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biopolitics, Closure for Our Journey with “The Right to Maim” // evaluation // next semester // semester closing event

Unfortunately I must cancel our final seminar session on 5.2.2024 due to a required scholalry staff meeting at the university. To make up for the missed discussion time, I invite you to participate in the following reflective activity:

Spend 30-60 minutes writing an internal dialogue between yourself at the beginning of this course and yourself now at the end. What key insights, questions, or critiques would you highlight from your intellectual journey with Puar’s text? How have your perspectives shifted or been complicated?

Then, post 1-2 questions or reflections from this dialogue on the course blog by [date]. These can be areas you still find confusing, moments that felt revealing or unsettling, ideas you want to explore further, or ways Puar’s concepts have informed how you look at the world.

Though we cannot meet in person, this will help synthesize our collective learning over the term. I will respond briefly to each post during the individual follow-up meetings on 12.2.2024. Please contact me if you have any questions.

I want to acknowledge that this has been an unusual semester with many disruptions and schedule changes due to circumstances beyond our control. From transit strikes to staff actions, we navigated various challenges together. While this impacted the flow of our discussions at times, I am grateful for your patience, empathy, and continued engagement with the course material and each other in the midst of uncertainty. I believe we found meaning in Puar’s text despite a sometimes “fuzzy” journey.

Please take a few minutes to provide your feedback on this course via https://lehrevaluation.fu-berlin.de/productive/en/sl/mUhkCt5e4502 . Your perspectives will help me improve courses in this module (Reading the Middle East) for future students.

I’m also excited to announce a new course for next semester – “Peering Through the Artificial Looking Glass: AI and the Middle East”:

Take a journey through the AI looking glass to examine how intelligent technologies are reshaping the Middle East. This seminar provides a critical perspective on AI, moving beyond the hype to probe its emerging influence across the region’s economies, societies, politics, and cultures.

Blending theory with regional insights, we will interpret AI’s impacts on issues from climate change and labor markets to surveillance and geopolitics. The course catalyzes debate on AI’s promises and perils, equipping students to assess its transformative potential with wisdom and nuance.

Lectures situate empirical studies within conceptual frameworks like Crawford’s “Atlas of AI.” Multidisciplinary readings and discussions consider how AI could either entrench or transform power structures. Student projects analyze AI case studies, from Emirati space programs to Saudi data initiatives.

This seminar charts AI’s expansion across a complex region. It eschews simplistic techno-utopian narratives, favoring nuanced and evidence-based perspectives. Join us as we peer critically yet optimistically through the artificial looking glass at the Middle East’s unfolding AI future.

I hope to see some of you there!

Thank you again for your thoughtful participation during an eventful semester – I have learned a great deal from you all. I wish you the very best going forward.

Best wishes, Victoria.

PS: Don’t forget that the semester closing event of the Department of History and Cultural Studies will take place on Wednesday, Feb 14, as of 6 PM in the lecture hall -1.2009 in the Holzlaube; the Iranian Studies institute has organized food and beverages.

biopolitics, session #14: postscript

Read Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim. Durham. Duke University Press. Postscript. 155-162.

Contribute to the blog by commenting on the readings and discussions. See ‘requirements’ for details.

biopolitics, essay on situated perspectives: rethinking assumed knowledge about biopolitics

Theoretical concepts like biopolitics and biopower have garnered extensive attention in fields ranging from philosophy to political science to legal studies. While Michel Foucault is credited with first articulating biopolitics in relation to modern states regulating their citizens’ biological conditions, subsequent thinkers have built on and critiqued his formulation through their own philosophical lenses. This proliferation of perspectives resists easy definition, instead revealing the situated, dynamic nature of knowledge claims.

Foucault introduced biopolitics as part of his broader examination of power, governance and discourse. He argued that authorities increasingly construe individuals’ bodies and aggregate populations as objects of control and optimization to align with state interests. Giorgio Agamben extends Foucault’s notion of biopower into more ominous dimensions, warning how it can deprive subjects of rights and reduce them to “bare life” at the mercy of sovereign decree. In contrast, Roberto Esposito adopts a more sanguine view of biopolitics’ potential for fostering communal welfare, care and solidarity when directed toward ethical ends.

Other prominent theorists like Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Thomas Lemke and Nicholas Rose have analyzed how biopolitical logics operate in contexts from globalized neoliberal networks to the proliferation of biological and genetic sciences. Across these diverse perspectives, a shared recognition exists of biopower’s growing reach into intimate, corporeal realms once considered outside the ambit of governance.

However, as feminist scholar Donna Haraway contends, assumed knowledge and perceived objectivity must be interrogated to reveal the situated, partial nature of knowledge claims. No single definition or deployment of biopolitics can be detached from the theorist’s particular identity, motivations, era and disciplinary paradigms that shape its articulation. We must ask questions that dig beneath surface meanings: Who is constructing this concept, for what aims and through what lens? What assumptions underpin their approach? Whose perspectives and experiences are marginalized? How could alternative standpoints reshape understanding?

Probing the contextual basis of biopolitical ideas in this manner enables more nuanced critique. It highlights the boundaries of specific knowledge frameworks, opening space for new configurations and multivocal insights. This dynamic, self-reflective orientation is especially crucial given biopolitics’ frequent invocation in debates around structures of power and inequality.

For instance, Jasbir Puar’s work The Right to Maim creatively adapts Foucault and Agamben’s theories to analyze biopolitical violence enacted upon Palestinian bodies. However, her usage does not neatly align with how those previous thinkers formulated biopower within their own projects. Puar expands Foucault’s institutional focus to encompass diffuse cultural forces and transmutes Agamben’s “bare life” into more incremental tactics of debilitation. These adaptations stem from her situated perspective as a feminist queer theorist concerned with subtle operations of control in Israel/Palestine. Her rendering of biopolitics cannot be divorced from this conditioned standpoint and associated political commitments.

Ultimately, Puar provides both an illuminating deployment of biopolitical theory and an object lesson in the situated relativity of such theoretical concepts. Rather than seek rigid definitions, we should embrace biopolitics and biopower as flexible frameworks ripe for constant reworking and contestation from diverse subject positions. This enables more pluralistic, ethical approaches to pressing issues of embodied governance and justice.

biopolitics, compensatory task for January 8

Unfortunately I will not be able to hold our discussion session today on biopolitics in Palestine as planned, due to being out indisposed. I apologize for the late notice and inconvenience.

Instead, please spend this time reading the assigned text below and completing the following task:

Carefully read through the excerpt provided and make notes on the key terms, concepts, and frameworks that the author refers to or utilizes. Consider what the author intends to convey through their use of each of these elements. How do these ideas and lenses shape the author’s analysis? Also re-read and think about how Jasbir Puar is utilizing terms such as biopolitics. 

Feel free to post your thoughts and interpretations of the reading in our course blog. This will allow us to begin a written dialogue even in my absence. We can pick up an in-depth discussion when we meet again on January 15th at 11am to discuss this task and chapter 4. Please note that this is a change from our original plan; I will update the course blog accordingly.

I hope this alternative assignment provides a productive way for you to engage with the materials for today. Please let me know if you have any other questions. I look forward to being back in class next week.

Wishing you all the best.


Necropolitical Ends: Biopower and Debility Across the Palestinian Closures Regime

Israel wields the full array of biopolitical stratagems in managing the boundaries of Palestinian civic life. The archipelago of strategic barriers, checkpoints, and permit regimes constitute what Foucault terms an enclosing ‘biopower’ – one calibrating movement of populations to carve the occupied landscape into discontiguous Palestinian zones. Life within these enclaves incubates contagious risks and debilities from cramped quarters lacking medical infrastructure or clean water. Israel’s periodic blockading of nutrition, sanitation equipment, and medicinal goods cannot but weaponize the biological vitality of Gazans contained inside a besieged strip. The microbes of infants wasting without milk come to manifest both the productivity and expendability of certain ‘Othered’ bare lives.

