Jasbir K. Puar

1. Introduction

Jasbir K. Puar is a contemporary critical theorist whose work has become central to debates in queer studies, disability studies, and analyses of nationalism and empire. Writing primarily from women’s and gender studies, she develops conceptual tools that have been taken up across philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, and critical security studies.

Puar is best known for coining homonationalism, a term describing how certain lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) subjects are incorporated into nationalist projects and used to mark Western states as modern and “tolerant” in contrast to racialized and often Muslim “Others.” In later work she elaborates debility and the “right to maim” to describe how states and global economies manage populations through chronic injury and infrastructural violence rather than only through direct killing.

Her major books, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), adapt assemblage theory and rework biopolitics and necropolitics to analyze how sexuality, race, disability, and security interlink. These texts have been influential but also contentious, provoking extensive scholarly debate and public controversy, especially around Israel/Palestine and accusations of antisemitism or political bias.

While not usually classified as a philosopher by discipline, Puar’s concepts now function as key reference points in discussions of liberal inclusion, intersectionality, state violence, and decolonial critique, and they continue to circulate widely in anglophone and increasingly global academic contexts.

2. Life and Historical Context

Puar was born in 1967 in Pine Hill, New Jersey, to Punjabi Sikh immigrant parents. Scholars often note that her diasporic South Asian and Sikh background informs her sensitivity to race, religion, migration, and U.S. empire, especially in the post–9/11 period. She completed her PhD in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (1999), a program known for its engagement with social movements and critical race and postcolonial theory. In 2000 she joined Rutgers University’s Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, which has remained her primary institutional base.

2.1 Historical Milieus

Puar’s intellectual formation is closely tied to several overlapping historical contexts:

Within this setting, Puar’s writings respond to how discourses of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion became central to U.S. soft power and to European liberal self-understandings. Commentators also situate her within a broader move from identity-based politics toward analyses of infrastructure, affect, and security, reflecting shifts in both academic theory and global governance practices.

3. Intellectual Development

Puar’s intellectual trajectory is often described in four overlapping phases, each marked by shifts in topic and theoretical emphasis but continuous concern with power, embodiment, and geopolitics.

During her graduate years, Puar engaged Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and queer of color scholarship, leading her to question liberal identity categories and assimilationist narratives. In the early 2000s, the post–9/11 security environment prompted her to examine how “terrorist” and “queer” bodies were differently regulated, culminating in Terrorist Assemblages and the elaboration of homonationalism and assemblage as central analytic tools.

In the 2010s, Puar’s focus turned toward disability, debility, and capacity, partly through engagement with disability studies and with global struggles over health care, war injury, and labor. The Right to Maim reflects this phase, arguing that states and markets actively produce debility. More recent work extends these concerns to infrastructural and decolonial contexts, especially Palestine, highlighting how power operates through spatial design, logistics, and environmental conditions, rather than only through spectacular acts of violence.

Throughout these phases, commentators note continuity in her reliance on poststructuralist theory, queer of color critique, and attention to empire, even as the empirical sites and key concepts shift.

4. Major Works

Puar’s reputation rests primarily on two monographs and a set of widely cited articles and chapters. The following table summarizes several key works:

In Terrorist Assemblages, Puar analyzes media, legal discourse, and cultural texts to explore how “queer” and “terrorist” figures are co-constituted within global security regimes. The 10th-anniversary edition reflects on how the concept of homonationalism has been translated, institutionalized, or contested in diverse contexts.

The Right to Maim offers an extended theoretical intervention into disability studies, reworking biopolitics and necropolitics to account for the production of debility. Articles such as “The Cost of Getting Better” and “Homonationalism as Assemblage” serve both as precursors and clarifications, often cited independently in debates over neoliberalism, health, and queer politics.

5. Core Ideas: Homonationalism and Assemblage

5.1 Homonationalism

Homonationalism names, in Puar’s formulation, the alignment between some LGBTQ subjects and nationalist, racist, or imperial projects. She argues that in the post–9/11 era, Western states increasingly present themselves as sexually progressive—protecting gay and lesbian rights—to contrast with allegedly homophobic, backward, or “terrorist” others, often coded as Muslim or non-Western.

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“Homonationalism is the collusion between LGBTQ subjects and the biopolitical and necropolitical agendas of the nation-state.”

— Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages

Proponents of Puar’s framework emphasize that homonationalism is not simply “gay nationalism” but a state-sanctioned arrangement in which only certain, usually white, gender-conforming, middle-class queer subjects are recognized as good citizens. Others—queer people of color, migrants, Muslims—may be further marginalized or targeted. This concept has been used to interpret phenomena such as LGBTQ-inclusive militaries, nationalist celebrations of same-sex marriage, and state branding campaigns that foreground queer tolerance.

Some commentators extend homonationalism to analyze regional contexts (e.g., in Europe, Israel, or India), while others question whether the term travels well beyond Euro‑American settings or risks overstating state intentionality.

5.2 Assemblage

Puar draws on Deleuzian assemblage to rethink social categories like “the terrorist” or “the queer citizen” as shifting constellations of bodies, affects, discourses, and infrastructures.

