Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (in IR) But were Afraid to Ask: The ‘Queer Turn’ in International Relations

Queer International Relations’ momentum in the past four years has made it inconceivable for disciplinary IR to make it ‘appear as if there is no Queer International Theory’. The ‘queer turn’ has given rise to vibrant research programmes across IR subfields. Queer research is not only not a frivolous distraction from the ‘hard’ issues of IR, but queer analytics crack open for investigation fundamental dimensions of international politics that have hitherto been missed, misunderstood or trivialised by mainstream and critical approaches to IR. As queer research is making significant inroads into IR theorising, a fault line has emerged in IR scholarship on sexuality and queerness. Reflecting the tensions between Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Studies and Queer Theory in the academy more broadly, the IR literature on (homo)sexuality largely coalesces into two distinct approaches: LGBT and Queer approaches. The article will lay out the basic tenets of Queer Theory and discuss how it diverges from LGBT Studies. The article then turns to the books under review and focuses on the ways in which they take up the most prominent issue in contemporary debates in Queer Theory: the increasing inclusion of LGBT people into international human rights regimes and liberal states and markets. The article finishes with a brief reflection on citation practices, queer methodologies and the ethics of queer research.

El auge de lo queer en las RI durante los últimos cuatro años hace que se haya vuelto inconcebible, en el tratamiento académico de las RI, “hacer como si no existiese una teoría internacional de lo queer”. El “giro queer” ha hecho aparecer intensos programas de investigación que atraviesan las subáreas de las RI. La investigación de lo queer no sólo no es una frívola distracción de los aspectos «duros» de las RI, sino que el análisis de lo queer abre a la investigación dimensiones fundamentales de la política internacional que hasta ahora habían sido ignoradas, mal comprendidas o trivializadas debido a enfoques convencionales y críticos de las RI. A medida que la investigación de lo queer va incursionando significativamente en la teorización de las RI, ha surgido, entre los estudiosos de las RI, una línea de falla acerca de la sexualidad y la cualidad de queer (“queerness”). Reflejando más ampliamente las tensiones entre los estudios LGBT y la teoría queer en los medios académicos, gran parte de la literatura RI sobre (homo)sexualidad se fusiona dando origen a dos enfoques distintos: el enfoque LGBT y el enfoque queer. Este artículo expone los principales fundamentos de la teoría queer y explica en qué se diferencia ésta de los estudios LGBT. Después, el ensayo se vuelve hacia los libros examinados y se enfoca en las maneras en que éstos tratan la cuestión que más se destaca en los debates contemporáneos de la teoría queer: la de la creciente inclusión de las personas LGBT en los regímenes internacionales de derechos humanos y en los estados y mercados progresistas. El artículo termina reflexionando brevemente sobre las prácticas en materia de citas, las metodologías queer y la ética de la investigación queer.

La forte percée du queer dans les RI au cours des quatre dernières années a rendu impossible, pour les RI en tant que discipline scientifique, de faire croire à l’inexistence d’une théorie queer internationale. Le « tournant queer » a donné naissance à des programmes de recherche dynamiques dans tous les sous-champs des RI. Non seulement la recherche sur le queer ne fait pas que distraire des questions difficiles posées par les RI, mais l’analyse queer ouvre en plus à la recherche sur des aspects essentiels de la politique internationale, jusqu’alors laissés de côté, mal compris ou banalisés par des approches conventionnelles et critiques des RI. À mesure que la recherche sur le queer progresse sur le terrain de la théorisation des RI s’ouvre une ligne de faille chez les spécialistes du queer et de la sexualité. Reflétant les tensions existant plus largement entre les études LGBT et la théorie queer dans le champ universitaire, la littérature de RI sur l’(homo)sexualité adopte deux approches distinctes : l’approche LGBT et l’approche queer. L’article expose les principes de base de la théorie queer, et discute de ce qui la différencie des études LGBT. L’essai se tourne ensuite vers les livres étudiés en examinant leur façon de traiter de la question la plus importante qui anime les débats actuels dans le champ de la théorie queer : l’inclusion croissante des personnes LGBT dans les régimes internationaux des droits de l’Homme, ainsi que dans les États et les marchés progressistes. L’article se termine par une courte réflexion sur les pratiques en matière de citation et sur les méthodologies et l’éthique dans les recherches sur le queer.

