ASA2 Section A01
10/25/2015
Week #6
Puar and Rai’s article “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on
Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots” illustrates the idea behind
how gender and sexuality are central to terrorism and the war against it. A
constant theme in the article is relating the terrorist as two separate
entities: the monster and the terrorist. In this sense, many see the terrorist
as a person that has been subjected to many different personality and
psychological defects along with childhood struggles leading to a poor sense of
self. This attitude of adverse psyche damage has lead researchers to classify
terrorist acts of violence merely as a psychological problem from the individual,
ultimately supporting the claim that these damages are abnormalities in the
eyes of the West in need to be corrected. This type of viewpoint downplays what
terrorism is and reduces the social and political aspects behind them to a
simple perverse abnormality seen in all terrorists. Though the idea behind
studying terrorism is to understand its dynamics and intricacies, the conclusions
reached by the field of study are fixated on varying psychological aspects and
not the developing social, political, and historical elements. I find it
disheartening to see that society is trying to change the focus of terrorism by
centralizing on what’s wrong with the terrorist rather than the socio-political
pretext behind the acts of terrorism by various groups.
Is society so hypersensitive to terrorism to the point where
they highlight the individual terrorist to have no alternate cause than to just
simply satisfy their “abnormal psychological compulsions”?
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