Queer Theory and the “Proper Objects” of International Relations

Abstract

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; Jones 1996; Carver, Cochran, and Squires 1998). 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 (Sedgwick 1990; Butler 1994). 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 redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the …