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ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise
El derecho a mutilar: Debilidad, capacidad, discapacidad
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.
338 pages, Paperback
Published October 11, 2022
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3773 people want to read
About the author
Jasbir K. Puar
14 books184 followersJasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She has also been a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York (UK) in Women’s Studies in 1993. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, globalization; postcolonial and diaspora studies; South Asian cultural studies; and theories of assemblage and affect.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
June 30, 2024
Incredible - except the introduction. Just skip or it go back to it after you read the rest.
April 10, 2018
There were some smart and incisive ideas in here when I could make sense of what she was saying, but Puar writes in such dense, jargon-y, and (imo) unnecessarily pretentious language that I found more than half the book incomprehensible. Maybe assemblage theory just isn't my thing, but after slogging through this book for a graduate class I was left with the indelible opinion that her work is completely inaccessible to the majority of people in the vulnerable and oppressed groups she claims to care about.
December 7, 2017
This book had me rather “shook.” As a person w/ disabilities it was eye opening to learn, in part, the troubling and problematic history of the ADAA, DSM, and disabled rights organizing.
More so, it was fascinating to learn the relationships between biopolotical debilitation economies and rehabilitative economies. Especially as it correlates to those effects by US and Israeli settler colonialism & imperialism. I work specifically with refugees (often from those nations) who have disabilities (almost exclusively from those conflicts) to find them work... which of course Puar addresses when she alludes to the relationship between personhood and citizenship to contribution to labor and capital production...
Puar offers so much in this text which I will certainly return back to. Her writing and ideas are dense, but it truly expands one’s understanding and capacity to understand.
More so, it was fascinating to learn the relationships between biopolotical debilitation economies and rehabilitative economies. Especially as it correlates to those effects by US and Israeli settler colonialism & imperialism. I work specifically with refugees (often from those nations) who have disabilities (almost exclusively from those conflicts) to find them work... which of course Puar addresses when she alludes to the relationship between personhood and citizenship to contribution to labor and capital production...
Puar offers so much in this text which I will certainly return back to. Her writing and ideas are dense, but it truly expands one’s understanding and capacity to understand.
May 4, 2021
I may write more later but right now I'm just proud of myself for finishing it! Friends who know what kind of nonfiction I tend to read: this was too dense and academic for me in places. Especially the analysis that relied on knowledge of Foucault's control & discipline theories. Ugh. I really need to read the original ideas sometime so I can figure that stuff out -- and by that, I mean the Black Panthers he stole those ideas from, Angela Davis and George Jackson.
Anyway, that aside aside --
Contrast between disability identify as a source of pride and advocacy, which is most often available to white people vs endemic debility which is forced on racialized, colonized, and occupied people, who can't afford the risks/losses that come with identifying as disabled.
(Debility = environmental and social control systems such as poverty, school-to-prison pipeline, racial trauma, etc. that affect racialized-colonized people in a way that (re-)produces their subaltern positions and a slow death that doesn't get reported as a deliberate result of government policies.)
Popular eugenics, including the Islamophobic kind carried out via the so-called War on Terror and the pronatalist kind supported by various colonizer regimes. Also includes discussion anti-miscenegation laws, fertility treatments, and surrogacy laws.
Homonationalism and crip nationalism, aka rehabilitating (some) queer and (some) disabled people into docile subjects in support of nationalist regimes. Rehabilitation is also a source of profit, so even bodies that don't have the capacity for wage labor can be "productive" by needing hired services provided via state or NGO.
Disaster capitalism and capacity. The medical industrial complex. NGOs and disability rights and humanitarianism that give cover to settler-colonial regimes. For example, do we fight to make military checkpoints more accessible, or does that just deflect from the issue of challenging military occupation? Does shooting to maim instead of shooting to kill make the IDF more humanitarian or better at manipulating international opinion? Can redefining racial categories into ever expanding multiplicities ever overwhelm racial control systems to the point where current surveillance and incarceration practices won't be possible?
Anyway, that aside aside --
Contrast between disability identify as a source of pride and advocacy, which is most often available to white people vs endemic debility which is forced on racialized, colonized, and occupied people, who can't afford the risks/losses that come with identifying as disabled.
(Debility = environmental and social control systems such as poverty, school-to-prison pipeline, racial trauma, etc. that affect racialized-colonized people in a way that (re-)produces their subaltern positions and a slow death that doesn't get reported as a deliberate result of government policies.)
Popular eugenics, including the Islamophobic kind carried out via the so-called War on Terror and the pronatalist kind supported by various colonizer regimes. Also includes discussion anti-miscenegation laws, fertility treatments, and surrogacy laws.
