Table of Contents

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

About the Author

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.

Reviews

“A profound and challenging book that should be read widely and repeatedly, Puar’s latest work contains revelations about contemporary power that offer avenues for transforming academic knowledge and our own subjectivities.”
*Signs*

“Terrorist Assemblages is brilliant, hyperkinetic, and perhaps, most of all, ferocious. It is ferocious in its analysis and critique not only of networks of control over and unrelenting superpanopticism of queer, racialized bodies but also of queer, feminist, and critical race theory and activism.”
*Journal of Asian American Studies*

“Few points of identification, cherished political practices, or progressive claims are left unimplicated in Puar's analysis of the war on terror. . . . Terrorist Assemblages exemplifies the most difficult and yet most important work that critical theory can offer its readers and practitioners: a thoroughgoing interrogation of the inequalities, oppressions and injustices that shape the present, which refuses to leave its authors' and readers' own investments outside its critiques.”
*Theory & Event*

“Puar provides compelling and convincing examples of the unwitting effects of homonormative discourse.”
*Parallax*

“Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times is a powerful, energetic, and highly insightful read. The book absorbs a surprising amount of intellectual, political, and emotional labour. . . . [R]eaders can have that rare and golden experience of emerging from these pages transformed. Indeed, the demands that Puar places on her reader are substantial, but the rewards well worth it. Cutting, courageous, and prescient, Terrorist Assemblages is well worth the read.”
*Antipode*

"It is her ability to traverse the theoretical terrains between theories of affect and nonrepresentation as well as discourse and identity that exemplifies how these seemingly opposed poststructuralisms do, in fact, enrich each other and make Terrorist Assemblages a critically important work."
*Annals of the AAG*

"Terrorist Assemblages is a challenging and urgent book that pushes studies of the sexual beyond their comfort zone. . . . The chapters offer a series of bold and creative readings that aim to rewrite emergent orthodoxies within both critical and not so critical discourses on the 'war on terror.' Where such discourses perpetuate separation and distance, Puar strikingly demonstrates connectivity and coincidence."
*Social & Cultural Geography*

"Terrorist Assemblages will appeal to scholars who wish to push the limits of interdisciplinary thinking and writing. In both form and content, this book energetically experiments with different theoretical frameworks and disparate sources to produce fresh insights on a variety of issues. For these and many other reasons, Terrorist Assemblages is bound to become a mainstay in graduate courses across a range of disciplines, and will certainly be cited as a key text in scholarship that examines how discourses surrounding sexuality are mobilized in the service of war, nation-building, and imperialism."
*E3W Review of Books*

"Terrorist Assemblages is a rich and textured read that lays bare the perniciousness of liberal politics while asking for the hard work it takes to build radical solidarity."
*Social & Cultural Geography*

". . . I think it only appropriate that we succumb to this project’s velocity, that we explore Puar’s virtuosic, methodological interventions, while acknowledging the captivating intellectual performance at the heart of Terrorist Assemblages. . . . Puar importantly provides a salient and scathing political critique of nationalism in its hetero, homo, religious and racialized incarnations."
*Women & Performance*

“Puar’s project brings what we might describe as a racial politics of tolerance to the production of queers. . . . In doing so, she challenges those of us engaged in human rights theory and advocacy for sexual minorities to a serious consideration of what it is that enables such advocacy to be effective in the first instance, and what the effectiveness of such campaigns means for the re-positioning of LGBT subjects in mainstream political economies. . . . Her examination of terrorist discourses foregrounds a dimension of Foucault’s characterization of contemporary power that has been largely ignored by theorists who take up this framework for speaking of power: namely, the instrumentality of death—that is, the extent to which the protection and management of some life/lives is contingent on letting others die.”
*Feminist Legal Studies*


"Since the publication of Puar’s book, the presence of Islamophobic and openly gay politicians like Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders—who had seemed exceptional in the early 2000s—has become rather the norm. . . . Puar’s book has been extremely important in the effort to make sense of these phenomena."
*Social Text*