Jasbir Puar Research Articles

“Jack and Johnny went up the hill”: Emergent homonationalism and the construction of a palatable queer subject in post-Section 377 Bollywood cinema

ABSTRACT This article interrogates an archetype it terms the “palatable queer subject” in post-Section 377 Bollywood cinema. It advances that the production of this subject reflects and reifies India’s emergent homonationalism in the wake of the 2018 decriminalization of homosexual relations. The palatable queer upholds nationalism while enabling India to present itself on the global stage as a progressive nation state. In the Indian context, decriminalization granted this particular subject access to a newly sedimented norm of queerness predicated on the exclusion of more marginalized queer communities. This article strives to excavate this archetype in Hitesh Kewalya’s Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (Be particularly careful of marriage). It extends Jasbir Puar’s framework of homonationalism in new geographic and conceptual directions, arguing that the palatable queer subject in Bollywood cinema reveals that certain queer people – namely, cisgender upper-caste, upper-class men – have been folded into the nation state, at the expense of more vulnerable queer people.

Assimilationism, Sexual Nationalism, and the Backlash Against Gender and Sexuality

Fifteen years ago my co-authors and I wrote an article discussing the politics of sexual nationalism in the Netherlands (Mepschen at al., 2010). We argued that gay and lesbian emancipation had come to center almost solely on the political idea of the “integration” of alleged sexual and religious others into the Dutch moral community. We pointed out that the Dutch case was exemplary of wider European developments. In various European countries we have witnessed complex transformations in the relationship between the nation and the question of sexual democracy (Fassin, 2012). Lesbian and gay rights and discourses have been weaponized to frame Western Europe as the “avatar of both freedom and modernity” (Butler 2008, 2) and depict its Muslim citizens and others with a migration background as backwards and homophobic. In the words of the queer theorist Jasbir Puar (2007), who coined the term ‘homonationalism,’ gay rights have been recast as an “optic, and an operative technology” in the production and disciplining of Muslim Others (See also Rahman 2014.) Cases of homophobia among Muslim and migrant citizens are highlighted, treated as archetypal, and cast within Orientalist narratives that underwrite the superiority of European secular modernity. Homophobia is increasingly represented as peripheral to Western European culture (Mepschen 2017). As I see it, we still live in the same historical moment: the notion of sexual nationalism is more relevant than ever. But at the same time, things are changing. Before we get to that, a short overview of what has been discussed in the last fifteen years.

Transgendering-assemblages: Sin Wai Kin’s trans techniques and acts of boybanding

This article investigates the artist Sin Wai Kin’s (單慧乾) speculative approach to drag through the prism of ‘transgendering-assemblages’. Influenced by the assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda and Jasbir Puar, I propose that transgendering-assemblages actualize the properties of transness (Marquis Bey) through particular trans techniques (Grace E. Lavery). I introduce Sin’s more-than-human trans techniques, from make-up to costume, and approach to nonbinary storytelling to investigate identity assemblages more broadly. With explicit attention to their engagement with Chinese opera and Taoism, the speculative boyband in Sin’s Turner Prize nominated work It’s Always You (2021) prompts my proposal for ‘boybanding’ as a technique for investigating identity assemblages. The final section is focused on the genderings of East Asian masculinities in Sin’s work to argue how all gender-assemblages are also ‘racializing assemblages’ (Alexander G. Weheliye). I conclude with a provocation on what assemblage as a nonbinary concept (defined by what it does rather than what it is) can offer studies of gender.

Yoshida Ami’s Onkyō and the Persistently "Japanese" Body: Making (Electro)voice Sound

<p>This essay examines the experimental vocal and electronic work of Yoshida Ami in the context of the Japanese onkyō movement of the turn of the millennium, developing the concept of “plasmatic voice” that addresses the assemblage of embodied vocal performance through audio technology. Understanding vocal performance as it circulates globally through digital media networks must be perforce include transcultural analysis of race, culture, and gender, as well as other salient identity categories dependent on context. The essay also closely examines common metaphors for audio devices (such as microphones) as part of a programmatic attempt to listen deeply to human and nonhuman sounding without relying on the normative human body as the centre of analysis. Instead, a process-based approach following Jasbir Puar’s combining of intersectionality alongside assemblage theory is undertaken.</p>

Signs of Grace: Protestant Pro-slavery Rhetoric of Disability in the 19th Century

This archival analysis of 19th-century Protestant pro-slavery rhetoric shows that positive evaluations of disability concealed debilitation practices on plantations. The examination complicates a narrative in disability histories that associates Christian teaching with only a negative evaluation of disability as indexing a state of sin. Instead, the article explains how positive and negative evaluations of intellectual deficiency coalesced within a theological imaginary to shore up white Christian consciences, allowing for and encouraging the violence perpetrated against the enslaved. The article concludes, following Jasbir Puar and Julie Avril Minich, to query whether re-inscribing a positive evaluation of disability does disability justice?

