The turban as an assemblage
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Puar conceptualises the turban not as a mere "appendage" to the body but as an "assemblage," blurring the lines between organic and inorganic entities (193). Unlike conventional views of clothing as external to the body, the turban is rendered integral to the Sikh identity—its forced removal is not just a physical act but a profound assault on personhood. As Puar describes, it is both a violation to their masculine persona within their community, and an unwilling submission to hegemonic norms of national belonging, where the act of deturbaning becomes a means of reindoctrinating the individual into a patriarchal, patriotic identity. This assemblage collapses the boundary between body and object, producing a fused identity where the turban cannot simply be taken off without unraveling the self.
The turban’s status as an assemblage is particularly disruptive in the context of racial profiling and nationalist anxieties, as Puar describes. Post-9/11, the turban becomes a hyper-visible marker that draws suspicion and fear - a site of The turban’s status as an assemblage is particularly disruptive in the context of racial profiling and nationalist anxieties, as Puar describes. Post-9/11, the turban becomes a hyper-visible marker that draws suspicion —a site of "stickiness" where racialised emotions such as fear, hostility, and anxiety adhere. As Sara Ahmed's concept of stickiness illustrates, these emotions do not simply reside in the turban but circulate and accumulate on it, transforming it into a powerful signifier of danger and deviance (185). Puar highlights how attackers often target the turban itself, clawing or unraveling it in acts of intimate violence that seek to strip away not just a symbol of religious identity but a layer of the individual's embodied self. This violence is underpinned by a dual logic: the turban as a hypermasculine signifier of resistance and as a queer object that unsettles normative understandings of gender and sexuality. Its assemblage nature, therefore, positions the turbaned body as both hyper-visible and fundamentally illegible within frameworks of heteronormative nationalism.
The part I found incredibly interesting was that the turban, as an assemblage, aligns with other wartime bodies that blur organic and inorganic boundaries, such as "burqa'ed figures" or "(female) suicide bombers" (196). These bodies, like the turbaned Sikh, trouble distinctions between machine and flesh, tradition and modernity, self and nation. In these cases, the body becomes a vector for state anxieties around sovereignty and security, embodying both a threat and a disruption of normative bodily coherence. The turban, in its assemblage form, resists reduction to a simple cultural marker; instead, it functions as a dynamic site of power and visibility within the biopolitical lens of surveillance.