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Budapest W8: Nationalism, Gender, Sexuality - Class Notes

Presentation - A recent political event where nationalism, gender and sexuality are entwined. Can be more of a screening rather than a presentation.

Female Suicide Bombers - profiling fails, they cross the boundary of fair war, they are queer subjects because they transgress categories of femininity

Queer subjects - sexuality at the centre of Puar's analysis (classic for queer theory)
Discourses on counter terrorism are gendered, nationalised, sexualised
How certain bodies are defined against other bodies
Link to Mosse - racialisation and sexualisation are mutually constitutive - define what national is from defining the 'Other' or queer subject
Definition of the national subject is reflected by the queer subject - heterosexuality becomes the key to being national
Puar - homosexuality and its defence is used against others to constitute a nation that has SOME queer bodies as proper bodies
Queer liberal subject - makes the homophobic islamic subject as peverse
Puar - sexuality is absolutely critical to the geopolitcs of american exceptionalism - america is unique, best, special. A country whose self-imagining is superior to, and they use sexuality to assert that over others (as more tolerant, accepting. the tolerance is proved by intolerance)
Tolerance US vs. Intolerant Islam, where US is protector of good, protector of vulnerable subjects and others who are vulnerable elsewhere

Foucault - speakers benefit - the person who makes claims to be liberal gains a power that makes others intolerant

Puar - manufactures homosexuality and muslim as mutually exclusive categories and seperates categories of race and sexuality - where the unraced US has categories that intertwine.

The Orient - Western man could go to experience sexual, fluid liberation. However, Puar shows how this discourse has changed - it is now a space of oppression

- Difference between 'Assemblage' and 'Intersectionality'

Assemblage - affect, temporality, spacialality, feelings, unreadable, always in the state of becoming
Contradicts categories that would be used to nationalist identity
Intersectionality - representation, categorisation, used to monitor and oppress/explain oppression, identity (legible, visual). For Puar, intersectionality cannot capture terrorist.

Intersectionality - representation - epistemological knowledge
Assemblage - becoming/events - ontological knowledge

- What's 'queer' and 'terrorist' for Puar? How does she see the relationship between them?

Muslim bodies are queer and ascribed terrorist identity which is marked by physical attributes - they are terrorist because of their physical presence. Puar says that physical attributes links a person to terrorism based on preconceptions.
Terrorist - monstrosity is not just because of the actions that a person does, but also because of what they are.

Diaspora and terrorist as assemblage - it is not that the place exists, but because who you are is formed in the movement - diaspora is created in the movement.

Monstrosity emerges from difference

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