Jasbir Puar

Jasbir K. Puar
Born	1967 (age 56–57)
Alma mater	Rutgers University (BA) University of York (MA) University of California (PhD)
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley San Francisco State University New York University Rutgers University
Thesis	"Transnational Sexualities and Trinidad: Modern Bodies, National Queers" (1999)
Doctoral advisor	Norma Alarcón
Main interests	Queer theory race studies
Notable ideas	Homonationalism
Website	www.jasbirkpuar.com

Jasbir K. Puar (born 1967) is an American professor at Rutgers University. Her most recent book is The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017). Puar is the author of award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007). She has written on South Asian diasporic cultural production in the United States, United Kingdom and Trinidad, LGBT tourism, terrorism studies, surveillance studies, biopolitics and necropolitics, disability and debilitation, theories of intersectionality, affect, and assemblage; animal studies and posthumanism, homonationalism, pinkwashing, and the Palestinian territories.

Academic career

Raised in the Basking Ridge section of Bernards Township, New Jersey, 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 and completed her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at University of California at Berkeley 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, patriotism, and terrorism, suggesting that it is "already profoundly queer". Her focus is on terrorist corporealities in opposition to "normative patriot bodies", and she argues that "discourses of counterterrorism are intrinsically gendered, raced, sexualized, and nationalized".

Puar draws from the assemblage approach developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This is a way of viewing social and political phenomena as a combination of biological and cultural factors. She critiques the deployment of homonationalism 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" discourse, the integration of gay people into consumerism, the ascendance of "whiteness", and Western imperialism and the war on terrorism. Puar argues that traditional heteronormative 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 "homonationalism". 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. 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.

Further reading

• Chatterjee, Piya; Maira, Sunaina (2014). The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780816680900.