Following all too closely on the heels of my last post, a new book from Jasbir Puar, out from Duke University Press in November: The Right to Maim: debility, capacity, disability:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: The Cost of Getting Better
1. Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled
2. Crip Nationalism: From Narrative Prosthesis to Disaster Capitalism
3. Disabled Diaspora, Rehabilitating State: The Queer Politics of Reproduction in Palestine/Israel
4. “Will Not Let Die”: Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine  1
Postscript: Treatment without Checkpoints

Here are three pre-publication reviews, first from Elizabeth Povinelli:

In signature style, Jasbir K. Puar takes readers across multiple social and textual terrains in order to demonstrate the paradoxical embrace of the politics of disability in liberal biopolitics. Puar argues that even as liberalism expands its care for the disabled, it increasingly debilitates workers, subalterns, and others who find themselves at the wrong end of neoliberalism. Rather than simply celebrating the progressive politics of disability, trans identity, and gay youth health movements, The Right to Maim shows how each is a complex interchange of the volatile politics of precarity in contemporary biopower.

Paul Amar:

Jasbir K. Puar’s must-read book The Right to Maim revolutionizes the study of twenty-first-century war and biomedicine, offering a searingly impressive reconceptualization of disability, trans, and queer politics. Bringing together Middle East Studies and American Studies, global political economy and gendered conflict studies, this book’s exciting power is its revelation of the incipient hegemony of maiming regimes. Puar’s shattering conclusions draw upon rigorous and systematic empirical analysis, ultimately offering an enthralling vision for how to disarticulate disability politics from this maiming regime’s dark power.

And Judith Butler:

Jasbir K. Puar’s latest book offers us a new vocabulary for understanding disability, debility, and capacity, three terms that anchor a sharp and provocative analysis of biopolitics of neoliberalism, police power, and militarization. Gaining recognition for disability within terms that instrumentalize and efface its meanings carries a great risk. So too does opting out of discourse altogether. Puar references a wide range of scholarly and activist resources to show how maiming becomes a deliberate goal in the continuing war on Palestine, and how the powers of whiteness deflect from the demographics of disability and ability. Lastly, her deft understanding of how the attribution of ‘capacity’ can work for and against people in precarious positions will prove crucial for a wiser and more radical struggle for justice.

If you can’t wait until November, you can get a taste of Jasbir’s arguments in her essay for borderlands 14 (1) (2015) ‘The ‘Right’ to Maim: Disablement and Inhumanist Biopolitics in Palestine‘ available as an open access pdf here.  I’ve been attending closely to Jasbir’s vital arguments as I re-think the sketches I made in Meatspace? and The prosthetics of Military Violence: more soon.