Women's & Gender Studies Graduate Program Presents:
Convivial Conversations Series
Monday, February 16, 2015
11am - 1 p.m. - Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building - Douglass Campus
A conversation between Rasha Moumne, PhD Candidate, and Professor Jasbir Puar
Light refreshments served. Please RSVP to Suzy Kiefer (
Rasha Moumne, PhD Candidate:
This paper is an initial exploration of the discursive and legal production of the figure of the Middle Eastern wartime gay refugee in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, the ongoing war in Syria, and the emergence of a gay refugee assistance industry in Lebanon.
Professor Jasbir Puar:
“Inhumanist Occupation: Palestine and the Right to Maim”
This talk looks at the productivity of disablement as a war tactic of the Israeli state in Gaza and the West Bank. It argues for a revisioning of biopolitics that accounts for maiming as a goal of settler colonialism that defies easy demarcations between making live and letting die. Such an analysis complicates recent debates about the function of "collateral damage" by mining the schism between targeting to kill and targeting to disable.