Abstract
I knew Faking It before it was published. Telling me about a potential cover for her then-new project with what I remember as a gleam in her eye and an oddly flat, or perhaps just studiously neutral voice, Cynthia Weber said, ‘so imagine “Uncle Sam” with each foot on an island…maybe Haiti and the Dominican Republic, maybe Cuba and Puerto Rico, I don’t know…wearing just his hat and coat and a giant strap on dildo’. 1 I’d like to report I said something clever or even uttered an equally casual ‘oh, yeah, imagine that’. Alas, it was more along the lines of ‘uhm, yeah. No. I don’t think so. Wait. What?’. ‘Yeah, no’ and ‘wait, what’ have probably been the two lines I have most commonly inarticulately uttered in the 30 or more years I have known Weber. To be fair, these eloquent, intelligent exclamations started well before Cynthia shared the ideas that would become Faking It. 2
Faking It is one of the most important and most un(der)appreciated IR (and well beyond) books of the 21st century. In a profound sense it was one of the books that helped to start IR’s truculent, recalcitrant, belligerent move out of the last century. In contrast to so many IR and related texts, Weber’s book quickly found a following in arenas far afield from IR: Anthropology, Caribbean Studies, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, History, Latin American Studies, Modern Languages, Political Science, Religious Studies, Sociology, and Women’s Studies.
What’s missing here? Weber, IR’s ‘fallen daughter’ 3 par excellence, has been a prophet without honour in her own home. Perhaps this is what she gets for being the ‘bad girl’ 4 who called out Keohane and scared the shit outta people. For ‘queering’ IR before it was trendy, Weber paid a price; as Nayak notes, some of the recent animosity around queering IR – more on that below – ‘was nothing compared to the panic that ensued when [Faking It] was first published’. 5 Weber threw down a gauntlet; actually, given that a gauntlet is only an armored glove, it was more like she threw down a whole suit of armour (or 200 or 500) and all the dumb boys – literal and figurative – inside.
The Cold War had ended and IR’s golden age of white guys in ties talking about missile size (as well as Richardson’s arms-race models 6 and first strike second strike nuclear capability… really, you young’uns out there, #notevenkidding) was coming to an end. People were talking about matters such as human rights and even, goddess forbid, feminism. 7 This is the context into which this (im)possible text boldly strode, revelling in endless possibilities, transcending ‘mere’ IR/IR theory, and, per Patti Smith, fucking little with the past and plenty with the future 8 and proceeding with abandon. 9 It is often said The Velvet Underground’s first record album only sold 5000 copies but everyone who bought one started a band. I have no idea how many copies of Faking It were sold, but would venture that everyone who read it started, well, I dunno, something…
Inspired by Faking It, this brief essay is guided by three scholars ‘outside’ of IR, Tsing and Deleuze and Guattari, and one, Nayak, who works on its margins. Tsing’s contribution here is her ‘zone of awkward engagement’, ‘where words mean something different across a divide… These zones…are transient; they arise out of encounters and interactions. They reappear in new places with changing events’. 10 The appeal of arboreal models is clear, but they (de)limit as much as they open and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome appealing but difficult. 11 Guattari’s transversal seems to resonate in powerful and important ways with Faking It. The transversal is a means/method intended to overcome the ‘dead end’ of the hierarchical (and patriarchal) control networks and the logic of compulsory horizontal control. 12 Such a-centric constellations ‘do not move on the basis of predetermined strands and channels from one point to another, but right through the points in new directions… lines of flight, ruptures which continuously elude the systems of points and their coordinates’. 13 This lends itself to notions of no borders, multiple connections, endless entrances and exits, and ‘creating situations in new places rather than familiar, well explored territories’. 14 And Nayak’s astute point that the promise of queer IR to reveal the discipline’s instability is twin(n)ed with the ‘threat’ to do exactly that seems key. 15 That threat, read as transversal, was a key source of disciplinary hostility to Faking It then, and queer IR work now. Of course, those white guys in ties know how to deal with threats. Already hunkered and bunkered against what Nayak describes as the now annual ‘declarations that IR is dead’, 16 the response is to go on the offensive, marginalising, and attacking.
