In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of "debility"-bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors-to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.
In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of "debility"-bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors-to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.
Preface: Hands Up, Don't Shoot! ix
Acknowledgments xxv
Introduction: The Cost of Getting Better 1
1. Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled
33
2. Crip Nationalism: From Narrative Prosthesis to Disaster
Capitalism 63
3. Disabled Diaspora, Rehabilitating State: The Queer Politics of
Reproduction in Palestine/Israel 95
4. "Will Not Let Die": Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in
Palestine 127
Postscript: Treatment without Checkpoints 155
Notes 163
Bibliography 223
Index 261
Jasbir K. Puar is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, also published by Duke University Press.
"Puar’s book-length intervention in Disability/Queer Studies could
not have come at a better time, and is a great example of
scholarship that poses difficult, necessary questions for the
future of Disability Studies."
*Global Comment*
"The Right to Maim proves a passionate and thought-provoking
critique of the ways in which the state inscribes its power and
social control upon the body. . . . An extraordinarily courageous
and timely contribution to a radical struggle for global
justice."
*Al Jadid*
"Jasbir Puar’s work in The Right to Maim is crucial to
understanding not only that the nature of settler colonialism is
genocidal but also how that genocidal nature operates."
*Social Text*
"Building on the analytics she advanced in Terrorist Assemblages,
Jasbir Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state,
sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of
disability."
*Social Text*
"Draws fascinating empirical and theoretical connections. . . . The
Right to Maim has much to contribute to major debates occurring
within and across disability studies, geographies of sexuality,
feminist theory, and critical race studies. Puar charts new
territory for feminist geographies."
*Gender, Place & Culture*
"Puar provides a scathing and politically important critique. . . .
A compelling and important analysis."
*Women's Studies Quarterly*
"Challenges the reader with a rigorous analysis. . . . A very
engaging text that insists on a shared commitment for justice in
Palestine and a responsibility within disability studies to
consider far beyond the exceptional."
*Cultural Studies*
"Jasbir Puar’s work, bringing together disability studies, queer
theory, Foucauldian biopolitics and settler colonial studies . . .
reveals the centrality of the phenomena of debility, disability and
capacity for understanding contemporary politics there. . .
. The Right to Maim is a great gift to future scholars
who should find in the book rich inspiration for further work. A
fascinating intellectual agenda has been demarcated, and a
prescient window into the politics of the colonisation of Palestine
has been opened here."
*Radical Philosophy*
"Hugely rewarding. . . . An important book for scholars and
students rethinking disability and capacity, but also for those
studying Israel’s racialized permanent war against the
Palestinians."
*International Journal of Middle East Studies*
"Social theorists, social justice organizers, and indeed all
anthropologists, would do well to read this book. The Right to Maim
should also be read in social science courses that consider
identity politics in America. As a kind of social experiment, it
would be entertaining for someone as myopically unaware of the
social inequality Puar is discussing, and the ways in which
identity is formed outside of White Patriarchal Male
Perspectives—like Jordan Peterson—to read this book."
*Somatosphere*
"[This] book is groundbreaking— nay, field-cracking— and will
likely be read, reviewed, and engaged with vigor in the
multifarious subfields for whom it bears implications."
*Journal of Medical Humanities*
"The Right to Maim is a groundbreaking work. . . . I wish this book
was longer. By the end of the text I was craving more, which is the
highest praise I can think to give to a book. While some of the
more theory-laden moments in the book threaten to distract from the
content, especially when Deleuzian concepts are invoked, it never
becomes overwhelming and the text itself remains a brief but
brilliant work that I recommend highly."
*Somatechnics*
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