puar k
1nc (surveillance)
Modern “superpanoptic” systems of surveillance convert bodies to easily
catalogued and controlled “data bodies”—this process induces gender conformity
Puar 14 Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University (Jasbir,
“Jasbir Puar: Regimes of Surveillance” 12/4/14, http://cosmologicsmagazine.com/jasbir-puarregimes-of-surveillance/) | js
Cosmologics: Key to much of your work is that surveillance is not simply a tool to maintain “security,” but is far more productive.
Could you expand on this, and especially on its relevance to the formation of various identities in America? Jasbir Puar: Much of my
work on surveillance has focused on technologies of surveillance as not only responsive and thus
repressive, but also as pre-emptive and thus productive. And many of these forms of surveillance
appear in neo-liberal models of security, model-minority racialization, proper modes of
masculine and feminine gender conformity, educational mandates, and patriotic citizenship. This
interest follows from Michel Foucault’s basic insight regarding “regimes of security” and how they operate in control societies
through an anticipatory temporality: in other words, controlling so that one does not have to repress. Regimes of
security also entail corralling greater numbers of populations into a collective project of surveillance. We have
seen, and continue to see, many examples of this post September 11th. The If You See Something, Say Something campaign on NYC
public transit interpellates the general public into service of the “greater good”; the NSEERS list impelled pre-emptive repatriation
(and sometimes migration to a country of origin that one had never been to) to South Asia and the Middle East; the Turban Is Not a
Hat campaign sought to educate Americans about the differences between Muslims and Sikhs by regulating the distinctions between
headwear, turbans, headscarves. Surveillance is not just about who the state is watching, but about
multiple circuits of collective surveillance: it’s not just about the act of seeing or noticing or
screening (bodies/identities), but also about acts of collecting, curating, and tabulating data and
affect. Surveillance doesn’t just modulate between inner/outer or public/private, but rather
upholds the fantasy that these discrete realms exisst, while working quite insidiously through
networks of gaze, data, and more. Even with forms of direct policing such as Stop and Frisk, the temporality of
surveilling is not just reactive, but also preemptive and increasingly, predictive. In surveillance studies, the
notion of the “superpanoptic” supplements the panoptic. The latter is a system through which the subject internalizes
the gaze of surveillance and the behavior of a docile body; the Superpanopticon, however, supplements
and sometimes precedes the Panopticon. It is a system through which data forms and announces the body,
producing a data body that may well show up before an actual body. After 9/11, the meme “Flying While
Brown” emerged in response to airport policies regarding Arab or Muslim-looking passengers and as a correlate to “Driving While
Black.” Flyers in U.S. with great compliance started throwing out their expensive toiletries and, since the “shoe bomber” incident,
taking off their shoes without reflection, a comment on the smooth inhabitation of new surveillance tactics. This kind of connective
analysis links various kinds of figures that emerge as targets of explicit surveillance to the on-going systems of surveillance that
bubble underneath. More recently, Global Entry, TSA Pre√, and other pay-as-you-go securitization programs allow you to pay for
your status as a non-security risk or terrorist threat. I’m very interested in these forms of pay-as-you-go surveillance systems that
neutralize you as a security risk. I think they allow for new fissures in the informational superpanoptic to develop, as people like
myself, who have traveled, for example, to Pakistan, Lebanon, and Palestine, have nonetheless paid to be certified as non-risky
travelers. The data body, composed of information, of qualitative and quantitative metrics,
supersedes the physical body. The data body does not replace the physical body, but cuts in front
of it, thus allowing a scrambling of class, race, and nation in particular.
The homonationalist state creates the illusion of privacy by curtailing
surveillance—this feigns acceptance of the “ideal” queer body while enabling the
exclusion of deviant bodies behind the scenes
Puar 14 Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University (Jasbir,
“Jasbir Puar: Regimes of Surveillance” 12/4/14, http://cosmologicsmagazine.com/jasbir-puarregimes-of-surveillance/) | js
Cosmologics: Writers have noted a shift in American surveillance after September 11th which in part refocused police efforts on
religious minorities. Could you speak a little more to this shift, and perhaps place it within a wider trajectory of surveillance in
America? Jasbir Puar: Much of the work in Terrorist Assemblages mapped out the dissolution of public/private divides
that have in the past animated feminist scholarship regarding the state and state intrusion into
the “private.” This private, as women of color and transnational feminists have pointed out, has never quite existed
given the level of state bureaucratic and administrative presence in the households of immigrants and people of
color. One interest of mine is connecting the securitization upsurge that occurred after 9/11 with the formation of Homeland
Security to both earlier and more recent discourses of security that revolve around the “home,” and in particular the home as
something private, national, and safe. So before the War on Terror we had the War on Drugs: this rationalized policing in the name
of safe homes, in Black communities in particular. The War on Drugs no doubt provided a domestic blueprint for the foreign
deployment enacted after September 11th. This is one connective point to 9/11. Another connective tissue to 9/11 is the financial
crisis of 2008, which was not a break from the securitization of the home and homeland, but a manifestation of one of its tactical
failures, that of securing the home economically. I think 2008 marks the end of the “post 9/11″ moment and re-complicates the
“Muslim terrorist” as the predominate target of surveillance technologies and discourses. Surveillance happens—obliquely, but it
happens—through the instrument of the sub-prime mortgage, whereby once again the security and safety of the home is determined
through the surveillance of those subjects deemed financially suspect. In this case, predominantly Black and Latino populations
were subject to foreclosures. Surveillance and securitization economies work through a sort of monetization of ontology—certain
bodies are intrinsically risky investments via a circular logic of precarity whereby these bodies
are set up as unable to take on risk in the very system that produces them as risky. This kind of
connective analysis links various kinds of figures that emerge as targets of explicit surveillance—in the case of 9/11, a religious figure,
the fundamentalist terrorist—to the on-going systems of surveillance that bubble underneath. One analysis that I offer in Terrorist
Assemblages is the irony of the decriminalization of sodomy in the Lawrence decision of 2004, a ruling that pivoted
around the privatization of anal (and thus homosexual) sex within the sanctity of the privatelyowned home. This was at a time when Homeland Security was requiring registration of men from Muslim countries,
infiltrating mosques, enacting home deportations—just generally disrupting and halting the construction of any
kind of private home. One interpretation, then, of who exactly the Lawrence decision protects is: not so
much the lesbian or gay or homosexual or queer subject, but rather one whose private home has
no reason to be suspected and is not suspicious. The construction of “intimacy,” as it is anchored
in the private, becomes instrumentalized within the calculus of biopolitics, a measure of one’s
worth to the state. The “democratization” of surveillance through networks of control demands
we pay even greater attention to the uneven distribution of disciplining, punishment, and
pleasure. Cosmologics: What frameworks have you found the most compelling for understanding the experience of surveillance
in ways more sensitive to lived reality, especially given the many ways we ourselves participate in surveillance? Jasbir Puar: I have
always been bemused about the debates regarding social media and privacy. Outrage over the intrusion of privacy practices on
Facebook and Twitter erupt with regularity. But rather than merely expressing discomfort and nostalgia about a long-gone protected
realm of the private, these debates also obfuscate an uncomfortable truth: that Facebook taps into our inner-stalker,
taps into the pleasures we revel in by surveilling others and by living out our own “privates” in
public. There is a kind of affective, technonationalist embrace of surveillance. So I think there is a
conversation yet to be had about pleasure and surveillance in relation to governmentality, policing, and biopolitics. This pleasure is
both afforded and sublimated in the directive to surveil on behalf of patriotism, the War on Terror, and “America.” Given the
ubiquity of surveillance in our everyday lives—we think nothing of pulling out cell phones to capture on video any number of events
that may unexpectedly unfold in front of us, from car accidents to incidents of police brutality to weather phenomena to gang rapes—
it then is hardly a stretch for a university administration (in this case, Rutgers University) to present the possibility of installing
cameras in classrooms as a protective measure and as the natural course of the normalization of surveillance. Of course, the
inhabitation of such pleasures is uneven and linked to the differential effects of surveillance upon different bodies and communities.
So the questions in front of us toggle between “who is being surveilled, and based on the assumption of what
political/dissident/deviant qualities?” to “is everyone being surveilled, and if so, what is done with the surveillance? How are
the lines drawn between pleasure and punishment?” The “democratization” of surveillance through networks of control demands we
pay even greater attention to the uneven distribution of disciplining, punishment, and pleasure. Gaza will be purportedly be
uninhabitable by year 2020—according to whose metric, and by which predictive, prehensive algorithms? Cosmologics: How do you
understand surveillance as having changed recently, and what do you see as the challenges it will pose in the future? Jasbir
Puar: One tendency I have also been tracking is the move from
responsive to pre-emptive to “prehensive”
securitization. The prehensive is a way of thinking about calculations of risk and the functioning of surveillance that considers
more than how surveillance potentially pre-empts unwanted outcomes through the disciplining of some as a warning to all, and
through the recruitment of the general populace in the task of watching. Rather the prehensive is about making the
present look exactly the way it needs to in order to guarantee a very specific and singular
outcome in the future.
Homonationalism has justified liberal interventions in foreign countries –
recreates biopolitics of the state controlling its population and violations of
freedom
Puar 13 - Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick,
N.J. (Jasbir, 2013, Rethinking Homonationalism, Int. J. Middle East Stud. 45 (2013) ) /AMarb
In my 2007 monograph Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (hereafter TA), I
develop the conceptual frame of
for understanding the complexities of how “acceptance” and “tolerance” for
gay and lesbian subjects have become a barometer by which the right to and capacity for
national sovereignty is evaluated.1 I had become increasingly frustrated with the standard refrain of transnational feminist discourse
“homonationalism”
as well as queer theories that unequivocally stated, quite vociferously throughout the 1990s, that the nation is heteronormative and that the queer is
inherently an outlaw to the nation-state. While
the discourse of American exceptionalism has always served a
vital role in U.S. nation-state formation, TA examines how sexuality has become a crucial formation in
the articulation of proper U.S. citizens across other registers like gender, class, and race, both
nationally and transnationally. In this sense, homonationalism is an analytic category deployed to
understand and historicize how and why a nation’s status as “gay-friendly” has become desirable
in the first place. Like modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we
are all conditioned by it and through it. In TA, for instance, I critically interrogate LGBTQ activist responses to the 2003
Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Lawrence, which decriminalized sodomy between consenting adults acting in private, bringing into relief how the
celebration of the queer liberal subject as bearer of privacy rights and economic freedom sanctions a regime of racialized surveillance, detention, and
homonationalism goes global , moreover, as it undergirds U.S. imperial
structures through an embrace of a sexually progressive multiculturalism justifying foreign
intervention . For example, both the justifications and the admonishments provoked by the Abu Ghraib photos rely on Orientalist
deportation. TA shows how
constructions of Muslim male sexuality as simultaneously excessively queer and dangerously premodern. The discursive field produced around Abu
Ghraib enlists homonormative U.S. subjects in the defense of “democratic” occupation. It
has been humbling and also very interesting to
see the ways homonationalism as a concept has been deployed, adapted, rearticulated, and critiqued in
various national, activist, and academic contexts; giving rise to generative and constructive debate was my true intent in writing the
book, which was derived not as a corrective but as an incitement to debate. The language of homonationalism is appearing
in academic and activist projects across North America, Europe, and now India. For example, a
Parisbased group called “No to Homonationalism” (Non a l’homonationalisme) is contesting the campaign
proposed for Gaypride in Paris because of its taking up of the national symbol of thewhite
rooster.2 A 2011 conference on sexual democracy in Rome took issue with the placement of World Pride in
the area of the city housing the highest percentage of migrants and staked a claim to a secular queer politics that
challenges the Vatican as well as the anti-migrant stance of European organizing entities. And as I
will discuss below, critical commentary on Israel’s gay-friendly public relations campaign coalesced into various
coordinated movements against “pinkwashing,” or Israel’s promotion of a LGTBQ-friendly image to reframe the occupation
of Palestine in terms of civilizational narratives measured by (sexual) modernity.3 At times the “ viral” travels of the concept of
homonationalism , as it has been taken up in North America, various European
states, Palestine/Israel, and India, have found reductive applications in activist organizing
platforms. Instead of thinking of homonationalism as an accusation, an identity, a bad politics, I have
been thinking about it as an analytic to apprehend state formation and a structure of
modernity: as an assemblage of geopolitical and historical forces, neoliberal interests in
capitalist accumulation both cultural and material, biopolitical state practices of
population control, and affective investments in discourses of freedom, liberation,
and rights. Homonationalism, thus, is not simply a synonym for gay racism, or another way to mark how gay and lesbian identities became
available to conservative political imaginaries; it is not another identity politics, not another way of distinguishing good queers from bad queers, not an
accusation, and not a position. It
is rather a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some)
homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental
reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality . To say
that this historical moment is homonational, where homonationalism is understood as an analytics of power, then, means that one must engage it in
the first place as the condition of possibility for national and transnational politics. Part of the increased recourse to domestication and privatization of
neoliberal economies and within queer communities, homonationalism
is fundamentally a deep critique of lesbian and gay
liberal rights discourses and how those rights discourses produce narratives of progress and modernity that
continue to accord some populations access to citizenship—cultural and legal—at the expense of the delimitation
and expulsion of other populations. The narrative of progress for gay rights is thus built on the back of
racialized others, for whom such progress was once achieved, but is now backsliding or has yet to arrive. I have thus theorized
homonationalism as an assemblage of de- and reterritorializing forces, affects, energies, and
movements. While the project arose within the post 9/11 political era of the United States, homonationalism is also an ongoing
process, one that in some sense progresses from the civil rights era and does not cohere only through
9/11 as a solitary temporal moment.
We propose being as the queer suicide terrorist before the law –an explosion of
self-sacrifice with a bomb, in favor of unsettling the violent definitions of
subjectivity. This is a complete refusal of western notions of subjectivity and a
universal humanity. We are machinic organisms, metal and environment together
in a messy fusion. Where does life begin and end? This question is only answerable
from a position of reason and power that we want to blow up.
Puar 07. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke
University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 216
The fact that we approach suicide bombing with such trepidation , in contrast to how we
approach the violence of colonial domination, indicates the symbolic violence that
shapes our understanding of what constitutes ethically and politically illegitimate
violence .- Ghassan Hage, "'Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm'"
Ghassan Hage wonders "why it is that suicide bombing cannot be talked about without being condemned first," noting that without
an unequivocal condemnation, one is a "morally suspicious person" because "only un- qualified condemnation will do." He asserts.
"There is a clear political risk in trying to explain suicide bombings."33 With such risks in mind,
my desire here is to momentarily suspend this dilemma by combining an analysis of these representational stakes with a reading of
the forces of affect, of the body, of matter. In pondering the modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a
pastiche of oddities: a body machined together through metal and flesh, an
assemblage of the organic and the inorganic; a death not of the Self nor of the Other,
but both simultaneously, and, perhaps more accurately, a death scene that obliterates
the Hegelian self/other dialectic altogether. Self-annihilation is the ultimate form of
resistance, and ironically, it acts as self-preservation, the preservation of symbolic self
enabled through the "highest cultural capital" of martyrdom, a giving of life to the future of
political struggles-not at all a sign of "disinterest in living a meaningful life." As Hage notes, in this
limited but nonetheless trenchant economy of meaning, suicide bombers are "a sign of life" emanating from
the violent conditions of life's impossibility, the "impossibility of making a life. "" This
body forces a reconciliation of opposites through their inevitable collapse- a perverse
habitation of contradiction.
Achille Mbembe's and brilliant meditation on necropolitics notes that the historical basis of sovereignty that is
reliant upon a notion of (western) political rationality begs for a more accurate framing: that of
life and death, the subjugation of life to the power of death. Mbembe attends not only to the representational
but also to the informational productivity of the (Palestinian) suicide bomber. Pointing to the becomings of a suicide
bomber, a corporeal experiential of "ballistics," he asks, "What place is given to life, death, and the
human body (especially the wounded or slain body)?" Assemblage here points to the inability
to clearly delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or molecular distinction between a
discrete biological body and technology; the entities, particles, and elements come
together, flow, break apart, interface, skim off each other, are never stable, but are
defined through their continual interface, not as objects meeting but as multiplicities
emerging from interactions. The dynamite strapped onto the body of a suicide bomber is not merely an appendage or
prosthetic; the intimacy of weapon with body reorients the assumed spatial integrity
(coherence and concreteness) and individuality of the body that is the mandate of
intersectional identities: instead we have the body-weapon . The ontology of the body
renders it a newly becoming body:
The candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the
soon-to-be-detonated weapon . Unlike the tank or the missile that is clearly visible, the weapon carried
in the shape of the body is invisible . Thus concealed, it forms part of the body . It is so
intimately part of the body that at the time of its detonation it annihilates the body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of
others when it does not reduce them to pieces. The body does not simply conceal a weapon. The
body is transformed
into a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in a truly ballistic sense .,1
Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and becoming fuse into
one: as one's body dies, one's body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide
bomber . Not only does the ballistic body come into being without the aid of visual cues
marking its transformation, it also "carries with it the bodies of others." Its own penetrative
energy sends shards of metal and torn flesh spinning off into the ether. The body-weapon does not play as
metaphor, nor in the realm of meaning and epistemology, but forces us ontologically anew to
ask: What kinds of information does the ballistic body impart? These bodies, being in the midst
of becoming, blur the insides and the outsides, infecting transformation through
sensation, echoing knowledge via reverberation and vibration . The echo is a queer
temporality-in the relay of affective information between and amid beings, the sequence of reflection, repetition, resound, and
return (but with a difference, as in mimicry)-and brings forth waves of the future breaking into the present. Gayatri Spivak, prescient
in drawing our attention to the multivalent tex- tuality of suicide in "Can the Subaltern Speak," reminds us in her latest ruminations
that suicide
terrorism is a modality of expression and communication for the subaltern
(there is the radiation of heat, the stench of burning flesh, the impact of metal upon structures
and the ground, the splattering of blood, body parts, skin):
Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and
mourning, for both self and other . For you die with me for the same cause, no matter
which side you are on . Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter
what side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you won't respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such
shared and innocent death. 36
We have the proposal that there are no sides, and that the sides are forever shifting,
crumpling, and multiplying, disappearing and reappearing, unable to satisfactorily
delineate between here and there . The spatial collapse of sides is due to the queer
temporal interruption of the suicide bomber, projectiles spewing every which way . As
a queer assemblage - distinct from the queering of an entity or identity- race and sexuality are
denaturalized through the impermanence, the transience of the suicide bomber, the
fleeting identity replayed backward through its dissolution . This dissolution of self
into others and other into self not only effaces the absolute mark of self and others
in the war on terror, but produces a systemic challenge to the entire order of
Manichaean rationality that organizes the rubric of good versus evil. Delivering "a message
inscribed on the body when no other means will get through," suicide bombers do not transcend or claim the rational nor accept the
demarcation of the irrational. Rather, they foreground the flawed temporal, spatial, and ontological pre- sumptions upon which such
Organic and inorganic, flesh and machine, these wind up as important
as (and perhaps as threatening) if not more so than the symbolism of the bomber and his
or her defense or condemnation.
distinctions flourish.
Figure 24 is the November/December 2004 cover of a magazine called Jest: Humor for the Irreverent, distributed for free in
Brooklyn (see also jest .com) and published by a group of counterculture artists and writers. Here we have the full force of the
mistaken identity conundrum: the distinctive silhouette, indeed the profile, harking to the visible by literally blacking it out, of the
turbaned Amritdhari Sikh male (Le., turban and unshorn beard that signals baptized Sikhs), rendered (mistakenly?) as a (Muslim)
suicide bomber, replete with dynamite through the vibrant pulsations of an iPod ad. Fully modern, animated through technologies of
sound and explosives, this body does not operate solely or even primarily on the level of metaphor. Once again, to borrow from
Mbembe, it is truly a ballistic body.
Contagion, infection, and transmission reign, not meaning.
1nc (identity)
Their conception of embodiment and identity presumes an intersection of
positions from which to demand accountability—this rendering of the social field
reproduces disciplinary power and locks us into the grid of positionality,
preventing change
Puar 7. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke
University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 211
There is no entity, no identity, no queer subject or subject to queer, rather queerness
coming forth at us from all directions, screaming its defiance, suggesting a move from
intersectionality to assemblage, an affective conglomeration that recognizes other
contingencies of belonging (melding, fusing, viscosity, bouncing) that might not fall so easily into what is
sometimes denoted as reactive community formations-identity politics-by control
theorists. The assemblage, a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks,
draws together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, organic and nonorganic forces.
For Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are collections of multiplicities:
There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in
the object, or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only
determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the
multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase as the multiplicity grows ).... An assemblage
is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.
There are no points or positions.... There are only lines.21
As opposed to an intersectional model of identity, which presumes that components-race,
class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion-are separable analytics and can thus be
disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate
time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency.22 Intersectionality demands
the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, relying on the
logic of equivalence and analogy between various axes of identity and generating narratives of
progress that deny the fictive and performative aspects of identification: you become an identity,
yes, but also timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every
space. Furthermore, the study of intersectional identities often involves taking imbricated
identities apart one by one to see how they influence each other, a process that betrays the
founding impulse of intersectionality, that identities cannot so easily be cleaved. We can think of
intersectionality as a hermeneutic of positionality that seeks to account for locality, specificity, placement, junctions. As a tool
of diversity management and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism, intersectionality
colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state- census, demography, racial
profiling, surveillance- in that "difference" is encased within a structural container that simply
wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic grid, producing analogies in its wake and
engendering what Massumi names "gridlock": a "box[ing] into its site on the culture map." He
elaborates:
The idea of positionality begins by subtracting movement from the picture. This catches the
body in cultural freeze-frame. The point of explanatory departure is a pin-pointing, a zero point
of stasis. When positioning of any kind comes a determining first, movement comes a
problematic second .... Of course, a body occupying one position on the grid might succeed in
making a move to occupy another position.... But this doesn't change the fact that what defines the body is
not the movement itself, only its beginnings and endpoints.... There is "displacement," but no
transformation; it is as if the body simply leaps from one definition to the next. ... "The space of
the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical no-man's land."B
Many feminists, new social movement theorists, critical race theorists, and queer studies
scholars have argued that social change can occur only through the precise accountability to
and for position/ing. But identity is unearthed by Massumi as the complexity of process sacrificed
for the "surety" of product. In the stillness of position, bodies actually lose their capacity for
movement, for flow, for (social) change. Highlighting the "paradoxes of passage and position,"
Massumi makes the case for identity appearing as such only in retrospect: a "retrospective
ordering" that can only be "working backwards from the movement's end." Again from Massumi:
"Gender, race and sexual orientation also emerge and back-form their reality, ... Grids happen.
So social and cultural determinations feed back into the process from which they
arose. Indeterminacy and determination, change and freeze-framing, go together."24
That ultimately positions the 1ac as a will to truth that fixes subjects in place and
enables the logic of the war on terror. Assemblages are a prior question because
they constitute the field of emergence for subjectivities.
Puar 7. Jasbir, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke University
Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 214
Linked to this is what Massumi calls "ontogenetic difference" or "ontogenetic priority," a concept
that rescripts temporality exterior to the sheer administrative units that are mobilized to capture
the otherwise unruly processes of a body:
To say that passage and indeterminancy "come first" or "are primary" is more a statement of
ontological priority than the assertion of a time sequence. They have ontological privilege in the
sense that they constitute the field of emergence, while positionings are what emerge. The
trick is to express that priority in a way that respects the inseparability and
contemporaneousness of the disjunct dimensions: their ontogenetic difference.
And later: "The field of emergence is not pre-social. It is open-endedly social. ... One of the things
that the dimension of change is ontogenetically 'prior to' is thus the very distinction between
individual and the collective, as well as any given model of their interaction. That interaction is precisely what takes
form."' The given models of interaction would be these bifurcated distinctions between the body and the social (its signification)
such that the distinctions disappear. Massumi's move from ontology (being, becoming) to ontogenesis is also relevant to how he
discusses affect and cognition and the processes of the body: "Feedback and feed forward, or recursivity, in
addition to converting distance into intensity, folds the dimensions of time into each other . The
field of emergence of experience has to be thought of as a space-time continuum, as an
ontogenetic dimension prior to the separating-out of space and time. Linear time, like positiongridded space, would be emergent qualities of the event of the world's self- relating. " 2 7
This ontogenetic dimension that is "prior" but not "pre" claims its priorness not through
temporality but through its ontological status as that which produces fields of emergence; the
prior and the emergence are nevertheless "contemporaneous." "Ontological priority" is a temporality and a
spatialization that has yet to be imagined, a property more than a bounded- ness by space and time. The ontogenetic dimension that
articulates or occupies multiple temporalities of vectors and planes is also that which enables an emergent bifurcation of time and
space.
