Description
Book SynopsisJasbir 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.
Trade Review"Puar’s book-length intervention in Disability/Queer Studies could not have come at a better time, and is a great example of scholarship that poses difficult, necessary questions for the future of Disability Studies." -- Anna Hamilton * Global Comment *
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The Right to Maim proves a passionate and thought-provoking critique of the ways in which the state inscribes its power and social control upon the body. . . . An extraordinarily courageous and timely contribution to a radical struggle for global justice." -- Sarah Rogers * Al Jadid *
"Jasbir Puar’s work in
The Right to Maim is crucial to understanding not only that the nature of settler colonialism is genocidal but also how that genocidal nature operates." -- Fred Moten * Social Text *
"Building on the analytics she advanced in
Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability." -- J. Kehaulani Kauanui * Social Text *
"Draws fascinating empirical and theoretical connections. . . .
The Right to Maim has much to contribute to major debates occurring within and across disability studies, geographies of sexuality, feminist theory, and critical race studies. Puar charts new territory for feminist geographies." -- Eden Kinkaid * Gender, Place & Culture *
"Puar provides a scathing and politically important critique. . . . A compelling and important analysis." -- Liat Ben-Moshe * Women's Studies Quarterly *
"Challenges the reader with a rigorous analysis. . . . A very engaging text that insists on a shared commitment for justice in Palestine and a responsibility within disability studies to consider far beyond the exceptional." -- Joshua Falek * Cultural Studies *
"Jasbir Puar’s work, bringing together disability studies, queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics and settler colonial studies . . . reveals the centrality of the phenomena of debility, disability and capacity for understanding contemporary politics there. . . .
The Right to Maim is a great gift to future scholars who should find in the book rich inspiration for further work. A fascinating intellectual agenda has been demarcated, and a prescient window into the politics of the colonisation of Palestine has been opened here." -- James Eastwood * Radical Philosophy *
"Hugely rewarding. . . . An important book for scholars and students rethinking disability and capacity, but also for those studying Israel’s racialized permanent war against the Palestinians." -- Ronit Lentin * International Journal of Middle East Studies *
"Social theorists, social justice organizers, and indeed all anthropologists, would do well to read this book. T
he Right to Maim should also be read in social science courses that consider identity politics in America. As a kind of social experiment, it would be entertaining for someone as myopically unaware of the social inequality Puar is discussing, and the ways in which identity is formed outside of White Patriarchal Male Perspectives—like Jordan Peterson—to read this book." -- Dina Omar * Somatosphere *
"[This] book is groundbreaking— nay, field-cracking— and will likely be read, reviewed, and engaged with vigor in the multifarious subfields for whom it bears implications." -- Allison L. Rowland * Journal of Medical Humanities *
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The Right to Maim is a groundbreaking work. . . . I wish this book was longer. By the end of the text I was craving more, which is the highest praise I can think to give to a book. While some of the more theory-laden moments in the book threaten to distract from the content, especially when Deleuzian concepts are invoked, it never becomes overwhelming and the text itself remains a brief but brilliant work that I recommend highly." -- Jack Leff * Somatechnics *
Table of ContentsPreface: 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
