Queer Times, Queer Assemblages- M.Carpio

Jasbir K. Puar in “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages” examines the proliferation of queerness in various terrorist corporealities, even if they remain unacknowledged, and argues that discourses of counterterrorism are intrinsically gendered, raced, sexualized, and nationalized and that the production of normative “patriot” bodies cohere against and through queer terrorist corporealities. (p. 121)

In one of the most interesting section for me Puar using a term that Deleuze develops rearticulates the suicide bomber’s body as a queer assemblage that moves away from binaries and resists intersectional and identitarian paradigms, favoring interwoven forces that merge and “dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency”.  Queer assemblage, Puar states, “allows for becoming/s beyond being/s” (p.128).  The assemblage of the suicide bomber’s body with the organic and inorganic, suicide and murder, metal and flesh, the body-weapon, forces a reconciliation of opposites and the interwoven of temporal, spatial, and corporeal narratives delinked from sexual identity.

Furthermore, assemblages also work against narratives of U. S. exceptionalism and challenge the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies that inform practices of state surveillance and control. “In the upheaval of the “with us or against us” rhetoric of the war on terror, queer praxis of assemblage allows for scrambling of sides that is illegible to state practices of surveillance, control, banishment, and extermination” (p.131)

This reading is especially useful when thinking about by own research and how to use a methodology that distances itself from intersectionality and identitarian paradigms give space to readings of queer affectivity, queer assemblages and the multiplicity of networks they allow.

Question

If the fusion of the organic with the nonorganic renders the turban a queer part of the body and the assemblage of visuality, affect, feminized position, and bodily nonorganicity accounts for its queer figuration, can the hijab be also an example of a queer part of the female body? 

Queer Times, Queer Assemblages - Ezra

      In Queer Times, Queer Assemblages, Jasbir Puar sets out to explore how the intrinsically gendered, raced, nationalized and sexualized discourses of counter-terrorism have generated the corresponding figures of 'patriot' and 'terrorist' corporealities (121). Puar sees this dual production instantiated in the co-constitutive opposition of the 'perverse', 'homophobic' Muslim and the normative queer liberal subject. She emphasizes how 'queernesses' simultaneously resist and converge with dominant formations to reveal ontological imbrications, dissolving the boundaries between what is queer and non-queer. She introduces the Deleuzian concept of assemblages to overcome a logic of stasis embedded within the optics of 'intersectionality', inasmuch as they rely on the discrete coherence of the analytics of sexuality, race, gender etc.

     In her assessment of U.S. exceptionalism, she reveals an operative "praxis of sexual othering" (122), contingent on the argumentative grounding of  queerness as a cultural product of the West, that distances the field of "queer modernity" from "queer monstrosity", and "national normative" from "anti-national" subjects (136). Moving from an analysis of a visual economy to an account of affect and feeling, Puar describes the tactile and sensorial dimension involved in wearing and arranging a turban, the experience of torture and detention, and the intimate proximity of suicide bombers with their weapons; she uses these to foreground an argument about the dispersion of the boundaries of bodies and their essential indistinguishability.

       Her interventions are relevant to the development of my research project inasmuch as they gesture towards a method of analysis which does not presuppose an integral identity as its point of departure. Through tracing notions of "amor libre"/"free love", I seek to dislodge assumptions in the field of Latin American studies which project teleological visions that privilege the emergence of individuated LGBTQ subjects. The project is centered around the relationship between utopian anarchist notions of community and affect, and the national-normative sexualities promoted by southern cone states. Similarly, the notion of a diasporic imaginary (134) is applicable to the extent that it is divorced from the primacy of a relationship to a homeland, especially given that anarchist projects of futurity forged community based on an antagonism or negation of the existing order.

Question:

1. Given its role as partial arbiter of U.S. exceptionalism and its complicity in affirming related binary oppositions what exactly is 'queer' about 'queer liberalism' in this instance?

