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.

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• Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
• The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)
• Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)
• In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)
• Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture)
• Living a Feminist Life
• Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance
• Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure