Jasbir Puar

Jasbir K. Puar
Born 1967 (age 48–49)
Residence New Brunswick, New Jersey[1]
Institutions University of California
San Francisco State University
New York University
Rutgers University
Alma mater Rutgers University (B.A.)
University of York (M.A.)
University of California (Ph.D.)
Thesis "Transnational Sexualities and Trinidad: Modern Bodies, National Queers" (1999)
Doctoral advisor Norma Alarcón
Known for queer theory
Influences Michel Foucault[2]
Website
www.jasbirpuar.com

Jasbir K. Puar is a U.S.-based queer theorist who is currently an associate professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.[2][3] Puar is author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.[2] She has written widely on South Asian disaporic 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 Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Academic career

Puar 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.[4]

In this essay, 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". Through an analysis of the American response to the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse in 2004, she contends that contemporary discourses of Muslim sexuality only mask and reproduce an underlying belief in American exceptionalism. She also rearticulates the body of the suicide bomber as "a queer assemblage that resists queerness-as-sexual-identity", a force with the power to converge, implode, and rearrange time, space, and body. Finally, Puar focuses on the archetypal Sikh terrorist, turban and all, in order to posit that her examination of queerness as an assemblage calls attention to "epistemology in tandem with ontology".[5]

Puar critiques the deployment of homonationalism in the United States as a justification for violently implementing 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.[5]

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".[6]

In her journal article, "Homonationalist Futurism: 'Terrorism' and (Other) Queer Resistance to Empire", Heike Schotten utilizes Puar's theoretical framework and conflates it with the theories of Lee Edelman to produce a model for thinking about racialized identities and resistance to the "sexual contures" of the United States Empire. Schotten posits that, when combined, Edelman and Puar's work serves as a crucial resource for "theorizing 'terrorism' and understanding it as an act of political resistance".[7]

Controversy

On February 3, 2016, Puar delivered a lecture at Vassar College, "Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters", in which she was critical of current Israeli policy toward Palestine, and particularly the Israel treatment of Palestinians.[8] Puar was recorded as stating (by persons attending the lecture) that Israel harvests the organs of dead Palestinians for scientific research; poisons Palestinians with uranium, lead, and phosphorus to "stunt" them; targets their procreative organs; maims them; and gives them the "bare minimum for survival" as part of a medical "experiment".[9][10]

In response to these allegations, a former president of the University of California and a professor emeritus of history at Michigan State University accused Puar of "hatred of Jews and Israel" and "updating the medieval blood libel against Jews".[9] The New York Daily News also weighed in and called Puar a “raving crackpot” who was a "master of using impenetrable language as faux intellectualism".[11] Ziva Dahl, who attended the lecture, said Puar's "incendiary, unbalanced hate speech masquerades as scholarship", and argued that "Disguised behind a plethora of pseudo-intellectual jargon, she presents bigotry all too reminiscent of 1930s Europe to demonize Jews." [10] It later became apparent that Puar had asked Vassar to bar recordings of her lecture. At a subsequent lecture at Fordham University, Puar imposed a similar "no recording condition".[12]

Ms. Puar's presentation was widely regarded as anti-semitic and has been the subject of continued discussion on campuses where she presents. Ms. Puar's lack of transparency was reported in numerous publications, as "Rutgers Women’s Studies Professor: Israel Mines The Organs Of Dead Muslims.[13] As a result of learning that her lecture at Vassar was recorded, Ms. Puar has threatened to sue Vassar and any person who distributes the recorded version of the lecture. Many mainstream publications have covered her presentation, including The Observer, with" Vassar Jewish Studies Sponsors Demonization of Israel … Again" ([14]) and Campus watch, who published: Blood Libels and BDS: Rutgers Prof Jasbir Puar's Vassar Lecture.[15]

While no actual threats have been substantiated, much as Ms. Puar will not allow the actual contents of her speech to be reproduced, she claims to have received "threats of rape and murder".[16][17]

Works

Books
Book chapters[1]

Awards

Puar has received multiple awards:[1]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 Puar, Jasbir (2016). "Jasbir K. Puar, Abridged CV". New Brunswick, New Jersey: www.jasbirpuar.com. Retrieved 28 February 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 West, Lewis (4 December 2014). "Jasbir Puar: Regimes of Surveillance". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cosmologics Magazine, Harvard Divinity School. Retrieved 28 February 2016.
  3. ↑ "Puar, Jasbir". Womens-studies.rutgers.edu. 28 October 2013. Retrieved 19 February 2016.
  4. ↑ "Current Institutional Affiliation(s)". Archived from the original on 23 July 2011. Retrieved 24 February 2011.
  5. 1 2 "Queer Times, Queer Assemblages", Social Text 84-85, Vol. 23. Nos. 3-4, Fall-Winter 2005
  6. ↑ "Jasbir K. Puar: Terrorist Assemblages : Homonationalism in Queer Times, October 2007". OutHistory. 2007. Archived from the original on 27 July 2011. Retrieved 28 February 2016.
  7. ↑ Schotten, Heike (March 2015). "Homonationalist Futurism: "Terrorism" and (Other) Queer Resistance to Empire". New Political Science. doi:10.1080/07393148.2014.957910. Retrieved 11 November 2015.
  8. ↑ Ziva Dahl, “Vassar Jewish Studies Sponsors Demonization of Israel … Again” Observer.com, February 9, 2016
  9. 1 2 Mark G. Yudof and Ken Waltzer, "Majoring in Anti-Semitism at Vassar", The Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2016.
  10. 1 2 Dahl, Ziva (March 3, 2016). "Vassar College Jewish Studies sponsors demonization of Israel…again". JNS.org.
  11. ↑ "Hatred on the Hudson", New York Daily News, February 22, 2016: 24
  12. ↑ "http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/scaredy-cat-bomb-thrower-article-1.2544174 Scaredy cat bomb-thrower: Israel-basher Jasbir Puar hides from Fordham sunlight" New York Daily News, February 26, 2016: 24
  13. ↑ http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/22/rutgers-womens-studies-professor-israel-mines-the-organs-of-dead-muslims/
  14. ↑ http://observer.com/2016/02/vassar-jewish-studies-sponsors-demonization-of-israel-again/
  15. ↑ http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2016/02/blood-libels-and-bds-rutgers-prof-jasbir-puar
  16. ↑ Executive Council of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. "In Defense of Professor Jasbir Puar's Academic Freedom". rutgersaaup.org. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  17. ↑ Adam Clark, "Rutgers union backs prof facing 'death' threats over speech", NJ.com, March 3, 2016

Further reading

External links

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