The Right to Maim

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We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network, and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. - Hi. - Siri. - Welcome to High Theory. - In this podcast, we get high on the substance of theory. I'm Kim Adams. - And I'm Sharunik Boussu. - We are two tired academics trying to save critique from itself. - Hello, and welcome to today's episode, which is titled "The Right to Mame," and I am here today with Basam Siddiqui. Basam, would you mind introducing yourself? - Sure. Thank you for having me. - Thank you for coming. - Yeah, so my name is Basam. I am a fourth year PhD candidate at the University of Michigan in English. And broadly, I study the medical humanities, disability studies, and post-colonial studies. And today, I will be talking about Jasbir K. Puar's book, "The Right to Mame." - What the heck is "The Right to Mame?" - Let me just preface the context of the term and where it comes from. So Jasbir Puar, who's very much known for her book, "Terrace Assemblages" and the term "Homo Nationalism." So in 2017, she came out with this book called "The Right to Mame," "Debility, Capacity, and Disability." And basically what she's trying to do is stage a very important intervention into disability studies, right? And the book has four chapters, but the one that I'm most interested in is the last one in which she theorizes the right to Mame, right? And she's theorizing that term or that phrase within the context of the Palestinian situation, right? To the occupation of Palestine. And so, and we all know this like, you know, even from the Kashmiri context, for instance, right? So in Palestine, for instance, the Israeli army, they shoot to Mame Palestinian protesters, right? So they wouldn't actually, you know, shoot to kill. They would like use pellet guns to sort of injure them and their knees or in their arms, et cetera, right? To render them disabled. She doesn't discuss the Kashmiri context as much and that's actually taken up by Anjali Reza Kolb in her new book, "Epidemic Empire," which is also a really interesting text. In this one, Puar is basically trying to theorize what is happening here in this sort of disproportionate response to Palestinian protesters within Foucault's model of biopolitics. What she says is, so, you know, we know that Foucault in his model of sovereign power, there is this axis, right? So for Foucault in sovereign power, the sovereign has the power to make a person die or let the person live, right? So make die, let live. And then in biopower, these axes are switched, right? So let live becomes let die and make die becomes make live, right? Because for Foucault in biopower, the state and non-state organizations, what they do is they want to infuse life through and through the populace. What they're doing instead of making die, like the sovereign king, for instance, unlike the sovereign king, they make live. And so within these four axes, let live, let die, make die, make live, Jasper Puar introduces will not let die. That is the right to main. The injuries, right? And the debilitation of the Palestinian protesters, right? The Israeli state isn't killing them, right? It's not letting them die. And that's basically what for Puar is the right to main. Her concept of debility, right? And this is another really interesting thing that she does, so what she's saying is that, we have this sort of very hackneyed way of making a binary between the non-disabled and the disabled, right? And she says that we all exist on a continuum of ability to capacity, right? So in Palestine, for instance, like the memeing of Palestinians, that's a very spectacular kind of violence, right? So that's something that we immediately recognize as disabling, but she then telescopes from that and says, well, there are these other every day things, right? That can render as debilitated, but which actually disability scholars have not considered as disabilities, right? And she says that those are debilities, right? So she says that racism is a debility because that affects people's lives every day. Non-hetronormative sexual orientation is a debility because it exposes you to certain kinds of violence. And then she looks at it within the scope of global capitalism, right? The workers, I mean, so many workers get injured on the job every day, right? And so she's basically saying that under late capitalism, debility is kind of the norm. And there are certain bodies which are there to be maimed, already, they're already marked to be maimed by the capitalist enterprise. - You have expanded the scope of the right to maim and especially the concept of debility. So let me ask my next question, is just how do we use the right to maim? And I guess like a related question of how do we use the concept of debility? - The right to maim is useful in the sense that, and debility too, and I think that they're very much related, right? It can be used, I think. So I think the most powerful use of this in Boir's book at least is to de-center what a lot of scholars have called white disability studies. Even though 80% of the world's disabled population lives in the global South, a lot of the theorization of disability comes from the global North, so from Europe and America. And so there's this kind of lack of intersectional analysis of how disability is part and parcel of race and gender. So I think debility, what it does is, it brings into the purview of disability studies, debilities that haven't been necessarily understood or studied within disability studies. And then we could include even caste if you're looking at a South Asian context, right? So caste becomes a debility. Disability scholars from India, for instance, Anita Guy, and a lot of these other scholars have been doing that work too. So I think that it's most useful as a critique of hegemonic disability studies. - It's definitely important to note that we are recording this episode in the wake of heightened anti-Asian violence. - Absolutely. In the US, and especially with the horrific incident that happened in Atlanta, I'm kind of wondering how who are things of debility or the concept of debility and the concept of minority together, let's say. 