Jasbir K. Puar (born 1967) is an American academic and author. She is Professor and Graduate Director of Women's and Gender Studies at

Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...

. Her most recent book is ''The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability'' (2017). She has written on

South Asian South Asia is the southern Subregion#Asia, subregion of Asia that is defined in both geographical and Ethnicity, ethnic-Culture, cultural terms. South Asia, with a population of 2.04 billion, contains a quarter (25%) of the world's populatio ...

diasporic cultural production in the United States, United Kingdom and Trinidad,

LGBT tourism LGBTQ tourism (or gay tourism) is a form of tourism marketed to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people. It may also include a focus on other members of the (broader) community. The tourism, and its related establishments, ...

terrorism Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war aga ...

studies,

surveillance Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing, or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as ...

studies, biopolitics and necropolitics, disability and debilitation, theories of

intersectionality Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how groups' and individuals' social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these intersecting and overlapping factor ...

, affect, and assemblage;

animal studies Animal studies is a recently recognised field in which animals are studied in a variety of cross-disciplinary ways. Scholars who engage in animal studies may be formally trained in a number of diverse fields, including art history, anthropology ...

and

posthumanism Posthumanism or post-humanism (meaning "after humanism" or "beyond humanism") is an idea in continental philosophy and critical theory responding to the presence of anthropocentrism in 21st-century thought. Posthumanization comprises "those pro ...

homonationalism Homonationalism is the selective acceptance of LGBTQ+ people in order to promote a nationalist ideology. It describes a phenomenon in which some nations strategically show increased support for LGBTQ+ rights as a means of reinforcing racial, r ...

, pinkwashing, and the

Palestinian territories The occupied Palestinian territories, also referred to as the Palestinian territories, consist of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip—two regions of the former Mandate for Palestine, British Mandate for Palestine ...

Academic career

Raised in the Basking Ridge section of

Bernards Township, New Jersey Bernards Township () is a Township (New Jersey), township in Somerset County, New Jersey, Somerset County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2020 United States census, the township's population was 27,830, an increase of 1,178 (+4.4%) f ...

, Puar graduated in 1985 from Ridge High School. She received her B.A. in Economics and German from Rutgers in 1989. She has an M.A. in Women's Studies from the

University of York The University of York (abbreviated as or ''York'' for Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a public Collegiate university, collegiate research university in York, England. Established in 1963, the university has expanded to more than thir ...

and completed her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

in 1999. Since 2000 she has been working at Rutgers University at the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Department. From 2014 to 2020 Puar was the graduate director of women's studies and gender studies at Rutgers.

Work

In "Queer Times, Queer Assemblages", published in 2005, Puar analyzes the War on Terror as an assemblage of racism,

nationalism Nationalism is an idea or movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation, Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: Theory, I ...

, patriotism, and

, suggesting that it is "already profoundly

queer ''Queer'' is an umbrella term for people who are non-heterosexual or non- cisgender. Originally meaning or , ''queer'' came to be used pejoratively against LGBTQ people in the late 19th century. From the late 1980s, queer activists began to ...

". Her focus is on terrorist corporealities in opposition to "normative patriot bodies", and she argues that "discourses of

counterterrorism Counterterrorism (alternatively spelled: counter-terrorism), also known as anti-terrorism, relates to the practices, military tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, law enforcement, businesses, and Intelligence agency, intelligence ...

are intrinsically gendered, raced, sexualized, and nationalized"."Queer Times, Queer Assemblages", ''Social Text'' 84-85, Vol. 23. Nos. 3-4, Fall-Winter 2005 Puar draws from the assemblage approach developed by

Gilles Deleuze Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes o ...

and

Félix Guattari Pierre-Félix Guattari ( ; ; 30 March 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, Semiotics, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and created ecosophy ...

. This is a way of viewing social and political phenomena as a combination of biological and cultural factors. She critiques the deployment of

in the United States as a justification to violently implement the doctrine of American exceptionalism embodied in the War on Terror. The United States flaunts its supposedly liberal openness to homosexuality to secure its identity in contradistinction to sexual oppression in Muslim countries. This oppression serves as an excuse for the United States to "liberate" oppressed women and sexual deviants in these countries, simultaneously papering over sexual inequality in the United States. United States exceptionalism and homonationalism are mutually constitutive, blending discourses of American Manifest Destiny, racist foreign policy, and an urge to document the unknown (embodied in the terrorist) and conquer it through queering its identity, hence rendering it manageable and knowable. Puar's ''Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times'', published in October 2007, describes connections between contemporary "

gay rights Rights affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people vary greatly by country or jurisdiction—encompassing everything from the legal recognition of same-sex marriage to the death penalty for homosexuality. Not ...

" discourse, the integration of gay people into

consumerism Consumerism is a socio-cultural and economic phenomenon that is typical of industrialized societies. It is characterized by the continuous acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing quantities. In contemporary consumer society, the ...

, the ascendance of " whiteness", and Western imperialism and the war on terrorism. Puar argues that traditional

heteronormative Heteronormativity is the definition of heterosexuality as the normative human sexuality. It assumes the gender binary (i.e., that there are only two distinct, opposite genders) and that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between peo ...

ideologies now find accompaniment from " homonormative" ideologies replicating the same hierarchical ideals concerning maintenance of dominance in terms related to race, class, gender, and nation-state, a set of ideologies she deems "

". Some reviewers have associated this argument with the "queer Marxism" of Kevin Floyd. In 2017, Puar published her second book, ''The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability'' again with

Duke University Press Duke University Press is an academic publisher and university press affiliated with Duke University. It was founded in 1921 by William T. Laprade as The Trinity College Press. (Duke University was initially called Trinity College). In 1926 ...

. She is currently working on a collection of essays around "duration, pace, mobility, and acceleration in Palestine", tentatively titled: ''Slow Life. Settler Colonialism in Five Parts''.

Academic career

Work

References

Further reading