Queer International Relations


Book Description

"This book puts International Relations scholarship and Queer Studies scholarship in conversation to tell a story about how sovereignty and sexuality are entangled in international relations theory and policy through numerous figurations of 'the homosexual' - as 'the underdeveloped', 'the un-developable', 'the unwanted im/migrant', 'the terrorist', 'the gay rights holder', 'the gay patriot' and Eurovision-winner Conchita Wurst's 'bearded lady'"--




Out of Time


Book Description

Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament came to be the focus of a global conversation about queer rights. The law attracted attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US evangelical Christian activists who were said to have lobbied for its passage. Focusing on the Ugandan case, this book seeks to understand the encounters and entanglements across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queerphobias. It investigates the impact and memory of the colonial encounter on the politics of sexuality, the politics of religiosity of different Christian denominations, and the political economy of contemporary homophobic moral panics. In addition, Out of Time places the Ugandan experience in conversation with contemporaneous developments in India and Britain--three locations that are yoked together by the experience of British imperialism and its afterlives. Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, Rahul Rao argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rao offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. The book argues that these mutations reveal the deep grammars forged in the violence that founds and reproduces the social institutions in which queer difference struggles to make space for itself.




Sexualities in World Politics


Book Description

As LGBTQ claims acquire global relevance, how do sexual politics impact the study of International Relations? This book argues that LGBTQ perspectives are not only an inherent part of world politics but can also influence IR theory-making. LGBTQ politics have simultaneously gained international prominence in the past decade, achieving significant policy change, and provoked cultural resistance and policy pushbacks. Sexuality politics, more so than gender-based theories, arrived late on the theoretical scene in part because sexuality and gender studies initially highlighted post-structuralist thinking, which was hardly accepted in mainstream political science. This book responds to a call for a more empirically motivated but also critical scholarship on this subject. It offers comparative case-studies from regional, cultural and theoretical peripheries to identify ways of rethinking IR. Further, it aims to add to critical theory, broadening the knowledge about previously unrecognized perspectives in an accessible manner. Being aware of preoccupations with the de-queering, disciplining nature of theory establishment in the social sciences, we critically reconsider IR concepts from a particular LGBTQ vantage point and infuse them with queer thinking. Considering the relative dearth of contemporary mainstream IR-theorizing, authors ask what contribution LGBTQ politics can provide for conceiving the political subject, as well as the international structure in which activism is embedded. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender politics, cultural studies and international relations theory.




Queer International Relations


Book Description

If asked about queer work in international relations, most IR scholars would almost certainly answer that queer studies is a non-issue for the subdiscipline -- a topic beyond the scope and understanding of international politics. Yet queer work tackles problems that IR scholars themselves believe are central to their discipline: questions about political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and the national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies, not to mention their implications for empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism. And since the introduction of queer work in the 1980s, IR scholars have used queer concepts like "performativity" or "crossing" in relation to important issues like sovereignty and security without acknowledging either their queer sources or their queer function. This agenda-setting book asks how "sexuality" and "queer" are constituted as domains of international political practice and mobilized so that they bear on questions of state and nation formation, war and peace, and international political economy. How are sovereignty and sexuality entangled in contemporary international politics? What understandings of sovereignty and sexuality inform contemporary theories and foreign policies on development, immigration, terrorism, human rights, and regional integration? How specifically is "the homosexual" figured in these theories and policies to support or contest traditional understandings of sovereignty? Queer International Relations puts international relations scholarship and transnational/global queer studies scholarship in conversation to address these questions and their implications for contemporary international politics.




Queering International Law


Book Description

This ground-breaking collection reflects the growing momentum of interest in the international legal community in meshing the insights of queer legal theory with those critical theories that have a much longer genealogy – notably postcolonial and feminist analyses. Beyond the push in the human rights field to ensure respect for the rights of people with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, queer legal theory provides a means to examine the structural assumptions and conceptual architecture that underpin the normative framework and operation of international law, highlighting bias and blind spots and offering fresh perspectives and practical innovations. The contributors to the book use queer legal theory to critically analyse the basic tenets and operations of international law, with many surprising, thought-provoking and instructive results. The volume will be of interest to many scholars, students and researchers in international law, international relations, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies and postcolonial studies.