Faking It, Friction, and IR
Faking It takes the language and discourse of IR and unpacks it, seeking to use the very language and tools (of the master?) to unpack and explore an overwritten and underconsidered space, US foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly in ‘America’s lake’ which Fidel Castro’s very existence seemed to threaten to turn into a ‘Cuban Caribbean’. While Weber ranges far and wide in an effort to make meaning – an effort she would, I suspect, deny – and (thankfully) finds much to inform her version/vision of IR, there is plenty that will be familiar to any student or scholar of IR; she attends to the classic. But these familiar (dare one say ‘tired’? Dare, dare) phrases and formulations are rendered new, queered, as it were, and thus we find ourselves in the zone of awkward engagement. We thought we knew what we were talking about. We thought we knew what things meant. We were wrong. And right. And everything in between… behind, above, below, alongside. Suddenly the friction is fierce as events and processes and actors (writ large and wide and deep) interact, coming and going in a bacchanalian revelry that neatly elides the Foucault, Irigaray, et al., lurking, IR interlopers with much to say. Latin America’s weirdly bizarre absence/otherness in IR is brought in by queering and in particular by the queering of the USA’s ol’ Uncle Sam – who’d a thunk? Weber would.
Given this both radical and important contribution, why has Faking It not become required reading in IR, in policy circles, even among the bilious netizens of the IR blogosphere? Nayak’s one word answer seems on the mark: ‘threat’; others might include: ‘homophobia’, ‘misogyny’, ‘fear’. 17 Nayak is right that it is the fear of the house of cards coming down that derails so many. 18 And so they go on the offensive – offensive being the operative word – and ignore, marginalise, and denigrate the power, promise, and possibility a text such as Faking It opens up. You don’t have to ‘buy it’ to consider what it has to offer. Think of all the texts we read and contemplate, the time we invest, in thinking about, searching for, formulating what is going on out there. Queer theory, for which Faking It is an excellent primer, provides exactly such an entry point. What are you waiting for? Or scared of? It’s OK. Really. Well, OK, not really. But that’s OK too. Maybe even fun. It certainly makes you think. Or should.
At least a part of what we are scared of is ol’ Uncle Sam and ‘his’ powerful state, particularly for those of us in the Global North. The USA, dammit, in drag with its limp, small genitals requiring a dildo to be able to fulfil its manly duties… and castration looms/lurks around the edges, no? This is not the world we thought we knew. Suddenly the assumptions that undergird ‘our’ (Northern/Western) hetero/cis-normative patriotism seem shaky and we’re feeling a little queasy, our smug, self-satisfied smiles turning a tad sour – this isn’t funny or cute, anymore; C’mon, be serious. We’re all good (neo)liberals here, #amirite, anxious to make the world ‘safe’ for everyone. Weber’s having none of this: ‘Whereas previously the US turned a blind eye to the realities of Cuba, since the 1960s the US has avoided its own realities, insisting on not seeing either itself as castrated or the queer compensatory strategies that enable it to appear straight’. 19 Oh shit; that’s what we were afraid of. Now what. Reading queer stuff is cool as long as we all get to be straight, cis, and white (bonus points for Judeo-Christian these days, huh?). Quick, pass the Morganthau…please? 20
By Way of a Conclusion
Faking It freaked people out. In a good way, in a bad way, in a confused and complicated way. A lot of people did their best to ignore it. Nonetheless, imaginations/whispers began to coalesce into sentiments that had to be and were tamped down by the hegemonic powers that be, who fought back, some as nice guys, some as little guys, and some as bad guys – a convenient, practiced, and reliable division of labour. Sorry fellas, contrary to popular perception and despite the lack of a meaningful place for queer IR and an impressive array of IR internet trolls (hiya boyz!), they lost. At the risk of pushing things too far… oh, wait, this is Weber; never mind – she took on the empire and she is still standing (how’s that for macho posturing?). As Muppidi has astutely suggested, ‘empire tells amazing stories’, but it may well be the case that amazing stories ‘tell’ empire. 21 That is, we – and here I am casting a broad and deep net in which we are almost all complicit and what are the implications of that; hegemony to the ninth degree? – effectively (and perhaps in smaller ways, affectively) write the empire into existence and maintain it and extend it and so on. Faking It is one scholar offering us a different story.
Apparently for many it is a really scary story, one that demands attack(s), the more offensive the better. The ridiculous mess on the Duck of Minerva website when Weber dared to address the incredible (and cruel) hostility towards queer theory and its practitioners on message boards is one of the tamer albeit reliably embarrassing and pathetic examples. 22 Y’all are cute… or would be if your privilege wasn’t so pernicious (and unrelentingly persistent); flame away hidden in your anonymity. When you’re done, let’s talk; with apologies for all the attendant assumptions, this humanifesto offers a guide from which we can learn and figure out where we’re going and what we’re doing and how to do it better and more (self-)consciously.