Homonationalism and crip nationalism, aka rehabilitating (some) queer and (some) disabled people into docile subjects in support of nationalist regimes. Rehabilitation is also a source of profit, so even bodies that don't have the capacity for wage labor can be "productive" by needing hired services provided via state or NGO.
Disaster capitalism and capacity. The medical industrial complex. NGOs and disability rights and humanitarianism that give cover to settler-colonial regimes. For example, do we fight to make military checkpoints more accessible, or does that just deflect from the issue of challenging military occupation? Does shooting to maim instead of shooting to kill make the IDF more humanitarian or better at manipulating international opinion? Can redefining racial categories into ever expanding multiplicities ever overwhelm racial control systems to the point where current surveillance and incarceration practices won't be possible?
September 16, 2024
It is frightening that if you read Hitler's Mein Kampf and Puar's The Right to Maim one after the other, you will notice some parallels in the thinking of these two people.
Both assume that there is a Zionist world conspiracy. Both consider it to be all-powerfull and paranoidly see the plan of this Zionist world conspiracy as responsible for much of the horror in the world. But they also see it as responsible for every liberalization and modernization of societies (which both Hitler and Puar (for different reasons) reject as problematic). Both are with regard to the presumed world conspiracy delusional and lose all connection to reality. For example, Puar denies that the gradual improvement in the living conditions of women and homosexual people in some countries of the global North is the result of a hard struggle by generations of activists. Instead, she claims, contrary to reality, that women and homosexual people in Israel and the US have been given these rights as a gift by a (Zionist) power elite. According to Puar, this is part of a perfidious master plan in which the sole purpose of this gift of rights is to mark Muslim people as backward so that they can then legitimately be murderd.
Any person who is halfway sane should be alarmed by such an delusional Welterklärungsantizionism! After all, Nazi Germany was a terrible example of how quickly a Welterklärungsantisemitism can turn into an redemptive antisemitism and ultimately into an elementory antisemitism.
(Whether Jews are demonized today not as Jews but as Zionists makes only a limited difference, because structurally the same thing happens: they are identified as the cause of all evil in the world, which in the future could lead to the call for the annihilation of every single one of them).
Another parallel between Puar's and Hitler's thoughts is that Zionists are delusionally fantasized as the evil object par excellence and a caricature-like evilness is projected onto them. As an example, I'll try to trace a train of thought from Puar (I'm sorry if it reads confusingly, but the train of thought in itself is simply absurd):
Puar claims that initially Zionists do not intentionally kill Palestinians, but merely injure them. According to her, however, this is never done out of empathy or anything similar (she fundamentally denies Zionists the capacity for such humanity) but solely out of absolute cruelty. For every Palestinian there is according to Puar absolutely nothing wrong with dying in the fight against Israel (what an absurd assumption!) and because the Zionist knows this and because it is according to Puar not enough for him to simply kill Palestinians, but he wants to kill them as cruelly as possible, he devises a perfidious plan, which he then carries out:
- Step 1: First he shoots the Palestinian in the knee (according to Puar, this alone would be the cruelest thing one could do, since according to her, letting someone live is crueler than killing him).
- Step 2: Some time later, the Zionist shoots a rocket at the house where the Palestinian lives.
- Step 3: The Zionist calls the Palestinian on the phone to warn him of the impending rocket strike (which, according to Puar, is again the cruelest thing one can do. Worse than killing is according to her demonstrating to people that you have power over the telecommunications network.)
- Step 4: Since the supposedly omniscient Zionist knows that the Palestinian has limited mobility, he can calmly assume that the Palestinian will not make it out of the apartment in time despite the call and will therefore ultimately die.
- Step 5: Repeat! (According to Puar, this alleged procedure is the commonly used master plan used to kill Palestinians as cruelly as possible.)
It is completely insane that Puar really presents as an incontrovertible truth that Zionists, just to kill as cruelly as possible, would implement such an incredibly complicated master plan as a standard procedure.
It is also crazy that Puar accepts cruelty as the only possible driving force behind all Zionist actions: If they kill Palestinians in a battle, it is out of cruelty. If they do not kill Palestinians, then it is also solely out of cruelty. If Palestinian civilians are warned of a rocket strike, then this is done solely out of cruelty. If people with disabilities, women or homosexual people are treated humanely, then of course this is also done solely out of cruelty. And so on and so forth.
Like Hitler, Puar thus sees Zionists as the ultimate evil, capable of nothing but destruction and cruelty. Such thinking, as the past has shown and the present shows, is of infinite danger to Jews.
