Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (published by Duke University Press in 2017) is a timely intervention in the field of disability studies and beyond, providing us with a renewed understanding of the concepts of disability, debility, and capacity. The author investigates how, why, and when bodies are perceived as debilitated, capacitated or often simultaneously she explores and interrogates the idea of ‘debility’ to disrupt the binarism of abled/disabled bodies and living-dying. Seeking to answer the question: “What does disability as a concept do?” (p.xx), this monograph of just about 160 pages traverses and engages with themes of financial capitalism, queer and disability politics, critical race theory, militarism and neo-imperialism, reproductive justice and most importantly settler colonialism and biopolitics. Pointing to Israel’s policy of shooting to maim Palestinians, Puar reworks biopolitics as a theory of debility and capacity revealing an investment in the futurity of certain bodies while simultaneously making certain other bodies available for maiming. The text’s focus is on how certain bodies come into biopolitical being through having a greater risk of becoming disabled than others (p.xix). The intensification of disability as an identity and category is instrumentalised by the state to not just obscure forms of debility but to actively produce and sustain its proliferation. This work also builds on the intellectual labour of activists from ongoing struggles worldwide. It offers learnings for forming transnational solidarities and organising resistance to neo-colonial, settler and imperial structures.

The book contains six chapters including an introduction and a postscript. The Preface and the Introduction set forth the conceptual frameworks to recognise the assemblage of disability, debility, and capacity as elements of biopolitical control. Drawing parallels between the sovereign entitlements of the police in the US and the military apparatus in Israel, Puar highlights how security practices mine the relationship between disability and death. The author offers debility as the endemic, a state in which death is disallowed and unliveable conditions continue to persist. They posit debilitation as a massification, as the intended result of the operations of biopolitics (p.xvii). The ‘right to maim’ then, is linked to but not the same as the right to kill. It is a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable. Hence, maiming is argued to be a sanctioned tactic of settler colonial rule.

In the introduction, titled ‘The Cost of Getting Better’, Puar shows the profitability of debility through an examination of queer suicides using the concept of slow death. Lauren Berlant’s concept of slow death^[i] represents a debilitating ongoingness of structural inequality, violence and suffering; a condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing life. (p.12) The author probes the conditions that make suicide an alternative to ongoing slow deaths. They question the limits of identity politics and inspiration porn-like narratives urging to place such suicides in the broader context of neoliberal demands for bodily capacity and the productivity of debility for control societies. The medical industrial complex and debt as financial expropriation are invoked to point to debility being profitable for financial capitalism. Puar also offers a guide for the text’s theoretical turns in the subsequent chapters, going over affective analysis, the distinction between disciplinary and control societies and posthumanist and subaltern contentions. The chapters that follow take up trans becoming in relation to affect and race, US imperialism and debilitation produced elsewhere, Israel’s project of rehabilitation through the debilitation of Palestinians and its extreme manifestation in the right to maim.

The first chapter, ‘Bodies with New Organs’ traces the move from the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to the present moment of trans-hailing by the U.S. state. In doing this, Puar analyses how trans bodies are recruited for a more generalized transformation of capacitated bodies into viable neoliberal subjects (p.35). The author argues that the ADA made gender normativity – organized through racial hierarchy – a requisite for claiming a disabled status. There is crip nationalism – the hailing of some disabilities as socially productive for national economies, and able nationalism – the ableist model of national inclusion and productivity, built into the legal apparatus. Apart from the law, it is trans exceptionalism and the capacitation through piecing (and not just passing) that complicates the trans relation to disability. According to the author, trans piecing “performs medicalization as strategic embodiment” (p.45). The trans subject that pieces see their body as made up of separable malleable fragments; the trans subject that pieces are emboldened with futurity. The trans normative body that pieces also passes; and integration through piecing becomes a valued asset in control societies (p.49). Articulating trans as an ontological force, Puar proposes becoming trans as capacitation of race that informs the functioning of biopolitical control. For them, becoming trans ought to be “a politics of manifesting beyond what control can control” (p.61).

