Jasbir Puar: From Terrorist Assemblages to The Right to Maim

This Social Text Periscope dossier offers reflections on Jasbir Puar’s work from Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times to The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. With The Right to Maim’s release occurring on the tenth anniversary of Terrorist Assemblages, the time seemed to us ripe not only to assess the import of the former, but also attend to the larger critical arc provided by Puar’s scholarship. Thus, we’ve invited seven scholars–Liat Ben-Moshe, Sara Farris, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Amber Jamilla Musser, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Fred Moten, and Helga Tawil-Souri–to reflect on the impact, applicability, and issues that have arisen from Puar’s work, with a primary focus on The Right to Maim.

cover image: Candice Lin, Birth of a Nation, 2008. Watercolor on paper, 44 x 54 in. Courtesy of the artist

Introduction: Relation, Exception, and the Horizons of Critique in Jasbir Puar’s Work

Peter Coviello and Hentyle Yapp

This Social Text Periscope dossier offers reflections on Jasbir Puar’s work from Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times to The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. With The Right to Maim’s release occurring on the tenth anniversary of Terrorist Assemblages, … Continue reading “Introduction: Relation, Exception, and the Horizons of Critique in Jasbir Puar’s Work”

Maiming Palestinian Time

Helga Tawil-Souri

Jasbir Puar’s argument in The Right to Maim of Israel’s deliberate debilitation of Palestinians—by bodily and psychological injury, social exclusion, economic stunting, and political encumberance—is a poignant one. Indeed, one simply has to turn on the news to see tens … Continue reading “Maiming Palestinian Time”

Disabling Wounds: Genocidal Violence, Paradoxical Indigeneity, and the Logic of Elimination of the Native

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

Building on the analytics she advanced in Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. In The Right to Maim, we see the tenuous inclusion of … Continue reading “Disabling Wounds: Genocidal Violence, Paradoxical Indigeneity, and the Logic of Elimination of the Native”