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“Assemblage allows us to consider bodies and identities as events and encounters, not as fixed properties of discrete individuals.”

— Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages

This approach departs from intersectional models that treat race, gender, sexuality, and nation as additive or stable attributes. Instead, Puar posits that these elements are dynamically recomposed in relation to security regimes, media images, technological systems, and affective climates. Supporters argue that assemblage theory better captures how figures like the “queer patriot” or “terrorist body” emerge and dissolve across different sites.

Critics contend that Puar’s assemblage framework may underplay enduring structures such as law or economic exploitation, or obscure the lived stability of some identities. Others propose synthesizing assemblage with intersectionality to retain both fluidity and structural analysis.

6. Core Ideas: Debility, Biopolitics, and Necropolitics

6.1 Debility

In The Right to Maim and earlier essays, Puar introduces debility to describe states of bodily compromise, injury, and exhaustion that are structurally produced and managed, yet may not be recognized as “disability” within legal or rights frameworks.

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“Debility underscores the slow wearing down of populations through infrastructural and environmental violence, a condition actively produced rather than simply endured.”

— Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim

She distinguishes debility from disability: disability often appears as a recognized identity category eligible for accommodation and inclusion, while debility refers to widespread but less visible harms—chronic illness, toxic exposure, overwork—that sustain neoliberal economies and security regimes. Puar argues that some populations are maintained in a debilitated state to extract labor, manage surplus populations, or avoid the costs associated with either full inclusion or outright elimination.

6.2 Biopolitics and Necropolitics

Building on Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, Puar contends that contemporary power often operates through what she calls the right to maim: a state’s capacity to injure and incapacitate rather than solely kill.

She extends biopolitics beyond the management of life to include calibrated exposure to harm, especially through infrastructures such as health systems, borders, and environmental regulation. Necropolitics, in her reading, encompasses not only decisions over death but also over ongoing debility and “slow death.”

Empirically, Puar and scholars influenced by her apply these concepts to contexts such as warfare, occupation, policing, and austerity, arguing that systematic patterns of injury (e.g., among racialized or colonized populations) reflect deliberate or at least structurally embedded strategies of governance. Some interpreters view this as a significant expansion of biopolitical theory; others argue that attributing a coherent “right to maim” to states risks implying intentionality where dispersed structural processes may be at work.

7. Methodology and Theoretical Influences

Puar’s methodology is interdisciplinary, combining close reading, critical theory, and empirical case studies. She frequently analyzes media representations, legal decisions, policy discourse, tourism campaigns, activist materials, and architectural or infrastructural arrangements, treating them as sites where power and subjectivities are co-constituted.

7.1 Theoretical Lineages

Key influences include:

Methodologically, Puar emphasizes assemblage over linear causality, focusing on how heterogeneous elements—bodies, affects, technologies, laws—assemble into formations like homonationalism or debility. She also foregrounds affect and capacity: how bodies feel, move, and are enabled or constrained by their environments.

Supporters argue that this approach allows Puar to trace complex, non-obvious connections between, for example, LGBTQ rights campaigns and security policies. Critics suggest that her heavy reliance on poststructural theory can yield dense prose and may make it difficult to distinguish between metaphorical and empirical claims, leading to debates about evidence standards and methodological rigor.

8. Impact on Queer Theory and Gender Studies

Puar’s work has had notable influence within queer theory, trans studies, and feminist and gender studies, particularly in the anglophone academy.

8.1 Reframing Queer Politics

The concept of homonationalism has become a widely cited framework for analyzing the entanglement of LGBTQ politics with nationalism, militarism, and Islamophobia. Scholars have used it to interpret:

• Military recruitment campaigns targeting queer subjects
• National branding that foregrounds LGBTQ rights
• Tensions between LGBTQ organizations and anti-racist or anti-imperialist movements

Many queer theorists credit Puar with complicating narratives that equate legal inclusion (e.g., same-sex marriage, anti-discrimination laws) with emancipation. Her work is seen as part of a broader turn toward queer of color critique and critiques of homonormativity.

8.2 Intersection with Feminist and Trans Studies

In gender studies, Puar’s assemblage-based approach has been invoked to rethink the relationship between intersectionality and poststructuralism. Some feminist scholars integrate her ideas to argue for more fluid understandings of gender, sexuality, and race that remain attentive to state power and empire.

Trans studies scholars engage her analyses of bodily regulation, surveillance, and security to explore how trans subjects are differentially incorporated into or excluded from national imaginaries. Others debate whether homonationalism adequately accounts for trans-specific dynamics, leading to extensions or revisions of her framework.

8.3 Debates within the Field

While many view Puar’s work as foundational, others express concern that homonationalism can be applied too broadly, risking the stigmatization of any participation in national or rights-based politics as complicit. In response, some gender and queer theorists advocate for more fine-grained analyses that distinguish among varieties of state engagement, activism, and complicity, sometimes drawing on Puar’s assemblage methodology while modifying her conclusions.