Just so that I am not misunderstood, I am of course not comparing Puar and Hitler as people! Hitler started a world war and was responsible for the Shoa and the deaths of millions of people and Puar would of course not do or approve of anything like that. I just want to make it clear that there are alarming parallels between Mein Kampf and The Right to Maim:
-the assumption of an all-powerful Zionist world conspiracy elite
- the assumption of Zionists as the ultimate evil object
- the self-evident assumption of an infinitely under-complex Manächaean world view (Everything Palestinians/Germans do is always done solely and alone for understandable motives. Everything Zionists do is done always solely and alone out of devious cruelty, as they are completely denied any positive humanity.)
Both assume that there is a Zionist world conspiracy. Both consider it to be all-powerfull and paranoidly see the plan of this Zionist world conspiracy as responsible for much of the horror in the world. But they also see it as responsible for every liberalization and modernization of societies (which both Hitler and Puar (for different reasons) reject as problematic). Both are with regard to the presumed world conspiracy delusional and lose all connection to reality. For example, Puar denies that the gradual improvement in the living conditions of women and homosexual people in some countries of the global North is the result of a hard struggle by generations of activists. Instead, she claims, contrary to reality, that women and homosexual people in Israel and the US have been given these rights as a gift by a (Zionist) power elite. According to Puar, this is part of a perfidious master plan in which the sole purpose of this gift of rights is to mark Muslim people as backward so that they can then legitimately be murderd.
Any person who is halfway sane should be alarmed by such an delusional Welterklärungsantizionism! After all, Nazi Germany was a terrible example of how quickly a Welterklärungsantisemitism can turn into an redemptive antisemitism and ultimately into an elementory antisemitism.
(Whether Jews are demonized today not as Jews but as Zionists makes only a limited difference, because structurally the same thing happens: they are identified as the cause of all evil in the world, which in the future could lead to the call for the annihilation of every single one of them).
Another parallel between Puar's and Hitler's thoughts is that Zionists are delusionally fantasized as the evil object par excellence and a caricature-like evilness is projected onto them. As an example, I'll try to trace a train of thought from Puar (I'm sorry if it reads confusingly, but the train of thought in itself is simply absurd):
Puar claims that initially Zionists do not intentionally kill Palestinians, but merely injure them. According to her, however, this is never done out of empathy or anything similar (she fundamentally denies Zionists the capacity for such humanity) but solely out of absolute cruelty. For every Palestinian there is according to Puar absolutely nothing wrong with dying in the fight against Israel (what an absurd assumption!) and because the Zionist knows this and because it is according to Puar not enough for him to simply kill Palestinians, but he wants to kill them as cruelly as possible, he devises a perfidious plan, which he then carries out:
- Step 1: First he shoots the Palestinian in the knee (according to Puar, this alone would be the cruelest thing one could do, since according to her, letting someone live is crueler than killing him).
- Step 2: Some time later, the Zionist shoots a rocket at the house where the Palestinian lives.
- Step 3: The Zionist calls the Palestinian on the phone to warn him of the impending rocket strike (which, according to Puar, is again the cruelest thing one can do. Worse than killing is according to her demonstrating to people that you have power over the telecommunications network.)
- Step 4: Since the supposedly omniscient Zionist knows that the Palestinian has limited mobility, he can calmly assume that the Palestinian will not make it out of the apartment in time despite the call and will therefore ultimately die.
- Step 5: Repeat! (According to Puar, this alleged procedure is the commonly used master plan used to kill Palestinians as cruelly as possible.)
It is completely insane that Puar really presents as an incontrovertible truth that Zionists, just to kill as cruelly as possible, would implement such an incredibly complicated master plan as a standard procedure.
It is also crazy that Puar accepts cruelty as the only possible driving force behind all Zionist actions: If they kill Palestinians in a battle, it is out of cruelty. If they do not kill Palestinians, then it is also solely out of cruelty. If Palestinian civilians are warned of a rocket strike, then this is done solely out of cruelty. If people with disabilities, women or homosexual people are treated humanely, then of course this is also done solely out of cruelty. And so on and so forth.
Like Hitler, Puar thus sees Zionists as the ultimate evil, capable of nothing but destruction and cruelty. Such thinking, as the past has shown and the present shows, is of infinite danger to Jews.
Just so that I am not misunderstood, I am of course not comparing Puar and Hitler as people! Hitler started a world war and was responsible for the Shoa and the deaths of millions of people and Puar would of course not do or approve of anything like that. I just want to make it clear that there are alarming parallels between Mein Kampf and The Right to Maim:
-the assumption of an all-powerful Zionist world conspiracy elite
- the assumption of Zionists as the ultimate evil object
- the self-evident assumption of an infinitely under-complex Manächaean world view (Everything Palestinians/Germans do is always done solely and alone for understandable motives. Everything Zionists do is done always solely and alone out of devious cruelty, as they are completely denied any positive humanity.)
