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.