On the Question of Soul Wounding: Secular Debility, Biopolitics, and Canada's Right to Maim

Jasbir Puar has demonstrated that the targeted debilitation of entire racialized populations embodies a contemporary illustration of colonialism’s machine. For Puar, colonizing states exist as biopolitical assemblages of control, the technologies of which instrumentalize a spectrum of debilities and capacities in the service of neoliberal colonialism, which requires maiming populations who are preconditioned for injury to secure sovereign power. This paper stages a conversation with Jasbir Puar to ask what additional insights might be gained about the relationship between colonialism and debility if critical disability scholarship went beyond a Foucauldian biopolitical analysis of the management of life, death, and debility when theorizing colonial violence. This paper thus reads across postcolonial and anti-colonial thought as well as Indigenous theories of trauma to encourage critical disability studies to expand the horizon of its reading practices when engaging these questions. These approaches, I maintain, provide critical insights into sovereign power that biopolitics cannot, including critical attention to non-secular configurations of settler colonial debility that biopolitical theory misses. I aim to show that a locus of Canada’s colonial sovereignty resides in targeted attacks, or “dis-membering,” forms of Indigenous non-secular transcendent self-consciousness—that is, the sanctioned maiming of Indigenous heterogeneous agencies in the service of neocolonial economic designs. In this sense, theories of metaphysics and violence must also be accounted for when attending to debility, colonialism, and sovereign power.

Crip Life Amidst Debilitation: Medicalization, Survival, and the Bhopal Gas Leak

In a textbook horror-story of global capitalism, on December 3, 1984, the U.S owned Union Carbide pesticide factory spewed forty tons of lethal toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) on the city of Bhopal in India. Nearly 10,000 people died and 30,000 people were disabled overnight. Continued exposure to MIC at the factory site has disabled many more in the decades since. Yet, few disability scholars have considered the histories of the survivors of the leak as a key site of crip politics. Drawing on work by Nirmala Erevelles, Jina Kim, Jasbir Puar, and Alison Kafer, this paper explores how the long history of debilitation, disablement, and survivorship since the Bhopal Gas Leak provides essential ground for re-zoning disability studies in the Global South. Braiding the theory of debility with the methodology of critical disability studies, this article posits that it is insufficient to say that the most marginalized in the Global South experience debility. Rather, it is also necessary to focus on their modes of survival in the face of the constant material and intellectual reproduction of said debilitation. The article demonstrates how poor lower-caste and Muslim workers and city-dwellers in Bhopal were subject to the debilitating logics of transnational corporate negotiations, racialized environmental de-regulation, and governmental profit-seeking in the years leading up to the leak. Through crip readings of medical research published between 1985 and 2000, I argue that this debility has been compounded through knowledge production which did not pay heed to the ways in which its victims contended with their vulnerability. In contrast to these sources, this article further examines testimonies and organizational pamphlets to contend that survivors in Bhopal offer their own model of disability justice and crip survival in the face of debilitation. In an era of vibrant disability rights organizing in the United States, the survivors of the leak emerged in global media primarily as victims of a tragedy caught in an endless cycle of injustice. Moving past the stance of pity often deployed in discussions of Bhopal, I highlight efforts of survivance that center disabled futurity, even as these activists use a different vocabulary and thereby strive to channel attention and resources to the myriad forms of crip survival in postcolonial India.

Journalism as War: Tracing the Predatory Culture and Economy of the Pak-Afghan Cross-border News Practices

ABSTRACT Based on in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun war journalists, this study explores the cross-border news practices and its underlying economy in Pakistan’s troubled tribal region that straddles the Pak-Afghan border. We argue that the structural remnants, including media, of the British colonialism of the past continue to boost the neo-imperialism of the present. Several studies have examined the war reporting in the Pak-Afghan border space, however, the intersection of the postcolonial State, militarization, and cross-border news labor practices is understudied. Backdropped in the critical examination of the news pursuits during the two wars: the Afghan “jihad” and the US-led “war on terror,” we show how war as business and news labor as commodity feed into each other and contribute to the making of a material and representational crisis which sustains what Jasbir Puar calls the “economy of injury.”