Psychologically, the internalization of occupation emerges clearly in UN interviews documenting cases of ‘checkpoint syndrome’. Mundane passages through militarized chokepoints instill trauma and anxiety in Palestinian citizens that biometric monitoring reduces to quantifiable behavioral data, further rationalizing these encounters through a biopolitical logic. According to prevailing neoliberal thought, such internalized responsibilization marks out modern governance. Yet indefinite delays also incubate cabals of young men, baking in their abjection until properly ‘feral’ – suggesting that disorder can likewise scaffold certain agendas. Fragmented roads and lands produce social isolation and communal violence that panoptic IDF overlooks exploit, particularly during flareups used to justify further territorial incursion.

Ultimately then, this regime’s biopolitical gambit for protected majoritarian life requires the calculated debilitation of minority existence across fractal borders. Clinical language of ‘maintaining necessary pressure’ reduces millions to statistics tweaked towards optimized outcomes behind securitized perimeter walls. Between dystopian literature tropes of citizenship and exception, the gradients of distorted life stretch from gestating bodies to burning effigies – each productive of their locality in the differential biopolitical field.

biopolitics, recaps of the first chapters of “The Right To Maim”

Recap #1

Preface: Hands Up Don’t Shoot!

  • Context: The writing was intensified by the events of Summer 2014 – the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the Israeli siege of Gaza.

Key Concepts:

  • The Right to Maim: A political theory that relates to the power dynamics in the control of populations, especially through targeted bodily assaults.
  • Settler Colonialism: Links between the situations in Ferguson and Gaza, highlighting the violence and control exerted over populations.
  • Intersectionality: The interconnectedness of various forms of oppression and resistance, emphasizing solidarity movements like Ferguson-to-Gaza.
  • Examples: Police brutality in the U.S. and Israeli military actions, both exemplifying the power to either kill or maintain debilitated populations under control​.

Recap #2

Introduction: The Cost of Getting Better

  • Focus: Analysis of media attention to gay youth suicides in 2010, highlighting how neoliberalism impacts bodily capacity and debility.

Key Concepts:

  • Bodily Capacity and Debility: The relationship between individual physical/mental abilities and the pressures of societal structures.
  • Neoliberalism and Slow Death: The idea that neoliberal policies contribute to ongoing structural inequality and suffering.
  • Examples: Discussion of the “It Gets Better” campaign, questioning the effectiveness of neoliberal approaches to addressing systemic issues of inequality and marginalization​.

Recap #3

Chapter 1: Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans Becoming Disabled

  • Focus: The chapter investigates how transgender bodies are shaped and influenced by political, legal, and social frameworks. It particularly focuses on the intersections of transgender issues with disability, exploring how both are subjected to biopolitical control and normativity within societal structures.

Key Concepts:

  • Trans(homo)nationalism: Refers to the recognition and assimilation of transgender identities into national discourses and legal frameworks, often reinforcing normative standards.
  • Biopolitical Control: The state and societal practices that regulate bodies, particularly focusing on transgender and disabled bodies, in terms of medical, legal, and social norms.
  • Transnormativity: The normalization of certain transgender identities, often aligning with white, able-bodied standards.
  • Examples:
    • American Disability Act (ADA): Discussed in relation to transgender rights, highlighting how the ADA’s approach to disability intersects with transgender issues.
    • Transgender Media Representation: Examines the media representation of transgender individuals and its impact on societal perceptions and legal rights.
    • Intersection with Race: Analysis of how transgender and disabled identities intersect with race, emphasizing the heightened vulnerability of trans individuals of color.
    • Medical and Legal Systems: The chapter scrutinizes how medical and legal systems both enable and constrain transgender identities, particularly in terms of access to healthcare and legal recognition.

Recap #4

Chapter 2: Crip Nationalism: From Narrative Prosthesis to Disaster Capitalism

  • Focus: The chapter explores the relationship between debilitation (a process of physical and social weakening) and disability within the contexts of labor, war, and state apparatus. It delves into how these forces shape perceptions and experiences of disability, particularly in capitalist societies.