July 2, 2024
completely changed my understanding of disability studies. the last few chapters on israel/palestine were excellent, covering topics of settler colonial debilitation, disaster capitalism, and pinkwashing and masculinity. still very relevant, seven years after publication.
what brought this rating down was how hard it was to get through the first part of this book. part of it was because i was missing a lot of the background knowledge on foucault and deleuze to understand the theory, but the text was really inaccessible. the writing was full of jargon that only made the points unclear—there's a difference between academic writing that's useful, and just bad writing. sentences were too long and drawn out, to the point that i had to reread the same one many times. disappointing because the points at the end are really interesting, once you get through all the theoretical jargon in the beginning.
what brought this rating down was how hard it was to get through the first part of this book. part of it was because i was missing a lot of the background knowledge on foucault and deleuze to understand the theory, but the text was really inaccessible. the writing was full of jargon that only made the points unclear—there's a difference between academic writing that's useful, and just bad writing. sentences were too long and drawn out, to the point that i had to reread the same one many times. disappointing because the points at the end are really interesting, once you get through all the theoretical jargon in the beginning.
March 31, 2024
Unfolds innumerable potentialities. Innumerable futures. Paradigm-changing and -defining and -multiplying. There was/is a 'me' before and after Puar's work. Of course, there will be innumerable.
February 27, 2025
Would’ve given it 2 stars based on the first couple chapters (arguments I just can’t get behind, absolutely 0 pragmatism) but the chapters on Palestine/Israel are pretty interesting. The sexual psychology of the IDF is fascinating
August 15, 2020
Far more academic than I was hoping, dense, barely readable (but by whom? Me? Well, personally, I'm not academic, qualified, so there's that), just a thick syntactical gum you might learn how to chew. Eventually. Sometimes. But do you want to? Well, it's 'style' [shrug] -- but it's also access, welcome, trans-disciplinary movement, so there might not be a shrug there at all. Shrug. I can bear it ok, but I feel like I could skip an entire line of text and get basically the same tiny amount of information as if I'd read the line as Puar wrote it. Is all of this 100% lucid and meaningful? Honestly.
Expression is bogged down in words I'd say are hifalutin non-words. But I would say something like that, wouldn't I? not having studied evidently what I should have studied before embarking here. I could point out and make fun of tons of these words -- from the common but still mystifying ('engender', 'assemblages', 'normative', 'cohere', 'neoliberal', 'amalgamates', 'instrumentalize') to the downright bizarre ('securitization', 'conceptualization', 'precaritization', 'capacitization') -- but I'd say it's probably just that I'm just not an academic, don't speak 'academic-ese' (and kind of don't even think there should be a separate, high, ivory-tower 'academic-ese' argot). Why say "intensification" when you could say "intensity and how it was built up"?
And phrases too -- like, 'Spacialize the relationality of absence', 'through the epistemic projects that have functionalized their coherence', or 'Binarization of an interdependent relationship', etc. Are these actual phrases that actually convey actual information or just coded things traded by academics? If it's the latter that's fine with me, but why publish them in a book? Sigh. I don't know. It's challenging, unfun to single these out, I guess, and it often seems a little disingenuous anyway, but I'll do what I do. Is it just me, or is "through reifying intersectional identity frames -- these are frames that still hinge on discrete notions of inclusion and exclusion -- as the most pernicious ones for political intervention, thus obfuscating forms of control that insidiously include in order to exclude, and exclude in order to include" (23) a lucid and coherent thing actually? Anyone??
I think the final lines of the preface synthesize the main argument pretty well nevertheless, though: "At our current political conjuncture, Black Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline to protect sacred grounds and access to water: these are some of the movements that are leading the way to demand livable lives for all. These movements may not represent the most appealing or desired versions of disability pride. But they are movements anchored, in fact, in the lived experiences of debilitation, implicitly contesting the right to maim, and imagining multiple futures where bodily capacities and debilities are embraced rather than weaponized" (xxiv). It takes more words in fact, and more jargon-stuffed prose than I might have used for an expression I think would be very basically the exact same, but it's a very solid and worthwhile argument: linking protest movements together as social manifestations against people who aren't able-bodied.
Whether those people are victims of "disability" (individualist) or "debility" (similar, overlapping, usually collective and state-sponsored or -used, not visible or trackable in quite the same way) is another of Puar's fixations. I won't wrongly try to summarize it, but basically the distinction might be somewhat due to abuse, impunity, legitimacy, etc. It's very scary to touch anything inside of this, but not strictly because of harsh/tender disability or social-rights PC subject matter, but because of syntactical oddness and density. I don't like it. It doesn't look good. But that's what's there. And the subject matter's too important not to try a tiny bit.
