'Homonationalism, Militarism, and the Waning of LGBTQ Rights'

The Laura C. Harris Series welcomes Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University Jasbir Puar presenting a lecture, “Homonationalism, Militarism, and the Waning of LGBTQ Rights.”

What is homonationalism in the context of the global proliferation of authoritarian regimes, right wing and illiberal governments, and in the face of the decline of U.S. empire? Authoritarian governments in Brazil, India, Turkey, Israel, Philippines, and Hungary are not only antithetical to but hostile towards queer, transgender, and women’s rights. In the U.S., there are more than 120 anti-trans bills pending vote in numerous state legislatures. Anti-feminist movements against gender ideology—”anti-gender movements” that have emerged globally, transnationally—seek to pathologize and criminalize gender and sexual fluidity. Despite these anti-gender conservative political agendas within and across nation-states, major military organizations and global financial governance structures persist with proclamations of LGBTQ inclusion. In this talk, Dr. Puar explores a crucial shift from the incorporation of mostly white, cisgender, elite gays and lesbians into the folds of national recognition to the present moment of all-out war on LGBTQ+ populations in places otherwise projected as “gay-friendly.”

Puar has been a faculty member at Rutgers University since 2000. Her most recent book is “The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability” (2017) published with Duke University Press in the series ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise that she co-edits with Mel Chen.  Puar is the author of award-winning “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times” (2007), which has been translated into Spanish and French and re-issued in an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (December 2017). Currently professor Puar is completing her third book, a collection of essays on duration, pace, mobility, and acceleration in Palestine titled “Slow Life: Settler Colonialism in Five Parts.”

Puar’s major awards include a 2018 Fellowship from the Palestinian American Research Council and the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University. She received the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award for her years of scholar-activist work. In 2017, Puar’s article “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled” (Social Text #124) was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus’s Crompton-Noll Prize for Best LGBTQ Studies Article.

Puar has held numerous Distinguished Lectureships and delivered international keynote addresses at the Troubling Seasons of Hate Conference at the University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa, December 2017); European Geographies of Sexualities Conference (Barcelona, Sept 2017); Conflicted Bodies (Goldsmiths, London, Sept 2017); Defazendo Genero (Campina Grande, Brazil, October 2017); among others.  

All audience members are required to wear masks.