Jasbir K. Puar

Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots

This question opens on to others: How are the technologies that are being developed to combat “terrorism” departures from or transformations of older technologies of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and nationalism? In what way do contemporary counterterrorism practices deploy these technologies, and how do these practices and technologies become the quotidian framework through which we are obliged to struggle, survive, and resist? Sexuality is central to the creation of a certain knowledge of terrorism, specifically that branch of strategic analysis that has entered the academic mainstream as “terrorism studies.” This knowledge has a history that ties the image of the modern terrorist to a much older figure, the racial and sexual monsters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Further, the construction of the pathologized psyche of the terroristmonster enables the practices of normalization, which in today’s context often means an aggressive heterosexual patriotism. As opposed to initial post–September 11 reactions, which focused narrowly on “the disappearance of women,” we consider the question of gender justice and queer politics through broader frames of reference, all with multiple genealogies—indeed, as we hope to show, gender and sexuality produce both hypervisible icons and the ghosts that haunt the machines of war. Thus, we make two related arguments: (1) that the construct of the terrorist relies on a knowledge of sexual perversity (failed heterosexuality, Western notions of the psyche, and a certain queer monstrosity); and (2) that normalization invites an aggressive heterosexual patriotism that we can see, for example, in dominant media representations (for example, The West Wing), and in the organizing efforts of Sikh Americans in response to September 11 (the fetish of the “turbaned” Sikh man is crucial here).1 The forms of power now being deployed in the war on terrorism in fact draw on processes of quarantining a racialized and sexualized other, even as Western norms of the civilized subject provide the framework through which these very same others become subjects to be corrected. Our itinerary begins with an examination of Michel Foucault’s figure of monstrosity as a member of the West’s “abnormals,” followed by a consideration of the uncanny return of the monster in the discourses of “terrorism studies.” We then move to the relationship Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism

Mapping US Homonormativities

In this paper I argue that the Orientalist invocation of the ‘terrorist’ is one discursive tactic that disaggregates US national gays and queers from racial and sexual ‘others’, foregrounding a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay, lesbian, and queer subjects themselves: homo-nationalism. For contemporary forms of US nationalism and patriotism, the production of gay, lesbian and queer bodies is crucial to the deployment of nationalism, insofar as these perverse bodies reiterate heterosexuality as the norm but also because certain domesticated homosexual bodies provide ammunition to reinforce nationalist projects. Mapping forms of US homo-nationalism, vital accomplices to Orientalist terrorist others, is instructive as it alludes to the ‘imaginative geographies’ of the US, as the analytic of race-sexuality provides a crucial yet under-theorized method to think through the imaginative geographies of the US in an age of counter-terrorism. It is through imaginative geographies produced by homo-nationalism, for example, that the contradictions inherent in the idealization of the US as a properly multicultural heteronormative but nevertheless gay-friendly, tolerant, and sexually liberated society can remain in tension. This mapping or geography is imaginative because, despite the unevenness, massively evidenced, of sexual and racial tolerance across varied spaces and topographies of identity in the US, it nonetheless exists as a core belief system about liberal mores defined within and through the boundaries of the US. Trazando mapas de Homonormatividades en los Estados Unidos En este artículo argumento que la invocación Orientalista de la ‘terrorista’ es un táctico discursivo que desagrega los homosexuales estadounidenses de los ‘otros’ raciales y sexuales, y como consecuencia subrayando una colusión entre la homosexualidad y nacionalismo americano que están producido por retórica nacional de inclusión patriótica y por sujetos lesbiana, gay y queer: homo-nacionalismo. Para formas contemporáneas de nacionalismo y patriotismo americanos, la producción de cuerpos lesbianas, gay y queer es crítica para el despliegue de nacionalismo en cuanto a estos cuerpos perversos reiteran heterosexualidad como la norma y también porque ciertos cuerpos homosexual domesticados proviene municiones para reinformar proyectos nacionalistas. Trazando un mapa de las formas homo-nacionalismo americanos, lo que son cómplices vitales a las otras terroristas Orientales, es instructiva ya que alude a los ‘geografías imaginativas’ de los EEUU como el analítico de raza-sexualidad proviene una manera critica aún bajo de teorizado para pensar en las geografías imaginativas de los EEUU en una época de contra-terrorismo. Por ejemplo, a través de las geografías imaginativas, lo que están producidos por homo-nacionalismo, se puedan quedar en tensión las contradicciones inherente en la idealización de los EEUU como una sociedad que es apropiadamente multicultural y heteronormativa pero sin embargo gay-amigo, tolerante y libertado sexualmente. Este mapa, o geografía, es imaginativo porque existe sin embargo como una creencia fundamental acerca de las costumbres liberales que son definidos dentro de y a través de las fronteras de los EEUU, a pesar de la desigualdad—evidenciado en profundo—de la tolerancia racial y sexual por espacios variados y topografías de identidades en los EEUU.

