Jasbir
Puar

This lecture examines the potential for affective connectivities and conviviality to rethink neoliberal stratification. Noting that discourses surrounding queer suicide reproduce problematic assumptions not only about race, class, and gender, but also bodily health, debility, and capacity, Jasbir Puar will be linking 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 post-humanist studies.

Jasbir Puar is professor and core faculty member in the department of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, globalization; postcolonial and diaspora studies; South Asian cultural studies; and theories of assemblage and affect. She is the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007), which won the 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Professor Puar has also authored numerous articles that appear in Gender, Place, and Culture; Social Text; Radical History Review; Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her edited volumes include a special issue of GLQ entitled “Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization” and she co-edited a volume of Society and Space entitled “Sexuality and Space”.

 She is currently working on a new book project focused on queer disability studies and theories of affect and assemblage.

Antke Engel, Institute for Queer Theory, in cooperation with the ICI Berlin.

The lecture is part of the series The Subtle Racializations of Sexuality: Queer Theory, the Aftermath of Colonial History, and the Late-Modern State.

Western states happily turn to gender and sexual politics in order to demonstrate their presumed progressiveness. They find support from some parts of feminist and LGBTI activism that regard (neo)liberal state and diversity policies as instrumental for achieving integration and recognition. Such alliances have recently been criticized for fostering new social divisions and endorsing occidentalist and sometimes racist premises. Interested in the nuances of this critique, the lecture series brings together theoretical and political considerations developed from anti-racist, queer of colour, and/or migrant perspectives on late-modern and neoliberal state policies.

The event, like all events at the ICI Berlin, is open to the public, free of charge. The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin. If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.