Key Concepts:

  • Debilitation: The intentional weakening or damaging of bodies as a strategy of control by capitalist and state systems. It is a prerequisite for the production of disability.
  • Crip Nationalism: The idea that disabled bodies are co-opted by nationalist and capitalist agendas, often in the guise of empowerment or inclusion but ultimately serving state and capitalist interests.
  • Biopolitics of Debilitation: The state and capitalist practices that create and exploit debilitated bodies for economic and political gains.
  • Examples:
    • War and Labor: The text links the organization of labor and war as mechanisms of debilitation, with disabled bodies emerging as a byproduct of capitalist and state violence.
    • ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act): Puar critiques the ADA for not addressing the broader structures that produce disability, suggesting it inadvertently supports capitalist exploitation of disabled bodies.
    • Global South: The chapter also discusses how capitalist exploitation leads to disability in the Global South, highlighting the unequal global distribution of disability and its ties to imperialist practices.
    • Racialized Disability: The chapter touches on how race intersects with disability, noting how racialized bodies are often more susceptible to debilitation due to systemic inequalities.

Most important arguments made in chapter 3:

Most Important Arguments Made in the Chapter 3: Disabled Diaspora, Rehabilitating the State: The Queer Politics of Reproduction in Israel/Palestine

  1. Israel’s promotion of LGBT rights serves as a strategy to distract from its occupation of Palestine and to position itself as a modern, democratic state in contrast to the allegedly backward Palestinian society.
  2. The occupation itself is a form of biopolitical control, manipulating both Israeli and Palestinian bodies through various means including sexual regulation, reproductive policies, and the framing of disability.
  3. The chapter challenges the simplistic view of Israel as a singularly progressive state in terms of LGBT rights, arguing that these rights are used instrumentally in the context of broader socio-political goals.
  4. Puar argues that pinkwashing is a tool in the larger context of Israeli settler colonialism, where it serves as both a form of preemptive securitization against Palestinians and a mechanism for internal colonization
  5. The intersection of disability with settler colonialism is highlighted, showing how disability rights are entangled with nationalistic and colonialist agendas.
  6. Puar critiques the Israeli state’s pronatalist policies and their intersection with nationalist and racialized agendas, particularly in the context of reproductive technologies and practices.

biopolitics, essay on chapter 3: Disabled Diaspora, Rehabilitating State – The Queer Politics of Reproduction in Palestine/Israel

Let us traverse the tangled terrain of “pinkwashing” – an intriguing concept indeed! As Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism unveiled, narratives create mythic dichotomies between West and East, moderns and ancients. Here too, Israel deploys tropes of progress and tradition to veil complex truths. I am reminded of Plato’s allegory, where the unenlightened see mere shadows on the cave wall, oblivious to realities hidden behind them. Palestinians become those shadows – rendered backward, monolithic, their truths eclipsed by this political art of camouflage.

Yet such dichotomies rarely capture lived complexity, wouldn’t you agree? As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, borderlands foster “technicolored” mestizaje identities that defy rigid binaries. Might diverse LGBTQ perspectives lurk behind this pink façade? As we traverse beyond Puar’s framework, let us give voice to marginalized narratives on all sides. Can we envision a discourse revealing varied dreams, fears, loves and hopes within both communities? One acknowledging minorities within minorities? After all, to quote Audre Lorde, “revolution is not a one time event.”

Homonationalism: A Mirror of Contradictions

This “homonationalism” also intrigues – nationalism’s dance with gay rights makes queer bedfellows indeed! As Foucault exposed, sexuality and state power entwine like vines. Which identities flourish in this bramble, and which are choked? Puar reveals the double-edged sword, where heralded progress for some obscures others still struggling for liberation.

I am reminded of activist Audre Lorde’s words: “I am defined as other in every group I’m part of.” Like Russian nesting dolls, minorities hide within minorities in manifold ways. In gazing at Israel’s homonationalist facade, let us ask – what stories of identity and exclusion are not being told? What voices yearn to breathe free from this cultural glue bonding citizenship and sexuality?

Rather than framing queer Israeli identities as automatic accomplices to the state, might we make space for diverse experiences? Could Israel’s LGBTQ communities themselves have complex, conflicting views on immigration policies affecting Palestinian kin? As Walt Whitman wrote, we “contain multitudes” of connections and contradictions within the self. Before making judgments, we would do well to listen to marginalized voices from across this metaphorical border wall. Only then can equivalence and empathy guide us forward.

