Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Aihwa Ong. Durham, NIC: Duke University Press, 1999. ix. 322 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

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Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest

Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life

Jasbir Puar's ambitious book offers a densely woven web of engagements with key debates in queer theory. The central focus is the multiple biopolitical configurations of sex, sexuality, race, and gender that have been unleashed by the war on terror, examining how the limited extension of civil rights for lesbians and gay men in the USA and Europe has allowed the USA and its allies to present the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as human rights missions against `backward' Islamic states that oppress women and gay men. She suggests sexual freedom is no longer perverse, but a strand of US and British exceptionalism that provides the `moral authority' to intervene in the affairs of other states. Puar argues that, by accepting their new civil rights, gay people in the USA become complicit in war and imperialism. Her work seeks to `̀ exhume the convivial relations'' (page xiv) between queerness and militarism. And she does mean `queerness'; Puar maintains that it is not just assimilated gay people who are complicit, but also transgressive queers who, she suggests, too frequently elide their own class and racial privilege. In this context, Puar's work extends recent debates surrounding homonormativity, moving away from a class-centred critique of the ways in which certain lesbian and gay populations have been incorporated into mainstream consumption, and refocusing the terms of the debate around homonationalism, or the ways in which lesbians and gay men (in the USA) have become aligned with the interests of the state. While her argument may be valid for the USA, I found Puar's attempt to extend her analysis to a European context both challenging and less convincing. Terrorist Assemblages opens with an interrogation of the links between contemporary homonationalism and biopolitics. The rise of homonationalism is then explored further through an excavation of the `sexuality of terrorism'. This chapter charts the trajectories of different sexualised discourses in the years since 9/11, noting how queer and feminist critiques have frequently, if unwittingly, reproduced imperialist representations of the queer sexualities of terrorists. This theme is pursued subsequently through a discussion of US sexual exceptionalism and how, in the aftermath of the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, Muslim masculinities were represented through a number of contradictory frames, as simultaneously `̀ sexually excessive and repressive'' (page xxv). Although these initial chapters highlight the conservative consequences of US homonationalism, the third chapter examines the simultaneous production of queer, liberal subjects through a discussion of the debates surrounding the decriminalisation of sodomy in the USA in 2003. Puar argues that celebratory queer readings of the 2003 Lawrence v Texas ruling, framed as it was on an assumption that same-sex couples are worthy of having their domestic privacy protected from state surveillance, only stand up if they ignore the biopolitical economies of control and the intensified surveillance of other bodies unleashed by the US Patriot Act. The exploration of queer, liberal subject formations is extended through a discussion of the pressures on South Asian queer diasporas in the USA to conform to homonormative imperatives. In this final chapter, Puar begins an affective reading of the troubling and confusing bodies of turban-wearing Sikh Americans (who are frequently mistaken for Muslim terrorists). This affective approach is intensified in the conclusion of the book, where Puar proposes rethinking queerness as neither identity, nor anti-identity, but as a spatially and temporally contingent assemblage with a focus on becoming; a queerness that offers corporeal convergences beyond intersectionality, attuning instead to the movements, intensities, and energies inhabiting events, spaces, and corporealities. She seeks a queerness that challenges the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies that can be measured and used to separate us from them. This queerness deprivileges the queer/not queer binary, moving beyond an approach that is exclusively resistant and dissenting, to one that acknowledges its own complicity in the production Reviews Environment and Planning A 2008, volume 40, pages 2791 ^ 2792

Review: Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times

Active (dis)engagement: the gendered production of political apathy in Israel

ABSTRACT What happens when we pay attention to the sensations of our research? Based on an image and encounter during fieldwork in West Jerusalem, this article traces how a feeling of discomfort both confirms and challenges what we (think we) know about settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel. Rather than dismissing the moments when narratives, objects and exchanges generate unease, I suggest that exploring this ‘data’ attunes us to how settlers navigate the complex and contradictory conditions of coloniality – how they create resources for living. Structuralist accounts of settler colonialism are not fully capable of engaging this texture, even as they might invoke or attempt to harness emotion through mechanisms including the logic of elimination, settler indigenisation and heteropatriarchy. While thinking with this existing theory, I ask scholars and activists to consider what exceeds our dominant frames, following how affects spill over, attach and circulate among settler subjects in ways that have material consequences. This uneasy approach entails letting things play out, accepting our own implication in power and taking theorisation seriously as an ethical practice. At the same time, it is profoundly future-facing, enabling us to better identify what must be done as we work toward decolonial futures.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2201473X.2022.2112427?needAccess=true

Katherine Louise Natanel

Papers

Active (dis)engagement: the gendered production of political apathy in Israel

Affect, excess & settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel