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Forum on

QUEER INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS1

Drafts of work published in

International Studies Review Volume 16, Issue 4, pages 596–622, December 2014

With Contributions by:

Cynthia Weber Amy Lind

V. Spike Peterson Laura Sjoberg Lauren Wilcox

Meghana Nayak

FROM QUEER TO QUEER IR Cynthia Weber

What is queer? Why are queer international theories relevant to international

relations? What might queer investigations of international relations look like?

While debates about the meaning of the term “queer” and whether or not queer

can be or ought to be defined rage on (Butler, 1994; Warner, 2012; Wilcox, this

forum), many self-identified queer scholars cite Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s description

of queer as their point of departure. Sedgwick suggested that queer designates “the

open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and

excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's

sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically” (1993:8).2

                                                                                                               1 This Forum is co-edited by Laura Sjoberg and Cynthia Weber. The forum was engaged by the ISR editorial team prior the appointment of Laura Sjoberg as an Associate Editor of the journal. 2 To be either one thing or another thing (a boy or a girl; straight or gay) is to signify monolithically; to be one thing and another (a boy and a girl; straight and gay) is to be queer in Sedwick’s terms.

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Sedwick’s exposition of queer makes clear the affinities queer studies has to

feminist studies and gender studies—with their analyses of the political work that

gender, sex and (sometimes) sexuality do—and to poststructuralist studies—with their

analyses of the political work that multiple significations do. Yet, queer studies is

neither reducible to feminist studies, gender studies, or poststructuralist studies. Nor

is it the sum total of these theoretical dispositions. As an academic practice, queer

studies has been and remains, as Teresa de Lauretis described it, an attempt “to

rethink the sexual in new ways, elsewhere and other-wise” in relation to but also

beyond traditional Gay and Lesbian Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, and

Poststructuralist Studies (de Lauretis, 1991: xvi; Rubin, 1992, Butler, 1990).

The “elsewhere” of queer studies about which de Lauretis writes has generally

functioned to locate queer international theories outside of the discipline of

International Relations (IR), largely because queer has been regarded as “other-wise”

to what most IR scholars have been schooled to understand as international relations

theory and practice (Weber, 2014a). While the advantages and disadvantages of

categorizing queer international theories as “elsewhere and other-wise” to a broader

body of work called IR theory is still hotly debated in the discipline (Weber, 2014b),

there is a growing recognition amongst many IR scholars that the distinction between

international relations theories and queer international theories upon which such

debates rely is unsustainable. This is for at least four reasons.

The first reason has to do with what queer studies and queer international

theories are and do. Queer studies and queer international theories primarily

investigate how queer subjectivities and queer practices—the “who” and the “how”

that cannot or will not be made to signify monolithically in relation to gender, sex,

and/or sexuality—are disciplined, normalized, or capitalized upon by and for states,

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NGOs, and international corporations. And they investigate how state and nonstate

practices of disciplinization, normalization, and capitalization might be critiqued and

resisted (Weber, 1994a, 1994b, 1999; Duggan, 2003; Puar, 2007). This is precisely

what Foucauldian-informed international relations scholarship does, albeit usually

without an explicit focus on non-monolithic genders, sexes, and sexualities.

Second, why a focus on non-monolithic genders, sexes, and sexualities matters

for the discipline of international relations is in part because states and states’ leaders

in particular have made it a focus of their domestic and foreign policies. How states,

for example, answer questions about the normality or perversion of “the homosexual”

and “the queer” and how these two figures are related to one another currently

influences how some states make domestic and foreign policy. For example, claims

made by Putin’s Russian and Museveni’s Uganda that “the homosexual” and “the

queer” are perverse led each country to formulate domestic policies that were to

varying degrees punished by some states and international organizations (Rao, 2010,

2012 and 2014; Weiss and Bosia, 2013). In contrast, the Obama administration’s

figuration of “the homosexual” but not “the queer” as normal led it to champion “gay

rights as human rights” as part of its foreign policy (Clinton, 2011), a general and

specific foreign-policy position that queer scholars critique (Duggan, 2003; Puar,

2007, 2010; Wilkinson and Langlois, 2014).

Third, queer international theories explicitly engage with what many IR

scholars regard as the discipline’s governing dichotomy—order versus anarchy.

Among the ways the “order vs. anarchy” dichotomy functions (and, importantly, fails

to function) in international relations is by articulating “order vs. anarchy” as “normal

vs. perverse” and, more specifically, as “hetero/homo-normative vs. queer”—which is

one of the dichotomies that queer theorists investigate and resist. When an order vs.

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anarchy dichotomy is constituted and sustained by a hetero/homo-normative vs. queer

dichotomy in international practice (as it is in the above examples regarding Russia,

Uganda, and the United States), any distinction between a general IR and a specific

so-called Queer IR disappears. For investigating how these dichotomies function is

(or ought to be) of central concern to both queer international theorists and IR

theorists more generally. Finally, the breadth of queer IR investigations now extends

to what are arguably the three core domains in which IR scholars claim expertise—

war and peace, international political economy, and state and nation formation.3

What this discussion suggests is that there is no definitive distinction between

something called IR and something called Queer IR. Having said that, though, it is

important not to lose site of the unique, critical difference “queer” makes—

ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically—to investigations of

international relations theory and practice.

Ontologically, Queer IR scholars focus on queer ontologies that do not or

cannot be made to signify monolithically. These include trans*, inter, cross, and pan

gendered, sexed and sexualized bodies—be they physical, geographical, political,

historical, economic, ideological, or other.4 These queerly figured bodies are often

                                                                                                               3 See, for example, Weber, 1994a, 1994b, 1998, 1999, 2002, forthcoming; Peterson, 1999, 2013, 2014; Pratt, 2007; Rao, 2010; Agathangelou et al, 2008; Agathangelou, 2013; Sjoberg and Shepherd, 2012; Sjoberg, 2012; Owens, 2010; Jauhola, 2010; Sabsay, 2013; Frowd, forthcoming, Remkus Britt, 2014, Picq and Thiel, forthcoming. 4 As Sam Killermann explains, ‘Trans* is an umbrella term that refers to all of the identities within the gender identity spectrum. There’s a ton of diversity there, but we often group them all together (e.g., when we say “trans* issues). Trans (without the asterisk) is best applied to trans men and trans women, while the asterisk makes special note in an effort to include all non-cisgender gender identities, including transgender, transsexual, transvestite, genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary, genderfuck, genderless, agender, non-gendered, third gender, two-spirit, bigender, and trans man and trans woman.’ See http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2012/05/what-does-the-asterisk-in-trans-stand-for/. In contrast, a cisgender person is someone who identifies with the gender/sex they were socially assigned at birth. For more definitions, see http://queerdictionary.tumblr.com/terms.

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analyzed intersectionally through and in relation to figurations of race, age, ability

and class, for example (Nash, 2008).

Epistemologically, Queer IR scholars recognize that knowledge and ignorance

in and about international relations are intricately bound with sexual knowledge and

sexual ignorance. This was Sedgwick’s general conclusion, based upon her

observation that twentieth-century Western culture depends upon knowing who

and/or what it means to be homosexual—because the heterosexual/homosexual

dichotomy supports so many other meaningful distinctions. Sedgwick’s list of

meaningful distinctions includes public/private, domestic/foreign,

discipline/terrorism, secrecy/disclosure, natural/artificial, wholeness/decadence, and

knowledge/ignorance (1990:11). When critically employed, these matrices of

knowing and/or not knowing allow us to reconsider not only a variety of

heterosexual/homosexual dichotomies but also a variety of cis-gender/trans*

dichotomies.

In light of Lisa Duggan’s observations about how homonormativity functions

in twenty-first century Western culture—as “a politics that does not contest dominant

heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while

promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized,

depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Duggan,

2003:50; also see Duggan, 2002)—contemporary Queer IR scholars recognize how

various homonormative/homodeviant dichotomies increasingly are used to make

sense of and to order intimate, national, and international relations.

Informed by such queer epistemologies, Queer IR scholars employ

methodologies that (like poststructuralist methodologies) do not seek to uncover “the

truth” of sexed, gendered, and sexualized bodies, assemblages, institutions, and orders

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(Foucault, 1979). For in what I call a queer logic of the and/or,5 such “truths” are

never stable and their representation is never guaranteed; therefore, any attempt to

represent them as if they were stable is understood as a political act. For this reason,

Queer IR scholars instead track when queer figurations emerge and how they are

normalized and/or perverted so that they might challenge but also support

heterosexual, heteronormative, cis-gendered, homonormative, homophobic and

trans*phobic assumptions, orders and institutions. The resulting “deviant

knowledges” of international relations these methodologies produce can disorient

Disciplinary IR knowledges not only about queer subjects (Ahmed, 2006) but also

about international relations subjects and the discipline of IR as a subject.

What research themes and questions follow from queer understandings of

international relations? I would suggest that there are at least (but not exclusively)

three, often overlapping, indicative sets of research questions that Queer IR scholars

have been and are generating.

The first set of research themes explores how “queer” and “queering” are

mobilized in international relations theory and practice. These questions often

investigate how queer and queering challenge “the normalizing mechanisms of state

power to name its sexual subjects: male and female, married or single, heterosexual

or homosexual, natural or perverse” (Eng et al, 2005:1) in intimate, national, and

international relations. This has lead queer international theorists to consider:

• Which figurations in/of international relations do not and cannot be made to signify monolithically in terms of gender, sex, and sexuality, and how research

                                                                                                               5 My notion of the queer logic of the and/or comes from Roland Barthes description of the and/or as an ‘and’ that is also at the very same time and ‘or’. In terms of gender, for example, this means one can be a boy or a girl while at the same time being a boy and a girl. According to Barthes, the and/or is ‘that which confuses meaning, the norm, normativity’ (Barthes, 1976:109). To my mind, this is what makes it queer (Weber, 1999), for it describes that which, in Sedgwick’s terms, cannot or will not signify monolithically.

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focused on these queer figures might make it possible to think and to do international relations differently (Weber, forthcoming);

• How queer(ing) nations, states, sovereignties, and empires affects international theory and practice (Weber, 1998a, 1999; Peterson, 1999, 2013, and this forum; Agathangelou et al, 2008);

• How queer(ing) the intimate relations of family and households queers the international (Peterson, 2010 and this forum);

• How queer(ing) mainstream IR theories like the “territorial peace” potentially rearticulates what the discipline of IR is and can be (Sjoberg, this forum; and more generally, see Wilcox, this forum; Nayak, this forum); and

• How queer(ing) borders (Sjoberg, this forum) and movement across borders by queer subjects (Fortier, 2002; Gopinath, 2005a; Luibhéid, 2005 and 2008; and Arondekar and Patel, forthcoming) might un-anchor international relations from its obsession with sovereign nation-states as its relatively fixed object of study.

This first batch of themes might give the impression that the queer (and Queer IR)

research questions queer(ing) generates are always transgressive and transformative.

This is not the case. Indeed, to reduce queer and/or Queer IR to some heroic

championing of an always already dissident figuration is to overlook how “queer” is

mobilized to constitute and preserve various hegemonic imaginaries of sex, gender,

and sexuality and the powerful assumptions, orders, and institutions they support.

It is, therefore, vital to pose a second set of Queer IR research themes and

questions that take account of how “queer” is sometimes claimed in the name of

normalizing and depoliticizing understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality rather

than contesting them. Research questions that explore these dimensions of queer

often investigate how the non-monolithic character of queer signification—a queer

logic of “and/or”—is appropriated by hegemonic actors, alliances, and orders as a

national and international strategy of governance through securitization and

marketization. How, for example, do states, international alliances, international

orders, and international institutions present themselves as:

• Simultaneously straight and/or queer, as I argue the United States (US) performs its hegemonic masculinity in relation to the Caribbean (Weber, 1998a, 1999);

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• Simultaneously politicizing and/or depoliticizing, as Duggan’s account of how homonormativies sustain a plethora of depoliticizing neoliberal institutions and aims in the name of a selective politics of inclusion suggests (2003);

• Simultaneously exceptionally tolerant and/or intolerant of LGBTQ populations, often in the form of policies that praise so-called “modern” states for their tolerance as a way to further abject as intolerant and intolerable so-called “traditional populations”, as Puar (2007), Kuntsman (2009), Schulman (2012), and Remkis Britt (forthcoming) argue supports Israeli policies of occupying Palestinian territories;

• Simultaneously pro-LGBTQ and/or anti-LGBTQ, as Lind and Keating argue is the case with present-day Ecuadorian state policy (Lind and Keating, 2013; Lind, this forum);

• Simultaneously protective of LGBT citizenship rights and/or dangerous to these same citizens because of the specific ways LGBTQ citizens are incorporated by states, as Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco argue through their analysis of how “queer necropolitics” functions (Haritaworn et al, 2013)?

In so doing, these scholars have generated a range of useful concepts and ideas that

enable a rethinking of specific aspects of international theory and practice, including

how actors, orders, institutions, and alliances are formed through and sustained by

“queer compensatory strategies” (Weber, 1999), “homonormativities” (Duggan,

2003), “pinkwashing” (Puar, 2007), “homonationalisms” (Puar, 2007),

“homoprotectionism” (Lind and Keating, 2013), and “murderous inclusions”

(Haritaworn et al, 2013). These analyses have also lead to speculation on what kinds

of “queer protest” and “queer protesters” might be the most effective in challenging

conservative mobilizations of queer (Rao, 2010; Duggan and Kim, 2011-2012).

Finally, a third set of themes and questions generated by Queer IR scholars and

scholarship considers what being a Queer IR scholar and doing Queer IR scholarship

does specifically in and to the discipline of international relations, especially

Disciplinary IR. For example:

• How do disciplinary strategies like shunning on the one hand and the “gentrification” of queer IR research on the other give the impression that “there is no queer international theory”? (Weber, 2014a; Weber, 2014b);

• As LGBTQ issues become significantly more visible in foreign policy, might it be at the discipline’s peril to erase Queer IR scholars and scholarship and to relinquish their domains of analysis to other (inter)disciplines like Global Queer Studies?

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• Could acknowledgement of Queer IR scholarship broaden and deepen understandings of what Disciplinary IR claims as its three core domains of research excellence: state and nation formation, war and peace, and international political economy?

• Might such analyses generate a novel range of theoretical insights that are primarily informed by both queer theory and international relations theory, particularly because both of these theoretical perspectives have so much to say about (in)securities?

• If so, should Queer IR scholars enter into a proper institutional alliance with Disciplinary IR—into a “gay marriage” of sorts—with (in)security functioning as their axis of sameness/similarity?

• Would this “queer the discipline of IR”? Is “queering the discipline of IR” possible? Or would the discipline of IR never accept a theory that “elevates perversion to philosophy”?6

As this discussion suggests, queer theorizations of international relations exist, they

are relevant to core international relations questions and topics, and they have long

been generating robust international relations research programs. The contributions to

this forum evidence and further these research programs, making clear the critical

difference queer can make for international theorizing.

                                                                                                               6 This is how Jack Halberstam defines ‘queer’. See Ristic, 1998.

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“OUT” IN IR: WHY QUEER VISIBILITY MATTERS Amy Lind

Generally speaking, theorists of IR imagine states as heterosexual. To the extent that

some feminist scholars have posited essentialist roles for “men” and “women” in the

(re)production of nations, they too have imagined states as heterosexual, even if

patriarchal. Queer studies scholars have begun to posit something different: Queer

states that are not inherently “straight” or heterosexual (Weber 1999, 2014a; Canady

2009), are “gay-friendly,” and in some significant cases paradoxical, simultaneously

promoting and opposing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI)

liberation. It is this latter category that I find most relevant to and useful for

understanding the current global fascination with and concurrent disdain for LGBTI

rights; a paradox observed both within and amongst nations, a paradox notable for

how LGBTI rights get mapped onto a myriad of other political struggles involving

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sovereignty, westernization, modernity, (de)colonization, and globalization. On one

hand, we are witnessing joyous celebrations of “gay pride” and same-sex partner

recognition around the world unlike ever before. Yet there are numerous virulent

homophobic and transphobic responses to queer visibility, including where states

promote the criminalization of queers, as in the case of Uganda’s proposed “Kill the

Gays” bill or Russia’s “gay propaganda” bill. Increasingly, states have become vocal

and visible actors in constructing homophobic as well as homopositive strategies

related to homosexuality and gender identity, and it is this paradoxical queer visibility

that I address here.

Specifically, in this essay I examine how queer visibility, especially LGBTI

rights discourse, has been used as a tool of hegemony and empire by states as they

struggle for power. On one hand, states that recognize LGBTI rights bring much-

needed visibility to oppressive situations. Yet when states equate LGBTI rights with a

particular, typically racialized brand of democracy, development or progress, they are

often pitting their own ideology against that of states or national communities they

view as “uncivil,” “backward,” or “terrorist.” As Spike Peterson points out (this

forum; also see Weber 1999, 2014a), a key aspect of queer theorizing is the

understanding that “codes and practices of ‘normalcy’ simultaneously constitute

‘deviancy,’ exclusions, and ‘otherings’ as sites of social violence.” Queer theory

contests the normalizing arrangements of sex/gender as well as the “normalizing

mechanisms of state power” (Eng, cited in Peterson, this volume). Yet, as I argue in

this essay, “queerness” itself has been normalized through state policy; for example,

as nationalist narratives of a “good gay” citizen (e.g., gender normative, white, middle

class, monogamous) are incorporated into exclusionary nationalist ideologies and

mapped onto broader political agendas such as national security or economic reform

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(Duggan 2002; Puar 2007; Agathangelou et al 2008). I thus ask us to be cautious

about claiming LGBTI rights victories as always or necessarily emancipatory,

especially when they are promoted through neoliberal state logics of securitization

and/or through the teleological lens of progress and modernization.

The celebratory global impulse toward same-sex marriage (SSM) is one

terrain in which these debates occur. SSM laws have now been passed in at least

sixteen countries and legislation is currently being proposed in several more. Some

countries also allow SSM in specific provinces or states (e.g., Mexico, US). Seen as a

celebration of lesbian and gay rights, heads of state promote their “gay-friendly”

legislation as a marker of progress and modernity: Following the July 2013 passage of

SSM legislation in the UK, David Cameron stated,

I am proud that we have made same-sex marriage happen…Making marriage available to everyone says so much about the society we are in and the society we want to live in…If a group is told over and over again that they are less valuable, over time they may start to believe it. In addition to the personal damage this can cause, it inhibits the potential of the nation.” (Cameron 2013, emphasis added).

The idea of SSM as reflecting the potential or modernization of a nation is often seen

not only as ending discrimination but also as a move toward capitalist prosperity and

(neo)liberal modernity. The earlier 2006 passage of SSM in post-apartheid South

Africa framed SSM as part of the country’s broader democratic opening and as a

move toward liberal democracy; to achieve this, gay and lesbian activists focused on

how queers would contribute to South Africa’s progress toward neoliberal modernity

as “respectable,” market-based citizens (Oswin 2007).

In a similar vein, states utilize SSM and more generally LGBTI rights

discourse to advance their notion of political security and democracy, as in the case of

the United States’ new branding of foreign policy as “gay-friendly” (e.g., through

USAID’s LGBT Global Development Partnership) and in Israeli state promotion as

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the most “gay-friendly” country in the Middle East. Ironically, neither of these states

have federal SSM laws. In the case of Israel, the government recognizes the marriages

of individuals married abroad, and Tel Aviv’s large Gay Pride festival has led some

observers to coin the city as the “gay capital of the Middle East.” The Israeli state’s

explicit promotion of itself as “gay-friendly” has led to some of the most vocal

critiques of what anti-occupation activists in Israeli occupied territories have called

“pinkwashing,” where state officials seek to create a more positive image of their

government, nation, human rights record, economic policy framework, or foreign

policy agenda, to name only a few, by promoting or speaking about LGBT rights.

These activists have claimed that as Israel promotes gay and lesbian equality as part

of its national agenda, it aims to create acceptance for its general human rights record

in the region, thus “pinkwashing” the human rights violations occurring in occupied

territories (Shulman 2012). This paradox, whereby “gay rights” are linked to Israeli

democracy while other forms of rights—such as Palestinian sovereignty—are

overlooked, is but one example of the ambivalent ways in which gay rights discourse

has been constructed and appropriated in the international arena. Importantly, non-

hegemonic national(ist) communities also appropriate LGBTI rights agendas and/or

can themselves be heteronormative: Palestinian LGBTI rights activists argue, for

example, that dominant notions of Palestinian sovereignty are themselves

heteronormative, and that change needs to occur from within as well.

These state “celebrations” of SSM have of course been met with opposition.

Anti-gay crusaders have long worked against SSM laws, yet more radical queer

activists have also opposed SSM on the basis that seeking inclusion in the institution

of marriage is reformist at best, and merely shields the ways in which marriage as an

institution is oppressive to individuals who do not conform to its (hetero)normative,

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Eurocentric, colonialist standards. This critique has been launched by numerous queer

activists in both the global North and South. In South America, whereas Argentina

recently passed SSM in 2010, making it the first country in Latin America to do so,

activists in other countries have explicitly opted not to push for marriage inclusion, at

least initially. In Ecuador, for example, until 2013 activists fought not for access to

marriage but for redefining the family (and citizenship) altogether, with the idea of

challenging the postcolonial state’s liberal notion of equality. As a result, the 2008

Constitution, passed by national referendum, included language redefining the family

as based not solely on kinship or blood relations but also on “alternative logics”; this

new definition is seen by its supporters as transforming the postcolonial legal

landscape in which “family” is defined, allowing not only for same-sex civil unions

but also access to state resources by gay and lesbian, transnational/migrant, and

indigenous households (Lind and Keating 2013).

Like SSM, anti-gay laws can also be seen as global sites of both dispute and

(ironically) celebration. How hegemonic states respond to anti-gay laws is fascinating

in itself: David Cameron has publicly linked countries’ LGBT human rights record

directly to UK foreign aid conditionality. Likewise, former US Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton has linked LGBT rights to countries’ “democratic” records, and the

US AID Global LGBT Development Partnership is now the largest state-sponsored

initiative of its kind. Uganda, in particular, has been threatened with foreign aid

suspension due to the passage of the 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which broadens

the criminalization of same-sex relations, including life in prison for those found

guilty and penalties for activists and groups that support LGBT rights. Indeed, while

the brutality of the law, which fortunately was dismissed by Uganda’s Supreme

Court, merits a response, one has to ask “why Uganda?” and not other countries.

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Interestingly, when Cameron and Obama were faced with international pressure to

boycott the 2014 Sochi Olympics following the passage of Russia’s “gay propaganda”

law, both publicly opposed a boycott. Cameron stated, “I believe we can better

address prejudice as we attend, not by boycotting…” (Xydias 2013); Obama opted not

to attend himself but invited LGBT celebrities to be part of the US delegation. Threats

of aid suspension or boycotts are seen as exceptionalist when clearly neither the UK

nor the US have achieved such “modernization” at home.

How, then, can scholars and activists best navigate these political landscapes

and understand the ambivalent nature of globalized queer visibility? Here I offer three

preliminary thoughts: First, recognizing how queer visibility becomes a tool of

hegemony and empire is key: As I’ve outlined above, queer visibility in global arenas

has brought with it a series of paradoxes that involve the legitimization of a “new gay

normal” (read: western, middle class, white, masculine, gender normative) over all

else, and which often serves as fodder for broader struggles for/against colonialism,

westernization, and empire. Rahul Rao (2012) has described this tension as involving

those who claim to be on the “right side of history” (the normative move toward

global gay rights, launched primarily by western states and global institutions) vs.

those who are simply “on the wrong side of empire,” including queers in countries

deemed “uncivil,” “dangerous,” or “backward” according to hegemonic standards.

Being “on the right side of history” implies, then, serving empire as well. Currently

this “new gay normal” is being played out in foreign policy, security, and

development arenas, and is embedded in state as well as market ideologies linking

gays to growth and neoliberal modernity.

Second, because states and global institutions are now finally “paying

attention to us” (Scott Long, quoted in Rao 2012), bringing heightened visibility to

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LGBTI rights, it is imperative that “we” pay attention to states and global institutions

as they continue to legislate, advocate, and/or construct discourses concerning LGBTI

rights in a global context – this being only one, albeit important aspect of thinking

“queerly” and critically in our queries of IR. Major groundwork has been done to

understand how hetero- and homonormativities are embedded in state practices of

securitization (e.g., Weber, Duggan or Puar) and law- and policy-making (e.g., Weiss

and Bosia), yet much needs to be done to better understand how and why states craft

both homophobic and homopositive strategies as they relate to their national political

economies as well as their positions vis-à-vis other states and regions, and to address

the very real consequences of pro- and anti-LGBTI rights discourse in people’s lives.

This certainly applies to nonstate communities as well (e.g., Palestine), and to non-

hegemonic states that invoke a heteronormative notion of nationalism (e.g., Ecuador,

Cuba).

Finally, although here I have focused on queer visibility in relation to state

practices, it is crucial, of course, that we pay attention to how other hegemonic

institutions such as institutions of global finance and development convey

heteronormative and/or homonormative logics in their supposedly neutral (and/or

modernization) discourse, with very real effects for citizens and policy recipients

(Cornwall et al 2008); Bedford 2009; Lind 2010). The World Bank’s suspension of

US $90 million in aid to Uganda in March 2014 is a case in point, alongside the

Bank’s “Economic Cost of Homophobia” project, which aims to monetize the cost of

discrimination and link it to aid distribution, economic growth, and modernization.

While advances in LGBTI rights are important steps, the political messiness of queer

visibility offers IR scholars an opportunity to think more critically about how state

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practices contribute to and indeed powerfully shape the (hetero)normative landscape

in which we conceptualize our work.

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FAMILY MATTERS: HOW QUEERING THE INTIMATE QUEERS THE INTERNATIONAL V. Spike Peterson

A key insight of queer analytics is that codes and practices of “normalcy”

simultaneously constitute “deviancy,” exclusions, and “otherings” as sites of social

violence. To reveal how power operates in normative codes and normalizing

practices, queer theory aims to “make strange”—disrupt, destabilize, deconstruct,

effectively to queer—what is considered normal, commonplace, taken-for-granted, or

the “natural order of things.” The point is to contest normativities and orthodoxies

(Browne, 2006, 886), in part by exposing “regimes of the normal” (Eng et al., 2005,

3) as historically contingent and power-laden social constructions and by disclosing

inconsistencies, instabilities, and fluidities of social meanings and boundaries. In

particular, queer work contests “power-ridden normativities of sex” (Berlant and

Warner, 1995, 345) exemplified in heteronormative sex/affective arrangements, and

the “normalizing mechanisms of state power” (Eng et al., 2005, 1) exemplified in

heteropatriarchal marriage/kinship arrangements.

Drawing on extensive cross-disciplinary research over several decades, I argue

that the making of states is the making of “sex.” In contrast to decentralized networks

of societal organization, successful processes of political centralization, i.e., state

making, are distinguished by their formal (legal) codification of marriage (entailing

the heterosexual matrix and “nuclear” family/household form) and patriarchal

inheritance of property and citizenship (instituting “private” property and insider-

outside status differentiation). These processes and their power relations are legible

initially in early (archaic) state formation, and subsequently (amplified by Christian

ideology) in modern European state-making and colonizing practices, eventuating in

  19  

the now hegemonic form of “sovereign” states constituting Disciplinary IR. In short,

the (contingent and contested) normalization of heteropatriarchal principles has

historically been key to securing “appropriate” social reproduction and reliable

transmission of property and citizenship claims enabling intergenerational continuity

of state formations.

I have recently summarized this genealogy of “sex,” “the family,” and state

formation (Peterson, 2014a) and earlier considered the intentional and unintentional

queering of states/nations (Peterson, 2013). I focus here on “the intimate” of

sex/affective relations, marriage, kinship, and family/household formations;1 first, to

reveal how they are being queered (troubled, made strange, destabilized) by

intertwined demographic, technological, socio-cultural and economic developments;

and second, to argue that these shifting dynamics matter pervasively for the

theory/practice of Disciplinary IR. After surveying an array of familial fluidities, I

situate them in relation to between-nation inequalities and transnational migrations,

and consider how global householding queers the international.

The Fecundity of an Unfamiliar – Family – Lens

It is normal for IR and Global Political Economy (GPE) scholars to ignore the

family domain of affective and sexualized relations, social reproduction, and resource

pooling. This is a mistake, and effectively masks the state’s enduring interest in who

counts as family and how families are constituted. Historically, state-making

established heteropatriarchal family/households as foundational socio-economic

                                                                                                               1In this essay I reference family/household, or either term separately, to variously signify sexual/affective/kin-based relations and resource pooling activities to secure the well-being and continuity of the (not necessarily co-resident or kin-based) collective unit (Peterson 2010a; also Smith and Wallerstein 1992; Douglass 2006).

  20  

units: they facilitated accumulation processes and centralized control more generally,

while marriage and family law regulated sexual relations, organized social

reproduction, and codified transmission of property and citizenship claims. Rarely

noted in IR, these heteropatriarchal premises—now normative for most

people/nations—have the effect of (re)producing inequalities not only of sex/gender

and sexuality but also class, ethnicity/race, and nationality (Stevens, 1999, 2010;

Peterson, 2013, 2014a, 2014b). How practices of social reproduction and political

economy operate within households is decisive for the markets and politics of states,

and by extension, the “international order.” Renown for intense emotional

investments (sex/affective relations, intimate care-giving), households are also sites of

economic decision-making (who does what work, how resources are pooled,

distributed and invested) as well as nonmarket and market economic production

(human capital, domestic services, income generation).2 A family optic reveals

complex decision making, diverse motives, life cycle transitions, and generational

dis/continuities; it also invites attention to how family options and constraints shape

and are shaped by state-based policies and the marketized economy of the global.

Queering the family thus raises a host of worldly questions.

Shifting Dynamics and Family Fluidities

Multiple, entwined developments have shaped the instability, inconsistencies,

and hence fluidity of “family matters” today. Demographic trends present a complex,

uneven picture. In richer countries, fertility rates and household size decrease while

total population and number of households increase (Buzar, Ogden and Hall, 2005).

                                                                                                               2Household production is variously estimated to equal one-half or even eighty percent of world economic activity (Safri and Graham 2010, 104, 111).

  21  

In poorer countries, we more often see population growth, yet household type

diversifies worldwide as people respond to shifting demographic, economic and

environmental conditions, internal and external migrations, and in some areas,

reconfigurations of “family life” due to devastating disease, long-lasting conflicts, and

“natural” disasters.

In the global North, the “privacy” of intimate relations is queered as fertility

concerns, genetic screening, and biotechnologies constitute an expanding terrain of

“family” issues. Childbearing in conventional mode is made strange by in vitro

fertilization, sperm banks, ovum donors, and surrogate gestation. Biotechnologies

afford unprecedented options and reproductive assistance is increasingly sought by

single women, heterosexual couples, and same-sex partners. These practices pose

queer questions regarding who the “real” parents are and how kinship is figured,

while also creating complex sociopsychological and legal situations. Adoption—

increasingly transnational—offers an alternative route, with its own cross-

ethnic/racial, cultural, and juridical challenges.

Social-cultural and economic trends visibly disturb heteronormative

arrangements, as we witness growing percentages of one-person households and

single-parenting practices, increased frequency and duration of cohabitation outside

of marriage, and later age marrying and childbearing.3 Gender identities, dynamics,

and household arrangements are made strange by same-sex couples, breadwinning

wives, high divorce rates, second-marriage couples, dual-career marriages, and

commuter relationships. Deteriorating economic conditions shape how resources are

concentrated and who cares for whom, as we see with adult children remaining longer

                                                                                                               3For example, in 2012 more than one-third of all US households were ‘non-family’ (single-person or no related family members).

  22  

“at home” and middle-aged daughters/sons assuming long-term care of aging parents.

Now well documented, a crisis of social reproduction especially affects the world’s

poorest households, while linking them—often directly—to household changes

elsewhere (LeBaron, 2010; Rai et al., 2014). This is exemplified in global circuits of

care: households in the global North (where female employment is high and aging

populations increase health- and elder-care needs) often seek caregivers from the

global South (where unemployment and limited resources spur migration), which

reconfigures household members and resource pooling arrangements in both—and

sometimes multiple—locations (Beneria, 2008; Peterson, 2012).

“Global householding” research illuminates the transnational dynamics of

these queer family matters (Douglass, 2006, 2010; Peterson, 2010a). The term

“householding” underscores how—throughout the world—“creating and sustaining a

household is a continuous process of social reproduction that covers all life-cycle

stages and extends beyond the family” (Douglass, 2006, 421). Global householding

references the many ways in which these processes (pursuing marriage/partnership,

earning income, managing daily life, securing childcare, eldercare, healthcare and

education, acquiring domestic “help,” relocating for retirement) occur across national

boundaries. The scale and reach of these transnational processes—involving as much

as one-sixth of the world’s population—signals their global significance.4 And, “in

                                                                                                               4Using different calculations, Douglass (2010) and Saffra and Graham (2010, 108-109) reach a similar estimate.

  23  

the aggregate, the global household produces and distributes a large quantum of social

wealth...and thus participates in international production, finance and trade, in

addition to the coordination of migration” (Safri and Graham, 2010, 100).

In sum, individuals increasingly move through non-normative arrangements

with greater frequency and intensity throughout their life course. These escalating

practices are literally “life changing”: they alter age and gender roles, divisions of

labor, and structures of responsibility; they multiply and relocate households and re-

schedule the pace of life phases; and they reveal the instability of heteropatriarchal

family/kinship relations, thus troubling the certainties of inheritance. This queered

drama is increasingly global; in part because social imaginaries respect no boundaries,

but primarily due to processes that link households, markets, and states within a

global frame.

Global Inequalities Beget (Queer) Global Householding

Since the 1980s, between-nation income gaps have become both more extreme

and more predictive of one’s lifetime well-being (Milanovic, 2012). While these stark

inequalities and the immigration pressures they induce are global political concerns,

migration itself is marked by shifting dynamics that warrant foundational

rethinking—arguably a queering—of conventional narratives (Portes and DeWind,

2007; Messkoub, 2009).

Information and communication technologies have pervasive effects—for

making new and sustaining old networks, increasing the number of non-migrants

affected by migration, and facilitating remittance flows that affect GPE. Subjective

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

  24  

experience also shifts: migrants report more ease living in and culturally identifying

with more than one nation—which may be expressed in political activism at, or

affecting, multiple sites. Cultural hybridities and plural allegiances variously trouble

nationally bound identity and citizenship claims. Also troubled are conventional

mechanisms of managing im/migration: making and implementing policy,

securitizing borders, processing violators, and “handling” conflicts spurred by anti-

immigrant animosities. In short, networking dynamics and globalizing processes

amplify the implications of—and expand the numbers of those who have an interest in

or are affected by—migration and its politics. Hence, migration matters to IR and

GPE. And migration is a family matter.

