Week 12

I am listening to the audiobook the Argonauts by Maggie Nelson right now in which she discusses the question of an individuals role in challenging heteronormativity. As a woman in a queer relationship, Nelson asks how wanting a family and love can both reify heteronormative ideals as well as disrupt them, and it is often unclear which is leading. She uses the example of a pregnancy, which she identifies as a radically intimate act that reimagines intimacy and identity through the body. And yet, is a pregnant woman still always participating in the sanctioned reproductive role for women? She also nods to the dilemma that straight people fret that queerness is dismantling society: marriage, family, love. And yet queer people fret that queerness as it is practiced will not be enough to break these systems down. This is where my mind was when I arrived at the Puar reading. Puar asks, in part, how queerness becomes sanitized so that it can reinforce national culture, and at times, heterosexuality. Another part of what Puar points to, however, is how queerness is racialized. I think what Nelson misses in part is how the seeming choice to participate or not participate in heteronormativity (or at least narrate choices in that way), may only be available to her because she is white. Muslim womanhood, especially motherhood, may already be queer in a way that it threatens the future that white America has envisioned for itself. Especially as Puar meditates on the question of giving and enfolding life on the last page, this example of pregnancy seems pertinent.