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?