This connection is missed by IR and GPE scholars who ignore households and

how their shifting (fluid, non-normative) realities affect international production,

in/securities, and migration strategies (Peterson, 2010b). Virtually all migrants

strategize and act not as lone individuals but in relation to their participation in

family/households, and their decision making reflects not only economic concerns but

also, for example, changes in sexual relations and gender roles, altered demographics

and living arrangements, new reproductive technologies and eldercare options, and

the complex unfolding of these in dynamic, increasingly global contexts.

In short, a queering of IR and GPE occurs as family matters are effectively

“scaled up” by transnational migration. While context will always shape how

particular households are queered, the scale and significance of transnational

migration—as a family-based strategy with global effects—reveals how fluidities at

any level shape other levels. In this sense, queering the family/intimate queers the

international. At the same time, queering the family reveals how heteropatriarchal

norms—codified in marriage and family laws determining inheritance of property and

  25  

citizenship claims—are key to the production of structural inequalities, including

those that spur transnational migration (Stevens, 1999, 2010). Consider that

citizenship rules simultaneously establish the in/exclusions of membership and, in

effect, operationalize the in/exclusions of state/nation boundaries. The troubling issue

here is that the state’s use of (birthright, inherited) citizenship claims to control cross-

border mobility of individuals structurally precludes the reduction of inequalities that

labor migration would actualize; hence the intense immigration pressure (Milanovic,

2012). In these senses, queering the family/kinship rules that constitute birthright

citizenship ultimately queers both the inherited basis of national in/exclusions and the

bounding of states/nations themselves. And without state/nation boundaries, w(h)ither

IR?

  26  

QUEERING THE “TERRITORIAL PEACE”? QUEER THEORY CONVERSING WITH MAINSTREAM IR1

Laura Sjoberg With others in this forum, I see queer theorizing as having multiple logics—

both within each approach to queer theorizing and across queer approaches (see

Weber, this volume). In this view, queer is unsettleable, intersectional, uncaging,

multiple (and multiplied), both/and (e.g., Weber, 1999), and engaged in projects of

(the productivity of) failure and maybe even destruction (e.g., Halberstam, 2011;

Edelman, 2004). Many instantiations of queer might (appropriately) reject

conversations with “mainstream” IR. I contend that queer theorizing can be fruitfully

applied, not only as rejection and/or transformation, but in conversation with the

research agendas of “mainstream” IR (e.g., Sjoberg, 2013, 2012). Along these lines,

this piece uses a brief example of engaging the logics of the materiality of sex in

Judith Butler’s (1993) Bodies that Matter with the “mainstream” IR research agenda

addressing the “territorial peace” (Gibler 2007; 2012; Gibler and Tir, 2010; Gibler

and Braithwaite, 2013). Rather than being representative or totalizing, this

engagement is meant to pair one queer theory work with one IR research endeavor to

suggest the potential productivity of such engagements.

The Territorial Peace

Gibler’s (2007, 509) work on the “territorial peace” is an intervention in the

Democratic Peace literature that suggests “joint democracy is actually an instrumental

variable that represents the absence of territorial issues in particular dyads, especially

neighbors.” Gibler (2007, 509) contends “democracy and peace might both be

                                                                                                               1 This contribution was engaged by the ISR editorial team prior the appointment of Laura Sjoberg as an Associate Editor of the journal.

  27  

symptoms—not causes—of the removal of territorial issues between neighbors” (e.g.,

Vasquez and Gibler 2001). Accordingly, Gibler (2007, 516) argues that states with

stable borders are more likely to become democracies, operationalizing border

stability as a product of whether a part of a state’s territory is at risk of capture by its

neighbors (and whether that state has the military capability to defend against any

territorial challenges, or pose a similar threat to its neighbors). Suggesting that “focal

points” for coordination of boundaries in “natural” geographic landmarks stabilize

borders, Gibler (2007, 518, 520) focuses on land borders not clearly demarcated in

“nature” as prone to instability. Using empirical data from 1946 to 1999, Gibler

(2007, 529, 512) asserts that “the democratic peace is, in fact, a stable border peace”

since “democracies have avoided war with one another because of lack of territorial

issues.”

Bodies that Matter

In Bodies that Matter, Butler (1993, xi) looks to understand how to “link the

materiality of sex to the performativity of gender.” In so doing, she describes sex as

“a regulatory ideal whose materialization is forced” (Butler, 1993, xii). This “forcing”

is a “regime of heterosexuality” which “circumscribes the materiality of sex” (Butler,

1993, xxii). In other words, the discursive norm of heterosexuality makes sex

differences and straightness seem “natural” and “natural” does not exist. In this view,

“it is no longer possible to take anatomy as a stable referent” and “the very contours

of the body are sites that vacillate between the psychic and the material” (Butler,

1993, 35, 36). Butler (1993, 58, 71) both critiques the assumption that sex and

sexuality are “natural” and attempts to divorce them from anything material.

  28  

Arguing that “to proscribe an exclusive identification for a multiply

constituted subject, as every subject is, is to enforce a reduction and paralysis,” Butler

(1993, 78, 83) characterizes the production of gendered identity as the “simultaneous

production and subjugation of subjects.” In this account, “hegemonic heterosexuality

is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealization” (Butler, 1993,

85). In other words, assigning one gender or sexual identity to any person is an act of

violence towards that person as well as towards gendered and sexualized identities. It

creates “the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior,

authoritative set of practices” which both naturalize and reify (Butler, 1993, 172).

Yet, as Butler (1993, 176) contends, denaturalization is not the easy answer it

appears to be—because “heterosexuality can augment its hegemony through its

denaturalization, as when we see denaturalizing parodies that reidealize heterosexual

norms without calling them into question.” This “resignification of norms” is “thus a

function of their inefficacy”—an inefficacy that can only be corrected by “inhabiting

the practices of its rearticulation,” which can be done by recognizing the ambivalence,

and indeed “drag” of not only homosexuality but gender generally (Butler, 1993, 181,

85). In other words, rejecting the materiality of sex and sexuality is as limiting as

refusing to recognize its contingency.

An Engagement?

As Butler (1993, 172) argues, “the term ‘queer’ emerges as an interpolation

that raises the question of the status of force and opposition, of stability and

vulnerability.” The first contribution that (Butler’s) queer theorizing might have for

the “territorial peace” could be complicating the concept and operationalization of

stable borders. Gibler carefully considers ways to define border (in)stability to avoid

implicating other variables of interest, but Butler’s analysis suggests that Gibler’s

  29  

account pays inadequate attention to borders’ foundational myths and perpetual

unsettledness. Feminist and queer theorists (e.g., Peterson, 1999; Weber, 1998a, 1999)

have seen borders as gendered and sexualized constructions, but reading Butler into

Gibler’s work suggests a fruitful analysis of state sovereignty (and therefore territorial

settledness) as what Butler characterizes as “hegemonic heterosexuality.” If

sovereignty is, in Butler’s terms, a “regulatory ideal,” the materialization of which is

circumscribed by a discursive regime naturalizing statehood, then “it is no longer

possible” to see borders “as a stable referent”—no border is stable, because borders

are conceptually, psychically, and materially unstable. They “vacillate” between “the

psychic and the material” and “cannot be stabilized” (Butler, 1993, 150).

The regulatory idea of the stable border reifies and is reified by the assumption

of compulsory heterosexuality that often defines families, birthrights, and

citizenships. Therefore, it is also fruitful to see the borders purported to delineate

territory as literal regimes of heterosexuality. From early modern European borders

moving with the marriages of royals to present-day legal migration structures being

constructed in part around heterosexual marriage, borders have always been, and

remain, violently entangled with (heterosexual) sexual norms. Belonging within (or

being denied belonging within) borders is often linked to sexual lineage, as are the

layouts of borders themselves—bounded territory (in Butler’s terms) circumscribes

and is circumscribed by the materiality of sex.

Yet, Gibler (2012) still finds the robust result that “territorially settled” states

are more likely both to become democracies and to resist initiating. This seems true

even over the violent enforcement of (heterosexualized) borders. How? A third

engagement with Butler’s theorizing suggests that the “territorial peace” could be

itself a complicated product of signification and resignification. State sovereignty

  30  

(and the accompanying privileging of borders) is normatively naturalized in global

politics, reified even through strategies of denaturalization. Even arguments about

“artificial states” (Alesina, Easterly, and Matuszeski, 2011), “unnatural borders,”

(Knight 2012), and “common colonial history” creating border instability appear to

denaturalize the idea of borders while actually reifying the notion that “real” states,

“natural” borders, and “stable” territories exist (Weber 1995). Apparently “settled”

borders, then, not only exist, but reify and reproduce themselves, a “constant and

repeated effort to imitate …[their] own idealization,” in which work like Gibler’s is

complicit. This suggests an account of the “territorial peace” in which regimes of

heteronormativity and the regulatory ideals of borders reinforce each other such that

borders and heteronormative behavior are resignified.

