Queer Assemblage (Hashim Ali)

Jasbir Puar’s article entitled “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages” makes a critical intervention in the field of South Asian queer diasporas by utilizing an assemblage framework. “Through am examination of queerness in various terrorist corporealities,” Puar mainly contends, “that queerness proliferate even, or especially, as they remain denied or unacknowledged by arguing that discourses of counterterrorism are intrinsically gendered, raced, sexualized and nationalized but also to demonstrate the production of normative patriot that cohere against and through queer terrorist corporealities” (Puar, 121). In her framework, the “turbaned” Sikh and Muslim terrorist, though seemingly disparate are contingent due to the discourse they produce. Thus, her method moves beyond the identity paradigm and embraces the contingencies and complicities of model minority exceptionalism with the discourses on U.S. exceptionalism in the post 9/11 moment.

Puar contextualizes the case study of Faisal Alam, director of international Muslim LGBTQ organization who gave several interviews in relation to the pornographic photographs of Arab prisoners at Abu-Ghraib scandal. Faisal read this event as the worst form of “sexual humiliation” faced by Islamic societies. Puar reads this as a generalized statement and Faisal’s role as a “native-informant” complicit with the project of U.S. sexual exceptionalism. Similarly, the mistaken identity attacks on turban wearing Sikhs based on their symbolic resemblance with Usama Bin Laden and the concurrent response adopted by Sikh community as emphasis on liberal education to emphasize “differentiated difference” between different minorities equally showcases their complicity as “model minority exceptionalism” with U.S. exceptionalism.

Instead, Puar offers a queer diaspora analytic that brings different groups and individuals together through affiliation not filial ties to their respective homelands. Puar asserts: “It is this shift from national and regional origin to corporeal affectivity—from South Asia as unifying homeland to the assemblage of the monster-terrorist-fag—in South Asia and in the diasporas, as they work together, that dislodges identity-based notions of queerness, thus problematizing queer diasporic exceptionalism but also motivating their exponential fortification and proliferation in the first place” (Puar, 136).

Discussion Questions:

1.     How is queer assemblage distinct from queer liberalism?

2.     What is Puar’s intervention in the queer diaspora in particular and South Asian diaspora in general?

3.     How should we evaluate Puar’s intervention? Is it a cultural critique, analytical optic or coalitional social justice paradigm?