'Cause you talked about race and sexual orientation as things which makes you more vulnerable to violence or you're vulnerable to special kinds of violence. - Yeah, that's a very good question. Yeah, I think like when you sort of import the right to meme into the United States, right? So when you're going from the Palestinian context to here, it's definitely then the sort of the resonances between debility and minority are there, right? Even though, again, we would have to nuance that because I feel like the right to meme is it's such a sort of a specific kind of biopolitical strategy that because in the United States, minorities are being killed, right? So we know this with the murder of George Floyd, police brutality against African Americans and now with sort of this rising anti-Asian violence, there is this kind of the specificity to this framework, right, that can't necessarily be transposed from one context to another, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not useful to think through, especially thinking about debility in terms of Native American communities, how being Native American in the United States is definitely a kind of debility, right? So there's been a lot of scholarship on life, on the reservations and if you read like Tommy Orange's book, they are there, for instance, you know, he writes so beautifully about issues of mental illness and alcoholism, right? And so I think it's in those spaces where, you know, these minoritized populations aren't necessarily killed, but they are in what Lauren Berlant called slow deaths, right? So in those instances of slow death, right, where their health is slowly being debilitated, I think is where that debility in minority access is most useful. - What I think who is also hinting at is, is this gradual process of disciplining and management. - Absolutely, right. - So my last question, how does, how will the right to maim save the world? - It certainly helps us understand power and sovereignty a lot more. And I'm not sure how that understanding can necessarily sort of kind of translate to action on the ground. I'm pretty sure like activists who would read this could use this theory for, you know, sort of to understand the sort of the logic of power here, right? And what's really interesting as it's another intervention that just we apart is bringing in is that this is, because, you know, we usually we think of, especially in the wake of sort of Iraq and Afghanistan and drone strikes. We tend to think of, you know, injury and death in those countries as collateral damage, right? That this is something that happened on the job. Like this was something that was peripheral, right? And what Fuhrar does is she says that this is actually very intentional that these populations are supposed to be maimed. It's not that they just got maimed while something else was being done. Understanding that, that this is not just an accidental thing, but something that's very deliberate, would then activists can sort of use that and then that understanding and then use that bring about change. - You know, understanding the ability is, I think, would be like an analog to understanding intersectionality, which is, you know, it's something, it's definitely more of a means than an end. - Absolutely, absolutely. - Do you use Fuhrar's work in your own writing and I'm really curious to know and how you do it? - Yes, I wrote an article about post-human, post-humanism, because a lot of disability scholars tend to romanticize disability as the post-humanist condition par excellence, right? And I sort of coming from a post-colonial studies, empire studies perspective, I find that problematic. And, you know, authors such as Alexander Vahiliya, for instance, have written that there are certain populations who haven't been considered human at all, and yet some scholars are already going to the post-human, right, and they're washing their hands with the human, right? And so for me, Fuhrar's work is most, was useful. So I wrote this article on this contemporary British novel called Anatomy of a Soldier, which is basically about this British soldier who is working with NATO in Afghanistan, and then he loses his legs, right, to a bomb, and then he sort of gets prosthetic legs. And, you know, prosthesis and, you know, sort of disability technology has been kind of theorized as a sort of very post-human thing, right? But what was sort of troubling to me was that those prosthetic legs come from the same system, which also produces other cyborg and technologies like unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. This sort of post-human vision is very sort of non-innocent, right? And so we need to be more critical, you know, when we're... And so in this kind of my takedown of post-human disability studies, Fuhrar was most useful. Fuhrar really helped me sort of critically analyze that text and hold disability studies to account. That sounds like a brilliant article, and I look forward to reading it, and I'm going to link it in our show notes. Thank you. Thank you so much, Basam. Yeah, no, of course. Yeah, thanks for having me. And thank you for listening to High Theory. If you like our podcast, please review and subscribe on Spotify, iTunes, Patreon, or wherever you get your podcast fix. Sharonik Bosu manages our social media presence. Owen Quinn composes our theme music, and Kim Adams and Sharonik Bosu edit our audio. You can also find us at high-theory.net. We hope you have a highly theoretical day.