Yet, following Butler, denaturalization is not an easy answer either, given that

denaturalization of given borders can reify the naturalization borders generally.

Recognizing the layers of “drag” in current borders specifically and the concept of

stable state borders generally might be a productive way to acknowledge this

contradiction. This cannot be accomplished within Gibler’s two-dimensional

operationalization of borders—more complexity would need to be included in both

definition and quantification.

So What?

“Mainstream” IR theorists (e.g., Desch, 1998) have argued that critical theory has

limited utility if it provides a more complicated explanation for a result a simpler

theory could predict. Gibler’s theory is simpler than my account, and my alternative

account is, in positivist terms, unprovable with available (and perhaps even attainable)

data. I suggest, though, using these arguments to halt the engagement is intellectually

and politically problematic.

  31  

This is not least because Butler’s account of performances of gender and

sexuality, applied to performances of “settled” borders, suggests that Gibler’s notion

of the benefits of territorial settledness is limited. Butler argues that proscribing

stability and “an exclusive identification” for subjects which are “as every subject is”

multiply constituted is both practically and normatively problematic, the

“simultaneous production and subjugation of (heterosexual) subjects.” As distinct

from feminist analysis of the role of “stabilized” gender identities on the production

of subjects (e.g., Tickner, 1992) and poststructuralist analysis on the inherent

instability of the concept of sovereignty (Ashley, 1984; Walker, 1983), Butler’s

contribution suggests that the (heteronormative) labeling and valorizing of “stable”

borders, whether or not it contributes to a decrease in military conflict among states,

functions to “enforce a reduction and paralysis” on the multiply constituted identities

within that (actually unsettled) territory, simultaneously producing the sovereign state

and subjugating those produced within it (see, e.g., Weber, 1998a). Butler’s work

suggests that it is possible that both the fantasy of territorial stability and Gibler’s

rearticulation of it are themselves acts of regulatory, heterosexist violence.

A fifth insight that reading Butler onto the “territorial peace” provides is that it

is not only state sovereignty that Gibler’s approach naturalizes and reifies, but also the

democratic peace thesis that Gibler critiques from within. While proposing a different

causal mechanism for the democratic peace result, Gibler’s work might be seen

through Butler’s lenses to enact a (always yet never queer) “resignification of norms”

of the democratic peace, given that it does not question the normative value or

empirical utility to democracy, either generally or as a part of efforts to mitigate

conflict among states. In this way, Gibler’s work might be described in Butler’s terms

as a “denaturalizing parody” of the democratic peace which “reidealizes” its norms

  32  

“without calling them into question.” Queer theorists have suggested that such

resignification provides affirmation of existing norms masquerading as critique,

injuring the subject more than the previous regulatory regime (see argument in

Halberstam, 2011, about failure). Rather than critiquing the fetishization of

democracy, then, the “territorial peace” might reify it.

Perhaps this short engagement functions to suggest the potential productivity

of (always fraught) conversations between “mainstream” IR research and queer

theory. While not all of the insights derived from Bodies that Matter for The

Territorial Peace are unique to queer theorizing, and Bodies that Matter is a small

subset of queer theorizing, this brief engagement suggests that both queer

methodological lenses and the substance of queer theorizing could be useful

interventions in mainstream IR. To that end, the point of this engagement has not

been to condemn Gibler’s “territorial peace” or valorize Butler’s notions of the

performance of the materiality of sex and the regulation of sexuality. Instead, it is to

suggest that the logics of queer theorizing when inserted into the research programs

of “mainstream” IR produce not only recognition of ambivalence, pretension, and

“drag” in IR theory, but also a hybrid, plural group of insights that could be fruitful

for both approaches. Here, the logic of the materiality of sex in Bodies that Matter can

identify vagueness, ambivalence, and even alternate causal connections within the

“territorial peace” research program. Engaging “territorial peace” research with

Butler’s framework suggests both macrotheoretical problems with the work and more

micro-level changes to variable operationalizations—so “territorial peace” researchers

reading Butler might make the research better both on its own terms and as it

resonates with queer logics in IR research. I recognize there is a distinct possibility

that this brief discussion will not transform the “territorial peace” research program. If

  33  

it does not, there remain benefits to discursive intervention (Hamati-Ataya 2012). If it

does attract a two-way engagement, its results could be creative and productive for

both approaches. Perhaps this is what Butler meant by seeking to engage in

“inhabiting the practices of …rearticulation.” If not, perhaps it could be.

 

  34  

QUEER THEORY AND THE “PROPER OBJECTS” OF IR Lauren Wilcox

Projects of queering IR are not about making IR queer as if it weren’t already; but

they are about revealing how sexualities, affiliations, and affects are produced and

regulated with existing practices of IR and our underlying conceptual frameworks for

understanding IR. Queer IR, then, cannot be subsumed within the topic of “sexuality”

as if sexuality were another overlooked variable akin to the debate over the “gender

variable” (Weber 1998b; on “gender variable” Hooper 1999, Carver, Cochran and

Squires 1998, Jones 1996). While queer theory is rooted in the political struggles for

recognition, rights, and the basic survival of “queer” people, “queer” is also not (only)

an umbrella term for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, and genderqueer

people, as the political commitments the term “queer” represents are rooted in a sense

of the insufficiency and inherent conservatism of such identity labels per se.

Furthermore, queering IR is not necessarily limited to theorizing sexual

identities/identifications. Not only does this move exclude sexuality from feminism or

“gender studies,” making it the “proper object” of queer studies, but this move also

performs an exclusion of the sort that the term “queer” was envisioned to avoid

(Butler, 1994; Sedgwick, 1990). Because of the very instability of the term “queer,”

once (and still in some quarters) a slur, the “queer” of queer theory is necessarily an

interpellation that is open-ended toward constant self-critique and different political

projects (as Weber notes in this forum). As Judith Butler writes in an influential

essay, “if the term ‘queer’ is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of

departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to

remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only

  35  

redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and

expanding political purposes” (1993, 228).

While queer theorists have demonstrated how fundamental concepts and

institutions in IR such as the state and identity are based on assumptions of

heterosexual, reproductive sex,8 whether or not such interventions take place in the

disciplinary spaces of IR, it is within the spirit of Butler’s critique of the “proper

objects” of queer theory that the rest of this piece describes two related but distinct

modes in which IR is being “queered,” and suggest further frameworks for exploring

the possibilities of “queering IR”. First, queer theorists have insisted that the

hierarchical categories of masculine/feminine and gendered dichotomies are not

absolute and thus IR has always been “queer”; and second, “queering” international

politics has also meant questioning the stability of sexuality as a category in relation

to shifting normative categories related to neoliberalism, the war on terror, and other

contemporary global forces.

IR as Always Already Queer

An important feature of “queer IR,” whether or not it is written in the disciplinary

spaces of IR, is that the object of study is not necessarily the identities or individual

sexual practices of particular individuals. Queer IR challenges heteronormative

assumptions in IR theory by arguing that certain actors in global politics can be read

as queer; in so doing, such work challenges the dichotomization of masculine and

                                                                                                               8 Works that denaturalize sexual difference and heteronormativity in the institutions and ideologies of the nation-state include Duggan 1994, Berlant 1997, Stevens 1999, Peterson 1999, 2013, 2014 and this forum, Canaday 2011; other central concepts in IR that have been subjected to queer critiques include foreign policy (Weber 1999), diasporas (Gopinath 2005), settler-colonialism (Smith 2010) and the civilian/combatant distinction (Kinsella 2011).

  36  

feminine, straight and gay. This reading of international politics as “queer” is echoed

in Jasbir Puar’s provocative work of “queer assemblages” which posits queerness in

the ability of a terrorist, for example, to defy binary classifications and embrace

paradoxes in relation to categories of gender and sexuality (Puar, 2007; Puar & Rai,

2002). In keeping with queer theory’s critique of sexuality as a stable identity, these

works emphasize identifications rather than identities as shifting, fluid, and

sometimes contradictory.

Judith Butler’s theory of performativity conceptualizes “gender” as a

performance of imitation and parody: gender and sexuality are performances that do

not reflect an underlying reality, but materialize reality in ways always unstable and

subject to multiple interpretations (Butler 1990, Weber 1998a, Sjoberg, this forum).