Expression is bogged down in words I'd say are hifalutin non-words. But I would say something like that, wouldn't I? not having studied evidently what I should have studied before embarking here. I could point out and make fun of tons of these words -- from the common but still mystifying ('engender', 'assemblages', 'normative', 'cohere', 'neoliberal', 'amalgamates', 'instrumentalize') to the downright bizarre ('securitization', 'conceptualization', 'precaritization', 'capacitization') -- but I'd say it's probably just that I'm just not an academic, don't speak 'academic-ese' (and kind of don't even think there should be a separate, high, ivory-tower 'academic-ese' argot). Why say "intensification" when you could say "intensity and how it was built up"?
And phrases too -- like, 'Spacialize the relationality of absence', 'through the epistemic projects that have functionalized their coherence', or 'Binarization of an interdependent relationship', etc. Are these actual phrases that actually convey actual information or just coded things traded by academics? If it's the latter that's fine with me, but why publish them in a book? Sigh. I don't know. It's challenging, unfun to single these out, I guess, and it often seems a little disingenuous anyway, but I'll do what I do. Is it just me, or is "through reifying intersectional identity frames -- these are frames that still hinge on discrete notions of inclusion and exclusion -- as the most pernicious ones for political intervention, thus obfuscating forms of control that insidiously include in order to exclude, and exclude in order to include" (23) a lucid and coherent thing actually? Anyone??
I think the final lines of the preface synthesize the main argument pretty well nevertheless, though: "At our current political conjuncture, Black Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline to protect sacred grounds and access to water: these are some of the movements that are leading the way to demand livable lives for all. These movements may not represent the most appealing or desired versions of disability pride. But they are movements anchored, in fact, in the lived experiences of debilitation, implicitly contesting the right to maim, and imagining multiple futures where bodily capacities and debilities are embraced rather than weaponized" (xxiv). It takes more words in fact, and more jargon-stuffed prose than I might have used for an expression I think would be very basically the exact same, but it's a very solid and worthwhile argument: linking protest movements together as social manifestations against people who aren't able-bodied.
Whether those people are victims of "disability" (individualist) or "debility" (similar, overlapping, usually collective and state-sponsored or -used, not visible or trackable in quite the same way) is another of Puar's fixations. I won't wrongly try to summarize it, but basically the distinction might be somewhat due to abuse, impunity, legitimacy, etc. It's very scary to touch anything inside of this, but not strictly because of harsh/tender disability or social-rights PC subject matter, but because of syntactical oddness and density. I don't like it. It doesn't look good. But that's what's there. And the subject matter's too important not to try a tiny bit.
May 25, 2023
4.5 this book is hot !! Jasbir’s arguments are incisive and searing, even when they meander. thoroughly enjoyed
January 5, 2025
still finishing chapters 1 and 2. otherwise, slay.
edit dec 2024: have read and re-read and re-re-read. puar is A+
edit dec 2024: have read and re-read and re-re-read. puar is A+
March 9, 2024
It was a trip to read this book in 2023-24, looking back on the campaigns Puar references in a climate of new aggressions against the same populations (ex. “It gets better” and the Israeli occupation of Palestine). Puar convinced me of collectivist solutions to liberation and the uselessness of rights discourse.
Thanks to the interview with Puar about this book on Death Panel podcast for finally motivating me to read this.
Thanks to the interview with Puar about this book on Death Panel podcast for finally motivating me to read this.
January 2, 2024
read for a class my first semester of grad school as oct 7 happened. almost too relevant. wordy and jargony throughout but shores up and most everything is tied together at the end. כואב כואב
"It is as if withholding death—will not let or make die—becomes an act of dehumanization: the Palestinians are not even human enough for death."
"The [old] right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die."
"How much resistance can be stripped without actually exterminating the population?"
"In the West Bank, immaculate freeways transport Israeli settlers through a landscape of dilapidated Palestinian back roads."
"...the injured do not count in the 'dry statistics of the tragedy'"
"...the creation of disability is a tactical military move on the part of the IDF"
"Israel not only profits lavishly from supplying Palestine but also wields direct discipline through its automatic powers of debt extraction. It can turn the spigot of fiscal pain on or off at will."
"That queer Palestinians in Ramallah cannot travel to Haifa, Jerusalem, or Gaza to meet fellow Palestinian activists seems to be one of the most obvious ways the Israeli occupation delimits—prohibits, in fact—the possibilities for the flourishing of queer communities and organizing the Israelis have enjoyed without mobility restrictions."
"...to be gay in Israel is not only to be Jewish (and not Palestinian and in many cases not even Arab), not only to be able-bodied (and not disabled), but also to be parents, to reproduce the national body politic along racial and rehabilitated lines."