The Biopolitics of Debilitation and Rehabilitation

And when it comes to disability – the body politic bared! Palestinian figures cast as broken, dependent…fragile merchandise of occupation’s brutal machinery. An ironic contrast emerges – the “rehabilitated” state turns caretaker nursemaid for its wounded wards.

Yet I hesitate to embrace this metaphor wholeheartedly. Does it not risk flattening the manifold ways disability mingles in Palestinian experience? As Judith Butler wrote, which bodies “qualify” as “grievable” enough for notice? The discord between populations ought not blind us to discord within.

Might we move past imagery of nameless invalids aided by magnanimous Israel? Let us conceive instead of individuals, families and communities adapting creatively to impairment’s challenges. Of neighborhoods and nations re-envisioning access, equity and empowerment even amidst hardship. Of pride and solidarity thriving alongside struggle. For as disability activist Eli Clare wrote, “complex embodiment ought not be reduced to simple spectacle.” In gazing past façades, we must make space for nuance – honor the once invisible.

The Fertility Front: Biopolitics of Population Poetics

Now to the fertile terrain of population policies – the bedroom intimacies colliding with statecraft! Israel’s pronatalist incentives expose motives consonant with occupying regimes through history…the demographic battleground where bodies become soldiers.

Yet, I am reminded of Arundhati Roy’s words: “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” If we peer past policy, might we glimpse the secret poetry of individual choice when reproductive futures hang in balance? What inner songs sound out when families weigh scientific possibilities against cherished beliefs? When genetic “defects” are defined, by whom – and by whose authority sentenced or spared?

This discourse would thrive, I believe, from embracing reproductive decisions not just as byproducts of state power but as complex personal turning points – crossroads of compromise between conscience and external constraints. Policy is but one vector; lived realities far messier and more multidimensional. Perhaps in listening to marginalized experiences around fertility, abortion and surrogacy, we may better stand in solidarity.

Surrogacy and LGBTQ Rights: Weaving Coatlicue’s Serpentine Identity

Now, surrogacy unfurls as a colorful fringe in this tapestry, interweaving queer family histories with state demographic designs. As previously discussed, the acceptance of formerly marginalized groups often correlates with positions of influence.

Yet even ingestion into the body politic rarely comes without complexity, as Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness knows. We contain diversity akin to ancient goddess Coatlicue’s serpentine locks – not easily subsumed or homogenized! I am reminded too of James Baldwin’s words: “I love America more than any other country in the world.” Yet also that “I refuse to accept…the things that white Americans have said they love.” Critical patriotism…loyalty laced with dissent.

In this spirit, could we move past framing Israeli LGBTQ citizens as simplistic pawns or proxies? Might some champion surrogacy rights precisely to resource those otherwise outcast? Could others within the community adopt critical stances – even opposing state policies seen as oppressing Palestinian kin, while benefiting from security and belonging themselves? Perhaps in exploring complexity within LGBTQ experience, new solidarities may emerge on all sides.

Retexturing the Narrative

Thus concludes our journey beyond borders – not into some utopian fantasy, but rather a landscape brimming with complications and contradictions everywhere transformed into opportunity! For in gazing past façades, essentialisms dissolve to reveal intricate humanity in all its forms.

Where to now? Perhaps a new discourse awaits – one truly incorporating voices once marginalized, addressing complex audiences, empowering testimony from multitudes. A platform nurturing empathy for struggles in all camps, binding up wounds from an insufficiently nuanced past.

As we have seen, simple binaries serve poorly to depict profound experience. Rather, reality resembles Gloria Anzaldúa’s coatlicue state – that fertile creative matrix, simultaneously constructive and destructive, harboring tremendous generative potential born of turbulence. Shall we midwife such creation together?

For beyond deconstructing oppression lies the creative burden – transmuting critique into care, spinning inclusion from threads of dissent, till a vibrant mosaic of liberation is all that remains. Who will take up such delicate work with me? Who will stand to retexture these tangled narratives into new patterns – both preserving uniqueness, yet interwoven and resilient enough for ardors ahead? Our work has just begun.