2. How does a theory of assemblages differ from an explicitly anti-identitarian approach?

Queer Times, Queer Assemblages

Puar teases out the connections between seemingly unrelated matters: sexuality and the discourses surrounding terrorism in the wake of 9/11.  Her work is grounded in present and in the methodologies of queer theory. She begins by pointing out how opponents of gay rights have involve the language of the war on terror to denounce homosexuality. she asks why it is that these two things (homosexuality and terrorism) have been conflated: "what is queer about the terrorist? And what is queer about terrorist corporealities?" (p. 127). Her work demonstrates "the production of normative patriot bodies that cohere against and through queer terrorist corporealities" (p. 121). 

Her work is in part a critiques of queer politics. She seeks to how queerness implicated in American nationalism and imperialism, as well as in the construction of racial difference and white privilege, using frames of the U.S. exeptionalism and multicultualism.  Puar draws an analogy between multicultualism and homonormativity. The queer impulse to transgress norms became itself a form of normatively. In this way, queerness is complicit in whiteness, and a queer norm is produced as "the tacit acceptance of U.S. imperialist expansion" (p. 123). Discourse of homonormativity distinguishes between "the race of the (presumptively sexually repressed, perverse, or both) terrorist and the sexuality of the national (presumptively white, gender normative) queer" (p. 126). 

It is interesting that Puar deals with figures, not actual physical bodies. She is concerned less with the meaning attached to bodies and more with how bodies relate to each other and what happens when bodies and things interact. She noted that "the turban, for example, is not merely an appendage to the body. It is always in the state of becoming, the becoming of a turbaned body, the turban becoming part of the body" (p. 133). 

This reading reminded me of the study that examined how leading news organizations in the U.S. framed the Abu Ghraib prison story. The events at Abu Ghraib reflected an administration policy of "torture," but ‘‘abuse’’ was the predominant news frame (Bennett et al., 2006). They suggested that "for all the photos and available evidence suggesting a possible policy of torture laid bare at Abu Ghraib, the story quickly became framed as regrettable abuse on the part of a few troops" (p. 481). The predominant abuse frames linked to the rampant homophobia in the armed forces, but excluded  processes of racism and sexism. 

Questions

"Bodies that are in some sense machined together, remarkable beyond identity, visuality, and visibility, to the realms of affect and ontology, the tactile and the sensorial" (p. 132). Puar is interested in figures, rather than organic bodies. How can this insight contribute to our understanding of racialization? 

References

Bennett, W. L., Lawrence, R. G., & Livingston, S. (2006). None dare call it torture: Indexing and the limits of press independence in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Journal of Communication, 56(3), 467-485.

Queer of Color Methodologies - Jozi Chaet

Josephine Chaet

GWS 502.01 – Women of Color Methodologies

Professor Naber

Relevance to the Text Generally

Over the course this past week, the information presented throughout the readings has largely focused on the way in which, or the extent to which, critical formations concerning queerness in the context of the United States might illuminate or inspire considerations of considerations of the institutional, legal, and political understanding of sexuality. In particular, David Eng, Roderick Ferguson, and Jasbir Puar examine the role of both queer theory and the study of sexualities in examining the “metatheories and the ‘real-politiks’ of Empire, often understood…as ‘the real business of politics” (Puar 2005, 121). While the following post cannot successfully engage with all of the complex notions presented by Eng, Ferguson, and Puar, this post attempts to think through the primary concept addressed over the course of the readings, which is mentioned briefly above – namely, the way in which the study of sexuality can be used to assess the racialized, gendered, and classed forms of power embedded within the historical construction and development of the United States as a whole. In turn, this post attempts to explore the implications of that anaylsis, and endeavors to address the potential ways in which it relates to my own emergent research.

Throughout her discussion concerning the way in which the South Asian queer diaspora has been reshaped over the course of the past approximately five years (at the time of publication), Puar reflects on the relationship between queer narratives and American nationalism. Specifically, Puar states that “queerness is proffered as a sexually exceptional form of American national sexuality through a rhetoric of sexual modernization that is simultaneously able to castigate the other as homophobic and perverse, and construct the imperialist center as ‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, and gendered normal” (Puar 2005, 122, italics in original). In effect, Puar suggests that the understanding of queerness is related to the creation and establishment of the formation of nation subjects throughout the United States (Puar 2005). That same notion is reflected throughout the work published by both Eng and Ferguson. In particular, Eng examined the connections between sexuality, the economy, and race inform and are informed by conceptions of American nationalism and identity. Moreover, Ferguson explicitly focuses his analysis on the theorization of sexuality as “a mode of racialized governmentality” (Ferguson 2005, 89), and thus examines sexuality as “an operation of power” (Ferguson 2005, 89). In doing so, all three scholars explore the value of queer studies in understanding empire, globalization, neoliberalism, and sovereignty (Eng et al. 2005), and thus examine queer epistemology in a way that permits the reconsideration of queer studies in relation to historical events of national importance.