"Israeli crip nationalism is secured through the disabled IDF veteran."
"It is as if withholding death—will not let or make die—becomes an act of dehumanization: the Palestinians are not even human enough for death."
"The [old] right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die."
"How much resistance can be stripped without actually exterminating the population?"
"In the West Bank, immaculate freeways transport Israeli settlers through a landscape of dilapidated Palestinian back roads."
"...the injured do not count in the 'dry statistics of the tragedy'"
"...the creation of disability is a tactical military move on the part of the IDF"
"Israel not only profits lavishly from supplying Palestine but also wields direct discipline through its automatic powers of debt extraction. It can turn the spigot of fiscal pain on or off at will."
"That queer Palestinians in Ramallah cannot travel to Haifa, Jerusalem, or Gaza to meet fellow Palestinian activists seems to be one of the most obvious ways the Israeli occupation delimits—prohibits, in fact—the possibilities for the flourishing of queer communities and organizing the Israelis have enjoyed without mobility restrictions."
"...to be gay in Israel is not only to be Jewish (and not Palestinian and in many cases not even Arab), not only to be able-bodied (and not disabled), but also to be parents, to reproduce the national body politic along racial and rehabilitated lines."
"Israeli crip nationalism is secured through the disabled IDF veteran."
June 4, 2022
this begins so close to my heart: in my broken home of st louis and its continual racism and establishing of who is maim-able. it moves even closer towards experiences of my closest friends and family through queer and trans theory and examples. and it finishes in palestine where i have visited and witnessed the afflictions of occupation. so close to my heart in every capacity.
in reterreiorializing ability in capacity, there is continuous development in who is “productive”, who works with capital and to who. in the continuous interrogation of capacity representations (think money behind depictions of peak athleticism), our laws (think dsm), necropolitics (how many in palestine would rather be dead than maimed), and crip nationalism (think handicapped spaces and who they are meant to symbolize/who they leave out of either able/disable category. and further who is queer? and how tel aviv as early adopters of queer forward legislation “justified” their other atrocities), puar lays deeply enlightening connective tissue between those most afflicted by our global biopolitic.
the right to maim makes many Foucault-driven texts seem incomplete, maimed in their own normative ability obsessed trajectories. i can sense i will be remapping the conceptions and experiences of the rest of my life towards puar’s
in reterreiorializing ability in capacity, there is continuous development in who is “productive”, who works with capital and to who. in the continuous interrogation of capacity representations (think money behind depictions of peak athleticism), our laws (think dsm), necropolitics (how many in palestine would rather be dead than maimed), and crip nationalism (think handicapped spaces and who they are meant to symbolize/who they leave out of either able/disable category. and further who is queer? and how tel aviv as early adopters of queer forward legislation “justified” their other atrocities), puar lays deeply enlightening connective tissue between those most afflicted by our global biopolitic.
the right to maim makes many Foucault-driven texts seem incomplete, maimed in their own normative ability obsessed trajectories. i can sense i will be remapping the conceptions and experiences of the rest of my life towards puar’s
January 15, 2019
Just so good--really dense at times, and there were things that felt like they should have been more incorporated (specifically the questions around It Gets Better, which seem in the preface like they would take up much more space than they did) but Puar's insights around debility will have me thinking through it for a long time afterwards, especially in conjunction with disability and disability studies. Super fascinating work, and such interesting parts about Israel and Palestine; the bit about IVF and pro-natalism in Israel especially, and the way that debility in Palestine manages to capture not just disability but also limitation of movement were so insightful.
April 9, 2022
The book felt endlessly infuriating. Wonderful, useful insights and inventions are overshadowed for me by some binaristic thinking, especially in the chapter that talked about trans identity construction which was to me, really infuriating and generally terrible.
November 24, 2019
bloated with theory. read chapter 2 if you don't have time!
September 21, 2024
Valuable and interesting ideas, particularly as it pertains to notions of intersectional approaches to critical theory as well as to our understanding of the current state of Gaza. WAY too much jargon, jumps around a lot in terms of the topics it tries to cover, and hard to get into if you don't have a strong foundation in affect theory, disability studies, and gilles deleuze.
August 23, 2024
She‘s cuckoo (thank you Siouxsie Sioux)
November 21, 2024
The butler did it.