The Intersectional Logic of “Bad Religion”

Using an example of German Christian development cooperation, this paper examines strengths and weaknesses of an intersectional analysis in relation to “religion.” I will make a twofold argument. First, I will argue that the rhetoric of “bad religion” present in development cooperation is based on an intersectional logic and reproduces marginalization. Second, I will present that intersectional approaches often conceptualize “religion” in an essentialist way. By doing so, I will explore the common features of “development” and “intersectionality,” referred to here as the intersectional logic of development, describe the role of “religion” within it and demonstrate a dualistic logic of reading positions as hegemonic and non-hegemonic within this intersectional logic of development. Drawing on the concept of assemblage developed by Jasbir Puar (2007), this essay concludes by proposing some programmatic considerations that allow addressing these challenges and further developing intersectional studies as well as the critical study of religion.

In the Name of Sovereignty

Abstract In a post-9/11 world, the figure of the female suicide bomber has emerged as a contentious figure in global discourse. Through the character of Saraswathi, Nayomi Munaweera’s novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012) foregrounds how the construction of this subaltern figure hinges on her susceptibility to rape. This relationship between rape and suicide bombing is deployed differently by the counterterrorist institutions that target her and the ethnonationalist movements that recruit her to make her speak as both victim and agent while silencing her. This article thus argues that we need to move away from the framework of victimhood and agency, which assumes subjectivity without accounting for how the body of the female subaltern is excluded from inhabiting subjecthood as a construct of bounded national sovereignty. Using Jasbir Puar’s theory of queer assemblage, the author explains how Saraswathi’s suicide bomber in ITM is constructed as a figure of antinormative subjectivity through a discourse of U.S. exceptionalism in opposition to a normative U.S. national identity and sovereignty. The author builds on Puar’s insights, which draw on affect theory, to rethink Saraswathi’s violent protest as a moment that destabilizes these normative identities and their related social scripts. The author further posits alternative visions of antinormative subjectivity in the novel that allow for Saraswathi’s survival after her rape.

The Grammar of Belonging: Bodies, Borders and Kin in the Belarusian—Polish Border Crisis

This article aims to be what Jasbir Puar referred to as ‘an unfolding archive’. It makes a critical intervention at a historical crisis point as it is unfolding. It sets out to examine the logic that writes the relations between bodies, borders and kin during the political crisis that transpired at the border of Belarus and Poland in 2021. I think of this logic in terms of a ‘grammar’, drawing on the idea articulated by Hortense J. Spillers, where ‘American grammar’ fleshes out the connection between slavery, kinship, nation-building and the processes of gendering. I examine the rubrics of the hegemonic national grammatics in contemporary Poland, which establishes who counts as kin and who belongs to the nation in the context of the border crisis. I offer the concept of ‘declining’ kinship to seek generative (im)possibilities to articulate affinities and solidarities running against the dominant system of reproductive nationalism.

Always Be Prepared

Always Be Prepared

Territorial Inequality Driven by Tourism: A Queer Mapping of Urban Space in Acapulco, Mexico

Drawing on the life stories of nine LGBTTTIQ-identified people who have lived in Acapulco (Guerrero, Mexico), this article provides a queer mapping of this city, peripherally situated in the Global South yet with longstanding entangled transnational connections. The frame for this analysis is the concept of “territorial inequality,” a term coined by urbanism scholar Óscar Torres Arroyo, whose seminal work examined the emergence of this southern Mexican city as an urban space formed through a process of socioeconomic segregation driven by tourism. This article also responds to the call of queer urban scholars to look beyond the metropole for spaces of the political theorized on their own terms. In Acapulco, class, race, and nationality intersect with sexuality in ways that have made it a destination for some queers while also dangerous and unpredictable for others, a segregated sociopolitical space where norms of masculinity have collided with multiversal expressions of sexuality imbued with patterns of exploitation. A key destination during the 20th-century rise of international tourism and a place now securitized as “violent,” this urban space is also the site of evolving LGBTTTIQ movements, communities, and shifting patterns of queer life and queer tourism. This article reconsiders proposals made by queer theorists such as Lionel Cantú and Jasbir Puar regarding the complicated role of tourism in shaping sexualities, urbanization patterns, and state practices structured through colonial, neoliberal, and liberational processes, to theorize queer dimensions of the development of this city.

Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia by Y-Dang Troeung

Reviewed by: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia by Y-Dang Troeung Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, by Y-Dang Troeung. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022. Xxvii + 223 pp. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1439921760. Chapter 1 of Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia opens with a photograph that Y-Dang Troeung encountered in the archive: an image of a smiling Cambodian refugee mother and her young daughter, the latter identified as the "last" refugee of the Canadian government's Special Indochinese Refugee Program, displayed on the front page of the December 4, 1980 issue of the Montreal Gazette. Troeung writes that this is "an account of goodness–of good refugees entering the good refuge" (48). Yet the child in the photograph is not a silenced subject, a blank page upon which the Global North state can write its humanitarian narrative, erasing centuries of Indigenous genocide and racializing logics. For the child, it is revealed, is Troeung, who stubbornly writes back, revealing a much longer genealogy of the Cold War in Cambodia that preceded her family's entry into Canada. "Knit[ting] together" autotheory and literary analysis, Refugee Lifeworlds creates a "complex fabric" that reveals the "texture and temporalities of refugee life as embodied and inherited experience" (5). Because it opens chapter 1, this anecdote of archival encounter ostensibly presents a beginning of sorts. But it is a beginning that is delayed, put on hold, coming after a twenty-page preface that outlines the long durée of US intervention in Cambodia and a forty-five-page introduction that outlines the key terms and interventions of the book. In this way, Refugee Lifeworlds presents a formal alternative to "scholarly approaches that often treat the refugee as a figure who comes into being only through arrival in the asylum state," when "whiteness enters the frame as an adjudicator of the refugee's humanity" (ix). Moreover, this vignette does not follow the expected script of the liberal subject's self-possessing arrival to speech. Instead, Troeung reveals moments of stumbling and reversal, of difficulty and denial. As explained in the Introduction, when Troeung wrote to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 2021 [End Page 103] "asking them to take down" photos like these of herself and her family, explaining that she had given them "in a state of mental distress, and that the final article replicated a colonial practice of putting refugee images and information on public display in an exploitative way," the CBC denied the request, citing lack of evidence of a "mental health crisis at the time of the interview" (7–8). This autotheory example–one of many interwoven throughout the text–incisively illustrates the importance of putting critical refugee studies in conversation with critical disability studies: the book's main intervention. Refugee Lifeworlds takes the fact that "a quarter of Cambodia's population died during the genocide, and the remaining three-quarters of the population were physically and mentally debilitated" as a point of departure (12). Engaging critical refugee studies scholars such as Yến Lê Espiritu and Khatharya Um alongside critical disability scholars such as Jasbir Puar and Liat Ben-Moshe, Troeung argues for a shift from "the language of trauma as an individual, knowable impairment to that of disability, understood as both a lived embodiment and system of differential impairment of racialized and gendered bodies" (13). The book curates a "crip Cambodian refugee archive" that enacts a "politics of refusal . . . of imperial, carceral, and white supremacist state violence" (23–24). "Refugee lifeworlds," as an analytic, acknowledges the necropolitical logics of death and destruction that have structured Cambodian subjectivity, even as it asks us to consider what new epistemologies are possible in the wake of genocide. Ultimately, the book underscores the importance of an abolitionist project of "refugee and disability justice for all" (15). Refugee Lifeworlds consists of four body chapters followed by a short autotheory coda. Chapter 1 unpacks "Cambodia's Cold War episteme" which has rendered Cambodia a "minor anecdote" in the colonial imagination, setting up the importance of centering Cambodian narratives (50). The remaining chapters take up...

Becoming Max, Athena, and Kristin: Transnormative Nationalism in Dark Angel, Battlestar Galactica, and the Chelsea Manning Controversy

Abstract In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar introduces the concept of homonationalism as an analytic for a sociohistorical moment of seeming contradictions in gay politics. Since the book's first edition in 2007, several scholars have theorized the relation between homonationalism and transgender politics by examining nonfictional texts from 2007 onward. That scholarship most often explores the controversy surrounding US transparency activist Chelsea Manning's 2010 leaks of government information and subsequent “coming out” as transgender. However, interactions among homonationalism, transgender politics, and fictional texts remain undertheorized. Analyzing those interactions with a focus on American exceptionalism and science fiction television, this article shows that transnormative nationalism began territorializing through transtextuality as early as 2000. This argument not only contributes a more comprehensive explanation of the relation between homonationalism and transgender politics but also reveals the role of science fiction television in connecting the two. The argument's supporting evidence comprises a science fiction television figure termed the post-post-gender cyborg woman. This figure is incarnated in Max, a transgenic woman in Dark Angel (Fox, 2000–2002), and Sharon, a female humanoid Cylon (or robot) in Battlestar Galactica (Sky1 and Sci Fi Channel, 2004–2009). The method is a multiperspectival cultural studies approach, which holistically interprets a text's cultural meanings through analyzing not only the text but also its transtextually related texts, production, and reception. The data include television episodes, webisodes, DVD special features, tie-in novels, published interviews, professional criticism, fan fiction, and fan video. The analysis concludes with how transnormative nationalism reterritorialized in the Manning controversy.

