1. TERRORIST
ASSEMBLAGES
HOMONATIONALISM IN
QUEER TIMES
JASBIR K PUAR
Deepti Bharthur

2. Overview of presentation
 Author Bio
 Focus of discussion
 Preface
 Introduction: homonationalism and politics
 Summary, overview of main arguments
 Critique
 Discussion prompts and questions

3. About the Author
 Associate Professor at Rutgers University
 Visiting Lecturer, Department of Performance
Studies, NYU
 Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry
in Berlin.
 Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, University of
California, Berkeley
 Research interests:
gender, sexuality, globalization; postcolonial and
diaspora studies; South Asian cultural studies;
and theories of assemblage and affect.
http://www.jasbirpuar.com/

4. Preface
 Reshaping of queer subject position in the
context of the US led anti-terrorist rhetoric.
 Biopolitics- assimilation of queer national
subjects into a liberal discourse that severs
their historic ties with death and violence and
incorporates them into normativity through
political measures of recognition. ( gay
marriage, adoption, family)
 Parallel process of demarcation and
racialization of ‘West Asian’ formations.

5. Preface
Tactics, Strategies, logistics
- Explores the linkages between
‘sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and
ethnicity in relation to the tactics and
strategies, and logistics of war machines.’ ( p. xi)
- ‘Queerness as a process of racialization’ and
its subsequent cooption into the US imperial
agenda.

6. Preface
 Methodology : ‘queer methodological
philosophy’
 Sites of enquiry: governmental texts, media
texts, LGBTIQ
documents, ethnographic, interview and
participant-observation data.
 Analyses based on five years
research, conducted in New York, New Jersey
and Connecticut.

7. Introduction: Homonationalism and
Biopolitics
Use of three major frames to discuss the
intersections of race, gender, sexuality, nation
and religion towards the construction of terror
and terrorist bodies.
 Sexual Exceptionalism
 Regulatory queerness
 Ascendancy of whiteness

8. Sexual Exceptionalism
 Refers to a difference ‘from’ and ‘above’
 The rewriting of homosexual citizens into the
national imaginary and their assimilation into
American heteronormativity.
 Allows for use of human rights frames and
claims to moral superiority to construct
discourses of sexual repression, violence vis-
à-vis those of ‘choice’, ‘liberation’ and
openness.

9. Queer as regulatory
 Queerness as regulatory frame of biopolitics
 Creation of a Islam vs queerness, modernist
vs archaic dichotomy.
 Expression of queer identity must perforce be
within the liberal-secular frame and set itself
up against orientalist ‘backwardness’ thus
resulting in the creation of disciplined
homosexual subject.
 Sara Ahmed on the idealization of
movement… ‘not free in the same way.’ (p.22)

10. Ascendancy of whiteness
 Building upon the work of Rey Chow and
Susan Koshy.
 Refers to the ways in which biopower works
to regulate and control the proliferation of
multicultural ethnic bodies in a way that does
not challenge the epistemological project of
European subjectivities.
 Sets the limits for the ‘ethnic’ within liberal
market driven discourse to fit a color-blind
national imaginary.

11. Ascendancy of whiteness
 Market virility – By reorienting the loyalty of
multicultural and homonormative subjects’
loyalty to state through market privileges, the
nation state manages its homophobic and
xenophobic stance while maintaining its
claims to inclusion.

12. Critique
Strengths
 Gives a new perspective on the discourse of
queer politics and activism and builds a
compelling connection to discourses of race
and terror.
 Does an excellent job of situating queer
politics and identity politics within larger
structures of state, market and geopolitics.
 Problematizes the dominant liberal frame of
understanding queer subject position.

13. Critique
Weaknesses
• Doesn’t probe into the role of militarization, US
foreign policy and market concerns in pushing
the war against terror ( ex- first world need for
natural oil and petroleum reserves, the defense
lobby)
• Doesn’t really address the question of
sovereignty in its discussion of citizenship.

14. Discussion Questions
 Is it time to move away from the white-
western liberal, normative frame of discourse
which has yet to shed its imperialist trappings
and engage with questions of race, sexuality
and gender from a new paradigm? If so, what
are the new sites and locations for alternative
theorizing and framing within which we can
situate feminist and queer politics?

15. Discussion Questions
 Puar discusses the role of the market in
reconfiguring the subject position of the queer
and the ethnic subject with regard to the state.
How does this resonate with larger discourses
on globalization and neoliberalism you might
have encountered in the course of your
research/coursework which have pointed to
trends of transnationalism, the dwindling
importance of the state as an actor etc? In
other words, how has capitalism and the rise
of market actors changed the dynamic of
identity oriented activism?

16. Discussion Questions
 The war on terror has been constructed as a
battle for a way ( the American way ) of
life, implicit within which are uncontested
notions of liberal democracy, freedom and
individual choice. Puar’s arguments lead us
towards observing similarities between this
and the discourse of multiculturalism, peace
and human rights originating from western
epicenters. Can we thus understand both as
essentially tools of empire. Why/Why not?