Queer scholarship has produced some of the most innovative and widely cited¹ research on concepts, themes and practices considered indispensable to the study of International Relations (IR), including war and peace, geopolitics, sovereignty, colonialism, nationalism, soldiering, globalisation, development and norm diffusion.² In IR, it was not until recently that major journals started to publish queer research. Yet Queer³ IR’s momentum in the past four years has made it inconceivable for disciplinary IR to make it ‘appear as if there is no Queer International Theory’.⁴ The ‘queer turn’ has given rise to vibrant research programmes across IR subfields.⁵ As the books under review indicate, queer research is not only not a frivolous distraction from the ‘hard’ issues of IR,⁶ such as weapons proliferation and global financial crises, but queer analytics crack open for investigation fundamental dimensions of international politics that have hitherto been missed, misunderstood or trivialised by mainstream and critical approaches to IR. Rather than adding sexuality as another variable to orthodox IR frameworks, or ‘simply’ studying non-normative sexual practices and identities, and their (lack of) protection through human rights regimes, Queer IR investigates how the operations of international power are shaped by sexual norms and logics. Queer analytics have produced insights not only on the political character of sexual norms and logics, but also offer a more expansive notion of the political in IR. Finally, Queer Theory’s refusal of a clearly bound referent object makes possible an engagement with ‘regimes of the normal’ beyond the sexual.⁷

As queer research is making significant inroads into IR theorising, a fault line has emerged in IR scholarship on sexuality and queerness. Reflecting the tensions between LGBT Studies and Queer Theory in the academy more broadly, the IR literature on (homo)sexuality largely coalesces into two distinct approaches: LGBT and Queer approaches. LGBT perspectives tend to focus on LGBT people and/or study norms and struggles around LGBT human rights, often reflecting a liberal stance of advocating for LGBT inclusion in citizenship rights. By contrast, Queer Theory is animated by a commitment to the radical contingency of the term ‘queer’.⁸ Accordingly, Queer Studies scholarship commonly refuses to limit itself to a bound referent object such as ‘the LGBT’. LGBT Studies have tended to question the analytical value and political significance of Queer Theory.

In the introduction to their edited volume, Sexualities and World Politics: How LGBT Claims Shape International Relations, Manuela Picq and Markus Thiel echo these concerns about Queer Theory being ‘intellectually enriching’ yet ‘less apt’ in political activism due to its ‘elite’ and ‘academic’ character.⁹ They explicitly distinguish LGBT perspectives from queer scholarship. While the individual chapters of the book take a variety of approaches, the editors are highly critical of queer research and instead advocate for what they term an LGBT perspective. Picq and Thiel challenge Queer Theory for its limited concern with ‘discourses’, a research methodology they associate with a ‘view [of] politics as secondary’,¹⁰ and as thereby leaving unchallenged ‘material inequalities’.¹¹ Their critique is based on the premise that meaningful political activism is only possible based on ‘identifiable categories to combat discrimination’.¹²

With many of the early canonised works in Queer Theory having their disciplinary homes in philosophy and the humanities, important strands of queer theorising in fact share(d) this view of ‘queer’ as ‘inimical to empirical investigation’.¹³ This kind of queer scholarship associates fieldwork with essentialism, and cultural analysis with anti-essentialism.¹⁴ This review article will critically engage with these claims in relation to the four books under review and the ‘queer turn’ in IR more broadly. I will demonstrate two arguments. First, that Queer IR research cannot be reduced to poststructuralism, specifically deconstruction or a focus on ‘discourses’. Second, that poststructuralist Queer IR has produced rich empirical work, including of ‘real world’ struggles and contestations over LGBT rights.

The article proceeds in two sections. The first will lay out the basic tenets of Queer Theory and discuss how it diverges from LGBT Studies. The essay then turns to the books under review. Rather than offer an evaluation of each work in question, this review article focuses on the ways in which these books take up the most prominent issue in contemporary debates in Queer Theory: the increasing inclusion of LGBT people into international human rights regimes and liberal states and markets. The section finishes with a brief reflection on citation practices, queer methodologies and the ethics of queer research.

Both Queer Theory and LGBT Studies challenge common sense ‘assumptions about heterosexuality as the default sexuality and kinship norm (“heteronormativity”)’ and the twin premise ‘of two “opposite” and complementary gender positions (“cissexism”)’.¹⁵ While the ‘queer turn’ in IR is commonly associated with studying LGBT people and LGBT human rights, Queer Theory is committed to the radical contingency of the term ‘queer’ and thus does not assume a pre-given (queer) subject that exists prior to politics that then seeks rights. The LGBT perspective sees LGBT people as pre-given rights-seeking subjects who enter a political field in order to seek those rights. By refusing to assume a stable ‘LGBT’ subject, Queer IR perspectives can instead inquire into how (queer) subject-making is a political process. Queer inquiry thus proceeds on the basis of questioning the political formations and normalising power of sexuality and gender, rather than assuming a stable, rights-seeking, liberal political subject. Queer inquiry seeks to trouble and destabilise – queer – ‘regimes of the normal’ (‘normal’ versus ‘perverse’) and show their contingent and thus political character.¹⁶ At a minimum, Queer Theory challenges understandings of gender and sexuality as singular and stable.