Identity is one of affect, a capture that proposes what one is by masking its retrospective
ordering and thus its ontogenetic dimension- what one was- through the guise of an illusory
futurity: what one is and will continue to be . However, this is anything but a relay between
stasis and flux; position is but one derivative of systems in constant motion, lined with erratic
trajectories and unruly projectiles. If the ontogenetic dimensions of affect render affect as prior
to representation-prior to race, class, gender, sex, nation, even as these categories might be the
most pertinent mapping of or reference back to affect itself-how might identity-as-retrospectiveordering amplify rather than inhibit praxes of political organizing? If we transfer our energy, our
turbulence, our momentum from the defense of the integrity of identity and submit instead to this affective
ideation of identity, what kinds of political strategies, of "politics of the open end,""
might we unabashedly stumble upon? Rather than rehashing the pros and cons of identity
politics, can we think instead of affective politics?
Displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or tangibly evidentthe seemingly queer body in a "cultural freeze-frame" of sorts-assemblages allow us to attune to
movements, intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures as they inhabit events,
spatiality, and corporealities. Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation,
and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information.
Further, in the sway from disciplinary societies (where the panoptic "functioned primarily in terms
of positions, fixed points, and identities") to control societies, the diagram of control, Michael Hardt
writes, is "oriented toward mobility and anonymity. . . . The flexible and mobile performances of
contingent identities, and thus its assemblages or institutions are elaborated primarily through
repetition and the production of simulacra. "29 Assemblages are thus crucial conceptual
tools that allow us to acknowledge and comprehend power beyond disciplinary
regulatory models, where "particles, and not parts, recombine, where forces, and not
categories, clash. "30
Most important, given the heightened death machine aspect of nationalism in our contemporary political terrain-a heightened
sensorial and anatomical domination indispensable to Mbembe's necropolitics-assemblages work against narratives
of U.S. exceptionalism that secure empire, challenging the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies
that inform practices of state surveillance and control and befuddling the "us versus them"
of the war on terror. (On a more cynical note, the recent work of Eyal Weizman on the use of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze,
Felix Guattari, and Guy Debord by the Israeli Defense Forces demonstrates that we cannot afford to ignore concepts such as war
For
while intersectionality and its underpinnings- an unrelenting epistemological will
to truth- presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely
anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever, assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal
of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for
becoming beyond or without being.32
machines and machinic assemblages, as they are already heavily cultivated as instructive tactics in military strategy.)
The impact to our argument is the revolutionary line of flight of the 1AC becoming
a line of death – this is the moment in which revolutionary movements turn
inward and destroy themselves, the passion for complete abolition.
Koerner 11. Michelle Koerner, professor of women’s studies at Duke, “Lines of Escape: Gilles
Deleuze’s Encounter with George Jackson,” Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 pg. 164
Writing
On the first page of the provocatively titled essay “On the Superiority of Anglo- American
Literature,” Jackson’s line is once again deployed, but here it is in reference to the idea that the
“highest aim of literature” is to escape (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 26). An interesting
convergence occurs here between political and aesthetic practices, suggesting an
indiscernibility between the two insofar as both effectuate becomings. Genet had already made a similar
point in describing Soledad Brother as a “poem of love and combat,” but deploying Jackson with respect to the question of
literature as such, this essay invites us to rethink a more profound relation between blackness and writing.
At some distance from traditional Marxist theory, Deleuze and Parnet insist we reject any account
of literature
as an “imaginary representation” of real conditions (literature as ideology) in order to
consider writing as a production at the level of real conditions.10 Writing, which is to say the
unleashing of the creative force of becoming in language (a line of flight), is not finally
reducible to already existing historical conditions, because such an act involves the
production of new conditions. Literature, as they underscore, is driven by a desire to liberate
what existing conditions seek to govern, block, capture; as such, it asserts a force in the world
that existing conditions would otherwise reduce to nonexistence.
Such formulations enable a radical assertion: Soledad
Brother, insofar as Jackson’s letters defy the prison
system and the arrangement of a social order defined by the criminalization and capture of
blackness, escapes what would otherwise be thought of as the historical conditions of its
production . Jackson’s writing gains its real force by a total refusal to adjust to existing conditions of capture, enslavement,
and incarceration. And it does so concretely by rejecting the subjectivity produced by the
structures of what Genet, in his introduction to the letters, called the “enemy’s language” (Jackson [1970]
1994: 336). Jackson (ibid.: 190, 305) himself underscores this dimension of the letters several times, remarking, “I
work on words,” and more precisely describing an operation by which the intensities of black
resistance come to be expressed in writing: “We can connect the two, feeling and writing, just
drop the syntax” (ibid.: 331). The specific feeling invoked here is linked first to Jackson’s total rejection of the terms of
captive society—“the feeling of capture . . . this slave can never adjust to it” (ibid.: 40) — but it further affirms a
connection to the “uncounted generations” of enslaved black labor: “I feel all they ever felt, but
double” (ibid.: 233). In dropping the syntax, Jackson describes a method for rearticulating the
relationship between the historical experience of capture (and the multiplicity of feeling
carried across the passage) and the feeling of that experience.
In his introduction to Soledad Brother, Genet focuses almost entirely on how Jackson’s use of language could be
understood as a “weapon” precisely because Jackson’s lines were shot through with such
violent hatred of the “words and syntax of his enemy” that he “has only one recourse: to
accept this language but to corrupt it so skillfully the whites will be caught in his trap”
(ibid.: 336).11 In corrupting the “words and syntax” of domination, one directly attacks the
“conditions that destroy life,” because language is here considered a mechanism by which
one’s thought, agency, relations, and subjectivity are “caught” by Power. As can be seen, this idea is
not one that Genet imports into Soledad Brother. Rather, these are ideas that Jackson himself has already
emphasized. Jackson’s “minor use” of a standard, major language thus contributes to Deleuze
and Guattari’s understanding of literature. This is to say that, while commonly associated with Franz
Kafka, the very notion of “minor literature” is also linked to the encounter between black
radicalism and French philosophy in the early 1970s.
The connection forged between writing and feeling in Jackson’s letters sug- gests that the production of resistant
subjectivities always involves a dismantling of the dominant order of language. To “drop the
syntax” names a strategy for forcibly rearranging existing relations. But such a strategy also
implies that one releases something else, specifically the affective force of what resists those
relations. Writing here becomes the “active discharge of emotion, the counterattack”
(Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 400). Or put differently, writing becomes a weapon .12
When Deleuze (1997: 143) states that “in the act of writing there’s an attempt to make life something more
than personal, of freeing life wherever it’s imprisoned,” he seems to refer to something
exceedingly abstract, but Jackson’s letters concretely assert writing as a freeing of life—of
blackness—from the terms of racist imprisonment. As we will see, Jackson twists and pulls on
the joints of language itself, quite literally seizing on the standard syntax until it breaks. In
doing so, what Jackson describes as his “completely informal” style makes language an open
field shot-through with fugitive uses (Jackson [1970] 1994: 208). Writing becomes an
expression of thought on the run, a way of mapping escape routes and
counterattacks that cannot be adequately understood in terms of structure or an
understanding of language as an invariable system.
But escaping the existing dominant social order on “lines of flight” — given the volatile intensities they assert
in the world — carries a real danger . In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 229) note the risk
of “the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of
connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turns to destruction,
abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition .” Here, a restricted concept of
abolition, understood simply as the destruction of the existing social order, runs the risk
of transforming the “line of flight” into a line of death . For this reason the issue of escape must
not stop at negation “pure and simple” but become one of construction and the
affirmation of life . And it is for this reason that the effort to connect “lines of flight” and to compose
consistencies across these lines becomes a matter of politics: an affirmation of a politics of
reconstruction as the immanent condition of abolition. Jackson ([1970] 1994: 328) wrote from prison:
“ Don’t mistake this as a message from George to Fay. It’s a message from the hunted
running blacks to those people of this society who profess to want to change the
conditions that destroy life.” A collective imperative determines the reading of these letters—namely, the necessity
to put them in connection with other lines. The circulation of these letters in France during the 1970s offers
a compelling example of how Jackson’s message insinuated itself into what would seem an
unlikely arrangement of French philosophy in the 1970s. Yet it is precisely in understanding that
moment in French thought as an effort to “change conditions that destroy life” that we
gain a sense of how Jackson’s book arrives at its expressly stated destination. In making the
connection between Jackson’s line and the lines of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and
his coauthors can be said to have gotten the message.
We propose being as the queer suicide terrorist before the law –an explosion of
self-sacrifice with a bomb, in favor of unsettling the violent definitions of
subjectivity. This is a complete refusal of western notions of subjectivity and a
universal humanity. We are machinic organisms, metal and environment together
in a messy fusion. Where does life begin and end? This question is only answerable
from a position of reason and power that we want to blow up.
Puar 07. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke
University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 216
The fact that we approach suicide bombing with such trepidation , in contrast to how we
approach the violence of colonial domination, indicates the symbolic violence that
shapes our understanding of what constitutes ethically and politically illegitimate
violence .- Ghassan Hage, "'Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm'"
Ghassan Hage wonders "why it is that suicide bombing cannot be talked about without being condemned first," noting that without
an unequivocal condemnation, one is a "morally suspicious person" because "only un- qualified condemnation will do." He asserts.
"There is a clear political risk in trying to explain suicide bombings."33 With such risks in mind,
my desire here is to momentarily suspend this dilemma by combining an analysis of these representational stakes with a reading of
the forces of affect, of the body, of matter. In pondering the modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a
pastiche of oddities: a body machined together through metal and flesh, an
assemblage of the organic and the inorganic; a death not of the Self nor of the Other,
but both simultaneously, and, perhaps more accurately, a death scene that obliterates
the Hegelian self/other dialectic altogether. Self-annihilation is the ultimate form of
resistance, and ironically, it acts as self-preservation, the preservation of symbolic self
enabled through the "highest cultural capital" of martyrdom, a giving of life to the future of
political struggles-not at all a sign of "disinterest in living a meaningful life." As Hage notes, in this
limited but nonetheless trenchant economy of meaning, suicide bombers are "a sign of life" emanating from
the violent conditions of life's impossibility, the "impossibility of making a life. "" This
body forces a reconciliation of opposites through their inevitable collapse- a perverse
habitation of contradiction.
Achille Mbembe's and brilliant meditation on necropolitics notes that the
historical basis of sovereignty that is
reliant upon a notion of (western) political rationality begs for a more accurate framing: that of
life and death, the subjugation of life to the power of death. Mbembe attends not only to the representational
but also to the informational productivity of the (Palestinian) suicide bomber. Pointing to the becomings of a suicide
bomber, a corporeal experiential of "ballistics," he asks, "What place is given to life, death, and the
human body (especially the wounded or slain body)?" Assemblage here points to the inability
to clearly delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or molecular distinction between a
discrete biological body and technology; the entities, particles, and elements come
together, flow, break apart, interface, skim off each other, are never stable, but are
defined through their continual interface, not as objects meeting but as multiplicities
emerging from interactions. The dynamite strapped onto the body of a suicide bomber is not merely an appendage or
prosthetic; the intimacy of weapon with body reorients the assumed spatial integrity
(coherence and concreteness) and individuality of the body that is the mandate of
intersectional identities: instead we have the body-weapon . The ontology of the body
renders it a newly becoming body:
The candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the
soon-to-be-detonated weapon . Unlike the tank or the missile that is clearly visible, the weapon carried
in the shape of the body is invisible . Thus concealed, it forms part of the body . It is so
intimately part of the body that at the time of its detonation it annihilates the body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of
others when it does not reduce them to pieces. The body does not simply conceal a weapon. The
body is transformed
into a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in a truly ballistic sense .,1
Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and becoming fuse into
one: as one's body dies, one's body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide
bomber . Not only does the ballistic body come into being without the aid of visual cues
marking its transformation, it also "carries with it the bodies of others." Its own penetrative
energy sends shards of metal and torn flesh spinning off into the ether. The body-weapon does not play as
metaphor, nor in the realm of meaning and epistemology, but forces us ontologically anew to
ask: What kinds of information does the ballistic body impart? These bodies, being in the midst
of becoming, blur the insides and the outsides, infecting transformation through
sensation, echoing knowledge via reverberation and vibration . The echo is a queer
temporality-in the relay of affective information between and amid beings, the sequence of reflection, repetition, resound, and
return (but with a difference, as in mimicry)-and brings forth waves of the future breaking into the present. Gayatri Spivak, prescient
in drawing our attention to the multivalent tex- tuality of suicide in "Can the Subaltern Speak," reminds us in her latest ruminations
that suicide
terrorism is a modality of expression and communication for the subaltern
(there is the radiation of heat, the stench of burning flesh, the impact of metal upon structures
and the ground, the splattering of blood, body parts, skin):
Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and
mourning, for both self and other . For you die with me for the same cause, no matter
which side you are on . Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter
what side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you won't respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such
shared and innocent death. 36
We have the proposal that there are no sides, and that the sides are forever shifting,
crumpling, and multiplying, disappearing and reappearing, unable to satisfactorily
delineate between here and there . The spatial collapse of sides is due to the queer
temporal interruption of the suicide bomber, projectiles spewing every which way . As
a queer assemblage - distinct from the queering of an entity or identity- race and sexuality are
denaturalized through the impermanence, the transience of the suicide bomber, the
fleeting identity replayed backward through its dissolution . This dissolution of self
into others and other into self not only effaces the absolute mark of self and others
in the war on terror, but produces a systemic challenge to the entire order of
Manichaean rationality that organizes the rubric of good versus evil. Delivering "a message
inscribed on the body when no other means will get through," suicide bombers do not transcend or claim the rational nor accept the
demarcation of the irrational. Rather, they foreground the flawed temporal, spatial, and ontological pre- sumptions upon which such
Organic and inorganic, flesh and machine, these wind up as important
as (and perhaps as threatening) if not more so than the symbolism of the bomber and his
or her defense or condemnation.
distinctions flourish.
Figure 24 is the November/December 2004 cover of a magazine called Jest: Humor for the Irreverent, distributed for free in
Brooklyn (see also jest .com) and published by a group of counterculture artists and writers. Here we have the full force of the
mistaken identity conundrum: the distinctive silhouette, indeed the profile, harking to the visible by literally blacking it out, of the
turbaned Amritdhari Sikh male (Le., turban and unshorn beard that signals baptized Sikhs), rendered (mistakenly?) as a (Muslim)
suicide bomber, replete with dynamite through the vibrant pulsations of an iPod ad. Fully modern, animated through technologies of
sound and explosives, this body does not operate solely or even primarily on the level of metaphor. Once again, to borrow from
Mbembe, it is truly a ballistic body.
Contagion, infection, and transmission reign, not meaning.
link – immigration surveillance
Homonationalist states only tolerate queer bodies that are also economically
valuable—policies towards unskilled workers maintain heteronormativity
Oswin 14 Professor of Geography at McGill University (Natalie, Sexualities, “Queer time in
global city Singapore: Neoliberal futures and the ‘freedom to love’” p. 424 – 427, 2014,
http://sex.sagepub.com/content/17/4/412.full.pdf) | js
With this invitation to naturalization, the government shows a willingness to change the complexion of the
national family, literally as well as figuratively. It positions migrants as no longer simply productive, but
also socially reproductive members of the city-state, stating: You and your family members have benefited from
what Singapore has to offer, just as Singapore has progressed and prospered with your labour and contributions. It is time to take a
step further and become a part of the Singapore family. (Singapore Immigration and Checkpoints Authority, 2007) This is another
one of those controversial moves that the PAP is willing to make for the sake of continued prosperity and economic growth. As the
immigrant population swells, worries over employment prospects for non-immigrant Singaporeans, rising income gaps and the
nature of Singapore identity in this new cosmopolis have been well articulated in local public discourse. Indeed, popular displeasure
over this new position on immigration is acknowledged as one of several related reasons why the PAP had its worst ever showing in
the 2011 general election.15 Included among those voicing their dissatisfaction are members of the LGBT
community. They are troubled by the possibility that the new official stance of tolerance towards
homosexuality is merely a pragmatic move to placate the presumed desire of ‘foreign talent’ for a
diverse urban experience and, further, they take issue with the fact that while Singaporean gays and
lesbians are denied full citizenship, foreign migrants – particularly those forming heterosexual
families – are invited in to help reproduce the nation, cast as harbingers of a bright future for the
city-state (see CKK Tan, 2009; KP Tan, 2007). But there are other ‘queer’ issues at stake here. The Singapore government’s push for
the naturalization of immigrants is selective. Only certain immigrants are encouraged to naturalize and
suitability is determined in direct relation to immigration category. The desired potential ‘new
immigrants’ are, in short, ‘foreign talent’, the local immigration category for highly skilled labour migrants.
Meanwhile, although government discourse has 424 Sexualities 17(4) Downloaded from sex.sagepub.com by guest on July 25, 2015
centred on the need to bring ‘talent’ to the city-state, efforts to become a leading creative city have facilitated a much larger influx of
‘foreign workers’, the Singapore government’s term for less skilled migrants.16 This latter group of migrants hails from
such countries as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh. They work largely in the domestic service, retail, and
construction sectors of the economy, and, in contrast to ‘foreign talent’, they are definitely not part of the
government’s long-term population plan, no matter how low the fertility rate gets (Yeoh, 2006; Yeoh and Chang,
2001). As Lee Kuan Yew has stated, ‘Foreign talent will create more jobs for Singaporeans, while foreign workers will do jobs locals
avoid and bear the brunt of layoffs in a recession’ (Straits Times, 2007). They are cast as instrumental for and supplemental to
Singapore society, and are most definitely not seen as worthy of incorporation or integration. As such, in a range of ways, the latter
group is allowed only a ‘furtive presence’ within the city-state in contrast to the comparative rootedness enjoyed by ‘foreign talent’
(Teo and Piper, 2009: 150). Most significantly, ‘foreign workers’ cannot naturalize. Further, they may not buy or rent public or
private housing. Male workers are required to live in employer-provided dormitories that are cordoned off in various ways from
surrounding neighbourhoods. Female domestic workers must live in often cramped quarters in their employers’ homes, and their
mobility outside the home is severely curtailed as employers fear that ‘maids’ will run off and their bond paid to the government for
the employees’ work pass will be forfeited (Yeoh and Huang, 2010). If allowed a day off, ‘foreign workers’ gather in particular public
areas that Singaporeans generally avoid, deriding them as ‘physically and socially polluted landscapes’ (Yeoh and Huang, 1998).17 In
short, through a range of disciplinary mechanisms, ‘foreign workers’ are cast as inevitably alien and in need of
strict surveillance and social control. Much existing critical scholarship interrogates this ‘foreign talent’/’foreign
worker’ distinction (Kitiarsa, 2008; Poon, 2009; Teo and Piper, 2009; Yeoh, 2006). This work focuses usefully on the class,
race and gender biases underpinning this unjust labour regime. It examines the coming together of elitism,
essentialist notions of multiculturalism, and portrayal of low-skilled work as feminized to ‘other’ ‘foreign workers’. These are useful
explanations. But they are unduly partial. For they ignore the fact that, as Eithne Luibhe´id argues, ‘sexuality,
heteronormativity and normalizing regimes in general structure all aspects of immigration’
(Luibheid, 2004: 233; also see Manalansan, 2006). In Singapore, the differentiation of these two categories of
immigrants hinges crucially on the starkly different ways in which their intimate lives are
regulated. While ‘foreign talent’ is invited into the city-state to help reproduce the nation, the
permanently extra-national state of ‘foreign workers’ is achieved in large part through their
exclusion from the institution of the family. As the Employment of Foreign Employees Act states: the foreign
employee shall not go through any form of marriage or apply to marry under any law, religion, custom or usage
with a Singapore Citizen or Permanent Oswin 425 Downloaded from sex.sagepub.com by guest on July 25, 2015 Resident
in or outside Singapore ...If the foreign employee is a female foreign employee, the foreign employee shall not become pregnant or
deliver any child in Singapore during and after the validity of her Work Permit...The foreign employee shall not be involved in any
illegal, immoral or undesirable activities, including breaking up families in Singapore. (Singapore Ministry of Manpower, 2009)
The undesirability of the ‘foreign worker’ is thus quite literal as their abjection is a factor of
sexual regulation at least in part. Further, frequent portrayals in the Singapore media sensationalize sexual
relationships among foreign workers as ‘deviant’ and there is much evidence that the perception of their domestic
lives as non-normative domestic lives affects public sentiment. For instance, a national controversy in 2008 occurred when residents
of an affluent private housing estate presented a petition to the government in objection to a plan to convert an unused former
school into a dormitory for foreign workers. As much public debate ensued, concerns raised by the residents and interested
commentators centred around assertions that housing workers in the unused school would lead to higher crime rates, an unclean
environment, changes to the character of the neighbourhood, and conflicts between Singaporeans and foreign workers because of
‘cultural differences’. Within these debates, it is significant that the fact that the workers to be housed were all male and without
families came up again and again, especially in response to criticisms that the residents welcome ‘foreign talent’ but not ‘foreign
workers’. As one commentator on the Straits Times forum page put it: the expats arrive here with their families and they put their
children in schools here. Foreign workers are in a ‘bachelor’ state without their family. They are grouped together, single men in
dormitories. The situation is entirely different. The connotations emanating from foreign single men living in dorms in an estate
which is predominantly family-oriented is only too obvious.18 Thus, ‘foreign workers’ are not excluded on the sole ground that
they are either women or feminized men, or on the sole ground that they are racial or national others. Their exclusion takes
force through ‘queering’, through their production as others who are not allowed into the family,
either national or nuclear.19 ‘Foreign workers’ in Singapore do of course exert agency. They manage to eke out intimate
relationships in the constrained spaces available, and they often maintain strong bonds to families left behind. But, as stated by Mr
Dulal, a Bangladeshi migrant quoted in a rare article in Singapore’s mainstream local press on the difficulties that ‘foreign workers’
experience locally because of their enforced existence outside the sphere of the family, ‘Singapore love is all bluff bluff one!’ (Straits
Times, 2009). Their relationships fall outside state sanction, and this is a fact that has real material
consequences. Further, ‘foreign workers’ are of course not a monolithic group of heterosexual
subjects. There are surely many queers, in an identarian or actbased sense, among them. But despite this empirical reality, the
salient point is that 426 Sexualities 17(4) Downloaded from sex.sagepub.com by guest on July 25, 2015 the Singapore
government regulates them as presumably ‘straight’ figures that nonetheless do not factor into the
dominant notion of reproductive futurism. ‘Foreign workers’, like gays and lesbians, are cast as only
productive and not socially reproductive.20 This relegates this class of migrants to a state of
arrested development, to lives lived asynchronously and out of place in this creative/global city. As Nayan Shah
argues, ‘transient laborers appear to exist on the margins of society, but their treatment is
constitutive of how normative society defines itself’ (2011: 266). In the Singapore case, normative society
defines itself as properly familial. But around that centre, many are stranded in queer time.
link – identity
They merely shift the focus of normativity, this reinforces binaries upholding
heteronormativity and patriotism
Jasbir Puar, 10-26-2007, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers
University, Ph.D in Ethnic studies, "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times,"
Drake University Press.
Sexual deviancy is linked to the process of discerning, othering, and quarantining terrorist
bodies, but these racially and sexually perverse figures also labor in the service of disciplining
and normalizing subjects worthy of rehabilitation away from these bodies, in other words,
signaling and enforcing the mandatory terms of patriotism. In this double deployment, the
emasculated terrorist is not merely an other, but also a barometer of ab/normality involved in
disciplinary apparatuses. Leti Volpp suggests, ‘‘September 11 facilitated the consolidation of a
new identity category that groups together persons who appear ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or
Muslim.’ This consolidation reflects a racialization wherein members of this group are identified
as terrorists, and are dis-identified as citizens.’’≥ This disidentification is a process of
sexualization as well as of a racialization of religion. But the terrorist figure is not merely
racialized and sexualized; the body must appear improperly racialized (outside the norms of
multiculturalism) and perversely sexualized in order to materialize as the terrorist in the first
place. Thus the terrorist and the person to be domesticated—the patriot— are not distant,
oppositional entities, but ‘‘close cousins.’’∂ Through this binary-reinforcing ‘‘you’re either with
us or against us’’ normativizing apparatus, the war on terror has rehabilitated some—clearly not
all or most—lesbians, gays, and queers to U.S. national citizenship within a spatial-temporal
domain I am invoking as ‘‘homonationalism,’’ short for ‘‘homonormative nationalism.’’
