Terrorist Assemblages

Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition
Ten years on, Jasbir K. Puar's pathbreaking Terrorist Assemblages remains one of the most influential queer theory texts and continues to reverberate across multiple political landscapes, activist projects, and scholarly pursuits. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, shifting queers from their construction as figures of death to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity. This tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends, however, on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by what Puar calls homonationalism-a fusing of homosexuality to U.S. pro-war, pro-imperialist agendas.
As a concept and tool of biopolitical management, homonationalism is here to stay. Puar's incisive analyses of feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, the decriminalization of sodomy in the wake of the Patriot Act, and the profiling of Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers are not instances of a particular historical moment; rather, they are reflective of the dynamics saturating power, sexuality, race, and politics today.
This Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition features a new foreword by Tavia Nyong'o and a postscript by Puar entitled "Homonationalism in Trump Times." Nyong'o and Puar recontextualize the book in light of the current political moment while reposing its original questions to illuminate how Puar's interventions are even more vital and necessary than ever.

Jasbir K. Puar is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and the author of The Right to Maim, also published by Duke University Press. Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater Studies at Yale University and the author of The Amalgamation Waltz.

Foreword / Tavia Nyong'o  xi Preface: Tactics, Strategies, Logistics  xvii Introduction: Homonationalism and Biopolitics  1 1. The Sexuality of Terrorism  37 2. Abu Ghraib and U.S. Sexual Exceptionalism  79 3. Intimate Control, Infinite Direction: Rereading the Lawrence Case  114 4. "The Turban is Not a Hat": Queer Diaspora and the Practices for Profiling  166 Conclusion: Queer Times, Terrorist Assemblages  203 Postscript: Homonationalism in Trump Times  223 Acknowledgments  243 Notes  249 References  307 Index  342