According to the Algemeiner (yes, a Jewish site), a book by Jasbir Puar, Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, has won one of the two 2018 Alison Piepmeier Book Prizes awarded by the National Womens Studes Association (NWSA).  According to the Association, the prize is “for a groundbreaking monograph in women, gender, and sexuality studies that makes significant contributions to feminist disability studies scholarship.”

Puar’s book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, appears to be a postmodern work, with the main thesis, according to the Algemeiner article (click on link below) being that Israel maims rather than kills Palestinians as a way to keep them under control (see also Amazon summary below):

Published in November 2017 by Duke University Press — which has come under scrutiny for its editorial advisors’ ties to the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel — the book posits that the “Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have shown a demonstrable pattern over decades of sparing life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill.”

Yet it contends that this “purportedly humanitarian practice of sparing death by shooting to maim” is not rooted in a desire to minimize fatalities, but rather seeks to maintain “Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive, in order to control them.”

The NWSA award’s review committee called The Right to Maim a “major milestone book,” which argues “that debilitation and the state production of disability are biopolitical projects both useful and productive for states under Neoliberal capitalism.”

This is the Amazon summary of the book (click on cover photo below to go there), so the Algemeiner apparently isn’t exaggerating the book’s thesis (my emphasis below):

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. [JAC: reread that last sentence.]

I won’t go into the other article describing the ties of the Duke University Press to the BDS movement, but you might have a look at the link, because the claims, if true, are disturbing. It’s all part of academia’s continual demonization of Israel, which in this case seems to be based on deliberate distortion and lying, in contrast to the academically-approved extolling the Palestinian government, one of the most repressive and mendacious regimes around (propagandizing kids with anti-Semitic messages, using human shields, and so on). [NOTE: I was referring here to the government, not the people themselves. Though a lot of Palestinians behave reprehensibly under the sway of religiously-born hatred, I did not mean to imply that all or most of them do.]

I’ve requested the book on interlibrary loan so I can have a look at it it, but apparently it’s all online, as the Algemeiner piece gives this link.  Given the last sentence of the H-Disability review below, I don’t think I’ll enjoy the book.

This is from a review in H-Disability by M. Lynn Rose (my emphasis):

Chapter 3, “Disabled Diaspora, Rehabilitating State: The Queer Politics of Reproduction in Palestine/Israel” takes up “pinkwashing,” which is, Puar claims, Israel’s use of gay rights propaganda to detract attention from its occupation of Palestine. The focus on inclusivity, she asserts, is limited to cisgender and gender conformity, and stands beside gender segregation in Orthodox Jewish communities. In establishing Israel as a rehabilitative act (rehabilitating the debilitations of statelessness and genocide), the model Jewish body was decidedly nondisabled, masculine, and heterosexual. Rehabilitation banished the “Oriental” in the European Jew, recreated Europe in Palestine, and conceptually separated the Jew from the Arab. The fear of maiming then becomes “a spectacular imperial tool, projecting the fear of maiming by Palestinians onto Palestinians through the debilitating effects of the occupation; this mechanism is the displacement necessary to secure able-bodied citizenry of Israel” (p. 107).

“Will Not Let Die: Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine,” chapter 4, focuses on the population targeted for injury, moving on from the focus in previous chapters on the population that is available for injury. Israel maintains biopolitical control through maiming, not killing; maiming, Puar claims, poses as a humanitarian manifestation of a “let live” mentality, but is actually a manifestation of the mentality of “will not let die” (p. 139). The section “No Future” takes up the fate of Palestinian children, targeted for stunting, PTSD, gunshot wounds, and so on. Puar calls her analysis an “anti-Zionist hermeneutic” (p. 153). “The ultimate purpose of this analysis,” she writes, coming full circle from her opening statement, “is to labor in the service of a Free Palestine” (p. 154).

The postscript, “Treatment without Checkpoints,” looks at debility within disability among the disability service providers at the checkpoints in Palestine, then extends the concept to other populations. Debilitated disability as a result of collective punishment demands a complicated activism. The desire for mobility extends beyond the individual body to the collective displaced population. Progress in achieving a positive disability identity, Puar concludes, will not come about until the end of Palestinian occupation.

The Right to Maim is not written for a general audience. It is a theoretical investigation into the meanings of disability, debility, capacity, queerness, and race in global biopolitical contexts. As such, it is not for everyone. Readers who have never worked their way through Mitchell and Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis, for example, will find this work slow going. I do not see its place in any undergraduate class, though it could be useful in theory-based graduate seminars. Readers who are fluent in theoretical scholarship, especially in disability theory, will find this to be a fulfilling read.

The “pinkwashing” canard, in which gay rights in Israel were supposedly allowed as a distraction from the country’s nefarious colonizing desires, is simply stupid. If the Orthodox Jews demonize gays, then that’s their right, but they aren’t allowed to violate the law. But beside that stands the arrant fact that Palestine, along with many other Muslim lands in the Middle East has no gay rights at all! Being gay in Palestine will put you perilously close to execution, as it will in Iran, Pakistan, and other places. It’s ridiculously but conventionally postmodern to raise the cry of pinkwashing—an accusation which there’s no evidence save anti-Semitism—while ignoring the blatant homophobia (indeed, making gay acts capital crimes) of Muslim countries. Puar’s emphasis on pinkwashing discredits her as an objective scholar. But of course she’s not objective, as you can see in the second paragraph of the H-Disability review.

Puar’s claim that Israel aims to maim the Palestinians as punishment and control, a ridiculous claim on the face of it, is clearly in the service of her agenda: “to labor in the service of a Free Palestine.” Can anyway take her lucubrations seriously when she so openly states her aim? Regardless, however, I’ll look very carefully for evidence that Israeli government policy is to maim Palestinians as a tool to subjugate them. Until now I always thought that BDS and anti-Zionist claim was that Israel simply wanted to kill noncombatant Palestinians (something I see no evidence for, either), but now it’s devolved to maiming them. And if Israel shoots to maim people rather than kill them if those people are attacking Israeli soliders or civilians, I’d find that admirable rather than detestable. Isn’t it better to shoot someone in the legs than to kill them? If you wanted to control a populace, wouldn’t it be better to kill them rather than maim them? Isn’t death a better deterrent than maiming?

But of course no matter what Israel does to defend itself, it’s going to be criticized. I’m simply waiting for people like Puar to call out the Palestinians for firing rockets at civilian populations, using small children to build tunnels for terrorism, using human shields, and demonizing homosexuals (after all, Puar is involved in queer studies.)

We’ll wait a long time for that, as Puar has not just a beam in her eye, but a whole truckload of them. And her goal, as she stated, is to “labor in the service of a free Palestine”, which may well mean the elimination of Israel as well.

And shame on Duke University Press, Rutgers, and the NWSA for giving awards for and taking so seriously the brand of ideologically-motivated “scholarship” practiced by people like Puar. (I will of course revise my opinion if I find any evidence for her thesis.) In the meantime, this looks like just another example of academia rewarding anti-Semitism. I suppose academic discourse and publishing has always been arcane and ideological, but never in my lifetime have I seen it be so tendentious—at least in the humanities.

If you want to listen to Puar yourself, here’s nearly two hours of her 2013 keynote address from CLAGS’ (The Center for LGBTQ Studies) conference on Homonationalism and Pinkwashing at The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York City. Her talk begins at 02:45.