Inhumanist Biopolitics: Prehensive Gendering in Occupation

Inhumanist Biopolitics: Prehensive Gendering in Occupation

Jasbir K. Puar (Women’s & Gender Studies, Rutgers University)
Wednesday, October 28, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

This lecture theorizes oscillating relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive, and increasingly prehensive forms of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine. Calculation, computing, informational technologies, surveillance, and militarization are all facets of prehensive control. Further, the saturation of spatial and temporal stratum in Palestine demonstrates the use of technologies of measure to manufacture a “remote control” occupation, one that produces a different version of Israeli “home invasions” through the maiming and stunting of population. If Gaza, for example, is indeed the world’s largest “open air prison” and an experimental lab for Israeli military apparatuses, infrastructural chaos, and metric manipulation, what kinds of fantasies (about power, about bodies, about resistance, about politics) are driving this project?

Jasbir K. Puar is the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007), which won the 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

Sponsored by the Hull Chair of Women’s Studies, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Academic Services, the Center for Black Studies Research, the Center for Middle East Studies, the Dept. of Feminist Studies, the Dept. of English, the Dept. of History, the Dept. of Sociology, the Dept. of Chicana/o Studies, the Dept. of Black Studies, the Dept. of Global Studies, the MultiCultural Center, Women, Gender, and Sexual Equity Center, and the IHC’s New Sexualities Research Focus Group.