Duke University Press The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)

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. 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." Author: Anna Hamilton Source: Global Comment " 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." Author: Sarah Rogers Source: 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." Author: Fred Moten Source: 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." Author: J. Kehaulani Kauanui Source: 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." Author: Eden Kinkaid Source: Gender, Place & Culture "Puar provides a scathing and politically important critique. . . . A compelling and important analysis." Author: Liat Ben-Moshe Source: 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." Author: Joshua Falek Source: Cultural Studies Review “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.” Author: Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of Source: Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism From the Author Jasbir K. Puar is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, also published by Duke University Press. About the Author Jasbir K. Puar is Professor of