Homonormativity has been theorized by Lisa Duggan as a ‘‘new neo-liberal sexual politics’’ that
hinges upon ‘‘the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized
gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.’’ Building on her critique of gay subjects
embroiled in ‘‘a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative forms but upholds and
sustains them,’’∑ I am deploying the term homonationalism to mark arrangements of U.S.
sexual exceptionalism explicitly in relation to the nation. Foucault notes that the legitimization
of the modern couple is complicit with, rather than working against, the ‘‘outfitting’’ and
proliferation of compartmental, circulating, and proximity-surveillance sexualities, pursued
pleasures and contacts. We see simultaneously both the fortification of normative heterosexual
coupling and the propagation of sexualities that mimic, parallel, contradict, or resist this
normativity. These proliferating sexualities, and their explicit and implicit relationships to
nationalism, complicate the dichotomous implications of casting the nation as only supportive
and productive of heteronormativity and always repressive and disallowing of homosexuality. I
argue that the Orientalist invocation of the terrorist is one discursive tactic that disaggregates
U.S. national gays and queers from racial and sexual others, foregrounding a collusion between
homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of
patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves: homonationalism. For
contemporary forms of U.S. nationalism and patriotism, the production of gay and queer bodies
is crucial to the deployment of nationalism, insofar as these perverse bodies reiterate
heterosexuality as the norm but also because certain domesticated homosexual bodies provide
ammunition to reinforce nationalist projects.
link – intersectionality
The US’s idea of intersectionality came from a set of social movements that were
designed to teach difference, their concept of intersectionality is flawed
Puar 12
Jasbir, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the top-ranked Women’s
and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “I would rather be a cyborg than a
goddess” Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory, Project Muse, PhiloSophia, pg. 56
To further complicate the travels of intersectional theorizing, in the United States
intersectionality came from a very specific set of social movements, whereas in Europe, where
the term is currently being widely taken up, the interest in intersectionality does not emerge
from social movements (and in fact, as Yuval-Davis points out, with the exception perhaps of
Britain, the efforts of migrant women to challenge dominant feminist frames went largely
ignored). Rather, this newfound interest in intersectionality signals a belated recognition of the
need to theorize racial difference; it also functions as a method for European women’s studies to
“catch up institutionally” with U.S. women’s studies. The category “nation” therefore appears to
be the least theorized and acknowledged of intersectional categories, transmitted through a form
of globalizing transparency. The United States is reproduced as the dominant site of feminist
inquiry through the use of intersectionality as a heuristic to teach difference. Thus, the EuroAmerican bias of women’s studies and history of feminism is ironically reiterated via
intersectionality, eliding the main intervention of transnational and postcolonial feminist
scholars since the 1990s, which has been, in part, about destabilizing the nation-centered
production of the category WOC (Kaplan and Grewal 1994).
Focus on differences defines identity and produces infinite amount of exclusion.
Puar 12
Jasbir, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the top-ranked Women’s
and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “I would rather be a cyborg than a
goddess” Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory, Project Muse, PhiloSophia, pg. 56
The issues I have sketched out reflect issues about knowledge production and suggest that
intersectionality is a viable corrective to epistemological violence, should these limitations
regarding subject positioning be addressed. But a different critique suggests that intersectionality
functions as a problematic reinvestment in the humanist subject, in particular, the “subject X.”
Rey Chow has produced the most damning critique of what she calls “poststructuralist significatory incarceration,”
seriously questioning whether the marginalized subject is still a viable site from which to
produce politics, much less whether the subject is a necessary precursor for politics (Chow 2006, 53).
“Difference” produces new subjects of inquiry that then infinitely multiply exclusion in order to
promote inclusion. Difference now precedes and defines identity. Part of Chow’s concern is that
poststructuralist efforts to attend to the specificity of Others has become a universalizing project
that is always beholden to the self- referentiality of the “center,” ironically given that
intersectionality functions as a call for and a form of antiessentialism (Brah and Davis 2004, 76). The poststructuralist fatigue Chow describes is contingent on the following temporal sequencing: Subject X may be different in
content, but shows up, time and again, as the same in form. (Examples might be found in the
relatively recent entrance of both “trans” identity and “disability” into the intersectional fray.)
Their focus on intersectionality only recreates gridlock of identity and forecloses
the possibility of fluidity
Puar 12
Jasbir, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the top-ranked Women’s
and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “I would rather be a cyborg than a
goddess” Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory, Project Muse, PhiloSophia, pg. 62
One of Crenshaw’s foundational examples—that of the traffic intersection— does indeed
describe intersectionality as an event. Crenshaw writes, “Consider an analogy to traffic in an
intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an
intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an
intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes,
from all of them.” And later: “But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the
skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating
efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. In these cases the tendency seems to be that
no driver is held responsible, no treatment is administered, and the involved parties simply get
back in their cars and zoom away” (Crenshaw 1989, 149). As Crenshaw indicates in this
description, identification is a process; identity is an encounter, an event, an accident, in fact.
Identities are multicausal, multidirectional, liminal; traces aren’t always self-evident. The
problem of how the two preexisting roads come into being notwithstanding, there is emphasis
on motion rather than gridlock, on how the halting of motion produces the demand to locate.
The accident itself indicates the entry of the standardizing needs of the juridical; is there a crime
taking place? How does one determine who is at fault? As a metaphor, then, intersectionality is a
more porous paradigm than the standardization of method inherent to a discipline has allowed
it to be; the institutionalization of women’s studies in the United States has led to demands for a
subject/s (subject X, in fact) and a method.
link – queer inclusion
The affirmative’s act of including queer/LGBT groups under the power of the state
is an just an act of pinkwashing-a persuasive political discourse fueled by modified
neoliberalism in attempt to normalize homosexuality and legitimize alternate
forms of hidden violence
Puar 2013 (Jasbir K., PhD. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the topranked Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “Homonationalism As
Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities”, Jindal Global law review Vol:4 Issue: 2
published November 2013, page2 33-34, Yung Jung)
In keeping with the movement of homonationalism-as-assemblage in its questioning of
periodisation and progress, this section discusses what has become known as pinkwashing, or
the practice of covering over or distracting from a nation’s policies of discrimination of some
populations through a noisy touting of its gay rights for a limited few.29 I focus on
Palestine/Israel here for two reasons: one, because after the U.S., Israel is, in my estimation, the
greatest benefactor of homonationalism, for reasons in part because of its entwinement with the
U.S., but not only; and two, because Israel has been accused of ‘pinkwashing’ in a manner that
apparently no other nation-state does, and I have been unconvinced that pinkwashing is a
practice singular to the Israeli state. Quite simply, pinkwashing has been defined as the
Israeli state’s use of its stellar LGBT rights record to deflect attention from, and in
some instances to justify or legitimate, its occupation of Palestine. Resonating within
a receptive field of globalised Islamophobia significantly amplified since 9/11 and reliant on a
civilisational narrative about the modernity of the Israelis juxtaposed with the backward
homophobia of the Palestinians, pinkwashing has become a commonly used tag for the cynical
promotion of LGBT bodies as representative of Israeli democracy. As such, it functions as a form
of discursive pre-emptive securitisation. Why is pinkwashing legible and persuasive as a political
discourse? First of all, a neoliberal accommodationist economic structure engenders the niche
marketing of various ethnic and minoritised groups and has normalised the production of a gay
and lesbian tourism industry built on the discursive distinction between gay-friendly and notgay-friendly destinations. Most nations that aspire to forms of western or European modernity
now have gay and lesbian tourism marketing campaigns. In that sense, Israel is doing what
other states do and what is solicited by the gay and lesbian tourism industry – promoting itself.
We can of course notice that the effects of this promotion are deeply detrimental in the case of
the occupation. But we might want to pose questions about the specifics of the ‘Brand Israel
Campaign,’ which has been located as the well-spring of Israel’s pinkwashing. How does the
Brand Israel Campaign differ from a conventional state-sponsored advertising campaign
targeting gay and lesbian tourists?30 Additionally, in some senses Israel is a pioneer of
homonationalism as its particular position at the crosshairs of settler colonialism,
occupation, and neoliberalist accommodationism creates the perfect storm for the
normalisation of homosexuality. The homonationalist history of Israel – the rise of LGBT
rights in Israel and increased mobility for gays and lesbians – parallels the concomitant
increased segregation and decreased mobility of Palestinian populations, especially post-Oslo.31
I have detailed this point at greater length elsewhere, but to quickly summarise: the advent of
gay rights in Israel begins around the same time as the first Intifada, with the 1990s known as
Israel’s ‘gay decade’ brought on by the legalisation of homosexuality in the Israeli Defence
Forces, workplace anti-discrimination provisions, and numerous other legislative changes.32
Pinkwashing operates through an erasure of the spatial logics of control of the Occupation and
the intricate and even intimate system of apartheid replete with a dizzying array of locational
obstacles to Palestinian mobility. That queer Palestinian activists in Ramallah cannot travel to
Haifa, Jersusalem, or Gaza to meet fellow Palestinian activists seems to be one of the most
obvious ways the Israeli occupation delimits – prohibits, in fact – the possibilities for the
flourishing of queer communities and organising that Israelis have enjoyed without hassle.
Instead of understanding access to mobility and congregation as constitutive of
queer identity and community, pinkwashing reinforces ideologies of the clash of
cultures and the ‘cultural difference’ of Palestinian homophobia rather than
recognising the constraining and suffocating spatial and economic effects of
apartheid. Questions about the treatment of homosexuals in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip
fail to take into account the constant and omnipresent restrictions on mobility, contact, and
organising necessary to build any kind of queer presence and politics. What becomes clear is
that the purported concern for the status of homosexuals in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is
being used to shield the Occupation from direct culpability in suppressing, indeed endangering,
those very homosexuals. Further, the LGBT rights project itself relies on the impossibility/
absence/ non-recognition of a proper Palestinian queer subject, except within the purview of the
Israeli state itself. It presents the ‘gay haven’ of Tel Aviv33 as representative of the entire
country and unexamined in terms of its Arab cleansing, while also maintaining Jerusalem as the
religious safeguard. As its shorthand use proliferates in anti-occupation organising forums
internationally, pinkwashing must be situated within its wider homonationalising geopolitical
context. That is to say, if pinkwashing is effective, it is not because of some outstandingly
egregious activity on the part of the Israeli government, but because both history and global
international relations matter. So while it is crucial to challenge the Israeli state, it must be done
in a manner which acknowledges that the assemblage of homonationalism going beyond the
explicit activities of any one nation state, even Israel. Building on theoretical points first
articulated in TA, I contend that it is crucial to keep in mind that pinkwashing appears to be an
effective strategy not necessarily because of any exceptional activities on the part of the Israeli
state but because of the history of settler colonial violence, the international LGBT tourism
industry, the gay and lesbian human rights industry, and finally, the role of the U.S.
The US deems certain forms of queerness acceptable in order to pinkwash over
and justify the violent imperialism it continues to wage
Diaz 8 professor of English at Wayne State University (Robert, Criticism, “Transnational Queer
Theory And Unfolding Terrorisms” p. 535 – 538, 2008,
http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1317&context=criticism) | js
Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblage: Homonationalism in Queer Times is a refreshing and much-needed addition to this recent queer
scholarship. Like Manalansan and Gopinath, Puar studies “queer diasporas” and their multiple performance practices. Expanding
on Duggan’s work, she maps
out moments of queer normalization and inclusion within U.S. dominant
culture. What is most salient about this book, however, is that it focuses on the ways in which sexuality aids in
policing appropriate forms of U.S. citizenship and diasporic identity during the current “war on terror.” The
author examines a collection of examples ranging from South Park episodes, to photographs from Abu Ghraib, to the Lawrence vs.
Texas ruling that struck down the Texas sodomy law by arguing that consensual sex was protected as “private.” Using these
examples, she creates a complex theoretical approach to analyzing the ways in which sexuality has been mobilized by
the United States after September 11th in order to demonstrate the country’s “exceptionalism.” Puar takes
aim at “exceptionalism” because it allows the United States to set itself apart from other more “barbaric”
(i.e., nonsecular, Islamic, and “fundamentalist”) nation-states and cultures. She argues that
exceptionalism also helps ON JASBIR K. PUAR’S TERRORIST ASSEMBLAGES 535 to produce a continual state
of paranoia that justifi es the complex methodologies needed to “fi ght” the war on terror. Her
argument is essential for critics looking for a way to better understand the linkages between sexuality and
antiterrorism. Puar suggests that exceptionalism serves as a strategic and effective means of furthering violence
against postcolonial populations by legitimizing secularism as the key ethical standard of
communities in the global north. It is precisely these secularist values that make the United States more
“progressive,” and what arguably makes the country’s population more deserving of biopolitical preservation
than ethnic and religious minorities within and outside its borders. Signifi cantly, Puar shows how
queer politics can be fueled by regulatory rather than liberatory purposes. In her introduction
(“Homonationalism and Biopolitics”), Puar notes that government policies around terrorism and academics writing about these
policies produce a version of queerness that abjects racial and national minorities. They do so by acquiescing to what Rey Chow defi
nes as the “ascendancy of whiteness,” or the mobilizing of cultural difference to serve the racially dominant population in the United
States.4 Key to this abjecting process is the valorization of secularism I mentioned. Puar sees the heightening of secularism as
indicative of “homonationalistic” impulses motivated by antiterrorism. She de- fi nes “homonationalism” as a form of sexual
normalization that accepts
particular forms of homosexuality in order to foster American empire:
as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness,
queerness, or homosexuality, but also of racial and national norms that reinforce these subjects”
“[T]his brand of homosexuality operates
(2). Although the critique of structures of state power such as the military is unsurprising, what is refreshing about Puar’s beginning
is that it also takes aim at a particular strand of queer theory that reiterates a fetishization of queer
exceptionality as always already liberatory or always already based on a transgressive difference. This fetishization in
the end elides the many ways that queer populations are also separated by multiple allegiances. Thus, aside from an automatic
assumption of “queer” as nonnormative, Puar asks how might this term be further complicated by historicizing queerness within a
U.S. context? She argues that layered racial and national af- fi liations are most legible at moments when the nation-state
needs to mark some bodies as terrorist to make these subjects susceptible to methods of
surveillance and control. Homonationalism is exceedingly present as the nation starts to deploy
more networked technologies of policing justifi ed by international attempts to thwart terrorism.
The fi rst chapter expands on homonationalism. Puar traces the rhetorical strategies deployed by lesbian and gay tourist
organizations, 536 ROBERT DIAZ feminists writing about the Middle East, and the cartoon show South Park. Although these
organizations and individuals seem to advocate for universal human rights, they also problematically rely on particular markers of
“otherness.” One example of this othering tendency is the constant exhibiting of those who practice Islam as automatically intolerant
toward women and sexual minorities. The author questions this assumption by suggesting that Islam is contradictory to and varied
among those who practice it. Indeed, in many cases, it even serves as a powerful source of cultural belonging for sexual minorities.
Queers of color in the United States, here notably South Asians living in urban locales such as New York City, have turned to their
ethnic enclaves and religious spaces as a viable way to create community during the government’s lockdown on “terrorism.” These
sites ultimately foster cultural belonging for persons outside of the “patriotic” U.S. citizen, white, and male population valorized in
the national imaginary. Toward the end of the chapter, Puar studies the South Park episodes since they also demonstrate specifi c
homonationalistic tendencies. In one reading, she notes how the preponderance of the (usually male)
“metrosexual” fi gure in media representations highlights how acceptable forms of queerness
tend to appeal to a consuming, cosmopolitan, white, and elite population. The hyperaestheticizing of hip
urbanity has become a central characteristic for the sense of queer respectability in the United States. This leads to the question,
what about other subjects who do not fi t this acceptable iteration of lesbian or gay culture? In her
most intriguing analysis of South Park, she focuses on an episode that features a guest character: Mr. Slave. Mr. Slave is a
leatherbottom who Mr. Garrison (the school’s teacher) invites to class so that he can then prove that the school is intolerant toward
homosexuality. Showing that the school’s administration is intolerant would enable Mr. Garrison to sue the school for a substantial
amount. Puar centers her analysis on a student’s statement about Mr. Slave, that he is Pakistani. She then proceeds to highlight the
problematic assumptions of this sentence, by suggesting that the production of the terrorist body depends upon the
oversexualization of the ethnic-national minority that “Pakistani” indexes. The leather bottom is confl ated with an interstitial
nationality, one that is both cooperative to the United States and one that is easily corruptible as a terrorist entity. She argues that
“the perverse and the primitive collide in the fi gure of Mr. Slave: the violence of homophobia is shown to be appropriate when
directed toward a pathological nationality, whereas the violence of racism is always already caught in the naming of the queer” (75).
In other words, Puar suggests that even in the most progressive of shows, such as a cartoon ON JASBIR K. PUAR’S TERRORIST
ASSEMBLAGES 537 made for adults that often satirizes the failed policies of the government, one can see the “unevenness of liberal
forms of diversity and tolerance” (75) produced as the nation consolidates its citizens within one seemingly cohesive group. The
relationality between terrorism and sexuality is revisited in chapter 2 (“Abu Ghraib and U.S. Exceptionalism”). Puar studies the
controversial Abu Ghraib photographs, which depict Iraqi prisoners being tortured by U.S. military personnel. These photographs
expose the United States’ failure to treat its prisoners humanely and ethically. Puar notes that the national grief and embarrassment
the Abu Ghraib photos produce have depended upon an understanding of torture, especially sexual torture, as an uncommon
military practice. She contends, however, that these photographs do not mark an exceptional moment at all. They demonstrate the
constant mobilization of sexuality as a policing mechanism that justifi es state violence. More importantly, she argues that the
nationalistic shock exhibited by a majority of the country’s population intrinsically polices what “Muslim sexuality”
ultimately means. At its base, this sexuality must
be inherently different from the “liberated” sexuality
practiced in the United States. The obvious point here is that this myopic way of thinking about Muslim
sexuality negates and disavows the multiple ways that the United States itself limits particular sexualities and
sexual practices within its border. Moreover, the focus on Muslim sexuality valorizes sexuality as the site of violence within
torture rather than thinking of violence as a networked strategy in compartmentalizing specifi c terrorist populations for death as it
secures the lives of the privileged few. As the author notes, “[T]he sexual is the ultimate site of violation, portrayed as extreme in
relation to the individual rights of privacy and ownership accorded to the body within liberalism” (81). Thus, the axiomatic grief that
goes hand in hand with the declaration that these pictures are uniquely abusive fosters the very same practices of marking the ethnic
national as outside of the United States citizen. This presumably also leads to justifi cations for furthering the
domination of postcolonial subjects across the globe through arguments against terrorism. In one brief
but astute moment, Puar points out that we know so much about the U.S. military personal perpetrating the abuse, but very little
about the Iraqi prisoners. This lopsided overabundance of information suggests a skewed form of historiography— one that fi lls in
the information for the U.S. subject in order to argue for this fi gure’s unexpected departure from norms of justice and ethical
behavior, while marking the suspected terrorist as only capable of being sexualized and violated, and nothing else. I fi nd Puar’s
attention to the speed, forms, and 538 ROBERT DIAZ intensity in which these photographs were mass distributed as a new
approach to thinking about their importance. Following the work of Brian Massumi on affect and visuality, Puar shifts away from
merely reading these photographs as representational artifacts, but as sites for exploring how the changing speed, intensity, and
distribution of images in an age of technological simulacra go hand in hand with modern forms of imperial consolidation and
expansion. Chapter 3 (“Infi nite Control, In- fi nite Detention”) and chapter 4 (“The Turban Is Not a Hat”) challenge the false
idea that privacy and citizenship have been secured for queer subjects by specifi c “monumental”
liberatory utterances. Chapter 3 presents a comparative analysis of the Lawrence vs. Texas case, which uses the
Fourteenth Amendment right to privacy to overturn the criminalizing of sodomy previously set forth in
Bowers vs. Hardwick (1987). This ruling also makes the claim that the moral belief that makes sodomy illegal is outdated, since, in
the words of Justice Kennedy, who delivered the majority opinion, “When sexuality fi nds overt expression in intimate conduct with
another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is enduring” (quoted in Puar, 123).5 Puar builds on the
criticism by specifi c feminists and queer theorists that Kennedy’s notion of queer relationships is limited in terms of its
understanding of what intimacy means. According to these critics, Kennedy’s description ultimately creates the
boundaries of what counts as valid domesticity and intimacy for protection. Puar then adds that what
this normative domesticity also marks are the limitations of citizenship for racial and ethnic
minorities that are constantly under the threat of surveillance because of multiple panoptic structures
(exacerbated by the war on terror). The notion of privacy has always been fl eeting for those subjected to
what she refers to as multiple and boundaryless forms of detention (hence making them, in her words, “infi
- nite”). What the Supreme Court considers as “lasting relationships” erases entire populations of
queer and racialized persons whose intimacies have been dictated by the state: “[T]he private is a racialized and
nationalized construct insofar as it is granted only to heterosexuals but to certain citizens and withheld from many others and
noncitizens” (125).
“Queer-friendly” federal reforms promotes not only
heteronormativity by marking queer bodies as “different but equal,”
but also constructs homonormativity
Lewis 11 assistant professor of Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University
(Rachel, Social Justice, “Lesbians under Surveillance: Same-Sex Immigration Reform, Gay
Rights, and the Problem of Queer Liberalism” p. 98, 2010 – 2011,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41336937.pdf) | js
As Alexander has demonstrated, ‘heterosexuality is at once necessary to the state’s ability to constitute
and imagine itself, while simultaneously marking a site of its own instability’ (Alexander, 1997, p. 65).
If, according to binaried sex/gender/desire logic, homosexuality is that which shadows the instability of the
nation’s heterosexuality, then that shadow itself is not constituted outside of nationhood, rather within it,
around it, hovering over it. Through the prescription of heteronormative stability, or shall I say ‘security’, the matter of the
insecure becomes highlighted: the shadow that is within and outside, the internally disciplined and the externally quarantined and
banished. Turning to Foucault’s sketch of flourishing sexualities: as a ‘circulating sexuality: a distribution of points of power,
hierarchized and placed opposite to one another’ (Foucault, 1978, p.45), the shadow is imagined, felt, feared,
desired, and in some instances, envisioned, to effectively function as a threat. Thus while queer bodies may be
disallowed, there is room for the absorption and management of homosexuality—temporally,
historically, and spatially specific—when advantageous for US national interests. As
homonormativity is one of a range of ‘compartmental sexualities that are tolerated or encouraged’, this management is not
consistent and is often only directed towards certain audiences. As a ‘proximity that serves as
surveillance procedures’ (Foucault, 1978, p.46), homo-nationalism is both disciplined by nation and its
heteronormative underpinnings, and also effectively surveys and disciplines those sexually perverse
bodies that fall outside its purview. Thus the US nation not only allows for homosexual bodies, but also
actually disciplines and normalizes them—suggesting, in fact, the need to attend to theorizations of the nation
as not only heteronormative, but also homonormative. Reading non-normative gay, homosexual, and queer
bodies through nation, not against it, is to acknowledge that (some) nations are productive of
non-normative sexualities, not merely repressive of them. There are at least three deployments of US
homonationalism that bolster the nation: 1) it reiterates heterosexuality as the norm (for example, the bid for
gay marriage accords an ‘equal but different’ status to queers); 2) it fosters nationalist homosexual positionalities
which then police nonnationalist non-normative sexualities; 3) it enables a transnational
discourse of US queer exceptionalism vis-a`-vis perversely racialized bodies of pathologized nationalities, as the recent
violence in Abu Ghraib horrifically lays bare6 (and also in South Park, which I will discuss later)
Sexual deviancy will never be fully normally normalized, it invokes a rage that is
absent even in the worst of atrocities and paints the deviant as an ‘other’ to be
destroyed
Jasbir Puar, 10-26-2007, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers
University, Ph.D in Ethnic studies, "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times,"
Drake University Press.
The torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib is neither exceptional nor singular, as many
(Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the George W. Bush administration, the U.S.
military establishment, and even good liberals) would have us believe. We need think only of the
fact that so many soldiers who faced prosecution for the Iraqi prisoner situation came from
prison guard backgrounds (reminding us of the incarceration practices within the U.S. prison
industrial complex), let alone the treatment of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army guards,
or even the brutal sodomizing of Abner Louima by New York City police. Neither has it been
possible to normalize the incidents at Abu Ghraib as ‘‘business as usual’’ even within the torture
industry. As public and governmental rage alike made clear, a line had been crossed. Why that
line is demarcated at the place of so-called sexual torture—specifically, violence that purports to
mimic sexual acts closely associated with deviant sexuality or sexual excess such as sodomy and
oral sex, as well as S/M practices of bondage, leashing, and hooding— and not, for example, at
the slow starvation of millions due to UN sanctions against Iraq, the deaths of thousands of Iraqi
civilians since the U.S. invasion in April 2003, or the plundering and carnage in Falluja, is
indeed a spectacular question. The reaction of rage, while to some extent laudable, misses the
point entirely, or perhaps more generously, upstages a denial of culpability. The violence
performed at Abu Ghraib is not an exception to nor an extension of imperialist occupation.
Rather, it works in concert with proliferating modalities of force, an indispensable part of the
‘‘shock and awe’’ campaign blueprinted by the Israelis upon the backs of Palestinian corpses.
Bodily torture is but one element in a repertoire of techniques of occupation and subjugation
that include assassinations of top leaders; house-to-house roundups, often involving
interrogations without interpreters; the use of tanks and bulldozers in densely populated
residential areas; helicopter attacks; the trashing and forced closure of hospitals and other
provisional sites; and other violences that frequently go against international legal standards
link – queer reforms
Legal reforms end in augmented scrutiny of queer bodies and uphold other social
hierarchies
Jasbir Puar, 10-26-2007, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers
University, Ph.D in Ethnic studies, "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times,"
Drake University Press.
Paradoxically, the decriminalization of sodomy results in accentuated state regulation of
sexuality rather than a decline in such patrolling,≤ commissioning many other actors to
intensify other types of scrutiny, for example, to assess the suitability of homosexuals for
adoption and parenting. Hunter locates this heightened scrutiny as part of the subterranean
‘‘examination of the social acceptability of those persons who are the objects of the government’s
interventions’’ specific to jurisprudence regarding sexuality. Highlighting the Foucauldian
entanglement of freedom and regulation, Hunter argues that ‘‘deprived of criminal law as a tool,
opponents of equality for lesbians and gay men are likely to concentrate increasingly on the
strategy of containment.’’ She delineates several areas where containment tactics might be most
efficacious: disputes involving children, control over expressive space, otherwise known as the
public sphere, and distinguishing the ‘‘respectability’’ of queer relationships that reinforce
hierarchies of race, class, gender, and citizenship.≥
LGBT movements and decriminalization of same-sex relationships are part of the
liberalism agenda in hopes of promoting homonationalism
Puar 2013 (Jasbir K., PhD. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the topranked Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “Homonationalism As
Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities”, Jindal Global law review Vol:4 Issue: 2
published November 2013, page 32, Yung Jung)
As with the U.S., is gay marriage next on the gay equality agenda in India? For whom does a gay
rights equality agenda centring marriage benefit? Is there any relationship between the reading
down of Sec. 377-signalling an increasingly visible middle-class LGBT movement in India - and
the nature and visibility of sexual assaults on women, for example the recent gang-rape and
murder that occurred in New Delhi in December 2012? Are women who transgress their
scripted positions within the gender binary being punished through a backlash against the
striving for sexual liberation? Regarding Sec. 377, Oishik Sircar writes: The decriminalisation of
same-sex relationships is clearly an outcome of the gradually increasing cultural acceptance of
diverse sexualities that has taken place as a result of liberalisation and globalisation, as is
evident from the court’s constant allusions to international human rights law and case law, and
precedents primarily from the United States. These references made apparent the cultural logic
behind the court’s judgment: India needs to live up to the progressive developments in other
parts of the (Western) world by decriminalising sodomy. As Anjali Gopalan, founder of
petitioner Naz Foundation, said after the judgment was delivered, “Oh my God, we’ve finally
stepped into the 21st century.” This exclamatory declaration seems to be a history-vanishing
moment, where the ostensibly progressive present contributes to queer emancipation at the cost
of blinding us to a historicised understanding of the cruelly liberal genealogies of present-day
India.27 Rather than suggesting that these aspirations to join the 21st century, proclaimed by
Gopalan,28 are simply versions of homonationalism as applied to the Indian case, it seems more
prudent to note the divergences and differences that create multiple kinds of homonationalisms.
What is crucial to an/the on-going political struggle in multiple locations is not to critique a
long-awaited community-oriented film or the efforts of gay and lesbian activists in any national
location, but to insist on an awareness of homonationalism as an uneven and unpredicatable
process. How do the history of British colonialism, the specific periodisation of liberalisation in
India, and the uptake of neoliberal class stratification that produces privileged transnational
networks shape homonationalism as an assemblage?
Inclusion necessitates exclusion – They create a “normal” category of queer which
reestablishes the heteronormativity that criticize
Jasbir Puar, 10-26-2007, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers
University, Ph.D in Ethnic studies, "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times,"
Drake University Press.
National recognition and inclusion, here signaled as the annexation of homosexual jargon, is
contingent upon the segregation and disqualification of racial and sexual others from the
national imaginary. At work in this dynamic is a form of sexual exceptionalism—the emergence
of national homosexuality, what I term ‘‘homonationalism’’—that corresponds with the coming
out of the exceptionalism of American empire. Further, this brand of homosexuality operates as
a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the
racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual subjects. There is a commitment to the
global dominant ascendancy of whiteness that is implicated in the propagation of the United
States as empire as well as the alliance between this propagation and this brand of
homosexuality. The fleeting sanctioning of a national homosexual subject is possible, not only
through the proliferation of sexual-racial subjects who invariably fall out of its narrow terms of
acceptability, as others have argued, but more significantly, through the simultaneous
engendering and disavowal of populations of sexual-racial others who need not apply
This “Homonationalism” divides the patriotic from the terrorist ensuring the
elimination of the latter
Jasbir Puar, 10-26-2007, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers
University, Ph.D in Ethnic studies, "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times,"
Drake University Press.
One mapping of the folding of homosexuals into the reproductive valorization of living—
technologies of life—includes the contemporary emergence of ‘‘sexually exceptional’’ U.S.
citizens, both heterosexual and otherwise, a formation I term ‘‘U.S. sexual exceptionalism.’’
Exceptionalism paradoxically signals distinction from (to be unlike, dissimilar) as well as
excellence (imminence, superiority), suggesting a departure from yet mastery of linear
teleologies of progress. Exception refers both to particular discourses that repetitively produce
the United States as an exceptional nation-state and Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the
sanctioned and naturalized disregard of the limits of state juridical and political power through
times of state crisis, a ‘‘state of exception’’ that is used to justify the extreme measures of the
state.≥ In this project, this double play of exception speaks to Muslim and Sikh ‘‘terrorist’’
corporealities as well as to homosexual patriots. The ‘‘sexual torture scandal’’ at Abu Ghraib is
an instructive example of the interplay between exception and exceptionalism whereby the
deferred death of one population recedes as the securitization and valorization of the life of
another population triumphs in its shadow. This double deployment of exception and
exceptionalism works to turn the negative valence of torture into the positive register of the
valorization of (American) life, that is, torture in the name of the maximization and optimization
of life. As the U.S. nation-state produces narratives of exception through the war on terror, it
must temporarily suspend its heteronormative imagined community to consolidate national
sentiment and consensus through the recognition and incorporation of some, though not all or
most, homosexual subjects. The fantasy of the permanence of this suspension is what drives the
production of exceptionalism, a narrative that is historically and politically wedded to the
formation of the U.S. nation-state. Thus, the exception and the exceptional work in tandem; the
state of exception haunts the proliferation of exceptional national subjects, in a similar vein to
the Derridean hauntology in which the ghosts, the absent presences, infuse ontology with a
di√erence.∂ Through the transnational production of terrorist corporealities, homosexual
subjects who have limited legal rights within the U.S. civil context gain significant
representational currency when situated within the global scene of the war on terror. Taking the
position that heterosexuality is a necessary constitutive factor of national identity, the ‘‘outlaw’’
status of homosexual subjects in relation to the state has been a long-standing theoretical
interest of feminist, postcolonial, and queer theorists. This outlaw status is mediated through
the rise during the 1980s and 1990s of the gay consumer, pursued by marketers who claimed
that childless homosexuals had enormous disposable incomes, as well as through legislative
gains in civil rights, such as the widely celebrated 2003 overturning of sodomy laws rendered in
the Lawrence and Garner v. Texas decision. By underscoring circuits of homosexual
nationalism, I note that some homosexual subjects are complicit with heterosexual nationalist
formations rather than inherently or automatically excluded from or opposed to them. Further,
a more pernicious inhabitation of homosexual sexual exceptionalism occurs through stagings of
U.S. nationalism via a praxis of sexual othering, one that exceptionalizes the identities of U.S.
homosexualities vis-à-vis Orientalist constructions of ‘‘Muslim sexuality.’’ This discourse
functions through transnational displacements that suture spaces of cultural citizenship in the
United States for homosexual subjects as they concurrently secure nationalist interests globally.
In some instances these narratives are explicit, as in the aftermath of the release of the Abu
Ghraib photos, where the claims to exceptionalism resonated on many planes for U.S. citizensubjects: morally, sexually, culturally, ‘‘patriotically.’’ This imbrication of American
exceptionalism is increasingly marked through or aided by certain homosexual bodies, which is
to say, through homonationalism.
They attempt to categorize the queer body which sustains a biopolitical politics of
sameness and encourages a fear of deviance and difference
Jasbir Puar, 10-26-2007, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers
University, Ph.D in Ethnic studies, "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times,"
Drake University Press.
For Chow, in contemporary times, the ‘‘ascendancy of whiteness’’ in biopower incorporates the
multiplication of appropriate multicultural ethnic bodies complicit with this ascendancy. Part of
the trappings of this exceptional citizen, ethnic or not, is the careful management of difference:
of difference within sameness, and of difference containing sameness. We can note, for example,
that the multicultural proliferation of the cosmopolitan ethnic à la Chow has some demanding
limitations in terms of class, gender, and especially sexuality. That is, what little acceptance
liberal diversity proffers in the way of inclusion is highly mediated by huge realms of exclusion:
the ethnic is usually straight, usually has access to material and cultural capital (both as a
consumer and as an owner), and is in fact often male. These would be the tentative attributes
that would distinguish a tolerable ethnic (an exceptional patriot, for example) from an
intolerable ethnic (a terrorist suspect). In many cases, heteronormativity might be the most
pivotal of these attributes, as certain Orientalist queernesses (failed heteronormativity, as
signaled by polygamy, pathological homosociality) are a priori ascribed to terrorist bodies. The
twin process of multiculturalization and heterosexualization are codependent in what Susan
Koshy denotes as the ‘‘morphing of race into ethnicity,’’ a transmogrification propelled by the
cultivation of ‘‘white privilege as color-blind meritocracy.’’ (This morphing has also inspired the
politicization of the designation ‘‘people of color.’’) While Chow does not explicitly discuss why
racial frames lose their salience (and retain denigrated status) in relation to marketdriven
ethnicity, Koshy adds ‘‘the accommodation of new immigrants and the resurgence of white
ethnicity’’ as compelling factors that ‘‘obscure the operations of race and class’’ in transnational
contexts.
link – queer theory
The Idea that queerness is necessarily transgressive recreates binaries that
capture the fluidity of sexuality
Jasbir Puar, 10-26-2007, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers
University, Ph.D in Ethnic studies, "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times,"
Drake University Press.
What is at stake in defusing queer liberal binaries of assimilation and transgression, secularity
and religiosity? If we are to resist resistance, reading against these binaries to foreground a
broader array of power affiliations and disaffiliations that are often rife with contradiction
should not provide ammunition to chastise, but rather generate greater room for self-reflection,
autocritique, and making mistakes. It is easy, albeit painful, to point to the conservative
elements of any political formation; it is less easy, and perhaps much more painful, to point to
ourselves as accomplices of certain normativizing violences. In sum, what we can say about the
mechanics of queerness as a regulatory frame of biopolitics includes the following: 1. Queerness
as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control,
erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the
sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population). 2.
Within that orientation of regulatory transgression, queer operates as an alibi for complicity
with all sorts of other identity norms, such as nation, race, class, and gender, unwittingly lured
onto the ascent toward whiteness. 3. Allowing for complicities signals not the failure of the
radical, resistant, or oppositional potential of queernesses, but can be an enabling
acknowledgment. 4. But conundrums abound even with the fluidity of resistances and
complicities, for intersectional models cannot account for the simultaneous or multifarious
presences of both or many.
link – sex/gender surveillance
Universal, generalized solutions eliminating or reforming state systems of sex
classification fail—they can’t account for the ways the homonationalist state
utilizes such policies to perpetuate security projects
Currah 13 Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York (Paisley, Theory & Event, “Homonationalism, State Rationalities,
and Sex Contradictions” 2013, Project MUSE) | js
When it comes to securing the connection between the individual’s sex and the M or F attached to their record in a particular
context, it’s not only turtles all the way down—there are actually quite a few piles of turtles. In fact, rules for sex
classification are notoriously contradictory. When some individuals cross borders, walk into a government office to
apply for benefits, get a driver’s license, go to jail or prison, sign up for selective service, try to get married, or have any interaction
with any state actor, the sex classification of some people can and often does switch from M to F, or from F to M. Even within a
single jurisdiction, almost every particular state agency—from federal to municipal—has the authority to decide its own rules for sex
classification. And, to complicate matters even more, both state and federal judges have found that one’s sex classification for one
social function may not hold for others. The lack of a uniform standard for classifying people as male or female means that some
state agencies will recognize the new sex of people who change it, some will not. For most people, this lack of
uniformity doesn’t present a problem. For others, it does: an individual can be both M and F, depending on the
agency. In New York City the same person might be housed in a women’s shelter, segregated with men in prison, be given a “pink”
bus pass by one agency, have an M on her birth certificate, and an F on her passport—and be denied access to both men’s and
women’s residential drug rehabilitation facilities. If such a thing as “transnormativity” exists, it would be very
hard to assimilate into the categories when the definitions seem so capricious and arbitrary, and
which shift depending on so many factors. Policies and decisions on sex classification may be arbitrary (in that
they’re backed by a decision, not a fundamental truth) but they’re not necessarily capricious. The different metrics for sex
are telling, and much is lost when those differences are seen as irrational contradictions,
vestiges of social structures long past. While these policies may appear to be contradictory,
they’re not. In fact, if we let go of the idea that there is any “there there,” any whatness, to sex apart from what any particular
state actor say it is, the contradiction evaporates. State decisions about the M or the F stamped on documents or coded in records
become the only true thing we know. Everything else is in motion. In dropping the idea that there is any clearly delimited integrity to
the thing we call “sex” when we refer to an M or F on an identity document, it becomes easier to see what the category does in
particular instances. And what sex does depends on what state actors need it to do. As I explain elsewhere, different sex
classification criteria often reflect different state projects—recognition, security, surveillance,
distribution, reproduction. What seem to be contradictions in sex definition—across jurisdictions, between
agencies, and at different times—are simply the consequences of the fact that “the state” is not a singular
entity but multiple, does not do one thing, but many, is not produced through one process, but
many.25 In 2011, a transgender rights group sued the City of New York, claiming that its policy for sex re-classification on birth
certificates is “arbitrary, capricious, discriminatory, and otherwise unlawful.”26 (The policy requires individuals who want to change
the sex classification on their birth certificates submit evidence of genital surgery; the trans rights advocates wanted a different
metric, one based on gender identity, that was backed by the medical community.) The suit accused the city of putting forth a
number of contradictory “irrational” rationales in the justification for its particular rules for sex classification. In defending its
policy, lawyers for the city disputed the claim that its policy was irrational. They countered that “[t]he existence of different
approaches to similar problems does not render an agency’s rule irrational.”27 These lawyers understood what advocates did not—
that sex classification serves different purposes at different city agencies—and that to put in place a
single policy on sex reclassification across all city agencies would undermine the particular
political rationalities at work in those policies. And it’s those particular political rationalities that ought to receive
more critical attention. To some, the 2012 election stands as a turning point in the quest for GLB
rights; to others, it marks the continuation of a politics bent on increasing the power and reach
of a national security state and eroding the living standards—measured by economic security, health, and
mortality rates—of the population. However, construing the election as presenting a choice between
Obama the good and Romney the bad, or as a battle between Obama the not-so-great and Romney the bad, elevates
grand narratives and concepts—marriage, the state—over the thousands of ongoing and
quotidian decisions that regulate life. That simplification is understandable. It’s certainly much easier to talk
about same-sex marriage than to do archival excavations of applications of SSA policy, to delve into the cracks and
crevices of the regulatory state apparatuses. But in an article on Foucauldian theory of the state, Thomas Biebricher
and Frieder Vogelmann suggest that to produce a “critical perspective on the state” one has to “step
outside” the state’s own discursive formation. They argue that we need to produce “unwieldy
knowledge” that “does not function according to the logic of politics,” that “neither fully
embrace[s] nor simply reject[s]” governmental rationalities.28 Becoming swept up in the romance,
or tragedy, of the electoral narrative, gets in the way of understanding the minute technologies of
governance that regulate our lives. It’s not my intention to fall down the rabbit hole and to permanently foreclose
making the impossible and yet necessary jump from the “is” to the “ought” on questions of gay rights, homonormativity, and sex
classification. But it is my contention that we need to understand at a much more historical and granular
level what states are, what they do, and the effects of particular policies on sex. For any particular state
apparatus at a given moment, the apparently minor issue of the criteria for sex classification might be supporting more weight
than we might imagine; calling for its reform might involve more changes than we had anticipated, and
consequently engender more resistance than initially seems reasonable. So it’s important to
understand in each particular context, no matter how apparently mundane, what sex is doing and how that doing
is imbricated with other systems of social stratification. Universal solutions calling for uniform
criteria for sex classification across all forms and levels of government (the liberal agenda) or for the complete
elimination of sex as a legal identifier across the board (the more radical position) suggest that sex does the
same thing in every location. Molar, large-scale accounts of “sex” and “the state” depend on assuming a sameness to sex
or a singular rationality to state actors, decisions, and projects. We don’t know what a politics of resistance would
look like until we understand what it is we’re resisting.
link – security/terrorism
Establishing threats justifies violence in the name of fostering life culminating in
endless violence against the “terrorist”
Jasbir Puar, 10-26-2007, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers
University, Ph.D in Ethnic studies, "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times,"
Drake University Press.
In 1992, Judith Butler, faulting Foucault’s The History of Sexuality for his ‘‘wishful construction:
death is effectively expelled from Western modernity, cast behind it as a historical possibility,
surpassed or cast outside it as a non-Western phenomenon,’’ asks us to revaluate biopolitical
investment in fostering life from the vantage point of homosexual bodies that have been
historically cathected to death, specifically queer bodies afflicted with or threatened by the hiv
pandemic. For Foucault, modern biopower, emerging at the end of the eighteenth century, is the
management of life—the distribution of risk, possibility, mortality, life chances, health,
environment, quality of living—the differential investment of and in the imperative to live. In
biopower, propagating death is no longer the central concern of the state; staving off death is.
Cultivating life is coextensive with the sovereign right to kill, and death becomes merely
reflective, a byproduct, a secondary effect of the primary aim and efforts of those cultivating or
being cultivated for life. Death is never a primary focus; it is a negative translation of the
imperative to live, occurring only through the transit of fostering life. Death becomes a form of
collateral damage in the pursuit of life. This distancing from death is a fallacy of modernity, a
hallucination that allows for the unimpeded workings of biopolitics. In ‘‘Society Must Be
Defended’’ Foucault avers, ‘‘Death was no longer something that suddenly swooped down on
life, as in an epidemic. Death was now something permanent, something that slips into life,
perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it.’’∫≤ Butler, transposing the historical frame
of Foucault’s elaboration of biopower onto the context of contemporary politics of life and death,
notes the irony of Foucault’s untimely death in 1984 due to causes related to aids, at that time an
epidemic on the cusp of its exponential detonation.∫≥ Thus, Butler’s 1992 analysis returns
bodies to death, specifically queer bodies afflicted with or threatened by the hiv virus.∫∂ With a
similar complaint, albeit grounded in the seemingly incongruous plight of colonial and
neocolonial occupations, Achille Mbembe redirects our attention from biopolitics to what he
terms ‘‘necropolitics.’’ Mbembe’s analysis foregrounds death decoupled from the project of
living—a direct relation to killing that renders impossible any subterfuge in a hallucinating
disavowal of death in modernity—by asking, ‘‘Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for
the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the
fight against terror, makes the murder of its enemy its primary and absolute objective?’’∫∑ For
Foucault, massacres are literally vital events;∫∏ for Mbembe, they are the evidence of the
brutality of biopower’s incitement to life.
impact – pinkwashing
Pinkwashing reifies colonialism in attempt to legitimize the states sovereignty- the
affirmative’s pink washing discourse only recreates binary dualism between
“nonconforming” queers and homonationalists----turns case
Puar 2013 (Jasbir K., PhD. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the topranked Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “Homonationalism As
Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities”, Jindal Global law review Vol:4 Issue: 2
published November 2013, page 35, Yung Jung)
Pinkwashing is only one more justification for imperial/racial/ national violence
that has a long history preceding it. How has ‘the homosexual question’ come to
supplement ‘the woman question’ of the colonial era to modulate arbitration between modernity
and tradition, citizen and terrorist, homonational and queer? As elaborated by Partha
Chatterjee, this question arose with some force in the decolonization movements in South Asia
and elsewhere, whereby the capacity for an emerging postcolonial government to protect native
women from oppressive patriarchal cultural practices, marked as tradition, became the
barometer by which colonial rule arbitrated political concessions made to the colonised.34 In
other words, we rehearse here Gayatri Spivak’s famous dictum “white men saving brown women
from brown men.”35This particular triangulation has thus set the stage for an enduring drama
between feminists protesting colonial and neocolonial regimes and nationalists who discount
the presence and politics of these feminists in their own quests for decolonisation. We can also
say that, while the woman question has hardly disappeared, it is now accompanied by what we
could call the homosexual question, indeed yet another variant or operation of
homonationalism. The terms of the woman question have been re-dictated, as feminist scholars
have now become arbiters of other women’s modernities, or the modernities of The Other
Woman. To reinvoke Spivak for the 21st century: white queer (men) saving brown homosexuals
from brown heterosexuals. We can see how this moves from the woman question to the
homosexual question, and it remains to be contextualised in the various locations as to which of
these trajectories make more or less sense. First, the supplementing of homosexuality to women
results from the merging of two processes: the post-colonial state shoring up
respectability and legitimacy to prove its right to sovereignty to the colonial
father36 and the folding in or acknowledging of homosexual subjects into legal
and consumer legitimacy via neoliberal economies, such that homosexuals once on the
side of death (AIDS) are now on the side of life or are productive for nation-building. Second,
the homosexual question is in fact a reiteration of the woman question, insofar as it reproduces
a demand for gender exceptionalism and relies on the continual reproduction of the gender
binary. The homosexuals seen as being treated properly by the nation-state are not
‘gender queer’. They are rather the ones re creating gendered norms through,
rather than despite, homosexual identity. Obscured by pinkwashing is how trans
and gender non conforming queers are not welcome in this new version of the
proper ‘homonationalist’ Israeli citizen.37
impact – settler colonialism
Defending homonationalism is just an articulation of settler colonialism, modern
structures of sexuality arose as a method of to produce and justify settler
colonialism
Mortensen ’10 (Scott Laura Morgeson, PhD in Women’s Studies, past co-Chair of the
Association for Queer Anthropology, “Settler Homonationalism theorizing Settler Colonialism
within Queer modernities” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16:1-2, published 2010,
pages117-118, Yung Jung)
Modern sexuality arose in the United States as crucial to a colonial society of normalization. The
violent sexual regulation of Native peoples became a proving ground for forming settler subjects
as agents and beneficiaries of modern sexuality. Their subject positions arose relationally within the colonial
biopolitics of modern sexuality and call for broad analysis in queer, American, and Native stud ies.40 I now ask how colonial
histories made settlement a primary condition of the formation of modern queer subjects and
politics in the United States. I reexamine scholarship in queer studies that suggests this claim, and I mark how future
queer scholarship can center the study of settler colonialism, including as a condition of homonationalism. Settler colonialism
is the open secret in most historical work in U.S. sexuality studies and queer studies. Settler
colonialism conditioned every aspect of the history of sexuality in the United States, but only
rarely has it been made a focus of study. My account has suggested a convergence between the sexual colonization of
Native peoples and the growth in the United States of techniques of modern sexuality. These proliferated in the decades following
the frontier’s “closure,” a time that in fact represented a heyday of state and religious efforts to institute a colonial education of
desire, as in the events at the Crow Agency or during the 1879 – 1918 tenure of the Carlisle Indian School. Far from reflecting
finality, this period witnessed tense negotiations of active and contested settlement. In such a time, any iteration of modern sexuality
that placed Native people in the past knew itself to be a contingent claim that remained open to challenge. Thus scholars must
recognize that modern sexuality is not a product of settler colonialism, as if it came into being in
the United States after settlement transpired. Modern sexuality arose in the United States as a
method to produce settler colonialism, and settler subjects, by facilitating ongoing conquest and
naturalizing its effects. The normative function of settlement is to appear inevitable and final. It
is naturalized again whenever sexuality or queer studies scholars inscribe it as an unexamined
back drop to the historical formation of modern U.S. sexual cultures and politics. Scholars in Native
and American studies have theorized settler colonialism as the social processes and narratives that displace Native people while
granting settlers belonging to Native land and settler society. With Renée Bergland and James Cox, I examine how this displacement
is enabled by settler narratives of Native absence or disappearance.41 Both terms share a quality of invoking the very thing being
argued as not present. Stories of Native absence or disappearance thus precisely do not erase Native people but produce particular
forms of knowledge about Native people, as already or inevitably gone. Cox argues that tales of Native disappearance should also be
read as narratives of settlement. The very absence of Native people in a story is telling us a story about qualities of settler subjects,
cultures, and social life. Queer scholarship on race and sexuality has been effective at marking colonial relations and discourses and
inviting the study of settlement. Scholars reveal that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sexual sciences and civil
institutions distinguished primitive from civilized sexuality in order to define queer margins for sexual normality. Eithne Luibhéid
and Roderick Ferguson explain how Asian immigrants and conquered Mexicans after the mid nineteenth century, and African
Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow society, were produced as racial and sexual populations for national regulation.42
Queers of color in such contexts were targeted for control, but as emblems of entire racial
populations to be queered as the primitive margins of national whiteness and its civilizational
sexuality.43 In turn, Jennifer Terry and George Chauncey, among others, explain how sexual sciences classified perversions by
documenting white subjects as degenerates who had regressed to prior stages of racial evo lution.44 In early activism, white
sexual minorities reversed discourse on sexual primitivity in order to embrace it as a nature
deserving recognition by modern citizenship. In the United States, Harry Hay organized the Mattachine Society by
referencing stories of berdache as the primitive nature of sexual minorities and as a primitive model of acceptance that modern
societies could emulate — themes that were sustained in homophile and gay and lesbian civil rights activism.45 Each such moment
is illuminated by its relation to settlement. As Luib héid’s remarkable historical research suggests, the structural locations
of non Native people of color within the biopolitics of modern sexuality in the colonial and
imperial United States align with those assigned to Native peoples by sexual colonization.46 Their
distinctive encounters with racial and sexual power thus may be examined as interrelated effects of the United States forming as a
colonial power through processes of settlement. Yet studying their ties also will mark the many nonidentical locations occupied by
non-Natives, including queers of color, in relation to Native people under colonial conditions of settlement. In turn, white U.S.
sexual minorities who defended their sexual primitivity articulated normative practices of settler
citizenship.
