Family Matters: How Queering the Intimate Queers the International

Abstract

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, that is, 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–outsider 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 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 …