I wanted to read this book primarily so I could figure out what a queer assemblage is, since that’s a framework I’ve encountered at conferences and don’t really understand. I still don’t really understand— or rather, my understanding is that assemblage theory boils down to “any social thing is super complicated and built out of separate complex social things that are changing in their own ways on their own time.” Kind of like how the human eye evolved from several other separately-evolving systems, maybe. As a social framework, assemblages seems basically like dialectical thinking.
I already had a decent understanding of homonationalism and its relationship to the War on Terror via the introduction of Sodometries, where Goldberg analyzes a cartoon of Saddam Hussein in the context of post-9/11 politics and significant gay rights court cases. While that’s just one example, the concepts and relationships are explained well. So, I feel like this book primarily taught me about more examples— like the torture at Abu Ghraib, and how homophobia (and sexism) in other countries is used to justify U.S. imperial interests (like justifying the war in Afghanistan) but ignored in other places (like Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally). Puar also talks about queerness as regulatory (being “anti-norms” is its own kind of pressure) and secular queerness (which is basically Christian secularism) means queer identity feeds into Islamophobia, since Christianity is naturalized in the U.S.
But, I’m supposed to be thinking about methods as I read this.
So, I kind of see the method in this as looking at stickyness (I think that’s a Sarah Ahmed term) around/between social objects. I don’t feel like Puar is arguing that these confluences of nationalism and homophobia have been intentionally engineered, either at a national level or by individual propagandists, but they certainly exist, and keep cohering around each other. And saying “here’s how stuff is, and how it’s interacting with each other” is valuable, even if you don’t get at the Why (although Puar does get at the Why).
I think another important thing to learn from this discussion is how capitalism (and therefore imperialism) is super flexible and adaptable. Capitalism requires oppression, because dividing workers helps keep everyone down (paying undocumented people less than minimum wage means documented people are less likely to try to get paid more, because aren’t they already lucky, and why wouldn’t the employer just hire more cheaper people?) and keeps workers blaming each other for stuff instead of the bosses (like the fear of immigrants and blaming poor people for their own poverty). But, capitalism doesn’t need oppression in any particular form.
Lots of people profited an enormous amount off of slavery. But abolishing slavery didn’t destroy capitalism. The economic system adapted— to sharecropping, Jim Crow, prison labor, etc. In the same way, while homophobia functions(ed) as a tool to enforce gender and familial norms, and to keep some people in a marginalized surplus labor force (thereby keeping wages/costs down), now capitalism has adapted again. Homonormative families are more than welcome to participate in the market— the gay wedding industry, the gay tourist industry, the commodification of gay culture, etc.
Martinez talks about this too in relation to racism— it’s one of the tenets of critical race theory, that any reform/scrap of progress that is made, white supremacy will find a way to co-opt it.
It’s also similar to Moore’s argument in Dangerous Intimacies— that England started adapting its nationalist self-image to include homosexuality and homoeroticism, instead of always placing homosexuals in other countries (France, Turkey, Italy).
All kinds of special oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.) are bound up with capitalism (people in specially oppressed groups also have higher rates of poverty and other money-related difficulties) yet also operate separately from it (e.g. wealthy Black people still experience racism, wealthy white women still experience sexism). And maybe that’s kind of what an assemblage is— seeing those overlaps and how the pieces interact with each other while still seeing them as separately-changing parts.