A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory


Book Description

This book begins by putting gay & lesbian sexuality and politics in historical context and demonstrates how and why queer theory emerged.




Post-Queer Politics


Book Description

In Post-Queer Politics, Ruffolo looks at the work of Foucault, Butler, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Guattari and others in his creative refocus on the queer/heteronormative dyad that has largely consumed queer studies and contemporary politics. He offers a radical and intersectional new way of thinking about class, race, sex, gender, sexuality and ability that extends beyond queer studies to be truly transdisciplinary in its focus and political implications. It will appeal to readers across a range of subjects, including gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, cultural studies, political science, and education.




Sexuality and Translation in World Politics


Book Description

When terms such as LGBT and queer cross borders they evolve and adjust to different political thinking. Queer became kvir in Kyrgyzstan and cuir in Ecuador, neither of which hold the English meaning. Translation is about crossing borders, but some languages travel more than others. Sexualities are usually translated from the core to the periphery, imposing Western LGBT identities onto the rest of the world. Many sexual identities are not translatable into English, and markers of modernity override native terminologies. All this matters beyond words. Translating sexuality in world politics forces us to confront issues of emancipation, colonisation, and sovereignty, in which global frameworks are locally embraced and/or resisted. Translating sexualities is a political act entangled in power politics, imperialism and foreign intervention. This book explores the entanglements of sex and tongue in international relations from Kyrgyzstan to Nepal, Japan to Tajikistan, Kurdistan to Amazonia. Edited by, Caroline Cottet and Manuela Lavinas Picq. Contributors, Ibtisam Ahmed, Soheil Asefi, Laura Bensoussan, Lisa Caviglia, Ioana Fotache, Karolina Kluczewska, Mohira Suyarkulova, Jo Teut, Josi Tikuna, Cai Wilkinson and Diako Yazdani.




Queer Democracy


Book Description

Queer Democracy undertakes an interdisciplinary critical investigation of the centuries-old metaphor of society as a body, drawing on queer and transgender accounts of embodiment as a constructive resource for reimagining politics and society. Daniel Miller argues that this metaphor has consistently expressed a desire for social and political order, grounded in the social body’s imagined normative shape or morphology. The consistent result, from the “concord” discourses of the pre-Christian Stoics, all the way through to contemporary nationalism and populism, has been the suppression of any dissent that would unmake the social body’s presumed normativity. Miller argues that the conception of embodiment at the heart of the metaphor is a fantasy, and that negative social and political reactions to dissent represent visceral, dysphoric responses to its reshaping of the social body. He argues that social body’s essential queerness, defined by fluidity and lack of a fixed morphology, spawns queer democracy, expressed through ongoing social and political practices that aim to extend liberty and equality to new social domains. Queer Democracy articulates a new departure for the ongoing development of theoretical articulations linking queer and trans theory with political theory. It will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers engaged in research on political theory, populism, US religion, gender studies, and queer studies.




Queer Terror


Book Description

After Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush declared, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Bush’s assertion was not simply jingoist bravado—it encapsulates the civilizationalist moralism that has motivated and defined the United States since its beginning, linking the War on Terror to the nation’s settlement and founding. In Queer Terror, C. Heike Schotten offers a critique of U.S. settler-colonial empire that draws on political, queer, and critical indigenous theory to situate Bush’s either/or moralism and reframe the concept of terrorism. The categories of the War on Terror exemplify the moralizing politics that insulate U.S. empire from critique, render its victims deserving of its abuses, and delegitimize resistance to it as unthinkable and perverse. Schotten provides an anatomy of this moralism, arguing for a new interpretation of biopolitics that is focused on sovereignty and desire rather than racism and biology. This rethinking of biopolitics puts critical political theory of empire in dialogue with the insights of both native studies and queer theory. Building on queer theory’s refusal of sanctity, propriety, and moralisms of all sorts, Schotten ultimately contends that the answer to Bush’s ultimatum is clear: dissidents must reject the false choice he presents and stand decisively against “us,” rejecting its moralism and the sanctity of its “life,” in order to further a truly emancipatory, decolonizing queer politics.