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In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of "debility"-bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors-to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.
List of contents
Preface: Hands Up, Don't Shoot! ix
Acknowledgments xxv
Introduction: The Cost of Getting Better 1
1. Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled 33
2. Crip Nationalism: From Narrative Prosthesis to Disaster Capitalism 63
3. Disabled Diaspora, Rehabilitating State: The Queer Politics of Reproduction in Palestine/Israel 95
4. "Will Not Let Die": Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine 127
Postscript: Treatment without Checkpoints 155
Notes 163
Bibliography 223
Index 261
About the author
Jasbir K. Puar is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, also published by Duke University Press.
Summary
Jasbir K. Puar continues her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to theorize the production of disability, using Israel's occupation of Palestine as an example of how settler colonial states rely on liberal frameworks of disability to maintain control of bodies and populations.