Fórum Out of Time, de Rahul Rao, Parte II: Repensando o homonacionalismo

Abstract In this Forum, six scholars reflect on Rahul Rao’s recent book Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality from other geographies, themes and radical possibilities. Part II explores the analytic of homonationalism in dialogue with Rao’s Out of Time. Jasbir Puar, who coined the term in an earlier path-breaking work, thinks with and against Rao’s book on the relations between homonationalism and what Rao called homocapitalism. Puar also explores how the caste-gender politics of Radical Sikhi during the Farmers’ Protests in India (2020-2021) can serve as an alternative source of inspiration, companion to the queer and trans Dalits of Rao’s book. Shirin Deylami reflects on Rao’s work by exploring the disoriented grammars of the Iranian Islamic state. Specifically, Deylami analyses the way in which the discourse of westoxification has influenced and challenged the divergent state responses to transgender claims for care versus gay and lesbian rights claims.

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Capacitating militarised masculinity: Genitourinary injuries, sex/sexuality, and US military medicine

AbstractThis article examines the soldiering body in relation to the increasing prevalence of genitourinary injuries in military personnel. Feminist scholars have demonstrated that the idealised masculine soldiering body are central to the workings of international politics. The article shows that US militarised masculinity operates through the selective distribution of bodily capacities. The article draws upon critical disability studies, particularly Jasbir Puar's work on capacity and debility, to argue that treatments for genitourinary injuries revolve around the production of seminal capacity. Queer and trans bodies are debilitated in these arrangements through the denial of heterosexual and cisgender capabilities to them. To unpack this argument the article analyses treatments for genitourinary injuries. The article shows that genitourinary injuries destabilise the gender identity of US service members. Through an exploration of surgical treatments, including penis transplants and reconstructive surgeries, and fertility treatments, the article shows how masculine capacitation is achieved for some US service members through the debilitation of others; in particular, queer and trans bodies, and the bodies of Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

Tongzhi Sovereignty: Taiwan’s lgbt Rights Movement and the Misplaced Critique of Homonationalism

Abstract This essay reviews the influential work of a group of Leftist ‘sex liberation’ scholars who pioneered queer sexuality studies in Taiwan in the 1990s. In doing so, it focuses on their post-2000 political rift with the mainstream Taiwanese lgbt (tongzhi) rights movement. What ostensibly began as a split over views of same-sex marriage has developed into a contentious politics of Chinese versus Taiwanese national identity and what I call ‘tongzhi sovereignty’. In bringing together both national identity and sexual politics in Taiwan as increasingly intertwined sites of contestation, I argue that the two must be theorised in tandem. As a fertile site for unpacking this contentious divergence, I examine and problematise the way that cultural theorist Jasbir Puar’s popular concept of homonationalism has circulated in scholarship of cultural/sexuality studies about Taiwan as a slanted and largely unchecked analytic to criticise lgbt sociolegal progress and, for some scholars, obscures a pro-unification agenda.

Queering Comradeship: Anti-Capitalist Relations in We Are Who We Are

Queering Comradeship: Anti-Capitalist Relations in We Are Who We Are. This article argues that We Are Who We Are’s value lies in its exploration of the radical relationality of comradeship, a concept theorized recently by Jodi Dean. The profoundly queer connection forged and cultivated by the show’s dual protagonists, Caitlyn/Harper Poythress and Fraser Wilson, inspiringly models a comradeship that overflows with everyday possibilities for contemporary anti-capitalist praxis. The article begins by tracing the outlines of the material landscape in which Fraser and Caitlyn/Harper’s relationship unfolds, namely an American military base which captures the contradictory dynamics of our contemporary social totality. The queer theory of Jasbir Puar is also used to highlight the intersections of gender/sexuality, imperialism, and political economy. The article then offers a close reading of the show, using Dean’s (2019) four theses of the comrade as an organizing structure. Special attention is paid to the relational dynamics between Caitlyn/Harper and Fraser, juxtaposing them with those of others in their immediate lives. The article concludes by using recent sociological research on youth activism to argue that the political legacy left by Fraser and Caitlyn/Harper can, in fact, inspire revolutionary change and promote the everyday subversion of global war capital.