
If asked about queer work in international relations, most IR scholars would almost certainly answer that queer studies is a non-issue for the subdiscipline -- a topic beyond the scope and understanding of international politics. Yet queer work tackles problems that IR scholars themselves believe are central to their discipline: questions about political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and the national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies, not to mention their implications for empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism. And since the introduction of queer work in the 1980s, IR scholars have used queer concepts like "performativity" or "crossing" in relation to important issues like sovereignty and security without acknowledging either their queer sources or their queer function. This agenda-setting book asks how "sexuality" and "queer" are constituted as domains of international political practice and mobilized so that they bear on questions of state and nation formation, war and peace, and international political economy. How are sovereignty and sexuality entangled in contemporary international politics? What understandings of sovereignty and sexuality inform contemporary theories and foreign policies on development, immigration, terrorism, human rights, and regional integration? How specifically is "the homosexual" figured in these theories and policies to support or contest traditional understandings of sovereignty? Queer International Relations puts international relations scholarship and transnational/global queer studies scholarship in conversation to address these questions and their implications for contemporary international politics.
This book investigates how sexuality and queer theory are fundamentally entangled with the construction of sovereignty and international political practice. Cynthia Weber, a scholar in international relations, challenges the discipline's traditional exclusion of queer studies by demonstrating how concepts like performativity and identity are already embedded in mainstream IR discourse. She argues that state and nation formation, as well as foreign policies regarding security and development, rely on specific, often unacknowledged, configurations of sexuality to maintain power hierarchies.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars in the field identify this work as a foundational text for bridging the gap between critical queer theory and traditional international relations. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which requires a strong background in both political theory and gender studies to fully synthesize.
Page Count:
263
Publication Date:
2016-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0190469188
ISBN-13:
9780190469184
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