Puar traces, throughout her book, the queering of the male terrorist body as an integral part of homonationalist discourse. Her thoughts on the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the manner in which it perpetuates Orientalist discourse was especially fascinating. I particularly liked when she exposed the hypocrisy of American condemnations of Middle Eastern societies for their supposed homophobia by pointing out that sodomy had been made legal throughout the U.S. only a year or so before Abu Ghraib, and that the fixation with the supposed homophobia of Middle Eastern societies allowed Americans to ignore the homophobia, racism, and misogyny of their own troops. It is the sort of decontextualizing of events that we have been discussing throughout the course--the West is able to critique the East for its homophobia because it refuses to acknowledge or perceive its own faults. She identifies this willful blindness as the “counterpart to the obsessive pathologizing of the individual” (52). While American victims of tragedies are allowed the privilege of feeling grief or trauma, “people who have lost loved ones as a consequence of US foreign policy elsewhere are not depicted as sufferers of trauma or injustice” (53).

I don’t really understand what Chow means when she says, “From being negative blockade to being normal routine, war becomes the positive mechanism, momentum, and condition of possibility of society, creating a hegemonic space of global communication through powers of visibility and control” (34). I understand her argument regarding the manner in which war has become normative, woven into our daily lives--from the technology we use regularly--which conditions us to think of the world as objectified and thus target-like--to our constant awareness of wars occurring across the globe. But I am not sure why she asserts above that it is the “condition of possibility of society” (34). Anyone have any thoughts?