical cat. 😆) 

Well, October went by quick. Kind of a bummer since it’s usually one of my favorite months. But at the same time, it means this year is closer to being over. So I can’t complain too much. Onward to November. Hopefully it goes by quickly too. 

Books Read - Goal: 8  Total: 7

I almost hit my goal! Not that it really matters since I’m definitely not hitting my overall reading goal for the year at this point. But I’m happy that I’m reading a bit more now. The Death of Jane Lawrence was by far my favorite of the month (and perfect for the season). Staying with the Trouble was my least favorite and the first book I’ve rated one star in quite a while. It made no sense to me, yet somehow everyone in my feminist theory class loved it. 🤷‍♀️ Also, I finally finished Middlemarch!

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler - 2 stars

The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling - 4 stars

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway - 1 star

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw - 2 stars

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times by Jasbir K. Puar - 4 stars

Middlemarch by George Eliot - 3 stars

Willful Subjects by Sara Ahmed - 3 stars

On Tumblr:

Not much here, but go look at the pictures of my kitties. They’re cute, as you can see from this month’s wrap up pic.

Book Photography: If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

Book Photography: The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

Cat Photography: Cozy Boys

On the Blog:

Two reviews and some other odds and ends. I didn’t end up hitting the other book on my Victober TBR, but did I mention I finished Middlemarch? 

Victober 2021 TBR

Review: The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

Review: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

September OwlCrate Unboxing: Haunted Hearts

My Top 6 Spooky Books

A Season in Middlemarch, The End

[thelonguepuree]

[Oishik Sircar]: Carrying on with the reparation/rehabilitation dynamic, I’m interested in your thoughts on queer rights protections through the universalizing languages of international human rights law, anti-discrimination legislation, decriminalization of sodomy, privacy and marriage equality reforms/ plebiscites, that have almost become integral to the governmental rationalities of secularism and democracy … That human rights are pharmakon-like (both medicine and poison) has become axiomatic of any critical position. Yet, how does one work with rights under conditions where nation states legitimize their monopoly over violence through rights? [Jasbir K. Puar]: Increasingly, I think that the pharmakon formulation attributed to human rights is also relevant to academia in the United States, whereby education and the upward mobility and respectable subjecthood it supposedly grants are the medicine and student debt is the poison—a paragon of liberal elitism stubbornly inscrutable to itself. So, I am not outside the critique of rights, nor of academia. It would be foolish not to acknowledge that one accrues cultural and pecuniary capital through the work of critique, to portend that somehow one is standing in some politically pure position. I have learned a lot from Critical University Studies, a field that argues that counter-carceral knowledge production sutures more so than disrupts the corporate university, and that the university has to be rethought—perhaps more precisely, thought of again—as a site of political contestation, dissent, and theft rather than legitimacy. So my concern is never isolated from human rights per se but more anchored in the exclusionary practices and politics of liberal inclusion. The most interesting human rights workers I have met—from NGO folks to lawyers to professional feminists and so on—understand best the paradoxes of the work they do. It’s like summoning undercommons that stretch through these mutually reinforcing institutions that we are implicated in. All we can do is keep asking: where is it? How do we reach (for) it? Can we even imagine it much less generate a world free of these contradictions? Of course, contradictions are the dialectical productive force of change and with every encounter with contradiction that we embrace rather than deny, something moves. The last point you mention about working through rights that are being used against you has specific resonance in Palestine (though hardly exclusively). There is no liberal “solution” to Palestine. Both the one state and two state solutions are pharmakons and can only be the starting point for liberation, not the end. In some sense Palestine is the fertile ground for emblematic decolonizing movements—there is no recourse not only to rights, but what Arendt would call “the right to have rights,” no nation-state to appeal to, no international community safeguarding their human rights. So those are the spaces of the yet-to-be-known.

“‘A Deep and Ongoing Dive into the Brutal Humanism that Undergirds Liberalism’: An Interview with Jasbir K. Puar,” Oishik Sircar and Jasbir Puar, Humanity, Winter 2020

[thelonguepuree]

[T]he terrorist script feels largely unchanged from the post-9/11 moment. There's no need to exceptionalize the trauma of the current political scene, of which Trump is a symptom, not the cause. Debates about rupture and continuity forego more incisive analyses about scale, intensification, affect, speed, contractions, expansions, and tactics. The jolt of Trump is not that he revealed something heretofore unknown, but that he has accelerated and vastly expanded the scale of disregard, extending precarity to, yes, your back yard: it's in your backyard. Amidst constant refrains about the horror of our contemporary political scenario, I am continually struck by the discursive and material resonances with the war on terror.

Jasbir K. Puar, “Homonationalism in Trump Times”

[largemuscle69]

BOOK 23: Terrorist Assemblages by Jasbir Puar

What defines a terrorist? Recently, I have seen a lot of people remarking on how terrorist is truly an imperialist construction to code violence from non-white bodies as “other”. I have been meaning to read this for a while, and I’m very glad I picked it up. Puar theorizes that there exists a “homonationalism”, or a version of queer sexuality that is acceptable to empire/capitalism (think white and think normative family structures). Those who fall outside in terms of religion and race are bodies that are made to be queered and othered. Puar suggests that we should view bodies as assemblages that don’t have a fixed identity and are instead constructed in large part by the gaze of those who are the empire’s model citizens. Deeply influenced by post-9/11 America, this book really pulled together a lot of threads that I’ve been considering in a disjointed fashion. While I do caution that this is a Theory book (and dense to start), I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read so far and really has changed how I see the world. Would highly recommend, especially in this current moment of rising Islamophobia in the US.

[everydaysocialtheory]

The duality at work here--the centrality of multiculturalism and diversity to the discourse of citizenship, coupled with the surveillance, domestication, quarantine, and containment of the corporealities that attempt to represent these domestic ideals--enables the emergence of liberal multiculturalism not only as a consumptive project nor as a process of inclusion, incorporation, normalization and assimilation, but more pernicious let as a form of governmentality.

Jasbir Puar, The Turban in not a Hat

[querygallimaufry]

terrorist assemblages - paur

“In Terrorist Assemblages, my primary interest is in this process of the management of queer life at the expense of sexually and racially perverse death in relation to the contemporary politics of securitization, Orientalism, terrorism, torture, and the articulation of Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian sexualities. I argue that during this history juncture, there is a very specific production of terrorist bodies against properly queer subjects. The questions which have fueled this project include but are not limited to the following: What are the historical linkages between various periods of national crisis and the pathologizing of sexuality, the inflation of sexual perversions? What are the heteronormative assumptions still binding the fields and disciplines of security and surveillance analyses, peace and conflict studies, terrorism research, public policy, transnational finance networks, human rights and human security blueprints, and international peacekeeping organizations such as the United Nations? How do we conceptualize queer sexuality in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the “Middle East”—a term I hesitate to use given its area studies origins—without reproducing neocolonialist assumptions that collude with U.S. missionary and savior discourses? Given the mechanics of scapegoating sexual minorities as well as South Asians, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans, what kinds of discursive and material strategies are queer Muslims and queer Arabs using to resist state and societal violence?” 

- Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times