Applications to Real or Imagined Project(s)

Eng, Ferguson, and Puar’s separate discussions concerning the emerging role of queer studies in investigating broad social concerns in association with particular historical moments are stimulating, and provide a basis for an exploration of the relationship between perceptions of queerness, notions of sexual normativity, and the establishment of national identity. While my project does not directly focus on queerness, and thus, while I am unsure if my emergent project will explicitly apply a queer theoretical lens to my research, I am interested in the way in which the disciplinary apparatus of the state interacts with the “rights obtained by individuals in their conflicts with central powers” (Eng 2010, 28), a discussion that provided the underlying foundation for the analyses presented by all three scholars. Thus, while I am not, as my research stands now, directly engaged with discussions of sexual identity and sexuality, the interest in the state apparatus that is in some way part of all the articles for this week is in an interesting concept, and is one that can certainly be applied to my emergent project. In turn, the readings for this week are useful in their generative encouragement to critically explore and engage with questions concerning the law, the state, and civil society, as well as the intersections between those three institutions/entities. I am not completely sure if this notion makes sense, but the relationship between collective rights and politics was something that I was mulling over, and is something that I’m sure will continue to develop as the semester progresses.

Discussion Question(s)

At the moment, however, I have been thinking about a few particular, inter-related questions –

In what ways can the theoretical perspectives and methodological objectives presented over the course of the articles for this week be applied to research that focuses not on particular historical moments, but on extant communities and ongoing events? To what extent does that potential application confound (or illuminate) questions concerning positionality, accountability, and validity in research?

Roderick Ferguson's "Of Our Normative Strivings: African American Studies and the Histories of Sexuality" explores sexuality as a racialized, classed, and gendered concept and tool for the exertion of power within or on a group.  His analysis of queer of color and women of color studies discusses how these disciplines find the definition of heterogeneity is an active process engaged by top down strategies from white powers and upper class of color as well as parallel efforts from all members of the group of color.  His article follows the historical development of black sexuality heteronormative formation especially during and after America's reconstruction period.  This heteronormative sexuality structuring was and is an act of economic security as well as control over membership, class, and citizenship.

Institutions for gendered education were constructed during the reconstruction era and justified through a philosophy that these gendered roles were an important foundation toward achieving economic stability within the newly enfranchised black community.  A stable black economy was also preached as a strategy for eliminating or at least decreasing separation between races because "money is money" and reaches beyond racial divides.  In order to achieve this promised racial equality, blacks needed to achieve economic power which was said to only be possible through this gendered structure of role division.

Sexuality was and is policed as an issue of morality and morality becomes another ticket into or out of a group with power.  Membership and citizenship are decided by what those in power see to be acceptable behavior versus what is not and "acceptable" has a relatively narrow definition.  We are still seeing the policing of sexuality and gender roles through practices like "midnight raids" on (especially) black women receiving welfare.  Sexuality is utilized as another tool of power that either legitimizes or delegitimizes a person's personal identity, economic stability, class affiliations, and citizenship status - socially as well as under the law.

Ferguson utilizes Foucault's Governmentality to discuss to examine how theories of power act activate "through the constitution of agency rather than the abolition of it" (p95), stating that the African American middle class saw an investment in conforming with the class in power's definition of sexuality as a strategy for liberation, citizenship and belonging.  In doing so they internalize the oppression from the white oppressor and become an active agent in oppressing sexuality within their own group.