Queer Times, Queer Assemblages

These are queer times indeed. The war on terror is an assemblage hooked into an array of enduring modernist paradigms (civilizing teleologies, orientalisms, xenophobia, militarization, border anxieties) and postmodernist eruptions (suicide bombers, biometric surveillance strategies, emergent corporealities, counterterrorism gone overboard). With its emphases on bodies, desires, pleasures, tactility, rhythms, echoes, textures, deaths, morbidity, torture, pain, sensation, and punishment, our necropolitical present-future deems it imperative to rearticulate what queer theory and studies of sexuality have to say about the metatheories and the “realpolitiks” of Empire, often understood, as Joan Scott observes, as “the real business of politics.” 1 Queer times require even queerer modalities of thought, analysis, creativity, and expression in order to elaborate on nationalist, patriotic, and terrorist formations and their intertwined forms of racialized perverse sexualities and gender dysphorias. What about the war on terrorism, and its attendant assemblages of racism, nationalism, patriotism, and terrorism, is already profoundly queer? Through an examination of queerness in various terrorist corporealities, I contend that queernesses proliferate even, or especially, as they remain denied or unacknowledged. I take up these types of inquiries not only to argue that discourses of counterterrorism are intrinsically gendered, raced, sexualized, and nationalized but also to demonstrate the production of normative patriot bodies that cohere against and through queer terrorist corporealities. In the speculative, exploratory endeavor that follows, I foreground three manifestations of this imbrication. One, I examine discourses of queerness where problematic conceptualizations of queer corporealities, especially via Muslim sexualities, are reproduced in the service of discourses of U.S. exceptionalisms. Two, I rearticulate a terrorist body, in this case the suicide bomber, as a queer assemblage that resists queerness-as-sexual-identity (or anti-identity)—in other words, intersectional and identitarian paradigms—in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements. Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of

CIRCUITS OF QUEER MOBILITY Tourism, Travel, and Globalization

While I was in Trinidad and Tobago in February 1998, a curious incident set off a series of conversations about the often tense relationships between the interests and effects of globalization and postcolonial gay and lesbian identities. After the Cayman Islands, a British territory, had refused docking privileges in December to a so-called gay cruise originating in the United States, several other Caribbean governments expressed the intention to refuse the same cruise ship and those that might follow. The local Caribbean media engaged in no editorial discussions or debates about the cruises but merely printed press releases from Reuters and other global wire services. Caribbean Cana-Reuters Press reported that, in the Bahamas, a ship with nine hundred gays and lesbians on a cruise arranged by the California-based Atlantis Events had become a “test for the tourist-dependent Caribbean islands after the Cayman Islands refused the ship landing rights.” Officials from the Cayman Islands said that gay vacationers could not be counted on to “uphold standards of appropriate behavior.”1 Islanders had apparently been offended ten years earlier when a gay tour had landed and men had been seen kissing and holding hands in the streets. A U.S.-based gay rights organization now called on the British government to intervene. British prime minister Tony Blair did so and determined, in the case of the Cayman Islands (dubbed by Out and About, the leading gay and lesbian travel newsletter, the “Isle of Shame”), that codes outlawing gays and lesbians, many of which have descended from colonial legislation, breach the International Covenant of Human Rights and must be rescinded.2 U.S. officials followed suit, insisting that human rights had been violated.3 I watched with confusion, hopeful that both former and current British possessions would tell Blair and the United States to mind their own business, but aware of my ambivalent solidarity with Caribbean activists.4 Some activists, rely-

Prognosis time: Towards a geopolitics of affect, debility and capacity

This article brings into conversation theories of affect, particularly those emerging from technoscience criticism that foreground bodily capacities for affecting or being affected, for change, evolution, transformation, and movement, and studies of disability and debility which complicate these notions of capacity, even while privileging identity-based rights and representational politics that might reinscribe other forms of normativity. I argue for a deconstruction of what ability and capacity mean, affective and otherwise, and to push for a broader politics of debility that puts duress on the seamless production of abled-bodies in relation to disability. Central to my discussion will be formulations of risk, calculation, prognosis, statistical probability, and population construction, whereby identity is understood not as essence, but as risk coding. Affect is therefore a site of bodily creative discombobulation and resistance but one that is also offered up for increasing monitoring and modulation.

A Transnational Feminist Critique of Queer Tourism

This article frames queer tourism through two lenses. First, I explore how queer tourism and queer spatiality occlude questions of gender and efface the varied modalities of travel, tourism, mobility, and space/place–making activities of women, especially with respect to queer women and lesbians. Second, I point out the neocolonial impulses of all queer travel by highlighting the colonial history of travel and tourism and the production of mobility through modernity, and vice versa. Following M Jacqui Alexander’s (1997) claim that white gay capital follows the path of white heterosexual capital, how are queer women, queers of color, and postcolonial lesbian and gays also implicated in this process? Through these questions I propose to think about queer tourism and space through theories of intersectionality. In other words, how do we acknowledge and theorize “difference” in queer spaces? How do multiple identities, intersectionality, and social differences make the construction of queer space impossible?

‘THE TURBAN IS NOT A HAT’: QUEER DIASPORA AND PRACTICES OF PROFILING

This article examines two facets of post 9–11 South Asian organizing in the US – that of South Asian queer diasporics and of Sikh Americans. Ironically, South Asian queer diasporic subjects are under even greater duress to produce themselves as exceptional American subjects, not necessarily as heteronormative but as homonormative, even as the queernesses of these very bodies are simultaneously used to pathologize populations of terrorist look-a-like bodies. As contagions that trouble the exceptionalisms of queer South Asian diasporas, male turbaned Sikh bodies, often mistaken for Muslim terrorist bodies, are read as patriarchal by queer diasporic logics and placed within heteronormative victimology narratives by Sikh American advocacy groups focused on redressing the phenomenon of ‘mistaken identity’. Both the queer diasporic and Sikh American logics are indebted to visual representations of corporeality. Hence, I re-read these bodies as affectively troubling – generating affective confusion and indeterminancy – in terms of ontology, tactility, and the combination of organic and non-organic matter. Reading turbans through affect challenges both the limits of queer diasporic identity that balks at the non-normativity of the turbaned body (even as it avows the pathological racial-sexual renderings of terrorist bodies) while simultaneously infusing the ‘mistaken identity’ debates with different methods of comprehending the susceptibility of these bodies beyond heteronormative victimology narratives.

Bodies with New Organs Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled

DOI 10.1215/01642472-3125698

Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms

My recent writing has revolved around describing an ontopoetics of race that I name the sense of the brownness in the world. Brownness is meant to be an expansive category that stretches outside the confines of any one group formation and, furthermore, outside the limits of the human and the organic. Thinking outside the regime of the human is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. It is a ceaseless endeavor, a continuous straining to make sense of something else that is never fully knowable. To think the inhuman is the necessary queer labor of the incommensurate. The fact that this thing we call the inhuman is never fully knowable, because of our own stuckness within humanity, makes it a kind of knowing that is incommensurable with the protocols of human knowledge production. Despite the incommensurability, this seeming impossibility, one must persist in thinking in these inhuman directions. Once one stops doing the incommensurate work of attempting to touch inhumanity, one loses traction and falls back onto the predictable coordinates of a relationality that announces itself as universal but is, in fact, only a substrata of the various potential interlays of life within which one is always inculcated. The radical attempt to think incommensurate queer inhumanity is a denaturalizing and unsettling of the settled, sedimented, and often ferocious world of recalcitrant antiinhumanity. Queer thought is, in large part, about casting a pic-

Queer Theory and Permanent War

Can queer theory be recognizable as such when it emerges from elsewhere? This is the central question that guides our thinking on the intersections between queer theory and area studies, in our case the study of the Middle East as transnational. We come to this question in thinking through disciplinary and archival locations of knowledge production, and the political, economic, and social cartographies that animate both queer theory and the study of the Middle East. Finally, we outline some of the recent theoretical contributions of work that thinks across the boundedness of “queer theory” and “Middle Eastern studies,” and revisit the question of what queer theory may look like when it is not routed through EuroAmerican histories, sexualities, locations, or bodies. The United States remains foundational to queer theory and method, regardless of the location, area, archive, or geopolitical history. (This is still largely the case even in Europe, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.) US archives and methods appear to make legible and illegible all other geohistories. We note that this is not a new problematic. Much of the early work of queer theory in the 1990s sought to trace the flows of “queer” as a hegemonic traveling formation that followed the circuits of US Empire. In attempting to mark the complex negotiations and resistances to such purported external impositions, the “local” in the global south was unwittingly reified as raw data, often through the purview of “sexuality studies,” in relation to an everentrenching “global.” And yet, several decades later, despite many trenchant interventions, such epistemic issues remain. Commodifications of area, and of the local, result in a twofold movement. It is not just that queer theory is unconsciously enacting an area studies parochialization: queer theory as American studies. More trenchantly,