Synopses & Reviews
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 andldquo;homonationalismsandrdquo; are deployed to distinguish upright andldquo;properly hetero,andrdquo; and now andldquo;properly homo,andrdquo; U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likesandmdash;especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabsandmdash;who 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 Courtandrsquo;s 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.
Review
“By articulating terrorism, patriotism, and U.S. exceptionalism not only to race but also to homophobia, heteronormativity, and queerness, Terrorist Assemblages offers a trenchant critique of contemporary bio- as well as geopolitics. As an author on a hotly debated topic, Jasbir Puar is as gracious about acknowledging other authors’ contributions as she is unyielding in her interrogations of secular-liberalist epistemic conventions. This is a smart, admirably researched, and courageous book.”—Rey Chow, author of Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility
Review
“In this powerful book, Jasbir K. Puar offers a stunning critique of ‘homonational’ politics. She rethinks intersections as assemblages, as networks of affect, intensity, and movement. The very rigor of her critique suggests an unflinching optimism about what is possible for queer politics.”—Sara Ahmed, author of Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Review
“I could not stop reading this outraged, meticulous, passionate, and brilliantly-visioned book. Jasbir K. Puar’s analysis of the neoliberal, imperial, sexual, and racist present reaches into the U.S. academy and multiple transnational publics and is critical of them all, even when she has solidarity with them. It’s been a long time since I read something so smart and so thorough in its storytelling.”—Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship
Review
andldquo;Jasbir Puarandrsquo;s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times is a refreshing and much-needed addition to this recent queer scholarship. . . . Her argument is essential for critics looking for a way to better understand the linkages between sexuality and antiterrorism.andrdquo; - Robert Diaz, Criticism
Review
“Fleming's analyses of work critically confront today’s capitalism, now well into its shift from old centers (western Europe, north America and Japan) to new, lower-wage centers (Asia, Latin America, Africa, etc.). The resulting precariousness, scarcity, and mindlessness of work imposed on the old centers is being covered with an ideological fetishization of work that this book well deconstructs.”
Review
“Professor Fleming has established himself as the foremost critic of our generation on the pervasive and pernicious ideologies of business and management. In this, his latest contribution, he dismantles the work ethic and the compulsion of work that plagues all workers, waged and unwaged. This is a clarion call to action against the forces of work that would try to regulate and profit from our collective self-organization.”
Synopsis
A critical analysis of contemporary racial and sexual politics involved in post-9/11 laws and culture, where practices of liberal tolerance and the inclusion of gay, lesbian, homosexual, and queer subjects into the nation-state have developed into a type
Synopsis
Once, work was inextricably linked to survival and self-preservation: the farmer ploughed his land so that his family could eat. In contrast, today work has slowly morphed into a painful and meaningless ritual for many, colonizing almost every part of our day, endless and inescapable.
In The Mythology of Work, Peter Fleming examines how neoliberal society uses the ritual of workand the threat of its denialto maintain the late capitalist class order. Work becomes a universal reference point, devoid of any moral or political worth, transforming our society into a factory that never sleeps. Blending critical theory with recent accounts of job-related suicides, office-induced paranoia, fear of relaxation, managerial sadism, and cynical corporate social responsibility campaigns, Fleming paints a bleak picture of a society in which economic and emotional disasters greatly outweigh any professed benefits.
About the Author
“By articulating terrorism, patriotism, and U.S. exceptionalism not only to race but also to homophobia, heteronormativity, and queerness, Terrorist Assemblages offers a trenchant critique of contemporary bio- as well as geopolitics. As an author on a hotly debated topic, Jasbir Puar is as gracious about acknowledging other authors’ contributions as she is unyielding in her interrogations of secular-liberalist epistemic conventions. This is a smart, admirably researched, and courageous book.”—Rey Chow, author of Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility“I could not stop reading this outraged, meticulous, passionate, and brilliantly-visioned book. Jasbir K. Puar’s analysis of the neoliberal, imperial, sexual, and racist present reaches into the U.S. academy and multiple transnational publics and is critical of them all, even when she has solidarity with them. It’s been a long time since I read something so smart and so thorough in its storytelling.”—Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship“In this powerful book, Jasbir K. Puar offers a stunning critique of ‘homonational’ politics. She rethinks intersections as assemblages, as networks of affect, intensity, and movement. The very rigor of her critique suggests an unflinching optimism about what is possible for queer politics.”—Sara Ahmed, author of Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Table of Contents
Preface: Tactics, Strategies, Logistics ix
Introduction: Homonationalism and Biopolitics 1
1. The Sexuality of Terrorism 37
2. Abu Ghraib and U.S. Sexual Exceptionalism 79
3. Intimate Control, Infinite Detention: Rereading the Lawrence Case 114
4. andldquo;The Turban Is Not a Hatandrdquo;: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling 166
Conclusion: Queer Times, Terrorist Assemblages 203
Acknowledgments 223
Notes 229
References 287
Index 325