Discussion

This lecture examines the potential for affective connectivities and conviviality to rethink neoliberal stratification. Noting that discourses surrounding queer suicide reproduce problematic assumptions not only about race, class, and gender, but also bodily health, debility, and capacity, Jasbir Puar will be linking Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project and related discussions about the recent spate of queer suicides to broader social justice issues about disability as well as theoretical concerns in animal studies and post-humanist studies.Jasbir Puar is professor and core faculty member in the department of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, globalization; postcolonial and diaspora studies; South Asian cultural studies; and theories of assemblage and affect. She 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. Professor Puar has also authored numerous articles that appear in Gender, Place, and Culture; Social Text; Radical History Review; Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her edited volumes include a special issue of GLQ entitled “Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization” and she co-edited a volume of Society and Space entitled “Sexuality and Space”.

 She is currently working on a new book project focused on queer disability studies and theories of affect and assemblage.