In their text, "Queer Times, Queer Assemblages", Jasbir K. Puar discusses various terrorist corporealities through the lens of queerness; how the construction of these corporealities as queer positions them then as terrorist. In naming the terrorist, a picture of a backward, pathological, and perverse and emasculated, that have "femininity as their reference point of malfunction...Playing on this difference between the subject being queered versus queerness already being existing within the subject...allows for both the temporality of being and the temporality of always becoming" (Puar, 127). Puar goes on to discuss the terrorist corporeality in terms of a suicide bomber, in that "as one's body dies, one's body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide bomber, not before" (129). In this sense, the time-space, or temporality of the identity of a suicide bomber is queered because it does not follow normative sequence of self-proclamation/action = identity. The suicide bomber while alive is always becoming a terrorist, then after death is named a suicide bomber.
Puar takes issue with the feminist notion if intersectionality, stating that intersectional analysis of identity demands the knowing, naming, and stabilizing identities, versus an assemblage, which "is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency" (128).
I would like to critique these sentiments, in that yes, an intersectional analysis does operate on fixed categories, but from my understanding the aim of an intersectional analysis is to understand the historical realities of those terms which dictate how one's identity is read and performed through normative lenses. Intersectionality does not seek to stabilize identity categories, it seeks to understand those spaces where multiple identities merge or are at a crossroads within one persyn's identity. In those spaces of intersection is where an intersectional analysis attempts to queer identity categories as exclusive or separable, and take up the abjected space between the historical fixed categories of a persyn's identity as the place where lived experience happens. Gloria Anzaldúa and many other feminist writers take up this argument, saying for example, I may be read and categorized as these certain identity categories, but I always exist as all of them together, all of the time.
I feel that Puar's reading of assemblage to me seems a bit utopic, in the sense that assemblage seeks to account for "emotions, energies, affectivities, textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities" (128). It may be true that assemblage can account for temporal and spatial reorderings of a body in a context like a suicide bomber or terrorist, but it is privileged to disregard the historical realities of certain identity categories that construct and name (power from above) certain identities, that thus underscores lives realities.
Puar, Jasbir K. "Queer Times, Queer Assemblages." In Social Text (2005), 23:3-4
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