AustLit

'When Jasbir K. Puar coined the term ‘homonationalism’ in Terrorist Assemblages (2007), she was referring to a liberally-sanctioned queerness that had gained credibility in a post-9/11 world. It was, according to her, a biopolitics that pits a ‘sexual exceptionalism’ of the ‘global gay left’ against ‘perverse, improperly hetero- and homo- Muslim sexualities’. Within homonationalism, there lay the ‘convivial relations’ between queerness and neoliberal tendencies – such as privatisation, militarism, surveillance, deportation and empire – that lean on a nationalistic ‘imagined community’ while hawking an illusory feeling of freedom. Not dissimilar to carceral feminism, homonationalism espouses a quasi-progressive rhetoric that justifies racist, xenophobic and aporophobic positions.' (Introduction)