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Budapest W8: Nationalism, Gender, Sexuality - Queer Times

Puar, J. 2005. “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages.” Social Text 84–85, Vol. 23, Nos. 3– 4, Fall–Winter 2005: 121-39.

"I examine discourses of queerness where problematic conceptualizations of queer corporealities, especially via Muslim sexualities, are reproduced in the service of discourses of U.S. exceptionalisms. Two, I rearticulate a terrorist body, in this case the suicide bomber, as a queer assemblage that resists queerness-as-sexual-identity (or anti-identity)—in other words, intersectional and identitarian paradigms—in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements." p.121

Queerness as assemblage: "underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations." p.122


"“queer liberalism” notes an unsettling but not entirely unexpected reconciliation of the radical convictions of queerness as a post-structuralist anti- and transidentity critique with the liberal demands of national subject formation." p.122


"queerness is proffered as a sexually exceptional form of American national sexuality through a rhetoric of sexual modernization that is simultaneously able to castigate the other as homophobic and perverse, and construct the imperialist center as “tolerant” but sexually, racially, and gendered normal." p.122


"Reinforcing a homogenous notion of Muslim sexual repression vis-à-vis homosexuality and the notion of “modesty” works to resituate the United States, in contrast, as a place free of such sexual constraints." p.124


Patrick Moore, Queer Theorist: "Reports indicate that the prisoners were not only physically abused but also accused of actually being homosexuals, which is a far greater degradation to them" p.125


"Furthermore, in the uncritical face-value acceptance of the notion of Islamic sexual repression, we see the trenchant replay of what Foucault termed the “repressive hypothesis”: the notion that a lack of discussion or openness about sexuality reflects a repressive, censorship- driven apparatus of deflated sexual desire." p.125


"We have a clear view of the performative privileges of Foucault’s “speaker’s benefit”: those who are able to articulate sexual knowledge (especially of oneself, but in this case, also of others) then appear to be freed, through the act of speech, from the space of repression." p.126


"Muñoz’s description of this terrorist drag points to the historical convergences between queers and terror—homosexuals have been the traitors to the nation, figures of espionage and double agents, associated with Com- munists during the McCarthy era, and, as with suicide bombers, bring on and desire death (both are figured as always already dying, although for homosexuals it is through the AIDS pandemic)" p.126-7


"what is queer about the terrorist? And what is queer about terrorist corporealities?" p.127


"the terrorist does not appear as such without the concurrent entrance of perversion, deviance, deformity." p.127


"The Deleuzian assemblage, as a series of dispersed but mutually implicated networks, draws together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect." p.127


"an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency." p.128

"As a tool of diversity management, and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism, intersectionality colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state—census, demography, racial profiling, surveillance—in that “difference” is encased within a structural container that simply wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic grid." p.128

"These nonexceptional, terrorist bodies are nonheteronormative, if we consider nation and citizenship to be implicit in the privilege of heteronormativity, as we should." p.131 

"The “detained body” is thus a machination of ceremonial scrutiny and sheer domination." p.132

Michael Taussig: "For cultures whose forms of social knowledge have been fragmented and mutated by multiple experiences of conquest and cultural contact . . . tactile practices are difficult to read and contain multiple meanings. Such exchanges are frequently informal events intrinsic to everyday life through which cultural knowledge gets cited, transmitted or re-appropriated. The senses acquire texture." p.132


"tactile knowledges install normativizing traces of danger, fear, and melancholia into the bodies of racialized terrorist look-alikes." p.132-3

"The turban is not only imbued with the nationalist, religious, and cultural symbolics of the other. The turban both reveals and hides the terrorist." p.133

Mistaken identity: "the ideals of multiculturalism as promulgated by liberal education acknowledges that differences within difference matter." p.134

"The homeland, he proposes, “must be understood as an affective and temporal process rather than a place.”29 But if not the fact of place, what impels a diasporic sensibility or collectivity?" p.134

The feeling of diaspora: "The notion of queer diaspora retools diaspora to account for connectivity beyond or different from sharing a common ancestral homeland." p.135

"assemblages allow for complicities of privilege and the production of new normativities even as they cannot anticipate spaces and moments of resistance." p.137

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