Queer Theory’s refusal of a clearly bound referent object has produced insights not only on the mutually constitutive relationship between ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ sexual subjects and practices, but has also made possible an engagement with ‘regimes of the normal’ beyond the sexual – nationally and transnationally. Conceptualising sexuality and gender as part of wider relations of power and normalisation, Queer/Trans of Color Critique¹⁷ – Queer and Trans scholarship rooted in Black feminist and Women of Colour feminist thought – has explored a wide range of pathologised sexual subjects and desires beyond the figure of the homosexual. This includes non-normative heterosexual subjects such as the figure of the Muslim terrorist¹⁸ or insurgent who is produced as dangerously perverted through discourses of racialisation.

Given Queer Theory’s commitment to the radical contingency of the term ‘queer’ some strands of Queer Theory suggest that queer research is about any and all normativities. In IR, queer approaches are typically explicitly connected to political analyses of the workings of non-normative sexual and gender norms, practices, relations and or institutions while refusing to limit themselves to a bound referent object such as ‘the LGBT’.¹⁹ In the first comprehensive review of Queer IR scholarship, Melanie Richter-Montpetit and Cynthia Weber identify the following questions at the heart of the existing literature:

While some Queer IR research studies the politics of LGBT human rights and/or explores the differential impact of security practices and economic policies on non-normative sexual and gendered subjects, what characterises Queer IR scholarship is its treatment of queer as an analytical category.²¹ Rather than assuming a stable LGBT identity, Queer IR scholarship investigates how certain sexual norms, normativities and subjects are produced and come to be understood in binary terms, interrogating the political effects of this kind of either/or thinking and ‘regimes of the normal’. This critique extends also to the heterosexual/homosexual and male/female dichotomies underwriting traditional LGBT and Gender Studies, including some of the LGBT and Feminist perspectives in IR.

The rise of Queer Theory is commonly associated with ‘the poststructuralist turn’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, this concern with destabilising – queering – fixed notions of sexuality and gender can be traced back to at least the 1970s and the scholarship of lesbian feminists, most of whom self-identified as Black and Women of Colour theorists.²² In IR, scholars like V. Spike Peterson and Cynthia Weber published explicitly queer research as early as the mid-1990s.²³ Their work interrogated the heterosexism of nations and nationalisms as well as how states would actively use queerness in their international relations.²⁴ As I will discuss in the following section, while Queer IR scholarship is staunchly post-positivist, existing works subscribe to a wide range of theoretical approaches and research methods beyond poststructuralism and discourse analysis.

The increasing inclusion of (certain) LGBT subjects into international human rights regimes and liberal states and markets has come to constitute one of the most vibrant areas of debate in contemporary queer research.²⁵ While homo- and transphobia continue to be mobilised as powerful tools of statecraft,²⁶ an increasing number of state and non-state actors and institutions have come to endorse and promote LGBT rights and people. Under rubrics like ‘homonormativity’,²⁷ ‘homonationalism’,²⁸ ‘pinkwashing’²⁹ and ‘homocolonialism’,³⁰ Queer scholarship examines the ways in which these reconfigurations of sexual norms and normativities (‘the respectable LGBT’) shape national and transnational political and economic orders.³¹ In IR, a burgeoning body of literature explores how both anxieties about non-normative sexualities and genders, and LGBT rights advocacy have come to constitute important battlefields in contemporary struggles over the universality of human rights,³² norm diffusion,³³ foreign policy and the geopolitics of military interventions,³⁴ terrorism and counter-terrorism,³⁵ border security,³⁶ migration,³⁷ soldiering,³⁸ regional integration,³⁹ global medicine⁴⁰ and neoliberal development policy and restructuring.⁴¹

In her recent book Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality and the Will to Knowledge, Cynthia Weber probes the entanglements between the most fundamental category of IR theory – sovereignty – and (homo)sexuality. Led by ‘a queer intellectual curiosity’, the book offers a path-breaking intervention into IR scholarship on sovereignty challenging both the concept’s presumed singularity and its heteromasculinity. Taking as her point of departure Richard K. Ashley’s famous poststructuralist takedown of orthodox IR theory’s notion of sovereignty, Weber investigates the contingency of ‘Man’ as the foundation of legitimate authority and political community in the Westphalian interstate system. Pushing beyond Ashley’s critique of ‘statecraft as mancraft’, she explores how this figure of the ‘sovereign man’ is not simply contingent but produced in relationship to shifting notions of homosexuality and the figure of the male homosexual. Following Foucault, Weber connects the emergence of ‘homosexuality’ as a discursive object to 19th century Western medical and legal discourses.