Queer theory must have an examination of settler colonialism in
order to analyze the politics of differences between race, sex, and
gender
Mortensen ’10 (Scott Laura Morgeson, PhD in Women’s Studies, past co-Chair of the
Association for Queer Anthropology, “Settler Homonationalism theorizing Settler Colonialism
within Queer modernities” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16:1-2, published 2010,
pages: 120-121, Yung Jung)
In turn, Siobhan Somerville and Kevin Mumford have shown how popular stories and social practices in the early twentieth century
linked homosexuality to miscegenation, including representing it as emblematic of white “slumming” for sexual adventure in African
American districts of New York City and Chicago.50 Yet in the Northeast, blackness already connoted historical miscegenation with
Indianness. Amy den Ouden has explained how in the wake of normative associations of Native people with blackness in New
England, Native communities with black family lines could be marked by white authorities as racially inauthentic, thereby
delegitimating their Native identities and land claims. In light of this, by the early twentieth century, how did discourses on sexual
perversion tie Indianness and blackness to homosexuality, and how did they interlink? Did the histories of black-Indian
communities and of their regulation shape modern racial theories of homosexuality? What would a queer history of homosexuality
and miscegenation look like if Indianness —as an identity, or an object of colonial discourse —were crucial to analysis?51 Queer
studies must center settler colonialism and processes of settlement in order to pursue these
directions in scholarship. Settler colonialism appears in the relational of colonial and modern
sexual regimes; in narratives of sexuality and gender based on Native absence and
disappearance, despite evidence of Native survival and resistance; and in the normative
formation of settler sexual subjects, cultures, and politics. I argue that queer accounts of settler
colonialism will be supported by studying the colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality. The
frame of colonial biopolitics makes the discursive and institutional relationality of Native and
settler subject positions relevant to any account of modern sexuality in the United States. While
such accounts have tended to exclude Native people, biopolitics marks erasure as meaningful to narrating settlement, even as that
move can be investigated for evidence of the irruption of Native people amid stories of their demise. The frame of colonial
biopolitics will also mark how the power relations structuring “Native” and “settler” articulate
diverse people, cultures, and politics across differences of race, nation, class, disability, gender,
and sexuality that exceed these two terms and their opposition. Yet the normativity of the terms
within colonial biopolitics will still inform every U.S. formation of modern sexuality. Studying their
relationality can recall that the locations they define for Native people always are exceeded by the discrepant histories and
epistemologies of Native people’s interdependent and resistant lives. In turn, the term non-Native can help mark how subjects
outside Native communities incompletely fit the term settler— whether excluded from it categorically or asked to pass through or
appeal to it — as they negotiate varied non-Native lives in a settler society. Differences among non-Native people of
color, or between them and white people, thus will not be erased by marking their shared
inheritance of settler colonialism; indeed, doing so will mark those differences, even as their
distinctive relationships to settler colonialism and its naturalization become relevant to study .52
In the process, analyzing the colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality will focus queer studies on the
work of denaturalizing settlement. I mean here not just that settler colonial ism will be marked as a condition of all
modern sexual power in the United States but also that the meaningfulness of its naturalization will become a major area of study.
We need many more, and more detailed accounts of the subjects, institutions, and power relations that form whenever settler
colonialism is naturalized within modern queer projects in the United States. My argument invites scholars to return to
homonationalism and explain it as one crucial effect of the settler histories of modern sexuality
in the United States. We will see that if non-Native queers become sexual subjects of life, they
will do so by joining a colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality that functions to produce modern
queers as settler subjects in relation to Native peoples. Normatively white and national queer
politics will arise here by naturalizing settler colonialism, notably when appeals to the settler
state fail to trouble its colonial relation to Native peoples and its enforcement of a settler
society.53 To invoke Puar, the settler formation of U.S. queer projects will make them “queer as
regulatory” over Native peoples, whose social lives will appear distant in time and space despite
the continued existence of collective and allied Native activisms for decolonization and calls to
non-Natives to join. Homonationalism will arise here, where the historical and contemporary
activity of settler colonialism conditions queer modernities in the United States.54
2nc turns islamophobia
Homonationalism further entrenches islamophobia – the aff becomes the next
justification for pinkwashing
Puar 13 - Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick,
N.J. (Jasbir, 2013, Rethinking Homonationalism, Int. J. Middle East Stud. 45 (2013) ) /AMarb
The following brief discussion of homonationalism in relation to pinkwashing and Palestine may help demonstrate the complex ways
I see homonationalism as neither identity nor political position. Homonationalism and pinkwashing should not be seen as parallel
phenomena. Rather, pinkwashing is one manifestation and practice made possiblewithin and because
of homonationalism. Unlike pinkwashing, homonationalism is not a state practice per se. It is instead the historical
convergence of state practices, transnational circuits of queer commodity culture and human
rights paradigms, and broader global phenomena such as the increasing entrenchment of
Islamophobia. These are just some of the circumstances through which nation-states are now vested with the status of “gayfriendly” versus “homophobic.” The conflation of homonationalism and pinkwashing can result in wellintentioned critiques or political stances that end up reproducing the queer exceptionalism of
homonationalism in various ways.4 It is thus important to map out the relations between pinkwashing and
homonationalism, or, more precisely, the global conditions of homonationalism that make a practice such as Israeli pinkwashing
possible and legible in the first place. In connecting Israeli pinkwashing to a broader global system of power networks, I am
demonstrating the myriad of actors that converge to enable such a practice. Pinkwashing has become a commonly used tag for the
cynical promotion of LGBT bodies as representative of Israeli democracy. As its use as a shorthand proliferates, it must be situated
within its wider geopolitical context. That is to say, pinkwashing works because both history and global international relations
matter. So while it is crucial to challenge the Israeli state, it must be done in a manner that acknowledges the range of complicit
actors. Historically speaking, settler colonialism has a long history of articulating its violence through the protection of serviceable
figures such as women and children, and now the homosexual. Pinkwashing is only one more justification for
imperial/racial/national violence within this long tradition of intimate rhetorics around “victim”
populations. Further, Islamophobia has proliferated since the beginning of the “war on terror,” but
it also predates 9/11 in various forms (see, for example, Edward Said’s periodization of Islamophobia as heralded
during the end of the cold war). Pinkwashing works in part by tapping into the discursive and structural
circuits produced by U.S. and European crusades against the spectral threat of “radical Islam” or
“Islamo-fascism.”
2nc framework
Classrooms create a unique pedagogical experience where ideologies of LGBT
identities can change – if we can’t discuss this then it recreates structural violence
Vaccaro, August, and Kennedy 12 – All PhDs (Annemarie (Department of Human
Development and Family Studies at the University of Rhode Island), Gerri (Department of
Educational Studies at Rhode Island College), and Megan S (faculty member in the Department
of Education at Westfield State University,). Inside the Classroom Walls, Chapter 5, pg 83-84)
/AMarb
Classroom walls create an impression of dichotomy—the academic arena within, the personal
arena without. The reality, of course, is much more complicated. The walls are permeable:
students (and teachers) bring their personal experiences into the classroom and carry their
classroom experiences with them when they leave. Parents, coaches, and religious leaders are
present in our classrooms in the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs that students have learned
from them. In turn, classroom experiences spill over into family, extracurricular, and religious
life. In this way, classroom walls, though they mark off a space distinctive in purpose and
language patterns, are something of a fiction. Still, classroom spaces leave their mark on all of
us. We know what it is like to walk through the door of a classroom and wonder what is in store.
Most of us have experienced the relief that comes from slipping into a saved seat (prime real
estate for anyone in an unfamiliar setting) and the dread that comes from knowing that no such
seat awaits. Students understand that classrooms are not neutral spaces—they are charged with
emotion. Far from being beside the point, feelings of relief and dread are the point for young
people. And we adults need to pay attention because the stakes are high: these moments shape
attitudes and ideologies, and these attitudes and ideologies have physical and psychological
consequences—particularly for LGBT youth. Classrooms lay the foundations for an inclusive and
safe society: a just community where common interests and individual differences coexist. To
the extent that teachers, school administrators, and college professors create an atmosphere in
which difference is not only tolerated but expected, explored, and embraced, students will be
more likely to develop perspectives that result in respectful behaviors. Without the deliberate
creation of an inclusive atmosphere, however, what happens inside classroom walls
reproduces the prejudices that exist outside these walls: straightness and gender
conformity are assumed; LGBT identity is deviant. Any adult interested in creating safe
spaces for LGBT youth needs to consider the impact of schooling on the social and psychological
development of young people. Teachers and peers usher children from the relative protection
and insulation of family life into the classroom, where (perhaps for the first time) children
encounter cultural and ethnic norms different from those of their family. If our homes are
incubators, keeping our children safe as they grow into the patterns of family life, schools are
“outcubators”—places that introduce new ways of thinking and behaving. Social and
psychological development progresses as young people move through our educational system—
kindergarten through college.
Discussions about sexual orientations are absent from academia – we
need discussions to avoid status quo dominant social patners
Vaccaro, August, and Kennedy 12 – All PhDs (Annemarie (Department of Human
Development and Family Studies at the University of Rhode Island), Gerri (Department of
Educational Studies at Rhode Island College), and Megan S (faculty member in the Department
of Education at Westfield State University,). Inside the Classroom Walls, Chapter 5) /AMarb
Sexual orientation topics are entirely absent from nearly half our elementary teacher education
programs in the United States.4 It is therefore unsurprising that LGBT people are largely absent
from elementary curricula or classroom discussions. Take the topic of family, for instance—a
unit of study that is part of every (or nearly every) early childhood curriculum. The oft-stated
objective is for children to learn that families come in different shapes and sizes, live in different
dwellings, observe different traditions, and celebrate different holidays. Teachers around our
nation narrate stories about single-parent families, adoptive families, divorced families, and
foster families. The idea is that tolerance will grow as students gain appreciation for difference.
We can learn from each other and enjoy each other’s ways of being family. So far, so good—until
the family is two moms and their children or two dads and their adopted daughter. Such families
rarely make the curricular cut—they are invisible. While it might seem to be the safest and least
political of all curriculum units, the study of family can either reinforce or interrupt
heteronormative beliefs and attitudes. Most teachers are reinforcers. They teach their students
the status quo; they shrink from challenging dominant social patterns and expectations,
especially in relation to sexual orientation or gender identity. Even teachers who describe
themselves as social justice advocates fail to challenge homophobic or transphobic language and
images in many early childhood settings.5 Powerful social messages are responsible (at least in
part) for this noncritical allegiance to traditional perspectives. Consider the following story as an
example of how the forces beyond the classroom pave paths of heterosexism.
2nc alternative
We propose an aggressive counter-reading of the technology of suicide terrorism
as inherently queer. Defiant of the qualities of subject and object, rhyme, reason,
embodied or disembodied: death and becoming are achieved in one act. There are
no sides in the global war against difference: only death and life conjoined in the
same radical act. To study the tricky play of the suicide terrorist queers the entire
assemblage of the body, eviscerating its supposed naturality. Desperation is the
raw material of change. Give up everything to the viral assemblage of queer
toxicity.
Puar 07. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke
University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 216
The fact that we approach suicide bombing with such trepidation, in contrast to how we
approach the violence of colonial domination, indicates the symbolic violence that
shapes our understanding of what constitutes ethically and politically illegitimate
violence.- Ghassan Hage, "'Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm'"
Ghassan Hage wonders "why it is that suicide bombing cannot be talked about without being
condemned first," noting that without an unequivocal condemnation, one is a "morally
suspicious person" because "only un- qualified condemnation will do." He asserts. "There is a
clear political risk in trying to explain suicide bombings."33 With such risks in mind, my
desire here is to momentarily suspend this dilemma by combining an analysis of these
representational stakes with a reading of the forces of affect, of the body, of matter. In pondering
the modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a pastiche of oddities: a body machined
together through metal and flesh, an assemblage of the organic and the inorganic; a
death not of the Self nor of the Other, but both simultaneously, and, perhaps more
accurately, a death scene that obliterates the Hegelian self/other dialectic altogether.
Self-annihilation is the ultimate form of resistance, and ironically, it acts as selfpreservation, the preservation of symbolic self enabled through the "highest cultural
capital" of martyrdom, a giving of life to the future of political struggles-not at all a sign of
"disinterest in living a meaningful life." As Hage notes, in this limited but nonetheless trenchant
economy of meaning, suicide bombers are "a sign of life" emanating from the violent
conditions of life's impossibility, the "impossibility of making a life. "" This body forces a
reconciliation of opposites through their inevitable collapse- a perverse habitation of
contradiction.
Achille Mbembe's and brilliant meditation on necropolitics notes that the historical basis of
sovereignty that is reliant upon a notion of (western) political rationality begs for a more
accurate framing: that of life and death, the subjugation of life to the power of death. Mbembe
attends not only to the representational but also to the informational productivity of the
(Palestinian) suicide bomber. Pointing to the becomings of a suicide bomber, a corporeal
experiential of "ballistics," he asks, "What place is given to life, death, and the human body
(especially the wounded or slain body)?" Assemblage here points to the inability to clearly
delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or molecular distinction between a discrete
biological body and technology; the entities, particles, and elements come together,
flow, break apart, interface, skim off each other, are never stable, but are defined
through their continual interface, not as objects meeting but as multiplicities emerging from
interactions. The dynamite strapped onto the body of a suicide bomber is not merely an
appendage or prosthetic; the intimacy of weapon with body reorients the assumed spatial
integrity (coherence and concreteness) and individuality of the body that is the mandate of
intersectional identities: instead we have the body-weapon. The ontology of the body
renders it a newly becoming body:
The candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the
soon-to-be-detonated weapon. Unlike the tank or the missile that is clearly visible, the
weapon carried in the shape of the body is invisible. Thus concealed, it forms part of
the body. It is so intimately part of the body that at the time of its detonation it annihilates the
body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of others when it does not reduce them to
pieces. The body does not simply conceal a weapon. The body is transformed into a
weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in a truly ballistic sense.,1
Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and becoming fuse into
one: as one's body dies, one's body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide
bomber. Not only does the ballistic body come into being without the aid of visual cues
marking its transformation, it also "carries with it the bodies of others." Its own
penetrative energy sends shards of metal and torn flesh spinning off into the ether. The bodyweapon does not play as metaphor, nor in the realm of meaning and epistemology, but forces us
ontologically anew to ask: What kinds of information does the ballistic body impart? These
bodies, being in the midst of becoming, blur the insides and the outsides, infecting
transformation through sensation, echoing knowledge via reverberation and
vibration. The echo is a queer temporality-in the relay of affective information between and
amid beings, the sequence of reflection, repetition, resound, and return (but with a difference, as
in mimicry)-and brings forth waves of the future breaking into the present. Gayatri Spivak,
prescient in drawing our attention to the multivalent tex- tuality of suicide in "Can the Subaltern
Speak," reminds us in her latest ruminations that suicide terrorism is a modality of expression
and communication for the subaltern (there is the radiation of heat, the stench of burning
flesh, the impact of metal upon structures and the ground, the splattering of blood, body parts,
skin):
Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It
is both execution and mourning, for both self and other. For you die with me for the same
cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are, there are no
designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I cannot talk to
you, you won't respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and
innocent death. 36
We have the proposal that there are no sides, and that the sides are forever shifting,
crumpling, and multiplying, disappearing and reappearing, unable to satisfactorily
delineate between here and there. The spatial collapse of sides is due to the queer
temporal interruption of the suicide bomber, projectiles spewing every which way. As
a queer assemblage- distinct from the queering of an entity or identity-race and sexuality
are denaturalized through the impermanence, the transience of the suicide bomber,
the fleeting identity replayed backward through its dissolution. This dissolution of
self into others and other into self not only effaces the absolute mark of self and
others in the war on terror, but produces a systemic challenge to the entire order of
Manichaean rationality that organizes the rubric of good versus evil. Delivering "a
message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through," suicide bombers do not
transcend or claim the rational nor accept the demarcation of the irrational. Rather, they
foreground the flawed temporal, spatial, and ontological pre- sumptions upon which such
distinctions flourish. Organic and inorganic, flesh and machine, these wind up as
important as (and perhaps as threatening) if not more so than the symbolism of the
bomber and his or her defense or condemnation.
Figure 24 is the November/December 2004 cover of a magazine called Jest: Humor for the
Irreverent, distributed for free in Brooklyn (see also jest .com) and published by a group of
counterculture artists and writers. Here we have the full force of the mistaken identity
conundrum: the distinctive silhouette, indeed the profile, harking to the visible by literally
blacking it out, of the turbaned Amritdhari Sikh male (Le., turban and unshorn beard that
signals baptized Sikhs), rendered (mistakenly?) as a (Muslim) suicide bomber, replete with
dynamite through the vibrant pulsations of an iPod ad. Fully modern, animated through
technologies of sound and explosives, this body does not operate solely or even primarily on the
level of metaphor. Once again, to borrow from Mbembe, it is truly a ballistic body. Contagion,
infection, and transmission reign, not meaning.
Their arguments about singularity are an unrelenting epistemological will to truth,
which fixes subjects in place through uncomprehending difference. Err on the side
of ontogenesis. Only an approach which begins with assemblage rather than
singularity can break through the grid of intelligibility that overcodes possible
becomings in the status quo.
Puar 07. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke
University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 214
Linked to this is what Massumi calls "ontogenetic difference" or "ontogenetic priority," a
concept that rescripts temporality exterior to the sheer administrative units that are
mobilized to capture the otherwise unruly processes of a body:
To say that passage and indeterminancy "come first" or "are primary" is more a statement
of ontological priority than the assertion of a time sequence. They have ontological privilege
in the sense that they constitute the field of emergence, while positionings are what
emerge. The trick is to express that priority in a way that respects the inseparability
and contemporaneousness of the disjunct dimensions: their ontogenetic difference.
And later: "The field of emergence is not pre-social. It is open-endedly social. ... One of the
things that the dimension of change is ontogenetically 'prior to' is thus the very distinction
between individual and the collective, as well as any given model of their interaction. That
interaction is precisely what takes form."' The given models of interaction would be these
bifurcated distinctions between the body and the social (its signification) such that the
distinctions disappear. Massumi's move from ontology (being, becoming) to ontogenesis is also
relevant to how he discusses affect and cognition and the processes of the body: "Feedback and
feed forward, or recursivity, in addition to converting distance into intensity, folds the
dimensions of time into each other. The field of emergence of experience has to be thought
of as a space-time continuum, as an ontogenetic dimension prior to the separatingout of space and time. Linear time, like position- gridded space, would be emergent
qualities of the event of the world's self- relating. " 2 7
This ontogenetic dimension that is "prior" but not "pre" claims its priorness not through
temporality but through its ontological status as that which produces fields of emergence; the
prior and the emergence are nevertheless "contemporaneous." "Ontological priority" is a
temporality and a spatialization that has yet to be imagined, a property more than a boundedness by space and time. The ontogenetic dimension that articulates or occupies multiple
temporalities of vectors and planes is also that which enables an emergent bifurcation of time
and space.
Identity is one of affect, a capture that proposes what one is by masking its
retrospective ordering and thus its ontogenetic dimension- what one was-through
the guise of an illusory futurity: what one is and will continue to be. However, this is
anything but a relay between stasis and flux; position is but one derivative of systems in
constant motion, lined with erratic trajectories and unruly projectiles. If the
ontogenetic dimensions of affect render affect as prior to representation-prior to
race, class, gender, sex, nation, even as these categories might be the most pertinent
mapping of or reference back to affect itself-how might identity-as-retrospective-ordering
amplify rather than inhibit praxes of political organizing? If we transfer our energy, our
turbulence, our momentum from the defense of the integrity of identity and submit instead to
this affective ideation of identity, what kinds of political strategies, of "politics of the open end,""
might we unabashedly stumble upon? Rather than rehashing the pros and cons of
identity politics, can we think instead of affective politics?
Displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or
tangibly evident-the seemingly queer body in a "cultural freeze-frame" of sortsassemblages allow us to attune to movements, intensities, emotions, energies,
affectivities, and textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities.
Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, while
assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information. Further, in the
sway from disciplinary societies (where the panoptic "functioned primarily in terms of
positions, fixed points, and identities") to control societies, the diagram of control, Michael
Hardt writes, is "oriented toward mobility and anonymity. . . . The flexible and mobile
performances of contingent identities, and thus its assemblages or institutions are
elaborated primarily through repetition and the production of simulacra. " 2 9
Assemblages are thus crucial conceptual tools that allow us to acknowledge and
comprehend power beyond disciplinary regulatory models, where "particles, and
not parts, recombine, where forces, and not categories, clash. " 3 0
Most important, given the heightened death machine aspect of nationalism in our contemporary
political terrain-a heightened sensorial and anatomical domination indispensable to Mbembe's
necropolitics-assemblages work against narratives of U.S. exceptionalism that
secure empire, challenging the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies that inform
practices of state surveillance and control and befuddling the "us versus them" of the
war on terror. (On a more cynical note, the recent work of Eyal Weizman on the use of the
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Guy Debord by the Israeli Defense Forces
demonstrates that we cannot afford to ignore concepts such as war machines and machinic
assemblages, as they are already heavily cultivated as instructive tactics in military strategy.) For
while intersectionality and its underpinnings-an unrelenting epistemological will
to truth-presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately,
prematurely anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever, assemblage, in its debt to
ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be
known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming beyond or without being.32
Queer times require even queerer modalities of analysis — we agree that theories
of radical politics should not be reliant on subjectivity, but anything and
everything can be comprehended as an assemblage – indeed, we can take as its
inspiration the inherently queer figure of the suicide terrorist, calling into
question the very bases of Western self-hood, in favor of understanding the
interlockings of bodies as artificially made assemblages
Puar 07. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke
University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 204
These are queer times indeed, temporal assemblages hooked into an array of enduring
modernist paradigms (civilizing teleologies, Orientalisms, xenophobia,
militarization, border anxieties) and postmodern eruptions (suicide bombers,
biometric surveillance strategies, emergent corporealities, counterterrorism in
overdrive). With its emphasis on bodies, desires, pleasures, tactility, rhythms, echoes, textures,
deaths, morbidity, torture, pain, sensation, and punishment, our necropolitical presentfuture deems it imperative to rearticulate what queer theory and studies of sexuality
have to say about the metatheories and the realpolitik of empire, often understood, as Joan
Scott observes, as “the real business of politics.” Queer times require even queerer
modalities of thought, analysis, creativity, and expression in order to elaborate
upon nationalist, patriotic, and terrorist formations and their imbricated forms of
racialized perverse sexualities and gender dysphorias.
