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biopolitics, session #4: chapter 1: Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled

Read Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim. Durham. Duke University Press. Chapter 1 “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled”. 33–62.

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OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (24. Oktober 2023). biopolitics, session #4: chapter 1: Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 9. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13jnu


6 Antworten auf „biopolitics, session #4: chapter 1: Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled“

  1. Throughout Chapter 1, I find the turning point between being a trans person and the debility’s issue and disability very suggestive, bringing together racial, social or even political factors that can intervene in the identity of oneself and even of a society. It is here that the emphasis is placed on and the normally preconceived idea is challenged; being trans is not only limited to changing physically, actually entails more than that. Everything that is seen and valued as a disability, a debility, whether physical or otherwise, for me is linked to fear. After all fear can be used as a tool or weapon, for obvious political and other purposes. For instance, speaks volumes about the certain governments of countries in the Middle East, where sex reassignment surgery is seen as the only and viable way out for people who are attracted to others of the same sex.

    This is where I wanted to come and highlight certain articles, which I find quite interesting and related to this topic because of the perspective with which they have been treated.

    -Zengin, A. (2014). Sex for Law, Sex for Psychiatry: Pre-Sex Reassignment Surgical Psychotherapy in Turkey. Anthropologica, 56(1), 55–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24469641

    -Najmabadi, A. (2011). Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith: Transgender/Sexuality in Contemporary Iran. Social Research, 78(2), 533–556. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23347189

    -Jafari, F. (2014). Transsexuality under Surveillance in Iran: Clerical Control of Khomeini’s Fatwas. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 10(2), 31–51. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmiddeastwomstud.10.2.31

  2. I think there is a very important point that Puar draws which is piecing into trans. It carries an importance to question the concept of Becoming trans, just like the dilemma of debility and disability. I agree with the point that transness is an individual experience and that it actually breaks all cissexist norms, rather than a stage of adaptation to cis sexism. In this respect, I find Puar’s discussion here valuable. It is fluctuation rather than a concrete choice or assignment (?). Moreover, transsexuality has similarities with disability in this realm because both of these states are categorised by society based on how visible they are on someone’s body. It is parallel to what we discussed about disability. One’s disability is often visualised by the society and social definition of disability is often based on a physical element as an example using a picture of a wheelchair while referring disabled population. Similarly, trans identity is evaluated in an immanent way with the change of the body. I do not suggest that trans identity do/should not cover changes of the body however it is not limited to that. I also agree with Puar in her intersectionality discussions and it has reminded me the article “Trans/Portraits”. Trans/Portraits also shows insights about how discrimination produce discourse that targets the one’s identities as whole: gender, race, ability. Thus, the opposed political discourse should be intersectional in advance to embrace oppressed identities as a whole.

  3. The life’s Circumstances of palestinian refugees in the refugee camp of Jabalia in Gaza strip before and after the Genocide.
    Targeted readers: western world and Americans.

  4. In the first chapter, Puar talks about how some groups of people intentionally experience harm or become disabled due to violence, especially in areas affected by conflict or oppressive regimes. She argues that governments and global structures may actually want to keep some level of disability or weakness among these groups.

    She introduces the idea of “inhumanist biopolitics,” which is a way that power is used to control and dominate by causing disability and debility in certain populations.

  5. Puar describes and analyzes how being trans and being handicapped can be seen as a presupposed categorization that is static and restrictive. Bodies are being “pieced”, that is (conceptually) broken into parts, in order to be “fixed” and/or categorized. The headline of this chapter is referring to just that. The disabled body is supposed to fit in the binary of being either disabled or fully abled, whereas the trans body transforms into the gender normative binary of male and female. Furthermore discriminatory hierarchies of race and gender can be found. Puar names the male trans body and the physically impaired disabled body as pivot points.

    Both disabled and trans bodies are oftentimes depending on medical or social support from institutions that not only don’t understand the multiplicity of bodies but also control these bodies within a dominating framework of gender normativity, racial biases and ableist assumptions.

    Puar proclaims that rather processuality and multiplicity should be taken into account.
    Therefore, Puar proposes a disciplinary and activist linkage of trans and disability discourses that takes into account legal provisions as well as it de- /reconstructs existing normative ideas.

    Reading this chapter I couldn’t help but think of the article our peer Juan has shared in the writing seminar about transsexuality in contemporary Iran. In a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, transsexuality is a “condition” that can be cured. By transitioning the body therefore fits into a binary concept of sexuality.

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