The postructuralist work of Ashley on sovereignty, and Foucaultian IR scholarship in general, has neglected matters of sexuality and queerness, despite the fact that Foucault’s genealogy, on which they rely, demonstrates that the modern subject is fundamentally constituted through sex/uality. Seeking to remedy this oversight, Weber argues that one of the ways in which ‘sovereign man’ in discourses and practices of statecraft is constituted is in relationship to the Victorian figure of the ‘perverse homosexual’. The book traces how this notion of the perverted homosexual has been reworked over time and yet continues to shape contemporary IR theories about modernisation and development, and specifically recent discourses around immigration and security. She looks at four figures centred in these debates among both policymakers and IR scholars: the ‘unwanted im/migrant’, the ‘terrorist’, the ‘underdeveloped’ and the ‘undevelopable’, and examines the ways official foreign policy discourses construct these subjects as undesirable and dangerous.

Weber shows that the figure of the ‘perverse homosexual’ is increasingly accompanied by figurations of the ‘normal homosexual’. For instance, over time the Obama Administration’s Foreign and National Security Policy figured the ‘normal’ or ‘respectable LGBT’ not only as a subject of inalienable human rights (figure of the ‘gay rights holder’), but quite enthusiastically interpellated the figure of the ‘gay patriot’.⁴² Importantly, ‘[the] discursive production of the “LGBT rights holder” as the “normal homosexual” by Western states like the United States does not mean there are no longer “homosexuals” figured as perverse in international relations discourse’.⁴³ Rather the figure of the perverse homosexual continues to be mobilised, including by states that promote the respectable LGBT.⁴⁴

This approach sits in contrast to liberal LGBT scholarship, which views the rights-seeking subject as already pre-formed before entering the political field (in which it seeks equal inclusion and rights). Weber’s analysis adds to vibrant debates in Queer Studies and Queer IR on how non-normative gender and sexual formations shore up hegemonic geopolitical and economic projects, such as war, occupation and neoliberal austerity politics. However, Weber criticises that much research about Western and non-Western calls for LGBT rights rests on ‘universalized, reified understandings of neoliberalism and homonormativity’.⁴⁵ She argues that this ‘either/or thinking’⁴⁶ has produced monolithic readings of shifting figurations of (homo)sexuality and queer politics, including in some of the cutting edge scholarship on homonationalism and ‘the human rights industrial complex’.⁴⁷ Weber queers this ‘binary logic of power’ with the help of what she – drawing on Barthes’ concept of the ‘and/or’ – calls ‘queer logics of and/or’. This powerful analytic brings into focus the simultaneity of someone or something being one thing and/or another, for instance being simultaneously figured as the ‘normal homosexual’ and the ‘perverse homosexual’. This queer plural logoi allows for more nuanced understandings of international formations of power that can capture these complexities. Contrary to Picq and Thiel’s concern that queer approaches are politically impractical and elite, Weber’s queer logics open the analytical and political imaginary for (the study of) queer-feminist ‘resistive possibilities’.⁴⁸

Queer International Relations is an agenda-setting book by a scholar known for her powerful critiques of the boundaries of the discipline of IR and ‘doing’ IR. Rather than ‘forget IR theory’,⁴⁹ the book focuses in on and engages its object of critique with intention and care. While Weber challenges us to move beyond modes of Foucauldian IR that elide any consideration of sex/uality, at the same time, we may want to question the continued centring and (inadvertent) ‘rescue’ of Foucault in the book and Queer IR research more broadly. Queer International Relations of course references and agrees with postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentric character of Foucault’s History of Sexuality,⁵⁰ and even though Weber pays attention to racism and racial discourses, the Foucauldian analytics of power and sexuality underwriting the book’s overall analysis rest on a notion of Man or the human prior to racialisation.⁵¹ Weber explores how Man is fundamentally constructed in relationship to sexuality, specifically the figure of the perverted homosexual, and how ‘sexualized sovereign man’ then intersects with race and gives rise to particular racialised figures (‘the Al Qaeda terrorist’). By taking Foucault’s History of Sexuality as her point of departure, Weber’s investigation into the will to knowledge about sexuality and the homo/sexual subject underestimates the extent to which the modern (homo/sexual) subject is always already racialised.

What other, less Eurocentric, theorists might be brought to bear in thinking through Queer IR? Rather than start (and end) with Foucault and/or the Foucauldian white queer scholarship of Sedgwick, Butler and Warner, Queer IR could engage (in more depth) with the robust Queer/Trans of Color scholarship,⁵² which explores many of the themes and concepts at the heart of IR. Weber’s queer analysis of the contingent, political and plural character of Man and of the associated ‘will to knowledge’ (diagnosed in the subtitle of the book) seeks to contribute (as the title of the concluding chapter suggests) to Foucault’s ‘the end of Man’. More productively, Queer IR scholarship could take as its starting point Frantz Fanon’s ‘end of the world’. Weber’s important question – ‘Who is the homosexual?’ – would then be posed in relation to the question posed by Black Studies and Decolonial scholarship – ‘Who is the human?’⁵³

Paul Amar’s book The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism is another excellent example for how queer analytics allow for rich empirical work that traces operations of contemporary global power beyond either/or logics. The book explores the rise of new and complex security regimes in the Global South by examining Cairo and Rio de Janeiro, two megacities at the forefront of such developments. At the heart of these security regimes is the rise of a new doctrine of human security that casts human rights as beneficial to both national and societal security. Through painstaking empirical work, Amar traces how military and police security apparatuses and associated parastate actors consolidate and expand their reach and authority by constructing stigmatised sexualities and gender expressions as threats to moral security and public safety.

Amar argues that in the wake of recent global financial crises and resistance to predations of capitalist markets, states find it increasingly difficult to govern via market forces and the promotion of ‘market-state logics’, however ‘security-state logics are doing fine’.⁵⁴ These security logics are fostered through the promotion of the doctrine of human security. Doctrines of human security ‘promise to reconcile human rights and national security interests, rebalance humanitarianism and militarism, and expand the notion of politics to reintegrate social justice and economic development’.⁵⁵ And yet the new doctrines of human security do not challenge ‘the primacy of security discourse itself’.⁵⁶

Amar identifies ‘a particular Global South variant’ of the human security doctrine. At the centre of (human) security operations are humanitarian and cultural rescue campaigns in defence of ‘cultural heritage and developmental infrastructure’ from perverted ‘cultures of globalization’.⁵⁷ These rescue narratives are always tied to concerns about (non-)normative sexuality and gender. The subjects ostensibly protected by human-security regimes ‘are portrayed as victimized by trafficking, prostituted by “cultures of globalization,” sexually harassed by “street” forms of predatory masculinity, or “debauched” by liberal values’. Amar argues that these subjects of rescue cannot be adequately grasped if they are understood as mere human rights holders. Rather, these subjectivities ‘should be more accurately analyzed as human-security products merging in particular gender, racial, and transnational forms in and around military and police operations and parastatal security projects’.⁵⁸ Importantly, these subjects were not conceived ‘in the headquarters of the UN or in the humanitarian agencies of the Global North, but in a belt of the world that we used to call the semiperiphery’.⁵⁹

These new security regimes emerged in the context of struggles between military and police with ‘mass movements around morality, sexuality, and labor’.⁶⁰ The clashes between these various actors led to appropriations and convergences between ultra-conservative and progressive social movements, and self-identified progressive and conservative security doctrines. Amar’s queer analysis of the politics and struggles around the promise of human security demonstrates the central role of processes of moral-sexual subjectification – again, in contrast to the (liberal) LGBT IR perspective, which assumes pre-given, rights-seeking LGBT subjects. The book offers a stunning account of how these new security regimes operate via logics and circuits of power beyond binary notions of the ‘either/or’; they act as laboratories and factories for novel formations of global security governance⁶¹ and cannot be reduced to heteropatriarchal and racist rescue fantasies.

Rahul Rao’s book Third World Protest takes up the problématique of tracing the operations of international power beyond ‘either/or’ logics in the context of political protest and imaginaries of resistance in the so-called Third World. The book critically explores two of the most influential normative orientations in international relations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Challenging analytics of power-versus-resistance, Rao asks:

But what if things are more complicated, less dichotomous? Are the binary distinctions that we routinely draw – between proletariat and capital, multitude and empire, “us” and “them” in an array of different contexts – really up to describing a world in which the evils and misfortunes of human rights abuse and bad governance may be the result of a more complex topography of agents linked to one another across territorial and non-territorial boundaries?⁶²

Part of Rao’s investigation focuses on the dilemmas faced by Third World queer rights activists and queer activists of colour in the face of first, hegemonic actors promoting LGBT rights and people for regressive economic and (geo)political projects and second, racist and colonial desires shaping LGBT activism in the West (‘white gays to save brown gays from brown homophobes’).⁶³ Echoing queer critiques of LGBT rights having become ‘a marker of modernity’, Rao identifies transformations of international power and the rise of ‘new hierarchies’ that cannot be grasped by what he views as monolithic accounts of power in this literature.⁶⁴ He argues that ‘there is no single politics’⁶⁵ – neither to global LGBT social movements nor to the mobilisation of LGBT rights by a growing number of states, international organisations and corporate actors.