Throughout this book I allude to queer praxes of futurity that insistently disentangle the
relations between representation and affect, and propose queerness not as an identity nor antiidentity, but an assemblage that is spatially and temporally contingent. The limitations of the
intersectional identitarian models emerge progressively—however queer they may be—as I work
through the concepts of affect, tactility, and ontology. While dismantling the
representational mandates of visibility identity politics that feed narratives of
sexual exceptionalism, affective analyses can approach queernesses that are unknown or
not cogently knowable, that are in the midst of becoming, that do not immediately and
visibly signal themselves as insurgent, oppositional, or transcendent. This shift
forces us to ask not only what terrorist corporealities mean or signify, but more insistently, what
do they do? In this conclusion, I review these tensions between affect and representation,
identity and assemblage, posing the problematics of nationalist and terrorist formations as
central challenges to transnational queer cultural and feminist studies.
I propose the assemblage as a pertinent political and theoretical frame within
societies of control. I rearticulate terrorist bodies, in particular the suicide bomber, as an
assemblage that resists queerness-as-sexual-identity (or anti-identity)—in other words,
intersectional and identitarian paradigms—in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal
convergences, implosions, and rearrangements. Queerness as an assemblage moves away
from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and notqueer subjects, and, instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and
alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and
complicity with dominant formations. This foregrounding of assemblage enables
attention to ontology in tandem with epistemology, affect in conjunction with
representational economies within which bodies interpenetrate, swirl together, and
transmit affects and effects to each other.
It also aids in circumventing the fatigued “temporal differencing” of resistant identity paradigms
of the Other that Chow problematizes. Invariably, Chow argues, poststructuralist selfreferentiality produces alienating temporalities of “non-coincidence.” Mystification exoticizes
the Other through a referential inward-turning “temporality as self destruction” that
refuses continuity between the self and other, producing difference as a complete
disjuncture that cannot exist within the same temporal planes as the Self. Concomitantly,
futurization occurs where “temporality as allochronism” produces the Other as the “perpetual
promise” that is realizable, but only with a lag time, not in the present. Both Hansen and Chow
hint at the ends of identity. Chow suggests that attending to the specificity of others
has ironically become a universalizing project, whereas Hansen implies that othering
itself is no longer driven by the Hegelian self-other process of interpellation. While the language
of “misrecognition” problematically harks to an older Marxian model of false consciousness,
Hansen avers that taking up the position of the other only capitulates to state and
capitalist modes of domination and surveillance.
Affect, Race, and Sex
Representational analyses, identity politics, and the focus on rights-bearing subjects are
currently being complemented with thinking on affect and on population formation that
recognizes those who are living not only through their relation to subjecthood, but are
coming under control as part of one or many populations, not individuals, but
“dividuals.” Norma Alarcon intimated as much in her brilliant 1990 essay “The Theoretical
Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism.” In this essay she
asks, “Do we have to make a subject of the whole world?” suggesting that the modern subject
is exhausted, or rather that we have exhausted the modern subject. We have
multiplied it to accommodate all sorts of differences (i.e., a politics of inclusion),
intersected it with every variable of identity imaginable, split it to account for the
unknown realms of the subconscious, infused it with great individual rights (the rightsbearing subject). Foucault’s own provocations include the claim that sexuality is an
intersection, rather than an interpellative identity, of the body and the population. We an
read both of these pronouncements as attempts to highlight what Rey Chow calls “categorical
miscegenation”: that race and class are for the most part not only indistinguishable and
undifferentiable from each other, but are a series of temporal and spatial
contingencies that retain a stubborn aversion to being read. While Foucault’s formation
hails the feminist heuristic of “intersectionality,” unlike intersectional theorizing which
foregrounds separate analytics of identity that perform the holistic subjects’
inseparableness, the entities that intersect are the body (not the subject, let us remember)
and population. My own reliance upon calls to intersectional approaches not withstanding, the
limitations of feminist and queer (and queer of color) theories of intersectionality
are indebted in one sense to the taken-for-granted presence of the subject and its
permutations of content and form, rather than an investigation of the predominance of
subjecthood itself. Thus, despite the anti-identitarian critique that queer theory launches
(i.e., queerness is an approach, not an identity or wedded to identity), the queer subject, a
subject that is against identity, transgressive rather than (gay or lesbian) liberatory,
nevertheless surfaces as an object in need of excavation, elaboration or
specularization.
2nc alt solves
Using an assemblage to disrupt heteronormative norms by questioning our
epistemology is able to overcome bipolitics that causes racism and sexism – it’s a
prerequisite to politics
Puar 7 – Professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University (Jabir, 2007, Terrorist
Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, pg 174-175) /AMarb
As much queer diasporic theorizing seeks to enact the elaboration of a transgressive agential
queer diasporic subject, I would like to o√er an interpretation of a√ect that does not demand
that the (agential) queer (diasporic?) subject be read in line with a√ective or emotional
resonance, nor that the queer subject be produced through these resonances. I am not interested
in reading the turbaned body as a queer body or queering the turbaned body. As a figure that
deeply troubles the nation’s security, the turbaned body can be most fruitfully rearticulated, not
solely as a body encased in tradition and backwardness, attempting to endow itself with
modernity, nor as a dissident queer body, but as an assemblage, a move I make to both
expand the expectations and assumptions of queer reading practices (descriptive and
prescriptive) and to unsettle the long-standing theorizations of heteronormative
frames of reference for the nation and the female body as the primary or sole
bearer of cultural honor and respect. My aim is to rethink turbaned terrorist bodies and
terrorist populations in relation to and beyond the ocular, that is, as affective and affected
entities that create fear but also feel the fear they create, an assemblage of contagions (again,
this is distinct from the perverse body as contagious), sutured not through identity or
identification but through the concatenation of disloyal and irreverent lines of flight—partial,
transient, momentary, and magical. (In this sense I am departing from the currently emerging
convention of queer theory on a√ect, or on queer a√ect, which I discuss in greater detail in the
conclusion.) This rereading of turbaned bodies offers a critical counternarrative to both
queer subjects that regulate the terms of queerness (in this case, hinting at the
foreclosure of a queer diasporic turbaned Sikh, male or female, a subject that is distinct from the
queernesses that have often been attributed to Sikh masculinities) and the pathological
queernesses endowed upon terrorist populations that Sikh gurdwara communities seek to
evade. Crucially linked to this, the purported coherence and cohesion of the organic body is at
stake here, as I suggest, first, that the intermixing of the organic with the inorganic turban needs
to be theorized across an organic/ inorganic divide, a machinic assemblage, and second, that
informational and surveillance technologies of control both produce the body-asinformation and also impact the organic body through an interface—again, organic
and machinic technologies that interface to points of mutual dissolution. My reading thus
elaborates the biopolitics of population that racializes and sexualizes bodies not
entirely through their visual and affective qualities (as they are acquired historically
and discursively) but rather through the data they assemble, what are otherwise known as ‘‘data
bodies,’’ bodies materialized through information and statistics. Here I pro√er some
speculations about the connections and divergences—the dance—between the profile and the
racial profile, keeping in tension with each other the ocular, the affective, and the informational.
What is the concept of race in profiling if we are not to privilege the visible, the
knowable, the epistemological? Is the informational body, the data body that precedes and
follows us racial, or racist, and if so, how is it articulated within profiling? This is of particular
concern to me in part because the notion of ‘‘surveillance assemblages’’ that is currently
emerging from the field of surveillance studies, while rightly deprivileging the visual field in
favor of affect and information, tends toward discounting and dismissing the visual and its
capacity to interpellate subjects. This discounting is simply not politically viable given
the shifts around formations of race and sex that are under way in response to a new visual
category, the ‘‘terrorist look-alike’’ or those who ‘‘look like terrorists.’’
The way we challenge pinkwashing is important-refusal to address it reinforces
the single axis identity logic that otherizes queer
Puar 2013 (Jasbir K., PhD. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the topranked Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “Homonationalism As
Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities”, Jindal Global law review Vol:4 Issue: 2
published November 2013, pages 37-38, Yung Jung)
Pinkwashing is thus what Michel Foucault called an “incitement to discourse,”43 an impelling
form of confessionalism which inaugurates a call and response circuit that hails the very identity
accused of being impossible. Refusing the liberal response to this incitement to discourse – a
contemporary version of ‘We’re here, We’re queer, get used to it’ – suggests that one might not
want to respond to pinkwashing as (primarily or only) queers, since such a response reinforces
the single axis identity logic of pinkwashing that isolates ‘queer’ from other identities. Nor is
pinkwashing a queer issue per se or even one that uses queers specifically to manifestation of the
regulation of identity in an increasingly homonationalist world – a world that evaluates further
state ends. Pinkwashing is not about sexual identity at all in this regard but rather a powerful
nationhood on the basis of the treatment of its homosexuals. The challenge, then, is to not allow
the liberal or establishment gays in Euro-America (who are the primary targets of pinkwashing)
to redirect the script of anti-pinkwashing activism away from the radical non-liberal approach of
PQBDS and Al-Qaws. Failing this, as Maya Mikdashi has so brilliantly articulated, the re-writing
of a radical Palestinian queer politics by a liberal Euro-American queer politics would indeed be
a further entrenchment of homonationalism.44 Organising against pinkwashing through a
‘queer international’ platform can potentially unwittingly produce an affirmation of the terms
within which the discourse of pinkwashing articulates its claims, namely, that queer identity
emboldened through rights is the predominant manner through which sexual subjectivities
should be lived.
The alternative deconstructs boundaries of sexuality and to embrace an aesthetic
of multiplicity, the becoming of difference-we must view sexuality as an
assemblage not an identity in order to avoid the trap of neoliberal and
homonational discourse presented in intersectionality.
Puar 2013 (Jasbir K., PhD. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the topranked Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “Homonationalism As
Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities”, Jindal Global law review Vol:4 Issue: 2
published November 2013, pages 40-41, Yung Jung)
We can think of (sexual) identity, and our attachments to identity, as a process involving an
intensification of habituation. That is to say, identity is the intensification of bodily habit, a
‘returning forward’ of the body’s quotidian affective sensorial rhythms and vibrations to a
disciplinary model of the subject, whereby sexuality is just one form of bodily capacity being
harnessed by neoliberal capital. Similarly, the Brand Israel campaign now being inaccurately
equated with pinkwashing is only one form of an array of ‘washing’ that composes this
campaign. This habituation of affective intensity to the frame of identity – a relation of
discipline to control, or in actuality, disciplining control – entails a certain stoppage of where the
body once was to reconcile where the body must go. It is also a habituation that demands certain
politics and forecloses an inhabitation of others. Sensations are thus always under duress, to use
Panagia’s terms, to ‘make sense’ to submit to these master scripts either as a backformation
responding to multiplicity or as a demand to subsume it to the master script and foreclose that
multiplicity. These different modes of sexuality are reflected in two strands of queer theory. The
first is deconstructive in emphasis and focused on the social construction of sexual difference for
which language dominates the political realm through an insistence on the endless deferral of
meaning.49 The other way of understanding sexuality can loosely be defined as the
multiplication and proliferation of difference, of making difference and proliferating creative
differentiation: the becoming otherwise of difference. In this case, the ‘place’ of language itself is
being re signified; language not only has matter, it is matter.50 Deconstructions of sexuality
move to think against and through binaries in hopes of undermining and dissolving them, while
the second, affirmative becomings, proposes to read and foster endless differentiation and
multiplicity in hopes of overwhelming those binaries. The durational temporal capacities of each
strategy are distinct and dispersed across different scales. The first might focus on making sense
or making different sense of a representational format or forum; the second solicits sense, the
creation of potentialities of emergence, less so a reinvestment of form. It is instead more attuned
to the perpetual differentiation of variation to variation and the multiplicity of affirmative
becomings.51 Taking up further this second strand of sexuality as assemblage and not identity, a
strand invested in thinking about assemblages and viral replication rather than reproductive
futurism, this strand might stress the import of moving away from the aforementioned call and
response relay that continues to dominate the ‘mainstream/ global queer’ versus ‘queer-ofcolour/non-western queer’ logic of argumentation, a relay that often fails to interrogate the
complex social field within which ‘queer’ is being produced as a privileged signifier across these
boundaries.
We must analyze the virality of homonationalism in order to determine the
ontologies and new epistemologies that justify the constructions of gender- this is
a prerequisite to approaching queer scholarship
Puar 2013 (Jasbir K., PhD. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the topranked Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “Homonationalism As
Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities”, Jindal Global law review Vol:4 Issue: 2
published November 2013, pages 42-43, Yung Jung)
Homonationalism as viral and as it is taken up into control society is no longer a mirror of itself,
no longer a holistic concept that reproduces only itself. Virality most often is invoked in
contemporary parlance to point to the intensified speed and reach of information transit,
especially in relation to the internet. It also refers to indiscriminant exchanges, often linked with
notions of bodily contamination, uncontainability, unwelcome transgression of border and
boundaries while pointing more positively to the porosity, indeed the conviviality, of what has
been treated as opposed. 52 In closing, then, how could one think differently about the virality of
homonationalism, given its intractability with modernity? What does it mean to say that
homonationalism has truly gone viral - a virality of mutation and replication rather than the
banal reproduction of its analytic frame across different national contexts, as has been the case
with some of its identitarian usages? The beauty of virality, of course, is that it produces its own
critique, mutating the call-and-response circuit of Foucault’s incitement to discourse. But unlike
this circuit, which is always about making an accusation that one takes up the position outside
of, the critique of a viral form is already enfolded from its incipience. It makes it harder to place
blame on the original purportedly offensive product, since it engendered its own criticism, and
is thus altered through that encounter. Viral reproduction is not about excess or supplements; it
is instead a post-human capacity; what is reproduced is not the human subject, identity, or
body, but affective tendencies, ecologies of sensation, and different ontologies that create new
epistemologies of affect. When we say that something has gone viral, it’s another way of
acknowledging everything that is opposed to the virus, or the viral, can be circumnavigated.
Viral theory, then, as a post humanist intervention, also begins before the species-like divide of
the activism versus theory binary, an opposition that is foundational to the production within
the fields of Women’s Studies and Gay and Lesbian studies. Viral theory is immune to such
divides and divisions. Virality indicates not so much the portability of a concept but a measure
of its resonance. Thus virality might also be a way of differently thinking geopolitical
transversality that is not insistently routed through or against the nation-state, providing an
alternative to notions of transnationalism, and complicating the application of the concept of
homonationalism to national contexts. Certainly homonationalism-as-assemblage is an
alternative to the home diaspora reactive-dialectic that informs the project of the movie I Am or
endless call-and-response relay of ‘the west and the rest’ paradigm.
at: intersectionality
Intersectionality is only helpful for white women, it doesn’t do anything to disrupt
masculinist frames of thinking
Puar, 12
Jasbir, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the top-ranked Women’s
and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “I would rather be a cyborg than a
goddess” Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory, Project Muse, PhiloSophia, pg. 52-53
While Crenshaw specifically targeted the elisions of both critical race paradigms and gender normative paradigms ,
intersectionality emerged from the struggles of second wave feminism as a crucial black feminist
intervention challenging the hegemonic rubrics of race, class, and gender within predominantly
white feminist frames. Pedagogically, since the emergence and consolidation of intersectionality
from the 1980s on, it has been deployed more forcefully as a feminist intervention to disrupt
whiteness and less so as a critical race intervention to disrupt masculinist frames. Thus, precisely in
the act of performing this intervention, what is also produced is an ironic reification of sexual difference as a/the foundational one
that needs to be disrupted. Sexual and gender difference is understood as the constant from which there
are variants, just as women of color are constructed in dominant feminist generational
narratives as the newest arrivals among the subjects of feminism. This pedagogical deployment
has had the effect of re-securing the centrality of the subject positioning of white women.
Intersectionality is exclusionary to women of color, focusing on the big picture and
never analyzing individual groups of women
Puar 12
Jasbir, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the top-ranked Women’s
and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “I would rather be a cyborg than a
goddess” Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory, Project Muse, PhiloSophia, pg. 53
The theory of intersectionality argues that all identities are lived and experienced as intersectional—
in such a way that identity categories themselves are cut through and unstable—and that all subjects
are intersectional whether or not they recognize themselves as such. In the succinct words of Arun
Saldahna, using Venn diagrams to illustrate his point, “The theory of intersectionality holds that there is no
actual body that is a member of only one set” (Saldanha 2010, 289). But what the method of intersectionality
is most predominantly used to qualify is the specific difference of “women of color,” a category that
has now become, I would argue, simultaneously emptied of specific meaning in its ubiquitous application and yet overdetermined in
its deployment. In this usage, intersectionality always produces an Other, and that Other is always a
Woman of Color (now on referred to as WOC, to underscore the overdetermined emptiness of its
gratuitousness), who must invariably be shown to be resistant, subversive, or articulating a
grievance.4 More pointedly, it is the difference of African American women that dominates this
genealogy of the term women of color. Indeed, Crenshaw is clear that she centralizes “black women’s experience” and
posits “black women as the starting point” of her analysis (Crenshaw 1991, 1243). Thus, the insistent consolidation of
intersectionality as a dominant heuristic may well be driven by anxieties about maintaining the
“integrity” of a discrete black feminist genealogy, one that might actually obfuscate how
intersectionality is thought of and functions differently in different strands of black feminist and
women of color feminist thought. This ironic othering of WOC through an approach that meant
to alleviate such othering is exacerbated by the fact that intersectionality has become cathected
to the field of women’s studies as the paradigmatic frame through which women’s lives are
understood and theorized, a problem reified by both WOC feminists and white feminists.6 McCall
notes that “feminists are perhaps alone in the academy in the extent to which they have embraced intersectionality . . . as itself a
central category of analysis” (McCall 2005, 1771). This claim to intersectionality as the dominant feminist
method can be produced with such insistence that an interest in exploring other frames, for
example assemblage, is rendered problematic and even produces WOC feminists invested in
multiple genealogies as “race-traitors.”7 This accusation of course reinforces the implicit
understanding that intersectionality is a tool to diagnose specifically racial difference. Despite
decades of feminist theorizing on the question of difference, difference continues to be “difference from,” that is,
the difference from “white woman.” Distinct from a frame that privileges “difference within,”
“difference from” produces difference as a contradiction rather than as a recognizing it as a
perpetual and continuous process of splitting. This is also then an ironic reification of racial difference. Malini
Johar Schueller, for example, argues that most scholarship on WOC is produced by WOC, while many white
feminists, although hailing intersectionality as a self-evident, primary methodological rubric,
continue to produce scholarship that presumes gender difference as foun- dational. Writes Schueller:
“While women of color theorize about a particular group of women, many white feminists
continue to theorize about gender/ sexuality/women in general.” And later: “Indeed, it has become almost a
given that works in gender and sexuality studies acknowledge multiple axes of oppres- sion or invoke
the mantra of race, class, gender and sexuality” (Schueller 2005, 64).8 Much like the language of
diversity, the language of intersectionality, its very invocation , it seems, largely substitutes for
intersectional analysis itself. What I have elsewhere called “diversity management” can more rigorously
be described as a “tendency to displace the concept of intersectionality from any political
practice and socio-economic context by translating it into a merely theoretical abstraction of
slipping signifiers of identity
Intersectionality is based on modern colonial agendas that reinforce violence
through an western/euro-american understanding of identity
Puar 12
Jasbir, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the top-ranked Women’s
and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “I would rather be a cyborg than a
goddess” Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory, Project Muse, PhiloSophia, pg. 55
Such questions about time, history, and the shifts from exclusion to inclusion also bring to the
fore the dynamics of the spatialization of intersectional analyses. If, as Avtar Brah and Ann Pheonix have
argued, “old debates about the category woman have assumed new critical urgency” (Brah and Pheonix 2004, 76) in the context
of recent historical events, such as September 11th and the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq,
transnational and postcolonial scholars point out that the categories privileged by intersectional
analysis do not necessarily traverse national and regional boundaries nor genealogical
exigencies, presuming and producing static epistemological renderings of categories themselves
across historical and geopolitical locations. Indeed, many of the cherished categories of the
intersectional mantra—originally starting with race, class, gender, now including sexuality,
nation, religion, age, and disability—are the products of modernist colonial agendas and regimes
of epis- temic violence, operative through a Western/Euro-American epistemological formation
through which the notion of discrete identity has emerged. Joseph Massad quite astutely points out, in his
refinement of Foucauldian framings of sexuality, that the colonial project deployed “sexuality” as a concept
that was largely internalized within intellectual and juridical realms but was not distilled as a
widespread hegemonic project. While one might worry, then, about the development and
adaptation of the terms gay or lesbian or the globalization of the term queer, Massad highlights the
graver problem of the generalization and assumed transparency of the term sexuality itself—a
taken for granted category of the modernist imperial project, not only an imposed
epistemological frame, but also ontologically presumptuous—or in fact, an epistemological
capture of an ontologically irreducible becoming (Massad 2009). These problems of epistemic violence
are reproduced in feminist and gay and lesbian human rights discourses, as intesectionality is
now widely understood as a policy-friendly paradigm. In her piece detailing the incorporation of the language
and the conceptual frame of intersectionality into UN and NGO forums, Nira Yuval-Davis points out: “The analysis and methodology
of intersectionality, especially in UN-related bodies is just emerging and often suffers from analytic confusions that have already
been tackled by feminist scholars who have been working on these issues for longer” (Yuval-Davis 2006, 206). Yuval-Davis also
notes that the relatively recent spread of intersectionality in Europe has largely been attributed to
its amenability to policy discussions, an attribution she argues elides the work on migrant
feminisms in Europe and particularly the scholarly interventions of black British feminists in the
1970s.
at: alt is violent
Their evidence is false, we don’t glorify violence, we’re attempting to look at the
underlying causes of domestic violence and how we can prevent it.
Puar 12
Jasbir, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, Director of the Graduate Program of the top-ranked Women’s
and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, “I would rather be a cyborg than a
goddess” Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory, Project Muse, PhiloSophia, pg. 64
Massumi has been criticized for aestheticizing violence, but I would argue that what he conveys
so well is the interplay between signification and significance, movement and capture, matter
and meaning, affect and identity. Unlike Crenshaw’s accident at the traffic intersection, the
focus here is not on whether there is a crime taking place, nor determining who is at fault, but
rather asking, what are the affective conditions necessary for the event-space to unfold? In the
most basic of feminist terms, we can read Massumi’s interest in unraveling the script as offering
a different way of thinking about the questions, what causes domestic violence and how can we
prevent it?
at: high theory bad
Every “high theory” bad argument links to the 1ac, which reads evidence from
peer-reviewed journals behind a paywall. However, every attempt to put
themselves above, or below, these theoretical positions is a reason to vote negative
because our assemblage reserves those theories as tools in a toolbox, whereas
their permutations crowd them out. Aversion to meta-narratives is itself a metanarrative, and a potentially Maoist one at that.
