Thinking Life, Death, and Solidarity through Colonized Palestine

Medien and Puar conducted this interview in person in March 2016 and over e-mail between 2016 and 2017.

—Editors

Kathryn Medien:

You recently published a tenth-anniversary edition of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Puar 2007, 2017b). What were your aims and motivations for writing that book? What has changed over the past ten years? Can you tell us a bit about the tenth-anniversary edition?

Jasbir K. Puar:

I wrote Terrorist Assemblages informed by the intensive political organizing in which I participated in New York City after 9/11. The book foregrounded a relationship between modernity and queerness that had been generally refuted and rejected the idea of queerness as somehow always an illegitimate excess to nationalism. I fully grasped the schisms between the national queer subject and the perversely queer other, given all the artifacts and discussions that emerged after 9/11, heightened and intensified in the manner that assemblages work. The book was bred of political urgency. No one writes a book titled Terrorist Assemblages to get tenure. As time went on, I realized how marked I am by this book. It is not a great book with which to travel or get on a plane. The title not only follows me but continues to amass a threatening force. The premise of the book seems to become more controversial rather than obvious as our world becomes more charged and reactive around these issues.

My arguments in Terrorist Assemblages also emerged from my work in the 1990s, when many queer theorists explicitly framed queerness as intrinsically challenging nationalism and queer as an outlaw to the nation. Moreover, much of transnational feminist theory theorized the nation-state as inherently heteronormative. This never made sense to me: the queer-outlaw narrative was very celebratory even as it was normative in terms of class, race, gender—it was a nonintersectional queer outlaw. Through M. Jacqui Alexander's (1994) work, I started to understand the heteronormativity of the state as always accompanied by a homonormativity that figured the imagined outlaw. There has historically been a perverse modernity accorded to the imagined homosexual outlaw.

My PhD dissertation focused on Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians in LGBTQ organizing in 1990s Trinidad. The East Indian and African populations each claim to be greater in size while they are roughly equal, around 40 to 42 percent of the population, contributing to debates about authentic belonging in Trinidad. While I did not realize it then, I was already looking at a kind of homonationalism organized around an African modernity with claims to the nation-state in ways that marginalized Indo-Trinidadians. Within a biopolitical schema, Indo-Trinidadians were projected as backward and perverse, heterosexually repressed and not modern enough to be legibly homosexual. When Alexander writes about the homosexual as outlaw in Trinidad, only African bodies are modern enough to be potentially queer, the outlaw homosexual. In my dissertation, and later in Terrorist Assemblages, I argue that discourses of perverse homosexuality were always racially and class stratified, reflecting who was already anchored in particular ways to being able to claim the nation.

The postscript to the tenth-anniversary edition discusses what has changed in the ten years since I published the book. Tavia Nyong'o gestures to similar developments in his foreword. First, I suggest that homonationalism waxes and wanes; it is elastic. The mandate to produce and sanction Islamophobia in exchange for tenuous protection from homophobia is now an easily recognizable ploy. Second, the connections and forms of solidarity resisting antiblack racism and anti-Muslim racism are more robust, as are links to US settler colonialism. Third, the relationships between queerness and secularism—or, queerness as secularism—have been more fully deconstructed. After 9/11 queer Muslims were often characterized as exotic species. I think there is a somewhat greater appreciation for religious queers of any faith.

KM:

In Terrorist Assemblages you develop the analytic of homonationalism to elaborate on what you describe as "a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection" into the apparatus of the nation-state...