I’m under no illusions, especially with regard to the impressive array of haters. As Weber concludes in Faking It, there is no ‘storybook ending’. 23 ‘Knowledge’ (‘Knowing’ in her words) ‘does not generally lead to emancipation; rather it often incites the subject confronted with “the truth” to embark on even more elaborate strategies of denial’. 24 In words all too easily applied to IR, she notes that is the most likely outcome, though ‘what form these strategies of denial and deferral will take are unclear’. 25 But she perceptively notes that in such a situation, no one lives happily ever after and that is certainly true for an IR that willfully chooses to ignore an opportunity to open itself up to the world; it is past time to retire Waltz’s notion that ‘the theory of international politics is written in terms of the great powers of an era…A general theory of international politics is necessarily based on the great powers’. 26 Is it? Really?
Weber’s Faking It has aged well, weirdly and wildly prescient and strikingly and bizarrely applicable, indeed useful. Consider the frankly strange US response to Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, lauded at home as a ‘compassionate invasion’ 27 but regionally and globally seen by many as a military occupation. Or Cuba’s ‘reintegration’ into the region. And then there is the US’s decline and questionable place at the table as Latin America reconsiders its relations with the US, each other, and changing world (dis)order. Our understanding of all these and much more is only enhanced by Weber’s work. Talking about the revolutionary moment in Paris 1968, the French actor Miou-Miou, at the time a teenage upholstery machine operator, recalled: ‘I didn’t understand any of it, but it stirred me’. ‘Ordinary people like me’, she said, ‘started thinking that somehow our lives might somehow change’. 28 When I think about encountering Faking It that seems right: I didn’t understand it, it stirred me, and I thought ordinary academics like me could think more broadly about the world and make a difference – a difference in how and what we thought and wrote about, in how and what we taught and modelled for our students, and in the commitments we made. Like I said, I don’t know how many copies she sold, but I’d wager almost every one of us started a band.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
1.
While this was not, alas, the final cover, the book begins: ‘This is the United States as I see it today – a white headless body of indecipherable sex and gender cloaked in the flag and daggered with a queer dildo harnessed to its midsection. This figure finds its global footing on Caribbean islands and its hegemonic identity reflected in the Caribbean Sea’, Cynthia Weber, Faking It: US Hegemony in a ‘Post-Phallic’ Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Anna Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, ‘The House of IR: from Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism’, International Studies Review 6, no. 4 (2004): 21–49.
4.
Cynthia Weber, ‘Good Girls, Little Girls, and Bad Girls: Male Paranoia in Robert Keohane’s Critique of Feminist International Relations’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies 23, no. 2 (1994): 337–49.
5.
Meghana Nayak, ‘Thinking About Queer International Relations’ Allies’, International Studies Review 16, no. 4: 615–22.
6.
Lewis Fry Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press, 1960).
7.
Examples of the former include Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘Human Rights, Principled Issue-networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America’, International Organization 47, no. 3 (1993): 411–41; of the latter Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs 12, no. 4 (1985): 687–718 and Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). To be fair, by the mid 1990s more such work was appearing, but one might reasonably date the end of IR’s 20th century to the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union. IR’s short 20th century might be fairly described as 1914 (or even 1917 or 1919) to 1991.
8.
Patti Smith, ‘Babelogue’, Babel (New York: Putnam, 1973), 193; Patti Smith, ‘Babelogue’, Easter (New York: Arista Records, 1978). If Smith disavows interest in ‘fucking with the past’, Weber (Faking It) merrily shoulders that burden too.
9.
Patti Smith, ‘To the Reader’, Early Work (New York: Norton, 1994), xi-x.
10.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), xi.
11.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
12.
Gerald Rauning, Art and Revolution (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007), 205.
13.
Ibid.
14.
Ibid., 229.
15.
Nayak, ‘Thinking About Queer International Relations’ Allies’, 616.
16.
Ibid.
17.
Ibid.
18.
Ibid.
19.
Weber, Faking It, 3.
20.
This paragraph owes much to the ultracool thinking/questioning/prodding of Nayak, ‘Thinking About Queer International Relations’ Allies’.
21.
22.
23.
Weber, Faking It, 137.
24.
Ibid., 137–8.
25.
Ibid., 138.
26.
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 72–3.
27.
28.
Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 17.