Bowman 10. Paul Bowman, professor of cultural studies at Cardiff University, “Reading Rey
Chow,” Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, pg. 248
Thus, Chow recasts the investments and orientations of cultural studies, poststructuralism, and other politicized ‘suffix-studies’ subjects in terms of the
unacknowledged but constitutive ‘Chinese prejudice’, first identified by Spivak. According to Chow, ‘China’ has a multiple status in Western discourses,
including cultural studies. As well as representing, for so long, the Other of capitalism, of freedom, of democracy, and so on, ‘China’ has also offered
‘radical thought’ in the West a promissory image of alterity, revolution, difference, alternativeness, and hence resistance as such. And, as Chow also
observes, one of the most enduring metanarratives that has long organized cultural studies and cultural theory (plus much more besides) is the
discourse of ‘resistance’. ‘If
there is a metanarrative that continues to thrive in these times of
metanarrative bashing’ , argues Chow, ‘it is that of ‘‘resistance’’’: ‘Seldom do we attend a
conference or turn to an article in an academic journal of the humanities or the social sciences
without encountering some call for ‘‘resistance’’ to some such metanarrativized power as ‘‘global
capitalism’’, ‘‘Western imperialism’’, ‘‘patriarchy’’, ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’, and so
forth’.41
The discourses of cultural theory and cultural studies more widely do seem to be structured by keywords or (worse) buzzwords like ‘resistance’,
‘struggle’, ‘difference’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘multiculturalism’. And many have interpreted this as evidence that such putatively ‘radical’ work is, basically,
nothing more than fashionable nonsense. But, rather than writing it off, Chow proposes that one
of the key problems with the
notion of resistance resides in the consequences of its rhetorical construction. She argues that the
popular rhetoric of resistance is itself implicitly organized and underwritten by a
subject/object divide in which ‘we’ speak against that which oppresses (capital, patriarchy,
the West, etc.) and for (or ‘in the name of’) the oppressed other. Thus, ‘we’ rhetorically position
ourselves as somehow ‘with’ the oppressed and ‘against’ the oppressors, even when ‘we’ are
more often than not much more obviously at some distance from sites and scenes of
oppression.42
Of course, the aim of ‘speaking out’ and publicizing the plight of the oppressed may be regarded as responsibility itself. It is certainly the
case that a dominant interpretation of what academic-political responsibility is boils down to the
idea that to be responsible we should speak out. Yet it is nevertheless equally the case that, unless
the distances, relations, aporias and irrelations are acknowledged and interrogated, there is a
strong possibility that ‘our’ discourse will become what Chow calls a version of Maoism . She
explains:
Although the excessive admiration of the 1970s has since been replaced by an oftentimes equally excessive denigration of China, the
Maoist is
very much alive among us, and her significance goes far beyond the China and East Asian fields.
Typically, the Maoist is a cultural critic who lives in a capitalist society but who is fed up with
capitalism – a cultural critic, in other words, who wants a social order opposed to the one that is
supporting her own undertaking. The Maoist is thus a supreme example of the way desire
works : What she wants is always located in the other , resulting in an identification with and
valorization of that which she is not/ does not have. Since what is valorized is often the other’s
deprivation – ‘having’ poverty or ‘having’ nothing – the Maoist’s strategy becomes in the main a
rhetorical renunciation of the material power that enables her rhetoric.43
In other words, such rhetoric claims a ‘position of powerlessness’ in order to claim a
particular form of ‘moral power’ :44 a heady conceptual and rhetorical mix that can be seen to underpin an awful lot of academic
work today. Derrida regularly referred to this position as ‘clear-consciencism’: namely, the belief that speaking out, speaking for, speaking against, etc.
equals Being Responsible. However, quite
apart from tub-thumping and mantra-reciting, Derrida believed in
the promise of the ‘most classical of protocols’ of questioning and critical vigilance as ways to
avoid the greater violence of essentialist fundamentalisms. Of course, Derrida’s attempts to draw such questions as
how to interpret ‘responsibility’, how to establish who ‘we’ are, in what relations ‘we’ exist, and what our responsibilities might be, into the crisis of
undecidability were equally regularly regarded as an advocation of theoretical obscurantism and irresponsibility. This charge was – and remains – the
most typical type of ‘resistance’ to deconstruction. Despite the clarity and urgency of Derrida’s reasons for subjecting all presumed certainties to the
harrowing ordeal of undecidability, the resistance to deconstruction surely boils down to a distaste for the complexity of Derrida’s ensuing close
readings/rewritings of texts.45
Such resistance to deconstruction is familiar. It is often couched as a resistance to theory
made in the name of a resistance to ‘disengagement’; a resistance to ‘theory’ for the sake of
‘keeping it real’. Such a rationale for the rejection of deconstruction (or indeed ‘Theory’ as such)
is widespread. But when ‘keeping it real’ relies upon a refusal to interrogate the ethical and
political implications of one’s own rhetorical and conceptual coordinates – one’s own ‘key
terms’ – the price is too high . Chow points to some of the ways and places that this high price is paid, and reflects on the palpable
consequences of it. For instance, in politicized contexts such as postcolonial cultural studies, there are times when
‘deconstruction’ and ‘theory’ are classified (reductively) as being ‘Western’, and therefore
as being just another cog in the Western hegemonic (colonial, imperial) apparatus. As she puts it,
in studies of non-Western cultural others, organized by postcolonial anti-imperialism, all things
putatively ‘Western’ easily become suspect. Thus, ‘the general criticism of Western
imperialism’ can lead to the rejection of ‘Western’ approaches, at the same time as ‘the study of
non- Western cultures easily assumes a kind of moral superiority, since such cultures are often
also those that have been colonized and ideologically dominated by the West’.46 In other words,
‘theory’ – ‘for all its fundamental questioning of Western logocentrism’ – is too hastily ‘lumped
together with everything ‘‘Western’’ and facilely rejected as a non-necessity’.47 Unfortunately, therefore:
In the name of studying the West’s ‘others’, then, the critique of cultural politics that is an inherent
part of both poststructural theory and cultural studies is pushed aside, and ‘culture’ returns to a
coherent, idealist essence that is outside language and outside mediation. Pursued in a morally
complacent, antitheoretical mode, ‘culture’ now functions as a shield that hides the positivism,
essentialism, and nativism – and with them the continual acts of hierarchization, subordination,
and marginalization – that have persistently accompanied the pedagogical practices of area
studies; ‘cultural studies’ now becomes a means of legitimizing continual conceptual and
methodological irresponsibility in the name of cultural otherness.48
What is at stake here is the surely significant fact that even the honest and principled or declared aim of studying others can actually amount to a
positive working for the very forces one avowedly opposes or seeks to resist. Chow clarifies this in terms of considering the uncanny proximity but
absolute difference between cultural studies and area studies. For, area
studies is a disciplinary field which ‘has long
been producing ‘‘specialists’’ who report to North American political and civil arenas about
‘‘other’’ civilizations, ‘‘other’’ regimes, ‘‘other’’ ways of life, and so forth’.49 However, quite unlike cultural
studies and postcolonial studies’ declared aims and affiliative interests in alterity and ‘other cultures’, within area studies ‘others’
(‘defined by way of particular geographical areas and nation states, such as South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, and countries of
are studied as if potential threats, challenges and – hence – ultimately ‘information target
fields’.50
Africa’)
Thus, says Chow, there is ‘a major difference’ between cultural studies and area studies – and indeed between cultural studies and ‘normal’ academic
disciplines per se.51 This
difference boils down to a paradigmatic decision – itself an act or effort of
resistance. This is the resistance to ‘proper’ disciplinarity; the resistance to becoming ‘normal’ or
‘normalized’, wherever it might equal allowing power inequalities, untranslatables and
heterogeneities to evaporate in the production of universalistic ‘objective’ knowledge. This is why
Chow’s attitude is always that:
In the classroom [...] students
should not be told simply to reject ‘metadiscourses’ in the belief that
by turning to the ‘other’ cultures – by turning to ‘culture’ as the ‘other’ of metadiscourses – they
would be able to overturn existing boundaries of knowledge production that, in fact,
continue to define and dictate their own discourses . Questions of authority, and with
them hegemony, representation, and right, can be dealt with adequately only if we insist on the
careful analyses of texts, on responsibly engaged rather than facilely dismissive judgments, and
on deconstructing the ideological assumptions in discourses of ‘opposition’ and ‘resistance’ as
well as in discourses of mainstream power. Most of all, as a form of exercise in ‘cultural literacy’, we need to continue to
train our students to read – to read arguments on their own terms rather than discarding
them perfunctorily and prematurely – not in order to find out about authors’ original
intent but in order to ask, ‘Under what circumstances would such an argument – no matter how
preposterous – make sense ? With what assumptions does it produce meanings? In what ways and to
what extent does it legitimize certain kinds of cultures while subordinating or outlawing
others?’ Such are the questions of power and domination as they relate, ever asymmetrically,
to the dissemination of knowledge . Old-fashioned questions of pedagogy as they are, they nonetheless
demand frequent reiteration in order for cultural studies to retain its critical and political
impetus in the current intellectual climate.52
aff answers
2ac cede the political
Queer theory is the worst form of ivory tower theorizing --- it provides no solution
to improve real living conditions for LGBTQ individuals
Kirsch 2k
(Max, Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, “Queer Theory and Social Change”, p.
97-98)
Queerness as a deviant form of heterosexuality results in oppression. When this fact is not
confronted, it can lead to maladaptive responses that include the markings of internalized
homophobia: depression, psychosis, resignation, and apathy. These are very much reactions to the ways in which we view ourselves, which in turn are, at least in part,
due to the ways in which we are constantly told to view ourselves. Here, the production of consciousness takes a very concrete form. Those enduring this
form of violence cannot, even in the academy, simply decide to disengage. We cannot
simply refuse to acknowledge these facts of social life in our present society, and
hope that our circumstances will change . Although the lack of definition is what has inspired the use of "queer," it cannot, as
Butler herself asserts, "overcome its constituent history of injury" (1993b: 223). Be that as it may, "queer," as put forward by Queer theorists, has no inherent historical or social
context. We continually return to the following question: to whom does it belong and what does it represent? These advocates of "queer" do not acknowledge that queer is
Queer theory, particularly as it is expressed in Butler's
dichotomizes the political as personal and the political as social action into a
binary that positions political action in impossible terms. The nature of the "political" is never
clearly discussed, and remains a chasm (cf. Kaufman and Martin, 1994). However appealing the notion of
positioning the self through a reinterpretation of the "I" may be, it is misguided as political action: it cannot
generate the collective energy and organization necessary to challenge existing
structures of power . As Michael Aglietta observes, " There is no magical road where the most
abstract concepts magically command the movement of society " (1979: 43). The question of polities,
produced by social relations, and therefore contains the attributes of existing social relations. As I have shown,
writings on performativity,
then, brings us back to where we began: what is the nature of the political and how do we address it? Is it beneficial to maintain alliances with established political parties? Can
we adopt the dominant values of our culture and still hope to change the dynamics of those values? How do we form alliances with other oppressed groups? Is there a structural
economic basis for such an alliance, or should we look elsewhere? Perhaps most importantly: is it possible, given the tremendous resources represented by the dominant and
coercive ideology of our present social relations, to maintain the energy necessary to develop and continue modes of resistance that counter it? In the last question, as I will
show, lies an answer to the issue of alliances and structural identification. But first, we need to refocus the discussion.
The alt gets stuck in calcified opposition to state power---they should lose if they
can’t identify how becoming/flux is translated into political praxis
Noys 8 [Benjamin, Reader in English at the University of Chichester, Through a Glass Darkly:
Alain Badiou’s critique of anarchism]
Alongside this critique, we can also see other signs of the rejection of the tendency of the movement to mirror the power that it
opposes. Recent discussions in the journal Voices of Resistance from Occupied London, subtitled the Quarterly Anarchist Journal of
Theory and Action from the British Capital after Empire, raise the question of the limits of the counter-summit – precisely because it
remains locked into shadowing the summits of those in power. The article ‘For a Summit Against Everything’
by the Comrades from Everywhere asks the question: ‘Sure we need to meet – and our counter-summits are an excellent opportunity
for doing so. But why follow them around in their summits, why give them the tactical advantage of selecting where and when our
battles are to take place?’ (2007: 44). Arguing for a new form of counter-summit, autonomously organised,
they note: ‘Rather than waiting for them to decide where and when to meet, no longer running
behind them, we’ll jump on the driver’s seat and decide this for ourselves.’ (2007: 44) This suggests a
strategic recognition of not only the successes of the anti-globalisation movement (which Badiou does not recognise), but also its
failures or limitations. The limitation of the counter-summit is being answered with the proposal that a new independent and
autonomous form of summit take place. Whether or not this is successful the suggestion implies the recognition of the problem that
Badiou had earlier identified: whether ‘anti-capitalist’ politics finds itself mirrored in its own self-definition
as a movement of opposition (‘anti-‘). One of the strategic questions posed to anarchism, or
anarchist practice, will be its negotiation of this different form of autonomous ‘power’, especially
in distinguishing itself from more usual ‘leftist’ or ‘radical’ forms of organisation or ‘counterpower’.¶ The second point to consider is Badiou’s claim that anarchism takes up a position of perpetual
opposition without really believing or acting in such a way as to change the
existing situation. The journal cum-newspaper Turbulence (2007), developed for reflection within the movement of
movements, titled its first issue ‘What
would it mean to win?’ Thus it posed to the movement the question Badiou
suggested that libertarian or anarchist thought has tended to evade. What is interesting is that some of the articles in
the issue do reflect a sense of crisis or failure in the movement that links to the problem of ‘organisation’, or the development of
struggles. Ben Trott posits the need for ‘directional demands’, which ‘aim to produce a point around
which a potential movement could consolidate’ (2007: 15). Similarly the group The Free Association argue that
what is required are ‘problematics’, shared problems that involve ‘acting and moving’ (2007: 26).
The Argentinean group Colectivo Situaciones argues for the need to develop a ‘non-state institution of that which is collective’ (2007:
25). While it would obviously be foolish to take this as representative of ‘the movement’, even less as particularly anarchist, it is a
sign that the problem of ‘winning’ seems to lead on to the fundamental criticism Badiou poses:
how would anarchists go about achieving there desired egalitarian collective social forms?¶ To
‘win’ is, of course, not only a matter of proposing alternative social forms, but also of the means
by which these might be achieved. Of course this problem arises in part because Marxist or ‘leftist’ critics often
cannot identify what anarchist practice does as having ‘real’ effects because it does not conform
to their idea of what politics is or should be. Anarchist thought and practice has always been
concerned with the critique of politics, as the separation of one realm of human activity from all others and a
separation which helps create an expert political class and professional politicians or militants. That said, as the
‘movement of movements’ starts to look beyond the limits of the counter-summit it does begin
to encounter the problem of strategy and practice outside of the ‘mass’ protest or
‘temporary autonomous zone’ .¶ Although not coming from an anarchist position, but rather from the tradition of
post-autonomist thinking, Sandro Mezzadra and Gigi Roggero raise the problem of organisation directly in their article in
Turbulence. They point to the difficulty that the ‘movement of movements’ has had intervening into
the
relations of production and that there is a danger of simply repeating statements concerning the
exhaustion of the party form and the promotion of the new form of the network. Taking the case of
EuroMayDay they point out that although it posed problems, especially concerning migration, and transmitted ‘explosive
images’ it ‘did not did not manage to generate common forms of organisation and praxis’ (2007: 8).
This raises the question of the relation of movements to institutions – not only in terms of existing institutions but also in terms of
the creation of new institutions (Mezzadra and Roggero 2007: 9). In particular they consider the case of what they call ‘laboratory
Latin America’: the multiplicity of movements and institutions emerging in a range of countries, especially Venezuela. That complex
situation offers potential answers to the questions of how we might form a space in common, and ‘how can one employ the relations
of power without ‘taking power’?’ (2007: 9).3¶ We should note that the wider ‘left’ does not speak with a unified voice on these
matters; nor has it promoted any successful solutions even in terms of its own models of ‘revolution’ or ‘reform’. At the moment the
struggle is to find a way between what seems like a sterile opposition: between ‘changing the
world without taking power’ (as suggested by John Holloway) and ‘taking power to change the world’ (a
more ‘traditional’ left position). Anarchist sympathy rest with the first ‘option’. But if anarchists are to
answer the type of criticism posed by Badiou and acknowledge the limits currently being
experienced by the ‘movement of movements’, the implication appears to be the need for a new
strategic thinking that can engage with and against power to make a new world.
1ar cede the political
They cede politics to the right and reinscribes gender roles
McCluskey 8 [Martha, Professor of Law and William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar @ SUNY
Buffalo Law, “How Queer Theory Makes Neoliberalism Sexy”, Buffalo Legal Studies Research
Paper No. 2008-15]
Queer theory's anti-moralism works together with its anti-statism to advance not simply "politics," but
a specific vision of good "politics" seemingly defined in opposition to progressive law and
morality. This anti-statist focus distinguishes queer theory from other critical legal theories that bring questions of power to bear
on moral ideals of justice. Kendall Thomas (2002), for example, articulates a critical political model that sees justice as a
problem of "power, antagonism, and interest," (p. 86) involving questions of how to constitute and support
individuals as citizens with interests and actions that count as alternative visions of the public. Thomas contrasts this political model
of justice with a moral justice aimed at discovering principles of fairness or institutional processes based in rational consensus and
on personal feelings of respect and dignity. Rather than evaluating the moral costs and benefits of a particular policy by analyzing its
impact in terms of harm or pleasure, Thomas suggests that a political vision of justice would focus on analyzing how policies produce
and enhance the collective power of particular "publics" and "counterpublics" (pp. 91—5). From this political perspective
of justice, neoliberal economic ideology is distinctly moral, even though it appears to be anti-moralist and to
reduce moral principles to competition between self-interested power. Free-market economics rejects a political
vision of justice, in this sense, in part because of its expressed anti-statism: it turns contested
normative questions of public power into objective rational calculations of private individual
sensibilities. Queer theory's similar tendency to romanticize power as the pursuit of
individualistic pleasure free from public control risks disengaging from and
disdaining the collective efforts to build and advance normative visions of the
state that arguably define effective politics. Brown and Halley (2002), for instance, cite the
Montgomery bus boycott as a classic example of the left's problematic march into legalistic and
moralistic identity politics. In contrast, Thomas (2002) analyzes the Montgomery bus boycott as a positive example of a
political effort to constitute a black civic public, even though the boycott campaign relied on moral language to advance its cause,
because it also emphasized and challenged normative ideas of citizenship (p. 100, note 14). By glorifying rather than
deconstructing the neoliberal dichotomy between public and private, between individual
interest and group identity, and between demands for power and demands for protection, queer
theory's anti-statism and anti-moralism plays into a right-wing double bind . In the current
conservative political context, the left appears weak both because its efforts to use state power get
constructed as excessively moralistic (the feminist thought police, or the naively paternalistic welfare state) and also
because its efforts to resist state power get constructed as excessively relativist (promoting elitism
and materialism instead of family values and community well-being). The right, on the other hand,
has it both ways, asserting its moralism as inherent private authority transcending human
subjectivity (as efficient market forces, the sacred family, or divine will) and defending its
cultivation of self-interested power as the ideally virtuous state and market (bringing freedom,
democracy, equality to the world by exercising economic and military authoritarianism). From Egalitarian Politics
to Renewed Conservative Identity Queer theory's anti-statism and anti-moralism risks not only
reinforcing right-wing ideology, but also infusing that ideology with energy from
renewed identity politics . Susan Fraiman (2003) analyzes how queer theory (along with other prominent
developments in left academics and culture) tends to construct left resistance as a radical individualism
modeled on the male "teen rebel, defined above all by his strenuous alienation from the maternal" (p. xii). Fraiman
observes that this left vision relies on "a posture of flamboyant unconventionality [that] coexists with
highly conventional views of gender [and] is , indeed, articulated through them " (p. xiii).
Fraiman links recent left contempt for feminism to a romantic vision of "coolness ... epitomized by the
modem adolescent boy in his anxious, self-conscious and theatricalized will to separate from the mother"
who is by definition uncool—controlling, moralistic, sentimental and not sexy. (p. xii). Even
though queer theory distinguishes itself from feminism by repudiating dualistic ideas of gender,
its anti-foundationalism covertly promotes an essentialist "binary that puts
femininity, reproduction, and normativity on the one hand, and masculinity,
sexuality, and queer resistance on the other" (p. 147). This binary permeates queer theory's
condemnation of "governance feminism." (Brown and Halley, 2002; Wiegman, 2004) a vague category
mobilizing images of the frumpy, overbearing, unexciting, unfunny, and not-so-smart "schoolmarm" (Halley,
2002) whose authority will naturally be undermined when real "men" appear on the scene.
Suggesting the importance of gender conventions to the term's power, similar phrases do not seem to have gained comparable
academic currency as a way to deride the complex regulatory impact of other specific uses of state authority -for instance
postmodernists do not seem to widely denounce "governance anti-racism," "governance socialism," "governance populism,"
"governance environmentalism" or "governance masculinism" (though Brown and Halley do criticize progressive law reform more
generally with the term "governance legalism" (p. 11)). Queer attraction to an adolescent masculinist idea of the
"cool' dovetails smoothly with the identity politics of the right. Right-wing politics and culture
similarly condemn progressive and feminist policies with the term "nanny state" (McCluskey, 2000;
2005a). The "nanny state" epithet enlists femaleness or femininity as shorthand to make some government authority feel bad
to those comfortable with or excited by a masculinist moral order, it adds to this sentimental power by coding the maternal authority
to be resisted as a "nanny" (rather than simply a "mommy"), enlisting identities of class, age—and perhaps race and nationality—to
enhance uncritical suspicions of disorder and illegitimacy. The "nanny state" slur tells us that a rougher and
tougher neoliberal state, market, and family will bring the grown-up pleasures, freedom, and
power that are the mark and privilege of ideal manhood. The "nanny state" is not an isolated example of
the use of gender identity to disparage progressive or even centrist policies that are not explicitly
identified as feminist or gender-related. For example, "girlie-man" gained currency in the 2004 presidential election
to disparage opposition to George W. Bush's right-wing economic and national security policies (Grossman and McClain, 2004), and
and in 2008 critics of presidential candidate Barack Obama similarly linked him to disparaging images of femininity (Campanile
2008; Faludi 2008). These terms open a window into the connections between economic
libertarianism and moral fundamentalism. Libertarianism's anti-statism and anti-moralism requires sharp
distinctions between public and private, morality and power, individual freedom and social coercion. The problem, if we assume
these distinctions are not self-evident facts, is that libertarianism must refer covertly to some external value system to draw its lines.
Identity conventions have long helped to do this work, albeit in complex and sometimes contradictory ways.
Power appears weak, deceptive, illegitimate, manipulative, controlling, undisciplined, oppressive, exceptional, or naive if it is
feminized; but strong, self-satisfying, public-serving, protective, orderly, rational, and a normal exercise of individual freedom if it is
masculinized. Conventional political theory and culture identifies legitimate authority with an idea
of a masculine power aimed at policing supposedly weaker or subordinate others. A state that publicly
depends on and promotes such power enhances rather than usurps private freedom and security in
citizenship, market, and family, according to the traditional theory of the patriarchal household as
model for the state (see Dubber, 2005). Queer theory updates this pre-modern political ideology into
smart postmodernism and transgressive politics by re-casting its idealized masculine
power in the image of a youthful and sexy disdain for feminized concerns about
social, bodily, or material limits and support . In her challenge to this queer romanticization of
"coolness," Fraiman (2003) instead urges a feminism that will "question a masculinity overinvested in youth, fearful of the mutable
flesh, and on the run from intimacy ... [to] claim, in its place, the jouissance of a body that is aging, pulpy, no longer intact... a
subject who is tender-hearted ... who is neither too hard nor too fluid for attachment; who does the banal, scarcely narratable, but
helpful things that moms' do" (p. 158). Feminist legal theory concerned with economic politics adds to this alternative vision an ideal
that advances and rewards the pleasure, power, and public value of the things done by some of those moms' nannies (McCluskey,
2005a)—or by the many others engaged in the work (both paid and unpaid) that sustains and enhances others' pleasure and power
in and out of the home (McCluskey, 2003a; Young, 2001). One means toward that end would be to make the domestic work (and its
play and pleasure) conventionally treated as both banal or spiritual (see Roberts, 1997b) deserving of a greater share of state and
market material rewards and resources on a more egalitarian basis, as Fineman's (2004) vision would do.