A quote from one of the essays that Ferguson quotes on page 98 belies the black sentiment of reconstruction era heteronormative sexuality formation that has carried all the way into today's discussion on heteronormativity: "This should be a matter of grave concern to every Negro who has the future of the race at heart."  This statement is the clearest illustration of the flow of power through sexuality onto a people as a tool toward liberation.  It demands a responsibility of all individuals who desire membership or even citizenship to conform to a heteronormative construction of sexuality.  Within the statement there is almost a call to action to "get on board if you care" that simultaneously smacks of a guilt-trippy "if you are not with us, you're against us" attitude.

Discussion Question:
Since the manifestation of power through practices of sexuality permeate everything and every discipline, should we incorporate this into our research as another intersection or center as the starting point for examining the situation of all things in the US?

Queer of Color Methodologies- Alexia Bacon

This week’s readings center around the intersections of race and sexuality, more specifically they critique the concepts of race and sexuality in the context of nationalism and imperialism.  It is interesting to examine these concepts through the history that the researcher presents to the reader.  All the readings help form ideas around a broad lens of queerness around subjects that were not necessarily directly related to sexual identity. 

For me this weeks readings was lot to take in.  It is interesting to think about the large effects that imperialism has on not only nations identity, but individuals identity formation.  The readings also provide examples of intergenerational trauma that people of color suffer from based on being forced to turn their narratives into narratives that model the while male perspective. 

When relating this back to my own work it is important to understand these concepts and perspectives.  Working with diverse groups of young people it is important to understand various aspects that could possible make up there identity.  I also found it helpful to reflect on the histories discussed in the Ferguson reading, and the trauma that those histories weave into families. 

Discussion Question

·      What does research look like that uses queer of color methodologies, but is in disciplines that do not normally function within these lenses?

·      How could research and these methodologies benefit cultural relevancy within education?

Puar and Ferguson. Luca

Ferguson and Puar tackle and criticize liberalism and specifically the ways in which it works, by seemingly taking shapes of forms of protests that are instead completely included within the range and purview of liberalism, and its transformations (as in the case of neoliberalism).

Ferguson analyzes the African-American situation of today under Foucauldian lenses and he reminds us that “for Foucault, governmentality addresses the arrangement of things” and then adds that “in the gendered and sexualized context of nineteenth-century African American racial formations, governmentality was also about the production of things: here governmentality concerns not only the state but labor and industry as well. (p.95)” In particular he discusses how war and sexual normativity were tools to draft African American into citizenship and humanity.

He then posits that colonialism never really left the American landscape and the American cities. So those African-American social formations that wanted to be considered “elites” had to learn normative conservative strategies that were built specifically to regulate gender and sexual orientations and “imposing those tactics onto black poor and working-class folks (p.98).”

So for Ferguson African Americans were fundamental for the US state project of normalization. He connects capital, the state, and normative discourses of heteropatriarchy. So basically the non-normativity aspect is a part of a surplus population that capital requires, and that the normativity has to keep restrained. So, in a Foucauldian manner, Ferguson discusses how inclusion into normative discourses becomes a technique of discipline, that’s why he is interested in politics of negation as a way forward, which attempts to engage in heterogeneity as strength, and move away from static identity constructions. I like his analysis of the connection between normativity and state power and capital, even though I don’t think that governmentality is labor and industry as well, but that the State plays a big role in regulating those as well, precisely like Foucault suggested.

I think his piece ties in with Puar as well. She writes about how US imperialism acts in contingent ways to create and recreate assemblages that become gateways to embrace liberal queerness. Thus, she tries to move beyond the fixed nature of identities to problematize how a body works to enforce oppressions in order to escape its own (as in the case of torture male Sikh body, for example). She argues that “Intersectionality demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, generating narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative of identification: you become an identity, yes, but also timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every space (p.128).” In other words, identities work in a reified way when these are used as a justification for imperialist purposes, and they become a “mantra of liberal multiculturalism.”

I think her critique of intersectionality is very powerful if we use it to escape fixed notions of identities that tell a story which has no hint of differance and that might end up serving opposite causes and are used as “master” categories in others’ struggles.

My questions for Puar:

How can we define bodies without dehumanizing the people in question? How can overcome liberalism to find a real resistance that is not just a rearticulation of oppression? Is the category of exploitation a useful one if we think about relations of identities?