Lex's Queer of Color Methodologies Post

Puar’s “queerness as assemblage” provides a methodological approach that combines epistemology with ontology. By discussing how “bodies, such as the turbaned Sikh terrorist, interpenetrate, swirl together and transmit affects to each other” (2005, 122), Puar foregrounds several qualities of queerness (dissent, resistance and alternative) while acknowledging the continued presence of dominant structures within assemblages. 

I found Puar’s piece to be helpful in thinking how to approach my own work. By investigating parents’ and physicians’ experiences with a new form of prenatal technology, I hope to explore how the cultural meanings of “disability” (or, we could use Puar’s preferred term, debility) are expressed and produced through clinical interactions about prenatal testing. One sticking point for me is how to contextualize my work within “disability” when most of the research participants/informants will be nondisabled. Puar’s work gives me a way to talk about this, both by utilizing the theoretical concept of an assemblage, but also by talking about the ways in which bodies and epistemological positions impact one another.

If I take the sets of cultural meanings of disability as its own queer assemblage(s), by thinking through the points at which it departs from normativity and is complicit with it, this methodology will help me in making sense of the relationships and breaks in the data I collect. Even though my work will not explicitly direct “disabled embodiment” (or non-normative bodies) it will become important, I think, for me to account for the ways in which the embodied and epistemological temporality and expectations of pregnancy will potentially play into the decisions about whether to have the testing done, and whether to terminate on the basis of disability or not.

Puar goes on to describe the merits of assemblage over intersectionality, and in many ways, Puar’s emphasis on emotions, information, tactility and feeling very much line up with the kinds of data I anticipate collecting. Puar’s work here gives me a framework for how I might account for and contend with this kind of data, rather than edging it out of a more formulaic grid. Additionally, the assemblage’s “espousal of what cannot be known, seen or heard, or has yet to be” (Puar, 2005, 128) is particularly salient for my project, in that disability, in this particular context, is often that which remains to come, and represents both a futurity and, very often, a futility.

At the same time, examining disability as a queer assemblage also allows me to interrogate where there is complicity with state power, including white supremacist heteronormativity. Is it a surprise that I will have to seek out gay and lesbian couples (arguably a good example of queer liberalism!) to interview? How will I contend with the presence of compulsory normativity within these encounters? Puar helps me begin to think through these dynamics, not as demographic components but as affective components.

Something I'd like to discuss in class is the politics of queer politics. All of the theorists this week point to queer studies as a metaphor without a fixed referent, demonstrating its potential usefulness beyond and disruptive of the "queer/not-queer binary," as Puar (2005) suggests. At the same time, queer liberalism demonstrates the fulfilled potential for co-option of queer politics by the state. Are there limits to the uses of queer studies methodologies? How might we be aware of possible pitfalls?