Read
November 8, 2025내가해냄(완독)
July 9, 2024
Really wanted to rate this five stars because I learned more from this book than any other in the topic area, but writing is very inaccessible with all of its academic jargon and I had to read sentences 3x to grasp the meaning
April 27, 2023
Puar’s second book shifts focus from Terrorist Assemblages' focus on sexual identity & orientation to the perpetuation of and attention to disabilities, but with similar bases: that we hegemonize people with disabilities as facing similar issues, coming from similar backgrounds, and holding similar-views; the state’s modulation of what “counts” as a disability constructs its identity and restricts inclusion; there are upheld ideals of disabled folks just as there are queer folks, further creating, perpetuating, and harming the identities grouped in (she calls this “inspiration porn”). The binary is harmful here as it is anywhere: is there no alternative to framing any level of disability as either a defect or deserving of celebration? The right to maim, then, is the sovereign right to perpetuate slow violence, debilitation, and through both, “slow death.”
If all true liberation movements are intersectional, then feminist, equality, and anti-zionist movements are disability justice and queer justice movements in their own rights – also, because they are movements angled towards and in response to collective debilitation.
If all true liberation movements are intersectional, then feminist, equality, and anti-zionist movements are disability justice and queer justice movements in their own rights – also, because they are movements angled towards and in response to collective debilitation.
August 19, 2018
This book is far more readable than Terrorist Assemblages and expands upon the scholarship Puar presents in that book to explore variations of Crip Nationalism. Much of this book focuses on disability movements’ propensity to redirect scholarship towards a white centric focus a la what Puar and others call Crip Nationalism, as well as the role debility plays in allowing state powers to slowly weaken non-hegemonic peoples. The focus on Israel-Palestine in the latter half of the book may be a bit more niche of a scholarly interest compared to the more widely encompassing first half- especially for a book that is partially marketed as American studies, but the synthesis of postcolonial, queer, and disability theory in The Right to Maim make for a powerful scholarly resource.
September 12, 2018
I learned a lot more about biopolitics, particularly of the settler colonial state of Israel and how it mirrors some aspects of Nazi German. And how the continuation of the occupation requires international support for those living in this enclosed jail and this produces profit off of the suffering.
August 28, 2023
This book was obnoxiously impenetrable.
January 31, 2025
Reread. She’s lowkey the best mind of our generation :0
November 23, 2023
I was inspired to check out this book after listening to an interview of Jasbir Puar on the "Death Panel" podcast. Puar introduces the concept of debility (defined as "bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors"). She explains how a population can be debilitated-- that is, made available for maiming-- through systems of biopolitical control such as racism, colonialism, poverty, and imprisonment. Moreover, traditional frameworks for understanding death and disability can be used to obscure mass debilitation, such as the treatment of Palestinians by Israel. Considering debility can help us interrogate who the concept of disability is for and who it represents; debility broadens our understanding of disability by illuminating how structures of oppression and biopolitical control designate certain groups of people as maim-able.
This book epitomizes everything I love and hate about academia. The ideas and analyses in "Right to Maim" are electrifying, incisive, and key to making sense of contemporary global biopolitics. However, it's written in a tremendously inaccessible style, defenselessly dense and replete with unnecessary jargon. In my opinion, anyone could understand the ideas being presented in this book if they were presented in a more approachable format. The content of "Right to Maim" is essential for everybody interested in disability, race, colonialism, and/or how structures of power and oppression interact. Limiting the readers of this book to those who have a PhD in the critical social sciences or humanities is a huge disservice to the material it covers. Obviously this isn't a critique unique to Puar; this is how she's been trained and she's just being rewarded for perpetuating academic norms. Frustrating!
What if we expanded our frameworks of disability, debility, and capacity to include the more-than-human world? I'm particularly curious about how the concept of debility plays into our relationship with the natural world, especially in the era of global climate catastrophe. Capitalism and colonialism certainly designate the environment as something we have a limitless right to maim. Sunaura Taylor writes powerfully about disabled ecologies and environmental justice, including how landscapes become "disabled" as a result of anthropogenic activities that irreparably alter ecosystem structure and function. Puar's debility framework can be utilized to build on this idea of disabled ecologies and investigate how racism, colonialism, capitalism, and more differentially designate landscapes as maim-able. Clearly not a very well-thought-out idea, but I do think that considering the concept of debility in relationship to sciences like ecology, biomedicine, and more could yield powerful transdisciplinary findings. All the more reason to consider the accessibility of this text to readers beyond the ivory tower humanities/social sciences.
This book epitomizes everything I love and hate about academia. The ideas and analyses in "Right to Maim" are electrifying, incisive, and key to making sense of contemporary global biopolitics. However, it's written in a tremendously inaccessible style, defenselessly dense and replete with unnecessary jargon. In my opinion, anyone could understand the ideas being presented in this book if they were presented in a more approachable format. The content of "Right to Maim" is essential for everybody interested in disability, race, colonialism, and/or how structures of power and oppression interact. Limiting the readers of this book to those who have a PhD in the critical social sciences or humanities is a huge disservice to the material it covers. Obviously this isn't a critique unique to Puar; this is how she's been trained and she's just being rewarded for perpetuating academic norms. Frustrating!
What if we expanded our frameworks of disability, debility, and capacity to include the more-than-human world? I'm particularly curious about how the concept of debility plays into our relationship with the natural world, especially in the era of global climate catastrophe. Capitalism and colonialism certainly designate the environment as something we have a limitless right to maim. Sunaura Taylor writes powerfully about disabled ecologies and environmental justice, including how landscapes become "disabled" as a result of anthropogenic activities that irreparably alter ecosystem structure and function. Puar's debility framework can be utilized to build on this idea of disabled ecologies and investigate how racism, colonialism, capitalism, and more differentially designate landscapes as maim-able. Clearly not a very well-thought-out idea, but I do think that considering the concept of debility in relationship to sciences like ecology, biomedicine, and more could yield powerful transdisciplinary findings. All the more reason to consider the accessibility of this text to readers beyond the ivory tower humanities/social sciences.
May 17, 2025
This is a very good, but remarkably dense academic book that covers a host of issues and topics; primarily, it focuses on queer identity and theory, disability theory, political science and philosophy, and the history of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and bodies.
Puar says herself in the intro (a great critique of the It Gets Better movement) that this is really two books, which I agree with and is my first critique. The first half focuses on the intersections between queer (specifically trans) identity and disabled identity, using the theory from both fields to discuss her idea of ‘debility’ which is the way in which a state keeps a population ‘disabled’ or rendered available for disability in various ways (poor access to healthcare and education, a sense of expendable physical labour which can often cause bodily harm, etc.). There is also discussion of homonationalism here which was a new concept to me, but a very important one when we think of things like “pinkwashing.” She situates the ‘It Gets Better’ movement as a prime example of homonationalism as it creates an investment in liberalism and the national-state as a prerequisite for ‘it getting better.’
The second half of the book focuses on Palestine and Israel’s occupation, human rights abuses, and its use of not only the ‘right to kill’ which it asserts for itself but also what Puar calls the ‘right to maim,’ which ties to her notion of debility. Israel has, in the past (which is an important note as some of Puar says has been changed by the brutality of the 2023-onward escalation of genocide) and presently shoots to disable Palestinians instead of killing them, claiming that it is a humanitarian action but in reality it is a purposeful strategy to disable the Palestinian population. Compounded with Israel’s routine destruction of Palestinian infrastructure (especially medical and transportation) this keeps the Palestinian people in a state of prolonged, slow death.
My final critique for the book is around Puar’s discussion on queer-positivity in Israel. She acknowledges pinkwashing and critiques the homonationalist discourse present there, but seems to also agree that Israel is quite a progressive and safe place for queer people. I would have loved to have seen her engage with the works of Sa’id Atshan, like ‘Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique.’
All in all, an excellent book that perhaps should have been two, and occasionally gets lost in the density of theoretical language.
Puar says herself in the intro (a great critique of the It Gets Better movement) that this is really two books, which I agree with and is my first critique. The first half focuses on the intersections between queer (specifically trans) identity and disabled identity, using the theory from both fields to discuss her idea of ‘debility’ which is the way in which a state keeps a population ‘disabled’ or rendered available for disability in various ways (poor access to healthcare and education, a sense of expendable physical labour which can often cause bodily harm, etc.). There is also discussion of homonationalism here which was a new concept to me, but a very important one when we think of things like “pinkwashing.” She situates the ‘It Gets Better’ movement as a prime example of homonationalism as it creates an investment in liberalism and the national-state as a prerequisite for ‘it getting better.’
The second half of the book focuses on Palestine and Israel’s occupation, human rights abuses, and its use of not only the ‘right to kill’ which it asserts for itself but also what Puar calls the ‘right to maim,’ which ties to her notion of debility. Israel has, in the past (which is an important note as some of Puar says has been changed by the brutality of the 2023-onward escalation of genocide) and presently shoots to disable Palestinians instead of killing them, claiming that it is a humanitarian action but in reality it is a purposeful strategy to disable the Palestinian population. Compounded with Israel’s routine destruction of Palestinian infrastructure (especially medical and transportation) this keeps the Palestinian people in a state of prolonged, slow death.
My final critique for the book is around Puar’s discussion on queer-positivity in Israel. She acknowledges pinkwashing and critiques the homonationalist discourse present there, but seems to also agree that Israel is quite a progressive and safe place for queer people. I would have loved to have seen her engage with the works of Sa’id Atshan, like ‘Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique.’
All in all, an excellent book that perhaps should have been two, and occasionally gets lost in the density of theoretical language.
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