Abstract
Reviewed by: Ananya Sharma, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Cynthia Weber’s boldly conceived and cogently argued book is a path-breaking addition that offers a theoretically and empirically engaging conversation between International Relations (IR) and transnational/global queer studies scholarship. Her queer curiosity builds on that of contemporary thinkers in the West, ranging from those who question gender as a discourse (Foucault, Haraway, Butler) to language as a site of power (Barthes) and ‘statecraft’ as ‘mancraft’ (Ashley). Weber poses four questions about ‘western’ hegemonic discourses of IR theory and foreign policy: a) What is ‘homosexuality’?; b) Who is ‘the homosexual’?; c) How is ‘the homosexual’ figured as/in relation to ‘sovereign man’?; and d) Why are these questions relevant for IR and for (transnational/global) Queer Studies? Queer International Relations uncovers key links between sexuality and sovereignty, power and possibility. It productively disrupts disciplinary IR by destabilising one of the bedrock assumptions of the field sovereignty. Weber complicates Richard Ashley’s (1989) theory of ‘statecraft as mancraft’ by developing a new Queer IR theoretical and methodological technique – ‘queer logics of statecraft’ (p. 4). The central argument in Queer IR is that sovereignty, sexuality and all political scales from the intimate to the international are inseparable. By failing to read sovereignties and sexualities together, IR and (transnational/global) Queer Studies insufficiently comprehend contemporary mobilisations of power, which undercuts their ability to support or resist these mobilisations. Yet these overlapping bodies of scholarship further enrich understandings of how ‘sovereign man’ as ‘sexualised sovereign man’ functions in existing and emerging sexualised understandings of intimate, national, regional and international relations.
Weber explores how figurations of ‘the homosexual’ complicate and challenge conventional understandings of normality and perversion. She expresses her desire to carve out a space for plural logoi in queer theory as well as IR. Plural logoi depend on the ability to uphold the simultaneity of and/or (rather than either/or) in understanding social realities as social complexities. Weber queers the ‘binary logic of power’, drawing on Barthes’ concept of the ‘and/or’, calling it ‘queer logics of and/or’ (p. 42). 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’, which allows for more nuanced understandings of international formations of power. The book addresses four figurations, borrowing from Donna Haraway, of the perverse homosexual in the international sphere: the undeveloped, the undevelopable, the unwanted im/migrant and the terrorist – four others to the classically conceived sovereign man. The book traces how official foreign policy discourses construct these subjects as undesirable and dangerous.
The ‘perverse homosexual’ has been reworked over time and continues to shape contemporary IR theories about modernisation and development, immigration and security. Chapter 3 discusses the trope of western superiority which helped legitimate colonial expansionism in the form of state-sanctioned hetero-reproductive-married-monogamy to the ‘underdeveloped’, and marked out others as ‘undevelopable’. These sexually perverse figurations of the non-west continue to help mark distinctions between western and non-western states, and serve other aspects of contemporary foreign policy, such as the threats to (western) sovereignty presented by immigration and terrorism, which are discussed as case studies in Chapter 4. Perversely figured, the underdeveloped, undevelopable, unwanted (im)migrant and terrorist are all understood to threaten the coherence and stability upon which the modern state relies for its legitimacy. Chapter 5 uses a close reading of Hillary Clinton’s (2011) ‘Gay Rights are Human Rights’ speech to the United Nations to demonstrate how the figuration of the homosexual as LGBT rights holder is positioned against the perverse homosexual and in alliance with the sovereign man due to the assimilation of homosexual subjects into neoliberal frameworks of patriotism, work, consumption and reproduction. Finally, in her sixth chapter, Weber introduces the normal and/or perverse homosexual, a figure who defies categorisation, disrupts binary logics and suggests new ways of thinking identity and sovereignty alike. Here, Weber introduces the winner of the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest, whom she dubs ‘Tom Neuwirth and/as Conchita Wurst’ or ‘Neuwirth/Wurst’ (p. 144). As a self-proclaimed homosexual man, the Austrian Tom Neuwirth created Conchita Wurst as a Colombian, putatively heterosexual and female art figure, with a beard that forecloses her passing as female. Together in the same body, they blurred binaries and defied either/or logics not just of gender and sexuality but also of race and culture.
Queer IR’s central contribution is its ability to destabilise and contest received wisdom about international relations with refutation of binary logics and ostensibly stable categories. It refers to a spirit of exploration from a position that is multiple in-between. Weber lays to rest the presumptively white, masculine/cisgendered, able, heterosexual vision of sovereign man that underpins so much of what we do as IR scholars. She sets out to reveal how sexuality works as a fundamental organising principle in international politics. This is an excellent contribution to moving beyond the procrustean knowledge production ossified by the mainstream theories in IR towards rearticulating the diverse subjectivities that compose the international.
Reference
K. Ashley, Richard (1989) ‘Living on Borderlines’. In: Derian James Der J Shapiro Michael (eds) International/Intertextual Relations, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, pp. 259–321.