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?