Jasbir Puar

Raised in the Basking Ridge section of Bernards Township, New Jersey, Puar graduated in 1985 from Ridge High School.[2] She received her B.A. in Economics and German from Rutgers in 1989. She has an M.A. in Women's Studies from the University of York and completed her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at University of California at Berkeley in 1999.[3] Since 2000 she has been working at Rutgers University at the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Department. From 2014 to 2020 Puar was the graduate director of women's studies and gender studies at Rutgers.

In "Queer Times, Queer Assemblages", published in 2005, Puar analyzes the War on Terror as an assemblage of racism, nationalism, patriotism, and terrorism, suggesting that it is "already profoundly queer". Her focus is on terrorist corporealities in opposition to "normative patriot bodies", and she argues that "discourses of counterterrorism are intrinsically gendered, raced, sexualized, and nationalized".[4]

Puar draws from the assemblage approach developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.[5] This is a way of viewing social and political phenomena as a combination of biological and cultural factors. She critiques the deployment of homonationalism in the United States as a justification to violently implement the doctrine of American exceptionalism embodied in the War on Terror. The United States flaunts its supposedly liberal openness to homosexuality to secure its identity in contradistinction to sexual oppression in Muslim countries. This oppression serves as an excuse for the United States to "liberate" oppressed women and sexual deviants in these countries, simultaneously papering over sexual inequality in the United States. United States exceptionalism and homonationalism are mutually constitutive, blending discourses of American Manifest Destiny, racist foreign policy, and an urge to document the unknown (embodied in the terrorist) and conquer it through queering its identity, hence rendering it manageable and knowable.[4][6]

Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, published in October 2007, describes connections between contemporary "gay rights" discourse, the integration of gay people into consumerism, the ascendance of "whiteness", and Western imperialism and the war on terrorism. Puar argues that traditional heteronormative ideologies now find accompaniment from "homonormative" ideologies replicating the same hierarchical ideals concerning maintenance of dominance in terms related to race, class, gender, and nation-state, a set of ideologies she deems "homonationalism".[7] Some reviewers have associated this argument with the "queer Marxism" of Kevin Floyd.[8]

In 2017, Puar published her second book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability again with Duke University Press. She is currently working on a collection of essays around "duration, pace, mobility, and acceleration in Palestine", tentatively titled: Slow Life. Settler Colonialism in Five Parts.[9]

In 2019, John Paul Pagano wrote that "Recently Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar was celebrated for enrobing the canard of Jewish organ theft in a sumptuous fabric of critical theory.",[10] putting her claims of "organ harvesting" in the context of medieval antisemitism: "In the medieval mind, the association between Jews and the Devil grew [...] The recipes of medieval magic often focused on sickness and health, and sometimes they called for blood or body parts. Jews were assumed to need non-Jewish blood to be well."

Pagano highlights the historical link between Jews and accusations of needing non-Jewish blood for well-being, saying "Blood libel is the purest expression of Jew-hatred there is"[10]

In addition, Matt Wanderman wrote in "Israel National News" in 2016 that, "Last week Jasbir Puar, an assistant professor at Rutgers University's Department of Women's and Gender Studies who was visiting Vassar, gave a guest lecture entitled "Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters," in which she expressed a litany of complaints against Israel, including that it "assassinates" teenagers, harvests organs, and deliberately prevents resources from reaching Gaza in order to "maim" and "stunt" the growth of Palestinians."[11]

Further to this, Wanderman claims that "During her talk, Puar made numerous exaggerated and false statements about Israel's actions, often without any sources or by using vague wording to introduce conspiracy theories."[11]

• Chatterjee, Piya; Maira, Sunaina (2014). The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780816680900.