This approach is exemplified in Cynthia Weber’s reading of “post-phallic” US foreign

policy in the Caribbean, in which the US never really held the phallus in the first

place (1999). While her first reading traces the tensions and inconsistencies in the

symbolic politics of sexuality and gender, her second reading argues that neither

“masculine” or “feminine,” nor “gay” or “straight,” are subject positions that can ever

be fully occupied—they are always “troubled.” Weber also argues that US as victim

of attack and al-Qaeda as attacker cannot be read as easily as feminized victim and

racialized, hypermasculine aggressor. Rather, the sexual/symbolic politics of al-Qaeda

are far more complicated: al-Qaeda can be read as feminine in terms of its

representation as fluid and unlocatable, but its gender is also changeable as in the

hypermasculinity of evil in the figures of the airline hijackers. Al-Qaeda’s sexuality is

also ambiguous: while its ideology is of strict heterosexuality in pursuit of a violent

homosociality, its global presence makes it open to foreign flows that might penetrate

it as well. The America that was under attack on September 11, 2001 can be read not

  37  

only as feminized homeland, but also the masculine site of the projection of military

power (the Pentagon) and World Trade center as site of neoliberal globalization that is

the morally neutral ground for the adjudication of moral claims. Weber refers to this

dual symbolic gender and sexuality as “both/and” and describes it is “queer” in

contrast to the “either/or” logic of sexual difference (Weber 2002, 143, and also the

introduction to this forum). Belkin (2012) performs a similar theoretical move,

arguing that US hegemonic military masculinity is not premised upon exclusion and

distancing from the feminine and queer, as theorists of hegemonic masculinity have

argued. Rather, military masculinity often entails an embrace of these very qualities.

In his study of sexuality at US military academies, Belkin argues based on the

experience of cadets that being sexually penetrated is not necessarily a feminizing act,

but can also be a manly act of endurance, while being forced to penetrate can also be

understood as a loss of control and masculinity.

Shifting Meanings of Queer

Another understanding of what it means to “queer” International Relations is found in

scholarship that stresses the shifting location of the “queer” subject, noting that

“queer” subjects often occupy ambiguous places in societies, rather than purely

excluded or stigmatized. Developments such as the US Supreme court ruling laws

against “sodomy” unconstitutional, the spread of legal same-sex marriage in many US

states, European countries and elsewhere, and the shift of the dominant LGBT agenda

from a radical critique of norms of sexuality, family, and kinship to the emphasis on

inclusion and recognition in state institutions of marriage and the military (which has

led to the ambivalences describes by Lind in this forum) has also given rise to a

  38  

critique of “queer liberalism” (Eng, 2010). “Queer liberalism” refers to the inclusion

of queer subjects as economic subjects and subjects of rights before the law, abetting

the erasure of racial difference and as constituting a public of individualism and

meritocracy, a image of the subject that, as feminists (and Marxists) have taught,

takes for granted the gender and sexual hierarchies of the private sphere. Queer

theorists have argued that the inclusion of sexuality as a “private” matter leaves the

norms and hierarchies of gender and sexuality beyond political contestation, and has

played on constructions of monstrous corporealities and sexualities in the production

of racialized others. One such critique is Puar’s “homonationalism” thesis, which

critiques the “collusion of homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated

both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects

themselves” (Puar, 2007, p. 39). Queer theorists have also coined the phrase

“pinkwashing” as an articulation of homonationalism to describe the co-option of

white gay people by anti-immigrant and especially anti-Muslim forces in North

America, Western Europe, and Israel (Puar 2007, Schulman 2012, Lind, this forum)

and critiqued the ways this reproduces discourses of civilization/barbarism. Noting

that the figure of “queer” is no longer, if it ever was, solely defined by stigmatization

and exclusion, queer theorists of “murderous inclusions” that embody the “both/and”

logic of queer theory, in which queer figures can be both included and excluded, can

be both rescued and disposable (Haraitaworn, Kuntsman and Posoco 2012, 2014).

In light of such complicated and shifting dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, and

nationality, the figure of “the queer” (or “the queer theorist,” for that matter) cannot

be taken for granted as an oppositional figure in relation to hegemonic regimes of the

state, neoliberalism, or militarism. Theorizing “queer” as an event or a contingent

assemblage highlights the salience of the turn to affect, or the complex emotions and

  39  

attachments through which subjects and alignments are brought into being, which has

characterized much of the last decade or so in queer and critical theory writ large.

Works such as Ahmed (2004) and others that grew out of queer theorizing9 are

engaged with the ways in which emotional, affective investments are shaped by, and

inform, public policy and questions of identity, belonging in ways that speak to the

burgeoning literature in IR on emotion (Fierke 2013, Ross 2013, Crawford 2000). In

keeping the term “queer” open to its own exclusions, the turn to “affect” builds upon

work on the materialization of bodies, publics, and the relations between subjects and

norms that queer theory has emphasized into a scholarly and political agenda that

challenges contemporary “affective economies” (Ahmed 2004a) and the norms that

bring them into being through the formation of sexualities and racializations.

The turn to affect is also a critique of certain forms of queer theorizing, in which

“queer” is understood as “freedom from norms” as a kind of regulatory ideal that

demarcates “proper” queers and excludes other, such as those who assimilate to

various heterosexual norms of life as a matter of survival (Ahmed 2004b). Such a

model of queer politics ultimately reproduces liberal ideals of individual freedom and

choice, and reproduces the neoliberal fetish for mobility and flexibility of subjects,

excluding certain bodies and certain forms of attachments (Puar 2007, 22). Sexuality,

understood as a marker of a set of dynamics of (de)humanization and

hypervisualization of certain racialized, classed gendered bodies (as in Amar 2013 or

gestured to the ambivalences over queer visibility theorized by Lind in this forum)

draws our attention to “sexuality” as regimes of desire, danger, and attachments that

are not a priori reducible to orientations and identity, and yet nonetheless shape our

political conditions of possibility. One such example of this method of queering is

                                                                                                               9 Key texts in the ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences that expressly engage with issues of queerness include (Cvetkovich 2003; Clough 2007; Eng 2010; Berlant 2011)

  40  

Agathangelou, Bassichis and Spira’s (2008) critique of violent consequences of

neoliberal privatization and the incarceration and killing of racialized bodies, which

traces the “circulation and mobilization of feelings of desire, pleasure, fear and

repulsion utilized to all of us into the fold of the state—the various ways in which we

become invested emotionally, libidinally, and erotically in global capitalism’s mirages

of safety and inclusion” (Agathangelou, Bassichis, & Spira, 2008, p. 122). Another

example is Butler’s (2009) and Puar’s (2007) respective critiques of representations of

the “sexual abuse” scandal at Abu Ghraib as a statement about Arab or Muslim sexual

conservatism and backwardness in opposition to supposedly liberated US sexuality.

Queer as “assemblage” calls attention both to the formation of a “terrorist”

subject as queer, as well as a method of being “attuned to movements, intensities,

emotions, energies, affectivities and textures as they inhabit events, spatialities and

corporealities” (Puar 2007, 215). Puar’s appropriation of the Deleuzian term

“assemblage” for her invocation of “queer assemblages” (2007) is put into productive

tension with models of intersectionality which presume that the constituent elements

in identity models such as gender, class, race, and sexuality can be disassembled.

Such methods seek to shed light upon the “queerness” already present in the world in

terms of exclusions/inclusions, brutalities and differing regimes of living and dying

(Haritaworn, Kuntsman and Posocco 2014), while at the same time also seeking to

broaden queer analyses to include an ongoing engagement with shifting

identifications, desires, affects, and emotions that shape global politics. Queering IR

thus becomes a necessarily open-ended critique of the contingent formations and

alignments that set the terms of illegitimate or “unlivable” lives (Butler 2004), as well

as a search for the possibilities of life for bodies who fail to inhabit normative

conceptions of “the human.”

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  42  

THINKING ABOUT QUEER IR’S ALLIES

Meghana Nayak

What does it mean to be an ally to not only communities mobilizing for justice

but also to a field of study/scholars? I contend that this question is vital and pivotal as

we try to grapple with Queer International Relations (IR)/Global Queer Studies’

relationship with the IR discipline. In the context of academic institutions and

practices, I see “allies” as those who may not regularly cite, rely upon, study, teach, or

participate in a particular field of studies but are interested and invested in the

development and endurance of that scholarship. But what is done to and with queer IR

by allies? Are ally politics aiming to deconstruct, dismantle, and radically transform

the very systems of which they are beneficiaries? Or are allies leaving power

relationships intact because they are actually uneasy with, dismissive of, or unclear

about queer IR theorizing?

Scholars working in queer studies, critical race studies, or on allegedly

“peripheral” topics have increasingly questioned the politics of their so-called allies,

among students, faculty, administration, and the profession as a whole (Ahmed, 2012;

Carver, 2009; Gutierrez y Muhs, et. al. 2012). Perhaps, for some, being an ally means

establishing queer-friendly credentials, so they might support the work of a scholar

who does Queer IR or devote a week of attention in their IR class to Global Queer

Studies to illustrate the “diversity” of IR theories. Or, they might enfold queer IR

insights within slightly “safer” research agendas, such as “human rights.” But how far

are they willing to go in creating space for Queer IR to challenge how IR is done, or

how marginalized scholars are treated as different, anomalies, incompetent?