Part and parcel of the complex and dynamic political terrains of queer struggles in the Global South are the modernist ambitions of certain Third World elites. During the heyday of modern European imperialism, the failure of an unambiguous national heterosexism in many colonised societies was read as a marker for civilisational backwardness, and typically shaped anti-colonial resistance movements and later the gendered and heteronormative construction of most postcolonial nations. Today ‘the exact opposite has become true’.⁶⁶ Rao argues that it is in the context of these geo/political and economic contestations that some states and corporate actors in the Global South – including in India – have strategically mobilised LGBT rights as a vehicle to join ‘their rightful place at the table of great powers’.⁶⁷

One of the most prominent indictments of current global queer activism is Joseph Massad’s Desiring Arabs, in which (among other things) Massad posits the existence of a ‘Gay International’ – Western-based LGBT activism and organisations animated by colonial desires and imperial ambitions. While Rao agrees with Massad that current LGBT human rights politics are all too often entangled with racist and imperial politics, he argues that these efforts cannot be dismissed as simply driven ‘by racist [and colonial] rescue fantasies and as therefore irredeemable’.⁶⁸ Rao challenges Massad also over his wholesale dismissal of Arab activists using – and in fact inhabiting – Western sexual ontologies such as ‘LGBT’. Massad argues that the rise of identity-based LGBT activism among class-privileged Arabs is not only paving the way for Western cultural imperialism, but actively incites state-repression which shuts down existing spaces for ‘traditional’ same-sex practices between Arab men.⁶⁹ While sympathetic to Massad’s critique of ‘cosmopolitan rescue politics and its local interlocutors’, Rao challenges Massad for his slippage ‘into a reinforcement of communitarian authenticity narratives that police how sexual preferences ought to be expressed’.⁷⁰

Rao’s research of sexuality politics and various queer social movements in India, Iran and the ‘West’ shows that the Gay International is ‘an extraordinarily fractious space’.⁷¹ His analysis is based on the premise that ‘there is no singular locus of threat’⁷² to Third World protest and political struggles. Western imperialism is only part of the story. Rao argues that ‘it is vital that we not lose sight of the reality of homophobia in the Third World (or indeed anywhere)’.⁷³ He points out the irony of ‘the very incompleteness of (US American gay subjects) inclusion within the US nation’ and locates their LGBT activism internationally within the desire to belong domestically.⁷⁴

The notion that international LGBT politics are trapped between the Scylla of the universality of Western sexual and gender ontologies and struggles, and the Charybdis of equating LGBT rights and struggles with Western cultural imperialism, is challenged also by two of the chapters in Picq and Thiel’s edited volume. Drawing on Gurminder Bhambra’s work on ‘connected histories’,⁷⁵ Momin Rahman criticises Massad’s thesis of the Gay International for first, assuming ‘cultural exclusivity between West and East’, and second, ascribing ‘ownership’ of modernity to the West. Massad’s postcolonial analysis thus ‘unwittingly replays the prioritization of the West’ by suggesting that Arab countries follow these ‘modernization patterns’.⁷⁶ Rahman’s discussion of the politics of contemporary global LGBT rights struggles echoes the existing queer literature on homonationalism and gay imperialism that views the rise of global Islamophobia as a central condition of possibility for the internationalisation of gay rights discourses. However, his analysis pushes beyond the usual focus of these debates on the racism of Western states and LGBT organisations. Rahman theorises the formation of what he terms ‘Muslim homophobia’ by situating Muslim identities and homophobia in the context of aggressive Islamophobia ‘rather than reduce it to a preexisting component of a pre-modern, monolithic Islamic culture’.⁷⁷

In his detailed case study of the role of the LGBT movement in Turkey’s Gezi Park protests, Mehmet Sinan Birdal also challenges Massad’s erasure of the agency and political ambitions of non-Western LGBT social movements.⁷⁸ Birdal analyses the success of the LGBT movement in Gezi protests with the help of World-Systems theory. The chapter traces how LGBT activists formed powerful alliances with other social movements and thereby were able to advance their political agenda. Birdal connects the rise and diffusion of LGBT identities to the world economy and interstate system, not just ‘Western’ culture. He argues that global capitalism can give rise to transformative or antisystemic LGBT identities ‘and not merely agents of [the] Gay International’.⁷⁹

While Queer Theory is often associated with poststructuralism and specifically deconstruction and discourse analysis, much of the Queer IR literature of the 2000s in fact is chiefly concerned with questions of capitalism, development policy and international political economy more broadly, and from a range of historical materialist and non-Marxist materialist approaches.⁸⁰ This literature explores how struggles over sexual politics are not simply ‘culture wars’ rooted in different moral frameworks. In conversation with Feminist International Political Economy, materialist Queer IR scholarship demonstrates that the organisation of sexuality and gender formations continues to be fundamental to the reproduction of the global capitalist order.

