Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times

About this book

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-likesespecially Sikhs Muslims and Arabswho 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 Courts 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.