Anecdotal evidence reveals that scholars doing Queer IR, like other

marginalized academics, face troubling encounters on blogs and Facebook pages, in

  43  

conferences, job search committees, tenure and promotion committees, and reviews of

journal articles and manuscripts. These interactions include thinly veiled homophobia

or transphobia, scornful dismissal of queer studies as “not rigorous enough” or “not

legitimate,” and attempts to make deviant and intolerable those doing Queer IR

(Weber, 2014b). But “well meaning” self-proclaimed allies in fields such as Feminist

IR, Global Politics, or Postcolonial IR may also participate in acts of exclusion and

dismissal, even as these very scholars may find their allies, including in queer studies,

“don’t get it.” In interrogating resistance by not only those adamantly opposed to but

also alleged/potential allies of Queer IR, I have been contemplating Queer IR’s

promise (and threat) of revealing the instability of IR as a discipline. I contend that it

is not just in the mainstream-alternative approaches debate but also in the acts of

alleged solidarity and support that we see how tenuously IR operates. My hope is that

we do a better job in interrogating ally politics among and between various

communities of scholars.

In my classrooms, I have unsurprisingly discovered that many of my students

hold a perception that there is a difference between international LGBTQ activism

and Queer IR theory. The latter, they claim, is “elitist” and inaccessible. Many queer

or allied students see themselves and their struggles as intimately connected with

queerness, circumscribed as identity politics or the implementation of rights for

“sexual minorities.” When we discuss examples of gay rights movements or trans-

rights movements around the world, they respond favorably, understanding such

attempts for social justice within a human-rights framework of perpetrator/victim. But

when I assign readings that I think of as Queer IR/Global Studies, regarding

homonationalism (Puar, 2005, 2007), postcolonial and global anti-racist engagement

with queerness (Hawley, 2001), and heteronormative and cis-normative ontologies

  44  

underlying global politics and statecraft (Cohn, 1987; Weber, 1994a, 1994b, 1998,

1999, 2002, 2014a; Richter-Montpetit, 2007; Agathangelou et al., 2008; Canaday,

2009; Rao, 2012; Bulmer, 2013; Sjoberg, this volume), many (not all) students see the

work, or at least parts of it, as divisive, inaccessible, and even “dangerous” for the

“real struggles” of queer communities.

It is not uncommon that students may cling to a perceived praxis/theory

divide. I see it when I teach feminist theory and try to push past discussions on sexual

violence prevention or reproductive rights to also include postcolonial or black

feminist theory. I see it when I teach human rights and try to move the conversation

beyond successful international criminal legal cases to questioning the very premises

of human rights discourses. A significant number of students are indeed willing to sit

with the discomfort of acting towards justice while simultaneously questioning and

challenging what motivates and counts as “action” and “justice.”

However, the students who show resistance want to see IR as a field with

terminology, jargon, and “skills” to master so that they can “do something” in the real

world to protect people from persecution and harm. Anything else seems too negative,

too threatening to their relationship to the IR discipline, which to them holds the

promise of allowing them to “understand” global politics and to become career

professionals in changing the world. The same students who might excitedly read

Feminist IR scholarship or human rights work on sexual minorities, balk or seem

taken aback when I mention Queer IR or Queer Global Studies, thinking that this

scholarship belongs in some strange, otherworldly “theory” universe. Yet, they would

call themselves allies, or part of the “movement” for “LGBTQ rights.”

After semester-long encouragement of students to recognize their precarious

relationship with Queer IR, they start to see as political rather than as mere preference

  45  

their simultaneous disengagement with queer IR and excitement about “international

LGBTQ activism.” What, indeed, my students’ trouble with Queer IR reveals is the

presumption that IR as a discipline holds the key to understanding the world

(singular), “out there.” Thus, students start to understand that to engage with theory is

to explore the problematic premise that a college education will equip students with a

set of tools and skills to identify and solve problems in the world. So, queer theory’s

critical perspectives create space to ask how and why we name and identify with

issues of justice. Accordingly, being an ally is a complex political project, as what

might look like solidarity is actually tenuous, problematic, or incomplete because of

the kinds of power relationships we uncover through a critical, queer theory lens. The

students learn furthermore to unravel IR as an objective field of study and to see it as

a discipline. And thus the struggles they experience are instructive for articulating

what professional academics might be experiencing as well.

One of the most useful pedagogical tools at my disposal is Agathangelou and

Ling’s “House of IR” metaphor (2004; see also Nayak and Selbin, 2010).

Agathangelou and Ling describe IR as a “colonial household” (2004: 21), in which

exists a heteronormative family maintaining control and order, with “bad” children

living upstairs, perhaps punished for their naughty ways, “servants” living downstairs

providing labor, and barbarians and the like living outside. The “family” includes

“father realism,” “mother liberalism,” and the “caretaking” daughters, neoliberalism,

liberal feminism, and standpoint feminism. The “rebel sons” (such as Marxism,

postmodern IR, and pragmatic/liberal constructivism) and the “fallen daughters”

(postmodern feminism and queer studies) plan their devious disruptions of mother and

father’s rule from upstairs. Downstairs (in what I imagine are the “servants’

quarters”), area studies and comparative politics experts, Asian capitalist countries,

  46  

and peripheral and transitional economies provide the “knowledge” that confirms and

legitimizes the family’s rule. Finally, “outside” of the house are Orientalism, Al

Qaeda, postcolonial IR, and worldism.

While it is beyond the scope of this article to examine and engage with this

house metaphor, I find it useful in the classroom, conversations with my peers, and

my scholarship to consider that some subfields of IR can unsettle the entire

“household.” The house itself is a construction, an edifice that seems sturdy,

unquestionable, hetero- and cis-normative, with clear boundaries (different floors and

inside/outside) but is actually on shaky ground. We see the “shakiness” when

studying global politics. What we learn from the other pieces in this volume and

Queer IR studies is that states attempt to act “queer-friendly” but do so without

recognizing that the state itself is queer. By this I mean that the state has no settled,

“natural” gendered and sexualized identity (straight, cis-gender, masculine) precisely

because the state must constantly shift, anticipate, and revise how its gender and

sexuality appears. Just as, per Judith Butler, sex, sexuality, and gender are in a

“traumatic deadlock [such that] every performative formation is nothing but an

endeavor to patch up this trauma” (Zizek, 1993:265, quoted in Weber, 1998a:93), so

is foreign-policymaking an attempt to deal with the “trauma” of not being able to

decide and settle the representation/recognition/identity of states (Weber, 1998:93).

So, what we see is states acting in simultaneously “homophobic” and

“homopositive”/”homoprotectionist” ways, because “protection” of and extension of

rights to LGBTQ communities is meant to be an indicator of being “civilized,” where

countries can move towards “neoliberal modernity” if they treat queers right (Lind,

this volume). When countries “pinkwash” or promote homonationalism, they “act” as

straight allies, to distinguish themselves from straight persecutors.

  47  

With this understanding of IR (understood as political practices and

decisions), as unsteady, frantically trying to normalize distinctions and categories

between “us” and “them,” “good” and “bad,” “strong” and “weak,” let us return to the

question of being an ally to a discipline. IR, not just in terms of what political actors

do, but also as a discipline, is in a traumatic deadlock. When Weber (2014, this

forum) asks what Queer IR means for the discipline, I am curious not only about the

possibilities of erasure and gentrification of Queer IR but of what Queer IR reveals

about the IR discipline’s incoherence, instability, inability to be “straight.” If queer,

as Sjoberg notes in this volume, can complicate the idea of stable borders in the

context of states and territories, then so can queer complicate the idea of borders

around and within disciplines.

By looking closer at queer studies within this “household,” we remember that

some feminist theories are “allied” because they intersect with queer theory, while

other feminist theories might be more skeptical allies or dismissive. Further, queer

theory troubles the binaries of sex/gender, straight/gay, male/female, queer/not-queer,

thus serving as a critical theory that reveals that power works by investing in these

rigid distinctions and categories. So, we can ask which theories (feminist and

otherwise) are wedded to or challenge these categorizations and thus what they miss

or contribute to our understandings of the IR topics we study.

In addition, think of yearly declarations that IR is dead, confessions by IR

scholars that they find their homes elsewhere or struggle with antiquated theories, or

attempts to constantly stretch, question, and challenge IR and those who speak “in its

name” as policymakers or consultants. What is IR doing if not “patching up” the

trauma of not knowing its place or its boundaries, constantly troubled by feminists,

queers, undocumented migrants, stateless communities, indigenous politics (and the

  48  

list goes on)? Asking about Queer IR’s allies is meant to prompt the realization that

just as states act as allies in order to cover up their queerness or to act as “straight”

saviors, so too may academics act as allies in ways that distract from the discipline’s

queerness.

 

  49  

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