For instance, Rahul Rao’s most recent work on ‘global homocapitalism’ critically explores efforts by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to quantify the negative effects of homophobia on economic growth. Rao challenges the underlying view that homophobia is ‘merely cultural’ – a view of course that also informs the racist imaginative geographies of gay-friendly versus homophobic societies structuring many of the prominent human rights and geopolitical struggles discussed earlier. Rao argues that relegating anti-LGBT sentiments and politics in the Third World to the realm of the cultural enables those very actors ‘to obscure the material conditions that incubate homophobic moral panics, and their own culpability in co-producing those conditions’.⁸¹

Rao’s research on International Financial Institutions (IFI) initiatives against homophobia in Uganda and India traces the ways in which neoliberal development policies contributed to the material conditions that have given way to homophobic moral panics in both countries. He connects Uganda’s notorious ‘kill-the-gays-bill’ and the rise of a sweeping, aggressively anti-queer agenda to the dramatic ascendancy of Pentecostal Christianity. However, rather than simply reading these political developments as driven by either Uganda’s ‘culture’ or foreign Christian fundamentalists, Rao shows how this agenda became possible as a result of neoliberal restructuring. IMF-imposed austerity and privatisation measures led the shrinking state to delegate crucial social services like health care and education to faith-based organisations, producing the material conditions for anti-LGBT politics.⁸²

While Queer IR refuses to limit itself to narrow notions of (homo)sexuality and queerness, there is very little engagement in the Queer IR literature with cissexism and Transgender Theory, and even less with systems of ableism and critical disability studies.⁸³ The few scholarly publications and blog pieces that take up the violences of binary gender regimes tend to cast trans people as ‘transgressive and resisting of orthodox gender relations’ and as ‘“raw materials” to improve IR theory’.⁸⁴ These forms of epistemic violence are connected to the failure to substantively engage with Transgender Theory and theorists. All too often, the only or main entry point into these discussions is Judith Butler’s early scholarship on the performativity of gender, particularly her first two books – Gender Trouble⁸⁵ and Bodies That Matter⁸⁶ – and the narrow and near exclusive focus on the spectacle of the airport body scanner.

Butler’s work on the performative nature of gender, and the relationship between subjectivity and performativity, is sometimes erroneously understood as treating gender as a ‘choice’.⁸⁷ Butler’s famous conceptualisation of gender as ‘a stylized repetition of acts’⁸⁸ which ‘constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self’⁸⁹ is firmly grounded in an analysis of the regulation of gender through (certain) societal norms and regimes of violence. However, Butler’s engagement with transgender people and trans politics, in particular her discussion of transsexual discourses and her writings on Jenny Livingstone’s notorious documentary ‘Paris is Burning’,⁹⁰ and the film ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, have generated trenchant criticisms by Trans theorists inside and outside the academy.⁹¹

At the centre of these debates are Butler’s ‘reliance on the transgender figure to anchor the queer diagnosis of heteronormative sex/gender arrangements’ and ‘the intertwining of the categories of gender, identity and the human’ in her work more broadly.⁹² Trish Salah’s assessment that Butler’s early books evoke trans people and politics as material for ‘larger philosophical arguments with non-trans theorists of sexual difference, both on the right and on the left’⁹³ applies also to queer interventions in IR theory that treat trans people as illustrative of how gender is neither fixed nor binary, and thus ‘as objects rather than subjects of discourse’.^94,95

Several Trans theorists have connected this critique of Butler and Livingstone’s ‘Paris is Burning’ to larger concerns about queer methodologies and the ethics of queer research, in particular the question of positionality. Jay Prosser’s book Second Skin is among the most prominent interventions in Butler’s work on ‘Paris is Burning’. In the words of Jin Haritaworn, Prosser links what he views as Butler’s misplaced

“inclusion” of trans identities under the queer umbrella … to Butler’s failure to position herself and the filmmaker to privileges around whiteness, class, and non-transness, which gave them the material and discursive power to exclude the depicted working-class trans women of colour from an agentic and authentic femininity.⁹⁶

Informed by the anti-racist feminist principle of positionality, Haritaworn urges Queer Studies scholars ‘to reflect on where we stand, to define our speaking positions and how they relate to others, especially those whom we claim to speak for’.⁹⁷ Methodologically, it would thus be fruitful for Queer IR research to engage with Haritaworn’s caution about ‘queering from above’ rather than ‘queering from below’.⁹⁸

For instance, in a recent article titled ‘Practising Gender, Queering Theory’, Lauren Wilcox takes to task prominent IR scholarship associated with the ‘practice turn’ for erasing feminist and queer scholarship and concerns with gender. Wilcox rightly challenges the literature’s failure to theorise gender as a practice and its at best marginal engagement with Butler’s concept of the performativity of gender. Wilcox seeks to push dominant ways of thinking about practices in International Relations, specifically:

