The Disability Book Archive

[ID: A book cover. The background is white. A painting stretches from the bottom of the cover to bottom of top quarter. In the upper quarter of the cover, text reads:
The author’s name “Jasbir K. Puar” is at the top in black writing.
The title “The Right to Maim” is immediately below this in red caps.
The subtitle “Debility, Capacity, Disability” is immediately below this in smaller, yellow caps.
The painting is immediately below this. The background is a dark cream. It appears to show a humanoid figure climbing a mound composes of different circles. Two other figures appear to be falling off the mound. There are splashes of red paint around the mound and the figure on it. /end]

---

Content Warning:

• Colonisation
• Homophobia
• Ableism
• Death
• Genocide
• Bullying
• Child Death
• Suicide
• Violence

---

Summary:

In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar’s analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel’s policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability’s interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.

---

Notes:

This book won the 2018 Alison Piepmeier Book Prize.

This book won the 2018 Alan Bray Memorial Book Award.

This book is part of the Duke University Press ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise series.

---

Archivist Comments:

I tried to find the name of the painting in the cover but I can’t, so please do let me know if you know it. One of the ‘recommended’ books that popped up when I was researching this was Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics.

---