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This article examines the production of mobility obstacles and restrictions in Palestine, highlighting dimensions of the logistics of border crossings and movement in the West Bank in relation to disability rights frameworks. It argues two things: that the creation of what Celeste Langan calls “mobility disabilities” through corporeal assault as well as infrastructural and bureaucratic means is not only central to the calculus of the occupation but also, importantly, linked logics of debilitation; and that these calibrations of various types of movement render specific stretchings of space and time, what is here called “slow life.”

This roundtable asks what queer studies might offer to an analysis of debates on campus safety. New approaches in queer studies take as their object of study not only sex and gender but also the cultural politics of liberalism; in turn, scholarship on the geopolitics of injury demonstrates the situatedness of both identity and economic forms. Brought together, these scholarly approaches provide an important lens on many of the contradictions of contemporary college campuses. Rendering classrooms and other places on campus as intrinsically embedded in global relations of militarization, securitization, dispossession, and risk management, “safe space” is elaborated in this roundtable in material, administrative, and pragmatic terms: from the conceptualization of alert systems to the racialized fears driving insurance calculations for international study programs to the struggles over academic freedom and student organizing.

“Left of Queer” examines historical and theoretical developments in the evolving field of queer studies since the 2005 Social Text special issue “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” In particular, it focuses on three themes: first, it explores the possibilities of an expanded subjectless critique by interrogating not only the formative exclusions of queer studies but also the contingent material conditions through which “proper” queer subjects and identities emerge today; second, it reexamines long-standing debates on materialism and the incommensurability of queer studies and Marxism; and, third, it provincializes strands of queer critique by investigating the institutionalization of queer studies as a subset of American studies/US area studies. Throughout, it explores how emergent theoretical debates on debility, indigeneity, and trans revise and rework subjectless critique, histories of materialism, and queer studies as American exceptionalism by examining how the sublation of these key terms produces, manages, and animates new queer subjects for recognition in the political sphere.

In Curative Violence, Eunjung Kim offers a supple analysis of the affective attachments to cure and the structures that scaffold them. Writing that ‘the imperative of cure is produced by historical...

Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition Ten years on, Jasbir K. Puar’s pathbreaking Terrorist Assemblages remains one of the most influential queer theory texts and continues to reverberate across multiple political landscapes, activist projects, and scholarly pursuits. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, shifting queers from their construction as figures of death to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity. This tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends, however, on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by what Puar calls homonationalism—a fusing of homosexuality to U.S. pro-war, pro-imperialist agendas. As a concept and tool of biopolitical management, homonationalism is here to stay. Puar’s incisive analyses of feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, the decriminalization of sodomy in the wake of the Patriot Act, and the profiling of Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers are not instances of a particular historical moment; rather, they are reflective of the dynamics saturating power, sexuality, race, and politics today. This Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition features a new foreword by Tavia Nyong’o and a postscript by Puar entitled “Homonationalism in Trump Times.” Nyong’o and Puar recontextualize the book in light of the current political moment while reposing its original questions to illuminate how Puar’s interventions are even more vital and necessary than ever.

“Grids happen” writes Brian Massumi, at a moment in Parables for the Virtual where one is tempted to be swept away by the endless affirmative becomings of movement, flux, and potential, as opposed to being pinned down by the retroactive positioning of identity. Since the publication of Terrorist Assemblages, in response to anxieties about apparent prescription to leave intersectionality behind (as if one could), this chapter elaborates on the political usages of assemblages and assemblage theory. The theory of intersectionality argues that all identities are lived and experienced as intersectional—in such a way that identity categories themselves are cut through and unstable—and that all subjects are intersectional whether or not they recognize themselves as such. In the succinct words of Arun Saldanha, using Venn diagrams to illustrate his point, “The theory of intersectionality holds that there is no actual body that is a member of only one set”.

“Transgender rights are the civil rights issue of our time.” So stated Vice President Joe Biden just one week before the November 2012 election. This article critically reframes calls such as this by foregrounding a historical trajectory not celebrated by national LGBT groups or media or explicitly theorized in most queer or trans theory: the move from the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act to the present moment of trans hailing by the US state. Such a trajectory helps map the ways that neoliberal mandates regarding productive, capacitated bodies entrain the trans body to recreate an abled body not only in terms of gender and sexuality but also in terms of economic productivity and the economic development of national economy. Rather than argue for a better form of discretion between the categories of trans and disability, this article analyzes the ontological irreducibilities of such categories, irreducibilities that dissolve them through multiplicity. In following the implications of such an argument, this article unfolds trans and disability studies' concerns within a broader analysis of the geopolitics of racial ontology.

My recent writing has revolved around describing an ontopoetics of race that I name the sense of the brownness in the world. Brownness is meant to be an expansive category that stretches outside the confines of any one group formation and, furthermore, outside the limits of the human and the organic. Thinking outside the regime of the human is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. It is a ceaseless endeavor, a continuous straining to make sense of something else that is never fully knowable. To think the inhuman is the necessary queer labor of the incommensurate. The fact that this thing we call the inhuman is never fully knowable, because of our own stuckness within humanity, makes it a kind of knowing that is incommensurable with the protocols of human knowledge production. Despite the incommensurability, this seeming impossibility, one must persist in thinking in these inhuman directions. Once one stops doing the incommensurate work of attempting to touch inhumanity, one loses traction and falls back onto the predictable coordinates of a relationality that announces itself as universal but is, in fact, only a substrata of the various potential interlays of life within which one is always inculcated. The radical attempt to think incommensurate queer inhumanity is a denaturalizing and unsettling of the settled, sedimented, and often ferocious world of recalcitrant antiinhumanity. Queer thought is, in large part, about casting a pic

This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

In this author's response, Jasbir Puar furthers the conversation between her book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) and contemporary trends in theories of the theological, religious and secular. It begins with a consideration of the ‘viral’ travels of ‘homonationalism,’ a term that has moved across many geographies and political terrains since its coining. The response then focuses on three aspects of Terrorist Assemblages and the engagement it provoked. First, it traces the the relays between racialisation and religion, particularly vis-a-vis the charge of fundamentalism. Second, the neat opposition between religion and sexuality (particularly when the latter expresses as queer) is troubled through different theories of how exceptionalism has worked historically and continues to constitute investments in certain democratic fantasies of secularism. Finally, the piece concludes by broadening the preceding conversation to a theoretical scope at t...

L’‘homonationalisme’ designe l’inclusion de l’homosexualite dans le discours national produit notamment par les Etats-Unis dans leur « guerre contre le terrorisme », proclamant la superiorite sur les autres d’une civilisation qui aurait aboli toute oppression sexuelle — alors meme que les homosexuel∙le∙s de ce pays continuent de souffrir de discriminations et d’une oppression directement liee a leur sexualite. Opposant les identites gay et musulmane, du meme coup, ce discours fait de l’homosexualite une realite blanche. L’article montre que ce type d’opposition et de creation d’un sentiment d’exceptionnalite sexuelle (national et blanc) n’est pas l’apanage des seuls militaires et strateges etats-uniens, mais concerne aussi de nombreux milieux progressistes, associatifs et academiques, y compris feministes et queer.

This essay examines the potential for using affective connectivities to rethink neoliberal stratification. Because discourses surrounding queer suicide reproduce problematic assumptions not only about race, class, and gender but also about bodily health, debility, and capacity, I link Dan Savage's “It Gets Better” project and related discussions about the recent spate of queer suicides to broader social justice issues about disability as well as theoretical concerns in animal studies and posthumanist studies.

This article brings into conversation theories of affect, particularly those emerging from technoscience criticism that foreground bodily capacities for affecting or being affected, for change, evolution, transformation, and movement, and studies of disability and debility which complicate these notions of capacity, even while privileging identity-based rights and representational politics that might reinscribe other forms of normativity. I argue for a deconstruction of what ability and capacity mean, affective and otherwise, and to push for a broader politics of debility that puts duress on the seamless production of abled-bodies in relation to disability. Central to my discussion will be formulations of risk, calculation, prognosis, statistical probability, and population construction, whereby identity is understood not as essence, but as risk coding. Affect is therefore a site of bodily creative discombobulation and resistance but one that is also offered up for increasing monitoring and modulation.

This article examines two facets of post 9–11 South Asian organizing in the US – that of South Asian queer diasporics and of Sikh Americans. Ironically, South Asian queer diasporic subjects are under even greater duress to produce themselves as exceptional American subjects, not necessarily as heteronormative but as homonormative, even as the queernesses of these very bodies are simultaneously used to pathologize populations of terrorist look-a-like bodies. As contagions that trouble the exceptionalisms of queer South Asian diasporas, male turbaned Sikh bodies, often mistaken for Muslim terrorist bodies, are read as patriarchal by queer diasporic logics and placed within heteronormative victimology narratives by Sikh American advocacy groups focused on redressing the phenomenon of ‘mistaken identity’. Both the queer diasporic and Sikh American logics are indebted to visual representations of corporeality. Hence, I re-read these bodies as affectively troubling – generating affective confusion and indetermi...

In this paper I argue that the Orientalist invocation of the ‘terrorist’ is one discursive tactic that disaggregates US national gays and queers from racial and sexual ‘others’, foregrounding a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay, lesbian, and queer subjects themselves: homo-nationalism. For contemporary forms of US nationalism and patriotism, the production of gay, lesbian and queer bodies is crucial to the deployment of nationalism, insofar as these perverse bodies reiterate heterosexuality as the norm but also because certain domesticated homosexual bodies provide ammunition to reinforce nationalist projects. Mapping forms of US homo-nationalism, vital accomplices to Orientalist terrorist others, is instructive as it alludes to the ‘imaginative geographies’ of the US, as the analytic of race-sexuality provides a crucial yet under-theorized method to think through the imaginative geographies of the US in ...

These are queer times indeed. The war on terror is an assemblage hooked into an array of enduring modernist paradigms (civilizing teleologies, orientalisms, xenophobia, militarization, border anxieties) and postmodernist eruptions (suicide bombers, biometric surveillance strategies, emergent corporealities, counterterrorism gone overboard). With its emphases on bodies, desires, pleasures, tactility, rhythms, echoes, textures, deaths, morbidity, torture, pain, sensation, and punishment, our necropolitical present-future deems it imperative to rearticulate what queer theory and studies of sexuality have to say about the metatheories and the “realpolitiks” of Empire, often understood, as Joan Scott observes, as “the real business of politics.” 1 Queer times require even queerer modalities of thought, analysis, creativity, and expression in order to elaborate on nationalist, patriotic, and terrorist formations and their intertwined forms of racialized perverse sexualities and gender dysphorias. What about the war on terrorism, and its attendant assemblages of racism, nationalism, patriotism, and terrorism, is already profoundly queer? Through an examination of queerness in various terrorist corporealities, I contend that queernesses proliferate even, or especially, as they remain denied or unacknowledged. I take up these types of inquiries not only to argue that discourses of counterterrorism are intrinsically gendered, raced, sexualized, and nationalized but also to demonstrate the production of normative patriot bodies that cohere against and through queer terrorist corporealities. In the speculative, exploratory endeavor that follows, I foreground three manifestations of this imbrication. One, 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. Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of

This article frames queer tourism through two lenses. First, I explore how queer tourism and queer spatiality occlude questions of gender and efface the varied modalities of travel, tourism, mobility, and space/place–making activities of women, especially with respect to queer women and lesbians. Second, I point out the neocolonial impulses of all queer travel by highlighting the colonial history of travel and tourism and the production of mobility through modernity, and vice versa. Following M Jacqui Alexander’s (1997) claim that white gay capital follows the path of white heterosexual capital, how are queer women, queers of color, and postcolonial lesbian and gays also implicated in this process? Through these questions I propose to think about queer tourism and space through theories of intersectionality. In other words, how do we acknowledge and theorize “difference” in queer spaces? How do multiple identities, intersectionality, and social differences make the construction of queer space impossible?

n 1998, from January to March, I was in Trinidad for the entire length of the Carnival season. The purpose of my presence as an "ethnographertourist" in Trinidad was to evaluate the relationships between globalization, gender, and sexuality.' Specifically, my aim was to query how globalization could be defined in terms of gay and lesbian identities and what, in turn, was shaping gay and lesbian identities in Trinidad in the wake of contemporary processes ofglobalization. Certainly, palpable effects of globalization on gay and lesbian communities seemed to be surfacing in Trinidad at every moment.2 Gay and lesbian activists were taking part in national, regional, and international networks even as the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Caribbean had generated a tremendous amount of funding and research support from former colonizing countries in the last fifteen years, and the Internet had enabled global connections that were formerly impossible.3 An increasing number of gay and lesbian tourists, both "diasporic expatriates" and otherwise, were learning about gay and lesbian community meetings and fetes as well as gay-friendly Carnival masquerades specifically

In July 2011, Feminist Legal Studies published an article by Jasbir Puar titled: ‘Citation and Censorship: The Politics of Talking about the Sexual Politics of Israel’ (Vol 19, Issue 2: 133–142). In April 2012, Alan Posener wrote a complaint to Springer, the publisher of Feminist Legal Studies, objecting to content in Puar’s article. Specifically, Posener objected to Puar’s description of Posener as ‘antiMuslim’ on the basis that it was defamatory. In response to this complaint, the author has agreed to amend the relevant section of the article as follows: ‘‘One day prior to the start of the conference, the Director of the Humboldt Graduate School and also a conference organizing committee member, Professor Christina von Braun, gave an interview to Alan Posener, a well-known journalist in Berlin. While Posener is a self-described champion of Muslim rights in Europe, his contributions in the interview with Von Braun reflect one example of the complex ways that anti-Muslim assumptions can be refunctioned and masked within neoliberal discourse. In this interview von Braun made derogatory comments about the author’s work and person... [rest of paragraph to continue with original text]’’. The above paragraph should be deemed to replace the original version.

"Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men," Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. "Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other-it's all a form of torture," Haykel said. -Seymour M. Hersh