Putting into conversation Butler’s notion of gender performativity and Jack Halberstam’s work on ‘the queer art of failure’, Wilcox argues that ‘theorizing practice from the perspective of “gender failures” sheds light on the embedded exclusions within this literature’.⁹⁹

To illustrate her argument, Wilcox discusses the experiences of trans- and gender-nonforming people (or in her words, ‘the experiences of trans- and gender non-conforming bodies’) with ‘the “problem” of practising gender in airport security assemblages’.¹⁰⁰ In a section titled ‘Trans-bodies as Failures?’, Wilcox explores the experiences of transgender and gender-nonconforming travellers ‘as bodies that not only demonstrate the stakes of “failure” to practise gender, but also as potentially subversive bodies that demonstrate the instability of dichotomies between “success” and “failure” in the first place’.¹⁰¹ Discussing ‘the “mismatch” between embodiment and gender presentation’ among transgender and gender-nonconforming air travellers, Wilcox seeks to challenge the binary ways in which IR theory on the practice turn understands ‘gender’ as well as ‘competent’ practices. She writes: ‘In discussing the “problem” of practising gender in airport security assemblages, I argue that certain practices of gender can complicate the way in which gender as well as success and failure are understood in binary terms’.¹⁰²

While Wilcox draws attention to the erasure of transgender and gender-nonconforming people in international political life and IR theory as well as to the violent effects of cissexist security regimes, the overall argument and analysis are marred by some of the same shortcomings as Butler’s work. This includes the subsumption of ‘trans’ under the umbrella of ‘queer’; reading transgender people and gender-nonconforming people as ‘subversive bodies’¹⁰³ resistive to both gender normativities and security regimes as well as improving of IR theory. To come back to Haritaworn’s discussion of queer methodologies and research ethics, Queer/Trans of Color scholarship with its roots in Black and Women of Colour feminisms is particularly instructive for Queer IR in regards to questions of difference, positionality and genealogies of knowledge production.

Queer research demonstrates that sexuality and gender are important registers in the making and governing of subjects (people; states; organisations) and the international. The books under review have produced rich and innovative analytical and empirical work on core IR concepts and concerns, including sovereignty, security, neoliberal development and (global and regional) hegemony. As firmly established by three decades of feminist scholarship, the masculine epistemological and ontological commitments of much of the discipline have traditionally led IR research to underestimate and/or outright ignore fundamental dimensions of contemporary formations of global and international power. Queer IR echoes feminist analyses of the central role of practices, actors and social relations cast as merely ‘personal’, ‘private’, or ‘merely cultural’ in orthodox and prominent non-feminist critical IR scholarship. These ‘low politics’ are often constitutive of the ‘high politics’ of states and markets. Queer research not only extends these feminist insights through registers of sexuality and queerness, but also challenges and reworks heteronormative and cissexist ontologies underwriting feminist IR.

Picq’s and Thiel’s criticism that queer research is limited to poststructuralist deconstruction, treats real world politics as secondary and leaves unchallenged ‘material inequalities’¹⁰⁴ is not vindicated. Rather a wide range of theoretical and methodological commitments, including historical materialism and materialist postcolonial approaches, animate Queer IR scholarship. Thus, Queer IR research equally proves wrong queer voices that frame empirical research as inherently essentialising. Finally, poststructuralist queer scholarship, including Weber’s Queer International Relations, has produced rich accounts of ‘real world’ geo/political struggles and contestations over sexual politics, including LGBT rights.

Returning to Picq and Thiel’s critique of queer research as depoliticising, if anything, queer scholarship would point to the analytical and political limitations of LGBT Studies frameworks that limit the scope of the political to notions of ‘discrimination’, ‘equal inclusion’ and ‘human rights’ for leaving many fundamental structures of oppression, exploitation and violence unchallenged. The politics of inclusion and the notion that meaningful political activism is only possible based on ‘identifiable categories to combat discrimination’¹⁰⁵ often come at the cost of LGBT subjects who sit in marginal relation to ‘LGBT’ in many complex ways. Simultaneously, the reviewed books make it clear that while queer is commonly associated with non-normative gender and sexual practices and subjectivities, ‘queerness’ and queer analytics cannot be conflated with transgression and anti-normativity. If anything, the books emphasise that there is nothing inherently progressive about queer. It is thus critical for Queer IR to pay close attention to questions of difference, positionality and the politics of citation¹⁰⁶ practices. In particular Queer/Trans of Colour scholarship has important lessons to offer to Queer IR in this regard.

To conclude, the emerging ‘queer turn’ in IR extends and reworks critical IR epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. Engaging with queer scholarship will further expand and refine the notion of the political in IR, and help produce more complex and robust understandings of the operations of contemporary formations of international power, including beyond unhelpful binaries of power and resistance.

I would like to thank Alison Howell for her insightful feedback on a previous draft of this article. My thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.