The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability

Jasbir K. Puar’s acclaimed book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability carefully progresses, chapter by chapter, to construct a multifaceted argument that considers how disability as an individual identity is an effect (and affect) of ways neoliberalism atomizes individual relations to the state and corporate functions as well as liberal discourses of bodily, subjective, social, and economic potentiality and capacity. Debility, she shows, is a condition of neoliberal economic order that structures the everyday life of the global South and global North, targeted by the imperialist war machine and labor machine as readily as it “produces debt as debility” (17). Debility and disability are two interlocked terms within a political economy of capacity (the capacity for potentiality, labor, and production) within a neoliberal order that “promotes disability empowerment at the same time that it maintains the precarity of certain bodies and populations precisely through making them available for maiming”...