Terrorist Assemblages

by Puar, Jasbir K.

• ISBN13: 9780822341147
• ISBN10: 082234114X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-11-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

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 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-alikes-especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs-who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Jasbir k. Puar is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University

Table of Contents

Preface: tactics, strategies, logistics	p. ix
Introduction: Homonationalism and biopolitics	p. 1
The sexuality of terrorism	p. 37
Abu Ghraib and U.S. sexual exceptionalism	p. 79
Intimate control, infinite detention: rereading the lawrence case	p. 114
"The turban is not a hat": Queer diaspora and practices of profiling	p. 166
Conclusion: Queer times, terrorist assemblages	p. 203
Acknowledgments	p. 223
Notes	p. 229
References	p. 287
Index	p. 325
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