How to Do Things With Words

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

(2014). Mathematics Black Life. The Black Scholar: Vol. 44, States of Black Studies, pp. 16-28.

Mathematics Black Life

We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic with the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) While we do not know how this situation will unfold or resolve, we do have insight into how it fits within existing patterns and relations, particularly those pertaining to sociocultural constructions of (in)security, vulnerability, and risk We can see evidence of surveillance dynamics at play with how bodies and pathogens are being measured, tracked, predicted, and regulated We can grasp how threat is being racialized, how and why institutions are flailing, and how social media might be fueling social divisions There is, in other words, a lot that our scholarly community could add to the conversation In this rapid-response editorial, we provide an introduction to the framing devices of disease surveillance and discuss how a surveillance studies orientation could help us think critically about the present crisis and its possible aftermath

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/download/13985/9169

Dis-ease Surveillance: How Might Surveillance Studies Address COVID-19?

From the foreclosure crisis of 2008, to the tech boom-provoked housing crisis currently engulfing the San Francisco Bay Area, low-income residents of Oakland, California have been displaced from th...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263775819843924

City as borderland: Gentrification and the policing of Black and Latinx geographies in Oakland:

This essay examines the technological, media, and mediation shifts that are taking place in what has become generally referred to the “war on terror” contemporary moment. Through a careful and detailed analysis of the visual manifestation of this discourse in U.S. border security procedures and mainstream media coverage of the “war on terror,” the essay contributes to a growing series of commentaries that question the contemporary aesthetic effect of this political and cultural discourse. The essay provides a comparative analysis of Computer generated imagery in surveillance and border technologies, on the one hand, and in CNN's coverage of Saddam Hussein's capture, on the other. The author argues that through the language and aesthetics of transparency, human embodiment is being challenged and that there is a significant political cost to the ways by which human subjectivity is being experienced and understood.

Of Ziploc Bags and Black Holes: The Aesthetics of Transparency in the War on Terror

Terror and the Female Grotesque: Introducing Full-Body Scanners to U.S. Airports

At the airport we line up, remove our shoes, empty our pockets, and hold still for three seconds in the body scanner. Deemed safe, we put ourselves back together and are free to buy the beverage we were prohibited from taking through security. In The Transparent Traveler Rachel Hall explains how the familiar routines of airport security choreograph passenger behavior to create submissive and docile travelers. The cultural performance of contemporary security practices mobilizes what Hall calls the "aesthetics of transparency." To appear transparent, a passenger must perform innocence and display a willingness to open their body to routine inspection and analysis. Those who cannot—whether because of race, immigration and citizenship status, disability, age, or religion—are deemed opaque, presumed to be a threat, and subject to search and detention. Analyzing everything from airport architecture, photography, and computer-generated imagery to full-body scanners and TSA behavior detection techniques, Hall theorizes the transparent traveler as the embodiment of a cultural ideal of submission to surveillance.

The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security

Missing Dolly, Mourning Slavery: The Slave Notice as Keepsake

This essay responds to Michael Bowman's call for “performed memories” that challenge the production and reproduction of knowledge. The author performs memories of her changing relationship to the Patty Hearst archive in order to resist the postmodern knowledge that nostalgia is (1) uniform and (2) the enemy of progressive political action. The author animates feminist nostalgia for Patty Hearst in order to demonstrate that encounters between viewers and cultural images are an integral if little understood aspect of subject formation and the ongoing, uneven process of coming into historical consciousness. The author performs memories before the Patty Hearst archive in order to see what inventional options can be created from old pictures. In so doing, she hopes to challenge a theoretical image that circulates in postmodern cultural theory and criticism: the amnesiac viewer doomed by her lack of history and addiction to fashion, to political apathy and/or commercial cooptation.

Rachel Hall

Papers

Of Ziploc Bags and Black Holes: The Aesthetics of Transparency in the War on Terror

Terror and the Female Grotesque: Introducing Full-Body Scanners to U.S. Airports

The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security

Missing Dolly, Mourning Slavery: The Slave Notice as Keepsake

Patty and Me: Performative Encounters between an Historical Body and the History of Images