Jasbir Puar

Jasbir K. Puar
Born1967 (age 58–59)
Education
EducationRutgers University (BA)
University of York (MA)
University of California (PhD)
ThesisTransnational Sexualities and Trinidad: Modern Bodies, National Queers (1999)
Norma Alarcón
Philosophical work
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley
San Francisco State University
New York University
Rutgers University
Main interests
Notable ideas
Homonationalism
Websitejasbirkpuar.com

Jasbir K. Puar (born 1967)[1] is an American academic and author.[2] She is the author of Terrorist Assemblages (2007) and The Right to Maim (2017).[3][4]

She has written on South Asian diaspora;[5] LGBTQ tourism;[6] terrorism studies;[3] surveillance studies;[7] biopolitics and necropolitics;[8][9] disability and debility;[10] intersectionality, affect, and assemblage;[11][12] animal studies and posthumanism;[13] and homonationalism, pinkwashing, and Palestine.[14] She has been credited with coinining the term homonationalism.[15]

Early life

Jasbir K. Puar was born in 1967[1] and raised in Basking Ridge, Bernards Township, New Jersey.[16] Growing up in a religious Sikh family,[17] her family often participated in protests against the Indian government's repression of Sikhs during her childhood. Puar wrote an op-ed for her high school newspaper explaining the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India following the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

Education

Puar graduated in 1985 from Ridge High School.[16] She received a Bachelor of Arts in economics and German from Rutgers University in 1989. She has a Master of Arts in women's studies from the University of York and completed her PhD in ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999.[18]

Teaching

She was a faculty member at Rutgers University's Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department for 23 years, where she is now professor emerita.[19][20][21][22] From 2014 to 2020 Puar was the graduate director of women's studies and gender studies at Rutgers.

She is a professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.[20]

Writing

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."[23] Puar draws from the assemblage approach developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.[24] 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 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.[23][25]

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 are now accompanied by "homonormative" ideologies replicating the same hierarchical ideals of dominance in terms of race, class, gender.[26] Some reviewers have associated this argument with the "queer Marxism" of Kevin Floyd.[3] The book is credited with coining the term homonationalism, which went on to become influential in the fields of queer studies, activism and political science.[27][28][29]

In 2017, Puar published her second book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability with Duke University Press.[10] The Right to Maim won the Alan Bray Award from the Modern Language Association’s GLQ Caucus[17] and the Alison Piepmeier Book Prize from the National Women's Studies Association.[30]

She is currently working on a collection of essays around "duration, pace, mobility, and acceleration in Palestine," titled Slow Life: Settler Colonialism in Five Parts.[31]