9. Contributions to Disability and Decolonial Thought

Puar’s work has been influential in reorienting disability studies and in linking disability and debility to decolonial and anti-imperial analysis.

9.1 Disability and Debility

In disability studies, Puar’s distinction between disability and debility has prompted sustained discussion. She suggests that disability, as a recognized legal and political category, can sometimes function as a privileged site of inclusion (via accessibility policies, rights claims), whereas debilitated populations—such as precarious workers, environmental justice communities, or injured civilians in conflict zones—may remain unrecognized and unsupported.

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“Not all disability is equivalently disabling; some forms of debility are vital to the maintenance of neoliberal economies and security regimes.”

— Jasbir K. Puar, “The Cost of Getting Better”

Supporters argue that this framework reveals how disability rights gains can coexist with, and occasionally obscure, the intensified debilitation of other groups. Some disability theorists, however, worry that the distinction risks devaluing disability identity or underestimating the political importance of rights-based struggles.

9.2 Decolonial and Anti-Imperial Dimensions

Puar’s analyses of debility are closely tied to settler colonialism and occupation, particularly in the context of Palestine. She examines how infrastructural control, mobility restrictions, and exposure to violence can systematically debilitate populations, aligning this with broader discussions of necropolitics and decoloniality.

Her engagement with pinkwashing—the use of LGBTQ rights discourses to sanitize state violence—has been taken up by activists and scholars in decolonial and anti-imperialist movements. Proponents view her work as clarifying how sexual and disability politics intersect with global hierarchies of race and empire.

At the same time, some decolonial theorists question whether Puar’s poststructural vocabulary sufficiently incorporates Indigenous epistemologies or material histories, while others see her as contributing to a more global, relational understanding of decolonial struggle that foregrounds bodies, infrastructure, and affect.

10. Critiques, Debates, and Controversies

Puar’s work has generated extensive debate, both scholarly and public. Critiques address her conceptual frameworks, empirical claims, and political implications.

10.1 Conceptual and Methodological Critiques

Some scholars argue that homonationalism risks becoming an overly expansive label that conflates diverse practices—such as participation in state institutions, advocacy for LGBTQ rights, or support for specific foreign policies—under a single rubric of complicity. Others contend that her emphasis on assemblage and affect can underplay enduring legal and economic structures or material constraints.

In disability studies, critics question whether debility unnecessarily fragments the category of disability or implicitly hierarchizes forms of impairment. Some suggest that her skepticism toward inclusionary frameworks may undervalue concrete gains secured through rights-based activism.

10.2 Debates on Evidence and Interpretation

Puar’s style—dense theoretical argumentation coupled with interpretive readings of policy and media—has led some commentators to raise concerns about evidentiary standards and the line between speculative theorizing and empirical demonstration. Defenders respond that critical theory traditions often operate through symptomatic reading and that her claims are meant to illuminate patterns of power rather than provide comprehensive causal accounts.

10.3 Israel/Palestine and Accusations of Antisemitism

The most public controversies surround Puar’s work on Israel/Palestine, especially in The Right to Maim and various lectures. Critics, including some Israeli and Jewish organizations and scholars, have alleged that her portrayal of Israeli military practices as oriented toward “maiming” rather than killing risks demonizing Israel or reproducing antisemitic tropes. Supporters counter that her analysis draws on human rights reports, Palestinian testimony, and critical Israeli scholarship, and that labeling such critique antisemitic suppresses legitimate criticism of state policy.

The debates have sparked broader discussion about academic freedom, the boundaries of critical scholarship on Israel/Palestine, and the role of identity and positionality in interpreting geopolitical conflicts. These controversies continue to shape how Puar’s work is received and mobilized in different institutional and national contexts.

11. Legacy and Historical Significance

Puar is widely regarded as a key figure in early 21st‑century critical theory, particularly within queer, disability, and decolonial studies. Her concepts—homonationalism, debility, the right to maim, and assemblage—have entered the shared vocabulary of scholars analyzing sexuality, race, disability, and empire.

Her work is often situated alongside, and in dialogue with, other major reorientations in critical theory and feminist philosophy that challenge liberal narratives of progress and inclusion. In queer theory, homonationalism has reshaped how scholars and activists understand the relation between LGBTQ rights and state power. In disability studies, her focus on debility has prompted reexamination of who benefits from rights-based frameworks and how structural violence is distributed. In political theory and cultural studies, she is frequently cited in discussions of biopolitics, necropolitics, and the governance of life and injury.

Over time, Puar’s ideas have traveled beyond North American academia into European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Latin American debates, though often in adapted or contested forms. Some observers emphasize her role in consolidating connections between queer politics and Palestine solidarity, and between disability studies and analyses of occupation and infrastructure.

Assessments of her historical significance vary: supporters see her as a transformative theorist whose concepts will remain central reference points; critics regard her as emblematic of certain tendencies in poststructural and identity-based critique that may be revised by future scholarship. Nonetheless, her work has clearly marked an important moment in the evolution of critical approaches to sexuality, disability, and global power.