2ac permutation
Perm – do both – using subjectivity strategically solves best
Egginton 12 [William, Andrew W Mellon Professor in the Humanities at John Hopkins
University, "Affective Disorder", Volume 40, Number 4, Winter,
muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v040/40.4.egginton.html]
As we have seen, a
great appeal of Deleuzian affect theory has been its promise of a kind of short circuit
between experience and bodies that bypasses subjectivity and its attendant limitations63 —the ego,
ethnocentrism, gender bias, the list goes on—touching on an implicit ethical dividend, insofar as subjective capture seems
counterproductive to real engagement with otherness in almost any form. But as we've also seen, the same [End Page 36] early
modern attempts to ground ethics in experience that so influenced Deleuze reveal in striking detail how the limits of subjectivity
cleave to the problem of ethics at its very core. In fact, not only does it seem impossible to link the transmission
of affect to an ethical project without the mediation of subjectivity, subjectivity and its inherent
auto-alienation may well be intrinsic to affective experience. At its best, the turn to affect has
reminded theorists of communication in all its forms , from the political to the psychological to the
literary, that when humans communicate they do so through their bodies, and that the affective dimension
of this embodied communication often exceeds the grasp and dominion of cognitive processes. But as often occurs
with intellectual trends, the enthusiasts of affect have at times overstated their
case, asserting a promise for their theoretical endeavors that not only exceeds their
possibilities, but also undermines the very real pertinence of neurological studies of affect to
vital questions in philosophy, psychology, and the study of literature, art, and culture. It behooves us, in the
end, not to consider affect as an opponent to subjectivity, but instead to understand
how deeply related the two are . "I feel, therefore I am,"64 wrote the Cuban novelist and theorist Alejo Carpentier
in the context of his El recurso del método (Recourse of Method), a novel whose rationale from the title onward is a parody and
response to Cartesian thought; to which one can only note how even this most basic expression of the primordial kinship between
feeling and being seems sutured, at its core, to that solitary vowel that marks the subject's feeling minimal exclusion from the
surrounding world. [End Page 37]
2ac state good
State-based politics are critical to subvert heteronormativity
Chambers and Carver 8 Samuel Allen and Terrell, Judith Butler and Political Theory:
Troubling Politics, pg. 156-157
Finally, heteronormativity can also be subverted at the level of public policy. The trend in recent
years, particularly in the US, has been to make heteronormativity more explicit by writing it
into the law, where it previously was not mentioned (and for potentially subversive countertrends, see Carver 2007). The Federal
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the dozens of state DOMAs all serve to codify the presumption of heteronormativity by
announcing it plainly. In one sense, this is a dramatic setback in the struggle for equal civil rights for lesbian and gay citizens
– a fact that should not be downplayed. Nevertheless, in the politics of norms the very effort required to
defend heteronormativity outwardly suggests a certain weakening of the norm. And
legislators across the US have made it clear that they see themselves as responding to an
imminent threat. This threat is certainly not, as those legislators would have it, against the 'sacred institution of marriage', but it may well be a
threat to heteronormativity, to the easy presumption of heterosexuality . Perhaps the
legalisation of gay marriage will prove subversive on this front, if and when it happens. Perhaps it will not (Warner 1999). However, and in any event, from within the theory of
subversion that we have articulated here,
the most subversive move of all would come, on the level of national
public policy, in simply eliminating state-sactioned marriage altogether.
Legal control over subjectivity is inevitable but so are strategic demands on the
law—radical queer anti-statist politics are possible within the law
Peter Campbell 13, faculty member in the Program in Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, and
Rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh, JUDICIAL RHETORIC AND RADICAL POLITICS:
SEXUALITY, RACE, AND THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT,
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/45352/Peter_Campbell.pdf?sequence=
1
But—following Matsuda—I think that Butler seems to miss an important point. Given the material force of
the fantasy of legal sovereignty in the margins, “‘at the point[s]’” where power is “‘completely
invested in its real and effective practices,’” 31 I argue that resistance to the idea of legal
sovereignty must not preclude what Cathy Cohen might call a “practical”32 understanding of the
presently inevitable reality of the sovereign rhetorical operations of the law. The
political project of resistance to the performative sovereignty of judicial rhetoric in the United
States must not deny (as Matsuda and Richard Delgado said in 1987 to the “crits” of Critical Legal Studies) the
need to construct strategically informed and tactically sound responses to those
“formal” structures of law that already act as and with the material power of
sovereign authority ––authority over the constraints that legal forms of subjectivity
already impose on personhood.33 As Butler herself acknowledges in 2004,34 the absolute
critique of legal sovereign performatives does not adequately consider how the effects
of the fantasy of legal sovereignty are most often (and most often most terribly)
felt by “those who have” actually “seen and felt the falsity of the liberal promise”35 of the U.S.
judiciary as a shield against domination.¶ My experience of the law has occurred through my own participation in and
observation of judicial sovereignty––both from a majoritarian perspective. I teach argumentation in a prison, a setting that emphasizes the paradoxical
and simultaneous vitality and uselessness of rhetorical and argumentative interaction with those persons charged with enforcing the reasoned
justification of judicial decision through coercive violence. In our present democratic state of laws, the production of legitimacy for judicial sovereignty
through argument, and the production of legitimacy through force, work together in explicit and mutually supportive fashion. More happily, I was
recently invited by two friends to officiate their wedding, at a ceremony in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. I agreed, and asked whether I should purchase an
ordination online, so that I could legally perform the ceremony. There was no need— Massachusetts is unusual among U.S. states in maintaining a
category of officiant called a “solemnizer.” Any person, with little qualification, can apply to be a solemnizer. The dichotomy between the “republican
style”36 of the application process, and the quotidian ease with which I was granted the certificate made me think about the “sovereign performative”37
that I would stage in Rehoboth. The “I do” statement in a marriage ceremony is one of Austin’s core examples38 of an “illocutionary” performative, an
utterance which “has a certain force” in the “saying” of it,39 but this example itself performs an interesting elision of the role of a state representative in
a civil marriage ceremony. In Rehoboth, my friends would not be married until I pronounced them so publicly. That pronouncement would of course
require other performative statements (“I do”) from my friends as a pre-requisite to its validity.40 But on the date and in the location specified by the
solemnization certificate, I had, as a feature of the designation “solemnizer” bestowed on me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, absolute power
over whether they would be married or not—on that date and in that location. In the narrow context of the two possible realities of my friends becoming
married or not on that day and in that location, my role was to exercise the sovereign performative power of the Commonwealth as its judge-like
representative. ¶ But in that exercise, I would also be performing two arguments: one for the sovereign legitimacy (and successful performativity)41 of
my utterances and the illegitimacy of any others; and one for the value and significance of “married” as a position of legal subjectivity in Massachusetts
and the United States. I bring up this example to emphasize the specifically illocutionary power of the judicial rhetorical constitution of subjects before
law. Austin describes illocution as “‘in saying x I was doing y’ or ‘I did y,’”42 but judicial illocution might more accurately be described as “in saying x I
did x.” When I said that these people were married, I made them married. The statement and the doing were one and the same .
If a judge
sentences a person to death, she does not depress the needle; the pronouncement of sentence is an
illocutionary act in the first sense (x and y). But in pronouncing the sentence, the judge does redefine the
convicted (of a death-eligible crime) person’s subjectivity before law from “convicted” and/or “criminal” and/or
“felon” and/or “murderer” and/or “traitor” to, more primarily, “condemned.” This is an illocutionary act in the second sense (x and
x).¶ If a judge rules that it is unconstitutional to require a trans* person’s passport to list their gender
contrary to that person’s “self-understanding,”43 this is a “perlocutionary” act (where the utterance
effectively causes something to happen)44 in that the ruling enables the person who is trans* to change the
official designation of their gender. But it is also an x and x illocutionary act in the context of the petitioner’s
subjectivity before law—the utterance of the ruling has changed their self-understanding of their own
identity from “not real” to “real” in the eyes of the law. This would be even more evident if the ruling did not merely realize the
truth of a trans* person’s self-understanding as male or female, but went so far as to create, in the moment of the utterance itself, a legally recognized
trans* identity category. ¶ All of these examples are performatives enabled by the fantasy of the sovereign location of power in law. When asked, I
considered (given my own views on marriage as an institution) declining to perform the ceremony—even in Massachusetts, whose marriage laws mean
that the sexual orientation identity of the two people I married cannot be discerned from this story. I understood that my performative and the
discourse of the ceremony surrounding it would contribute in a small way to the sovereign power of the state over human relational and sexual
legitimacy. But this refusal would not have made the present sovereignty of the state over the determination of legally legitimate and illegitimate forms
Petitions to the law are inevitable; they will be made, often by
people with no other recourse to save their life, or to preserve their life's basic quality.
As Butler demonstrates, any such petition will have performative effect. I do not offer this brief critique of
of relation any less inevitable.¶
Butler’s theory of “sovereign performatives” to dispute the facticity of her arguments. I begin this project with the stipulation that
politics of resistance to the “sovereign performative” must include actions of resistance to statist
law itself—that is, the specific articulation of opposition, within progressive social
movements, to strategies that privilege appeals for help from judges . But these politics
must also acknowledge that those who undertake such strategies do not always do so without
knowledge of the sovereign performative function of their actions—“recourse to the law” does
not always or even usually “imagine” the law “as neutral.”45 These radical politics must also be undertaken with
knowledge of the effects of the petitions to law-as-sovereign that will inevitably be made —and
particularly with knowledge of the effects that flow from the (also performative and also inevitable) judicial
rhetorical responses to these inevitable petitions. ¶ Austin teaches us that it is in the nature of performatives to
not always work, and to produce effects in excess of their explicit ones. The judicial rhetorical constitution of subject and abject
forms of being-in-relation to law operates through legal performatives that contain the possibilities for their own future
“infelicity.”46 My project is an attempt to explore some future possibilities for the counter-sovereign articulation of subjectivity
before U.S. law—possibilities that are both foreclosed and engendered in the argumentative justifications for judicial decisions.
Specifically, I examine some key Supreme Court cases relating to sexual practice, race in education policy, and marriage. I perform a
legal rhetorical criticism of critic-constructed “meta”-texts47 that form argumentative frameworks through which judges apply
various legal doctrines to questions of sexual, racial, educational, and relational freedom.¶ Following Perelman, I understand judicial
argument to be the explanatory justifications offered for judges’ authoritative interpretive application of legal doctrine to problems
of public concern––problems that have been framed as legal, either by jurists themselves, petitioners to the courts, or both. In the
United States, judicial arguments about constitutional interpretation have the privileged
function of delimiting the grounds on which the authority of all other statist legal argument is
based. Given the overwhelming salience of constitutional legal discourse in U.S.
everyday life ,48 this means that the judicial rhetoric of constitutional law plays a significant
role in delimiting the grounds on which a person can base their claim—literally49–– to
existence and legitimacy in the U.S. polity. 50 Jurists’ arguments from and about the Due
Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S.
Constitution in particular perform a final arbitration function in the ongoing and generally contentious process
of the statist determination of what forms of racialized queer identity and relation will
be eligible for recognized and legitimated status in U.S. public life. ¶ In this dissertation, I
focus on the Fourteenth Amendment—due process and equal protection—rhetoric of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M.
Kennedy. I read this rhetoric in terms of “genealogies of precedent,” or the argumentative possibilities for queer
subjectivity before law that are brought into being by the doctrinal frameworks Kennedy and
other judicial rhetors use in a given opinion. Each chapter offers a case study of opinions in several Federal and Supreme
Court cases that are foundational to Kennedy’s development of a new constitutional jurisprudence of substantive due process and
equality. I demonstrate that this jurisprudence is both productive of and violent to possibilities for practical and strategic sexually
“progressive”51 interactions with U.S. constitutional law. These
interactions, despite their practical or
strategic formulation, can be undertaken and/or framed in terms of anti-statist and
institutional radical queer political goals . Possibilities for the success of such radical framing of practical
interaction are partially delimited in the argumentative choice of U.S. judicial opinions.
Ascribing violence to abstract conceptions of the subject is wrong
Nancy Fraser 95, “False Antitheses: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler,” Ch 3 in
Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, p 68, google books
This brings me to the second set of claims implicit in Butler's post- structuralist account of subjectivity—normative, as opposed to onto- logical , claims. Such
claims arise, first, in relation to the social practices through which subjects are constituted. Here Butler follows Foucault in claiming that practices of subiectivation are also practices of subjection. Like him, she
insists that subjects are constituted through exclusion; some people are authorized to speak authorita- tively because others are silenced. Thus, in
Butler's view, the consti- tution of a class of authorized subiects entails "the creation of a domain of
deauthorized subjects, pre-subjects, figures of abjection, populations erased from view." ¶ But is it
really the case that no one can become the subject of speech without others' being silenced? Are
there no counterexamples? Where such exclusions do exist, are they all bad? Are they all equally
bad? Can we distinguish legitimate from illegitimate exclusions, better from worse practices Of
subiectivation? Is subject-authorization inher- ently a zero-sum game? Or does it
only become one in oppressive societies? Can we overcome or at least ameliorate the
asymmetries in current practices Of subjectivation? Can we construct practices, insti- tutions, and
forms of life in which the empowerment Of some does not entail the disempowerment Of
others? If not, what is the point Of feminist struggle? ¶ Butler offers no help in thinking about these issues. Nor can she, I submit, so long as she fails to integrate
critical-theoretical considera- tions into her poststructuralist Foucauldian framework. That frame- work, I have argued elsewhere, is structurally incapable of providing satlsfactory answers to the normative
questions it unfailingly solicits.13 It needs modification and supplementation, therefore, in order to be fully adequate to the feminist project. In addition to her claims about the social practices of subiectiva- tion,
Butler also makes normative claims about the relative merits of different theories of subjectivity. She claims that some such theories are "politically insidious," whereas others are progressive or emanci- patory. On
the insidious side is the view of subjectivity as possessing an ontologically intact reflexivity that is not an effect of cultural processes of subjectivation. This view, according to Butler, is a "ruse of power" and an
Is it really ? There is no denying that foundationalist theories of subjectivity
have often functioned as instruments of cultural imperial- ism. But is that due to conceptual
necessity or historical contingency? In fact, there are cases where such theories have had
emancipatory effects —witness the French Revolution and the appropriation Of its
foundationalist view of subjectivity by the Haitian "Black Jacobin, Toussaint de I 'Ouverture.14 These
examples show that it is not possi- ble to deduce a single, univocal political valence
from a theory of subjectivity . Such theories, too, are bits of cultural discourse whose meanings are subject to "resignification. ¶ How, then, should we resolve the
"instrument Of cultural imperialism." ¶
Benhabib-Butler dispute over "the death of man"? I conclude that Butler is right in maintaining that a culturally constructed subject can also be a critical subject, but that the terms in which she formulates the
point give rise to difficul- ties. Specifically, "resignification" is not an adequate substitute for "critique, since it surrenders the normative moment. Likewise, the view that subiectivation necessarily entails
the view that foundationalist theories of
subjectivity are in- herently oppressive is historically disconfirmed , and it is conceptually incompatible with a
subjection precludes nor- mative distinctions between better and worse subjectivating practices. ¶ Finally,
contextualist theory of meaning. The upshot, then, is that feminists need to develop an alternative conceptualiza- tion of the subject, one that integrates Butler's poststructuralist emphasis on construction with
Benhabib's critical-theoretical stress on critique.
at: affect
Affective politics fail to spill up or influence politics
Schrimshaw 12 [Will Schrimshaw, Ph.D. in Philosophy and Architecture at Newcastle
University, is an artist and researcher from Wakefield based in Liverpool. January 28th, 2012,
"Affective Politics and Exteriority"willschrimshaw.net/subtractions/affective-politics-andexteriority/#]
The affective turn in recent politics thereby becomes auto-affective and in remaining bound to
an individual’s feelings and emotions undermines the possibility of its breaking out
into collective action and mobilisation. Yet, referring back to Fisher’s article, it is where this affective orientation
is inscribed into the social circuits of musical use and sonorous production that it perhaps
begins to break out of the ideology of individualism through tapping into a transpersonal or
`machinic’ dimension of affective signals that never find a voice yet remain expressive and
hopefully inch towards efficacy. What is important to express here is that much of this affective content is inscribed
in the use of music as much as its composition. As little of the Grime and Dancehall that Fisher and Dan Hancox catalogued towards a
playlist of the riots and uprisings expresses in explicitly linguistic and lyrical content the sentiments of political activism, it is in the use of music and sound as a carrier of affects
Where music is deployed as a more affective than
symbolic force in resistance, its significance becomes obscure and ambiguous from the
perspective and expectations of symbolic coherence. This noted lack of coherence and
communicable message marks , as Fisher points out, a certain exhaustion of recognised channels
of musical resistance: the protest song seems worn out, lacklustre, its own disempowerment,
apparent obsolescence and displacement in pop culture a symptom compounding the
apathy and estrangement that has characterised much of the still fairly recent discourse on
youth and `political engagement’.
at the point of both playback and composition that its importance lies.2
at: homonationalism
Homonationalism provides a simplistic account of relationship between tolerance
and violence---specific analysis of material structures and institutions is necessary
to solve
Ritchie 14 [Jason, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University,
“Pinkwashing, Homonationalism, and Israel–Palestine: The Conceits of Queer Theory and the
Politics of the Ordinary,” Antipode, 3 Jun 2014]
My argument is not, of course, that racism does not exist in many contemporary contexts—
including Israel–Palestine—nor I am arguing that “tolerance” of homosexuals has not, in many of those
contexts, been marshaled to provide cover for the imposition of violence against racialized
others (eg the Israeli occupation). My argument, instead , is that the popularity of the concept of
homonationalism owes much to its oversimplifications. Power, in this framework, is
reducible to racism, and racism is understood in a universalizing manner that allows the critic
to avoid the messy work of “[locating] the meanings of race and racism … within particular
fields of discourse [and articulating their meanings] to the social relations” in concrete
socio-historical contexts (Solomos and Back 1995:415).¶ I have utilized the metaphor of the
checkpoint to demonstrate what I believe to be a more empirically convincing and politically
engaged account of the everyday violence queer Palestinians face. Focusing on the checkpoint
requires one to locate the racist violence of the Israeli state in a specific time and place,
structured by identifiable social and political processes and inhabited by actual human
beings who embody multiple subject positions that differently inflect the ways in which they encounter those
processes and one another. Such a strategy will do little to challenge the monopolization of queer spaces in North American and
European cities by racist neocons like Michael Lucas, nor will it provide a convenient mechanism for radical activists—or
theoretically sophisticated academics—to validate their queer credentials. But if queers who live in other places have some value
beyond serving as grist for North American and European queers to consolidate a properly radical subjectivity and mitigate their
privilege, homonationalism's activist critics—and its theorists—might
consider resisting the impulse
to homogenize this or that queer as the victim or the victor and work instead to develop a
nuanced framework for building coalitions to fight—rather than platforms on which to fight
about—the complex and unpredictable ways space is organized, difference is enforced, and some bodies in
some places are allowed to move more freely than others.
at: legal reform excludes queers
Assimilation arguments are wrong---struggles for legal reform radically challenge
the concept of liberalism and civil society for everyone
Brenkman 2 [John, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the
CUNY and Baruch College, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 188-189]
Innovation is a crucial concept for understanding the gay and lesbian movement, which emerged from
within civil society as citizens who were stigmatized and often criminalized for their sexual lives created new forms of
association, transformed their own lifeworld, and organized a political offensive on behalf of
political and social reforms. There was an innovation of rights and freedoms, and what I have
called innovations in sociality. Contrary to the liberal interpretation of liberal rights and freedoms, I do not think
that gays and lesbians have merely sought their place at the table. Their struggle has
radically altered the scope and meaning of the liberal rights and freedoms they
sought, first and foremost by making them include sexuality, sexual practices, and the shape of household and family. Where
the movement has succeeded in changing the laws of the state, it has also opened up new
possibilities within civil society . To take an obvious example, wherever it becomes unlawful to deny
housing to individuals because they are gay, there is set in motion a transformation of the
everyday life of neighborhoods, including the lives of heterosexuals and their children. [End Page
188] Within civil society, this is a work of enlightenment, however uneven and fraught and
frequently dangerous. It is not a reaffirmation of the symbolic and structural underpinnings of
homophobia; on the contrary, it is a challenge to homophobia and a volatilizing of
social relations within the nonpolitical realm.
at: death k
Change and survival are key to avoid passivity and ressentiment
May 5 [Todd, Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, September 2005, “To change the
world, to celebrate life,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 31, No. 5-6]
For those among us who seek in philosophy a way to grapple with our lives rather than to solve
logical puzzles; for those whose reading and whose writing are not merely appropriate steps toward academic advancement but
a struggle to see ourselves and our world in a fresher, clearer light; for those who find nourishment among impassioned ideas and go
hungry among empty truths: there is a struggle that is often waged within us. It is a struggle that will be familiar to
anyone who has heard in Foucault’s sentences the stammering of a fellow human being struggling to speak in words worth hearing.
Why else would we read Foucault? We seek to conceive what is wrong in the world, to grasp it in a way
that offers us the possibility for change. We know that there is much that is, to use Foucault’s word,
‘intolerable’. There is much that binds us to social and political arrangements that are oppressive,
domineering, patronizing, and exploitative. We would like to understand why this is and how it happens, in
order that we may prevent its continuance. In short, we want our theories to be tools for changing
the world, for offering it a new face, or at least a new expression. There is struggle in this, struggle against ideas and ways of
thinking that present themselves to us as inescapable. We know this struggle from Foucault’s writings. It is not clear that he ever
wrote about anything else. But this is not the struggle I want to address here. For there is, on the other hand, another
search and another goal. They lie not so much in the revisioning of this world as in the embrace of
it. There is much to be celebrated in the lives we lead, or in those led by others, or in the unfolding of the world as
it is, a world resonant with the rhythms of our voices and our movements. We would like to understand this, too, to
grasp in thought the elusive beauty of our world. There is, after all, no other world, except, as Nietzsche taught, for those who would
have created another one with which to denigrate our own. In short, we would like our thought to celebrate our
lives. To change the world and to celebrate life. This, as the theologian Harvey Cox saw, is the struggle within us.1
It is a struggle in which one cannot choose sides; or better, a struggle in which one must choose
both sides. The abandonment of one for the sake of the other can lead only to disaster or
callousness. Forsaking the celebration of life for the sake of changing the world is the path of the
sad revolutionary. In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault writes that one does not have to be sad in order to be
revolutionary. The matter is more urgent than that, however. One cannot be both sad and revolutionary. Lacking a sense of the
wondrous that is already here, among us, one who is bent upon changing the world can only become solemn or bitter. He or she is
focused only on the future; the present is what is to be overcome. The vision of what is not but must come to be overwhelms all else,
and the point of change itself becomes lost. The history of the left in the 20th century offers numerous examples of this, and the
disaster that attends to it should be evident to all of us by now. The alternative is surely not to shift one’s
allegiance to the pure celebration of life, although there are many who have chosen this path. It is at best
blindness not to see the misery that envelops so many of our fellow humans, to say nothing of what
happens to sentient nonhuman creatures. The attempt to jettison world-changing for an uncritical assent to
the world as it is requires a self-deception that I assume would be anathema for those of us who have
studied Foucault. Indeed, it is anathema for all of us who awaken each day to an America whose expansive boldness is matched only
by an equally expansive disregard for those we place in harm’s way. This is the struggle, then. The one between the desire for lifecelebration and the desire for world-changing. The struggle between reveling in the contingent and fragile
joys that constitute our world and wresting it from its intolerability. I am sure it is a struggle that is not
foreign to anyone who is reading this. I am sure as well that the stakes for choosing one side over another that I
have recalled here are obvious to everyone. The question then becomes one of how to choose
both sides at once.
at: mbembe/necropolitics
Necropolitics thesis wrong and re-trenches power
Angela Mitropoulos 5, a graduate of La Trobe University’s Department of Sociology and
Anthropology. She currently writes on border policing. She has been published on several
occasions – "Necropolitics" October 16,
http://archive.blogsome.com/2005/10/16/necropolitics-war/
Mbembe concludes the essay by arguing that the concept of biopolitics might be better replaced
with necropolitics, and he discusses suicide bombings at some length, in a pretty interesting way. But I am not sure I would
follow him there with respect to the question of bios versus necros. They don’t seem to me distinguishable. The
nexus between life and death politics is surely complicated not only by ‘the right to life’ (and the
politics that attend it), but also by the reorganisation of so-called health and welfare policies, pharmacapitalism and its geopolitics,
the proprietisation of genes, and so on. But, maybe more than that, I would be inclined to think the following (the transition
between the territorial state to a mobile war machine, as Mbembe puts it)through a more detailed discussion of the why and how of
so-called ‘failed states’ in relation to their inability to give effect to the control over populations (and not simply resources). He talks
about the ‘erosion’ of their ability to control, but there’s no discussion of what it was that eroded this. In that sense, it’s left open
to characterise this erosion in terms not of people’s struggles but of processes that occur ‘above
their heads’ as it were. Thereby reducing them to objects of the war machines’ movements, but not
capable of movement themselves.