Puar is also critical of the disability rights discourse, analysing it as a “capacitating frame” (p.xvii) that recognises some disabilities at the expense of other disabilities that do not fit the liberal empowerment model. This is expanded further in the second chapter, ‘Crip Nationalism’, with attention to debilitation as a primary activity of capitalist global expansion. Puar develops the analytic of the biopolitics of debilitation to refer to the production of populations made available and targeted for injury. Work and war both need bodies designated for injury and maiming making disability a direct and deliberate product of capitalism and imperialism. Crip nationalism, herein, also features as an extension of US imperialism, rewarding conditional citizenship and privileging certain forms of disabilities within national hierarchies and transnational liberal rights frames (p.70). The author borrows from Snyder and Mitchell’s conception^[ii] of “narrative prosthesis” – an aspirational trope in which the disabled body overcomes tragedy and fails to reconsolidate the able body, to show how disability exceptionalism works to obfuscate and legitimise the operations of capitalism (p.85). There is the promise and fantasy of resolution for disability while masking the endemic nature of debility. This makes debilitation an integral feature of disaster capitalism, such that crisis is everywhere and yet only noticed through the event of disaster. Most importantly, this chapter provides a critique of the United States’ production of debilitation “here” and “elsewhere” through incarceration and racialization practices and the proliferation of crip nationalism imploring Euro-American disability studies to look inwards.

Puar adds to their conceptual framework of homo-nationalism from their previous work ‘Terrorist Assemblages’ in the third chapter, ‘Disabled Diaspora, Rehabilitating State.’ Homo-nationalism in Israel is entwined with a nation-building project of rehabilitation, reproductive biopolitics and the capacity and debility of bodies (p.101). The chapter also puts in focus “pinkwashing” – the deliberate highlighting of Israel’s LGBT rights track record to deflect attention from, obscure and more crucially, justify the occupation. The rehabilitation of the state of Israel as strong and virile, its pronatalist agenda with its most advanced assisted reproductive technology as well as claims of Palestinian homophobia point to how Israel regulates bodies to serve its Zionist agenda. Puar argues that to be gay in Israel is not just to be Jew and able-bodied but also to be a parent – “to reproduce the body politic along racial and regulated lines” (p.117). Pinkwashing, thus, is not a queer issue but must be seen as “a foil to pronatalist, eugenically oriented practices of sexual reproduction”, as part of a larger assemblage the goal of which is to modulate debility and capacity (p.124).

The last chapter, ‘Will Not Let Die’ is where the central argument of the text finds its most potent articulation. Puar complicates the biopolitical vectors of make life, make die, let live and let die by formulating the right to maim as “will not let die” or “will not make die” that masquerades as let live. (p.139) Israel enacts the right to maim on bodies and infrastructure. Whether it is the Israel Defense Forces’ shoot-to-cripple policy or the regulation of calories and water consumed by Palestinians or the bombing of hospitals in Gaza – these are all tactics used to achieve the aims of settler colonialism. The author conceives of maiming as a capacitating technology. Maiming debilitates the occupied population and its resistant future but is also able to manufacture support for Israel and its military as humanitarian entities. Injuries get excluded from the calculation of collateral damage and the relatively low number of deaths continues to fuel the occupation.

It has been over 6 months, nearly 200 days, of the siege of Gaza, which has resulted in death, starvation, injuries, mass internal displacement, complete blockades and asphyxiation of a kind never seen before. Israel continues to bomb school buildings, hospitals, refugee camps and more, as the United States empowers and enables its apparatus further. Reading The Right To Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability in this context is particularly instructive – it has lessons to offer for understanding the ongoing forms of debilitation and forging solidarities in resistance to war, imperialism and settler colonialism. Puar’s insistence that the purpose of their analysis is “to labour in the service of a Free Palestine” must push the reader to think across geopolitical, spatial and theoretical sites of oppression and defiance.

^[i] Berlant, L. (2007). Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Critical Inquiry, 33(4), 754–780.

^[ii] Mitchell, D. T., & Snyder, S. L. (2000). Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. University of Michigan Press.

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Akanksha Rao is a researcher and development professional based in Delhi.  She is interested in studying the state, especially systems of governance, security and incarceration.