References

  1. 1 2 "Puar, Jasbir K., 1967-". LC Linked Data Service. Archived from the original on March 18, 2025. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  2. ↑ Trupiano, Anna (October 19, 2022). "The next word you should know: Homonationalism". The Michigan Daily.
  3. 1 2 3 Nichols, Robert (April 16, 2010). "Book Review: Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. By Jasbir Puar. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007, 368 pp. $24.95 (Paper). ISBN: 082234114X The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. By Kevin Floyd. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 304 pp. $25.00 (Paper). ISBN: 0816643962". Law, Culture and the Humanities. 6 (2): 304–307. doi:10.1177/17438721100060021002. ISSN 1743-8721.
  4. ↑ Douglas, Emily R. (May 15, 2018). "The Right To Maim By Jasbir K. Puar". Society & Space. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  5. ↑ Puar, Jasbir K. (January 2, 2025). "'The turban is not a hat': Queer diaspora and practices of profiling". Sikh Formations. 21 (1): 34–74. doi:10.1080/17448727.2025.2533010. ISSN 1744-8727.
  6. ↑ Puar, Jasbir (October 2, 2003). "A Transnational Feminist Critique of Queer Tourism". Antipode. 34 (5): 935–946. doi:10.1111/1467-8330.00283. ISSN 0066-4812.
  7. ↑ West, Lewis (December 4, 2014). "Jasbir Puar: Regimes of Surveillance". Cosmologics Magazine. Archived from the original on December 27, 2014.
  8. ↑ Quinan, Christine; Thiele, Kathrin (January 2, 2020). "Biopolitics, necropolitics, cosmopolitics – feminist and queer interventions: an introduction". Journal of Gender Studies. 29 (1): 1–8. doi:10.1080/09589236.2020.1693173. ISSN 0958-9236.
  9. ↑ "Jasbir Puar shares lectures, book translations and launches, and research cluster award". Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. The University of British Columbia. April 13, 2026. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  10. 1 2 "The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability". Duke University Press. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  11. ↑ Puar, Jasbir K. (2016). "'I Would Rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess': Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory". In McCann, Carole; Kim, Seung-Kyung (eds.). Feminist Theory Reader (4th ed.). Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315680675-86.
  12. ↑ Puar, Jasbir K. (October 4, 2010). "Prognosis time: Towards a geopolitics of affect, debility and capacity". Women & Performance. 19 (2): 161–172. doi:10.1080/07407700903034147. ISSN 0740-770X.
  13. ↑ Livingston, Julie; Puar, Jasbir K. (2011). "Interspecies". Social Text. 29 (1): 3–14. doi:10.1215/01642472-1210237. ISSN 0164-2472.
  14. ↑ Puar, Jasbir; Mikdashi, Maya (August 9, 2012). "Pinkwatching And Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and its Discontents". Jadaliyya. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  15. ↑ McCann, Hannah; Monaghan, Whitney (March 19, 2026). Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-350-41528-7.
  16. 1 2 "Urban Skills Project Helps Ease Trauma Of The Past". Bernardsville News. August 29, 1985. Editor's Note: The three articles on this page were written by Jasbir K. Puar of Basking Ridge, a summer intern at The Bemardsville News [...]. She graduated from Ridge High School in June and will attend Rutgers University.
  17. 1 2 Sircar, Oishik (January 17, 2021). "A Deep and Ongoing Dive into the Brutal Humanism That Undergirds Liberalism: An Interview with Jasbir K. Puar". Humanity Journal. Retrieved October 7, 2025.
  18. ↑ "Jasbir K. Puar". SSRC. Archived from the original on July 23, 2011.
  19. ↑ "(POSTPONED) Control Societies Speaker Series: Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University". The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies | The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies. The University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  20. 1 2 "Jasbir Puar". Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. The University of British Columbia. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  21. ↑ "Control Societies Speaker Series: Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University". The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies | The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies. The University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved May 20, 2026.
  22. ↑ "Puar, Jasbir". Rutgers University :: Department of Women's and Gender Studies. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  23. 1 2 Puar, Jasbir K. (2005). "Queer Times, Queer Assemblages". Social Text. 23 (3–4): 121–139. doi:10.1215/01642472-23-3-4_84-85-121. ISSN 0164-2472.
  24. ↑ Ryder, Andrew (August 17, 2018). "'The Function of Autonomy': Félix Guattari and New Revolutionary Prospects". Salvage. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  25. ↑ Puar, Jasbir (2013). "Rethinking Homonationalism". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 45 (2): 336–339. doi:10.1017/S002074381300007X. S2CID 232253207.
  26. ↑ "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times". Duke University Press. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  27. ↑ Zanghellini, Aleardo (September 2012). "Are Gay Rights Islamophobic? A Critique of Some Uses of the Concept of Homonationalism in Activism and Academia". Social & Legal Studies. 21 (3): 357–374. doi:10.1177/0964663911435282.
  28. ↑ Turnbull-Dugarte, Stuart J.; López Ortega, Alberto (August 2024). "Instrumentally Inclusive: The Political Psychology of Homonationalism". American Political Science Review. 118 (3): 1360–1378. doi:10.1017/S0003055423000849. hdl:1871.1/2fd7cb51-00ae-4c61-8aa7-55c067c426c7.
  29. ↑ McCann, Hannah; Monaghan, Whitney (March 19, 2026). Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-350-41528-7.
  30. ↑ "Past Book Award Recipients". National Women's Studies Association. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  31. ↑ "Jasbir Puar". Onassis Foundation. Retrieved May 21, 2026.

Further reading

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