Queer/Trans Ks

Contents
Notes.......................................................................................................................... 4
Uniqueness................................................................................................................. 5
Links........................................................................................................................... 8
Anthro..................................................................................................................... 9
Border Disputes..................................................................................................... 10
[Anti-]Capitalism.................................................................................................... 11
Generic.................................................................................................................. 13
China..................................................................................................................... 15
Diplomacy............................................................................................................. 17
Data/Science......................................................................................................... 25
Pinkwashing.......................................................................................................... 28
Realism.................................................................................................................. 30
Generic............................................................................................................... 31
China Specific..................................................................................................... 35
Economy............................................................................................................... 37
Taiwan................................................................................................................... 40
Antiblackness........................................................................................................ 41
Identity/ Subject Formation................................................................................... 51
Security/IR............................................................................................................. 54
IR- Trans Specific................................................................................................... 61
Nationalism........................................................................................................... 65
State...................................................................................................................... 66
Fem IR................................................................................................................... 73
Space.................................................................................................................... 74
Warming/ Enviornment.......................................................................................... 79
Middle Eastern War............................................................................................... 86
Model Minority....................................................................................................... 88
Nuclear War........................................................................................................... 90
Terrorism............................................................................................................... 91
Orientalism............................................................................................................ 93
Women/ Men................................................................................................... 94
2NC Ballot Framer.................................................................................................... 96
Impacts................................................................................................................... 101

Diplomacy........................................................................................................... 102
Overkill................................................................................................................ 104
Neoliberalism...................................................................................................... 106
Homonationalism................................................................................................ 111
Biopower............................................................................................................. 117
Cis-Security......................................................................................................... 118
Ethics.................................................................................................................. 124
War...................................................................................................................... 126
Humanism........................................................................................................... 128
Alternatives and Methods....................................................................................... 130
Queer IR.............................................................................................................. 131
Trans-Disidentification......................................................................................... 132
2NC- Ext........................................................................................................... 134
Statecraft............................................................................................................ 135
Assemblages- Puar.............................................................................................. 140
Assemblages- Race............................................................................................. 144
Sinophone Praxis................................................................................................. 146
Failure.................................................................................................................. 148
Haraways Figurations......................................................................................... 150
Transgender China............................................................................................... 153
Kweer Theory...................................................................................................... 157
Tropicalism.......................................................................................................... 161
Imagination......................................................................................................... 162
Trans Rage........................................................................................................... 163
A2: Perm................................................................................................................. 167
A2: State Necessary............................................................................................... 172
A2: Queer Studies Homonationalist........................................................................173
A2: IR Solves Queer Issues..................................................................................... 174
A2: Queer Theory is Unintelligible..........................................................................176
A2: State Solves..................................................................................................... 179
Aff Answers............................................................................................................. 182
Queer IR Fails...................................................................................................... 183
Queer Theory Fails............................................................................................... 186
Queer Liberation Now/ State Solves....................................................................188

A2: Trans Range.................................................................................................. 189

Static Identities Good.......................................................................................... 191
Institutional Analysis Good.................................................................................. 196
A2: Disidentification............................................................................................ 200
Cedes the Political............................................................................................... 204
Realism Solves.................................................................................................... 208
State Key- Queer IR............................................................................................. 211
State Key- Queer Theory..................................................................................... 213
State Key- Heteronormativity..............................................................................216
State Key- Trans Rights........................................................................................ 217
Perm.................................................................................................................... 219
Perm- Trans Specific............................................................................................ 222
Homogenization DA............................................................................................. 224
Alt Fails- Generic.................................................................................................. 226

Notes
Shoutout to the bbqueers and queerfriends who made this file possible.
#2Queer4U #FFSRVSupremacy

This K is set up to be very formulaic.

Step 1: Choose your links. I highly recommend retagging things to fit the specific
context of the aff. Good K debaters do this nearly every round. Keep in mind many
link cards have dual-function as solvency evidence because they explain what
queering [advantage/epistemology] looks like. Consider it a two-fur. Youre welcome.

Step 2: Choose an alt. If you are debating a policy aff, you might want to treat
the debate like a counterplan and DA and go with the Queer IR alt. If you want to
make it a heavy indict of their epistemology, think about trans rage. There are many
options available, some tech-y, some performative. Find what feels right explaining
in the 2NC.

Step 3: Profit. Godspeed.

All questions should be directed to bricker312@gmail.com

Uniqueness
We control UQ Clintons rhetoric on Orlando makes
homonationalism inevitable absent the alternative
Erol 16 Professorial Lecturer in the School of International Service, American
University [Ali E., 6/15/2016, Hillary Clintons Response to the Pulse Orlando
Shootings, http://www.e-ir.info/2016/06/15/hillary-clintons-response-to-the-pulseorlando-shootings/] AMarb
shortly after the Pulse LGBT nightclub announced last
call in its Latinx night, Omar Mateen committed what is now dubbed the worst mass
shooting in American history killing 49 and wounding 53 people. Initial reactions to the shooting,
along with condolences and heartfelt sentiments, focused on issues such as gun
control, Mateens Afghan and Muslim background, and drawing caution to falling
victim to Islamophobia. Important issues missing from the emerging discussion,
however, were homophobia, transphobia, hegemonic masculinity, and the antiimmigrant sentiment. These attitudes are all unfortunately prevalent and salient in the
United States due to ongoing popular public discussions regarding same-sex marriage, nearly 200
anti-LGBT bills across 34 states in the first ten weeks of 2016 introduced by GOP (Griffin, 2016)
including the well-known North Carolinas House Bill 2 that regulates access to restrooms based on gender, and
the rhetorics of the candidates in the approaching presidential elections. As one of the
On the early hours of June 12th 2016,

presidential candidates, Hilary Clinton made several statements regarding the attack. She released a statement on
her official Facebook page few hours after the attack on Sunday morning, in addition to tens of tweets, an NPR

Clintons remarks were

especially important on several fronts: Clinton is the presidential candidate of the
Democratic party and presumed to be more progressive than her Republican counterpart,
Donald Trump. Moreover, some of Clintons campaign platform relies on the fact that she is
bidding to be the first woman president of the United States. For these reasons her
stance and declaration of solidarity with the LGBT individuals would be
monumental. However, Clintons addresses had a different focus. In all the statements she
made, Clinton drew attention to responding to such attacks and sustained the war
against terrorism narrative. She emphasized expanding and strengthening
intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and increasing the air raids against ISIS to
defeat them on the battlefield. For instance, in her speech she made Monday afternoon, she laid out a
three-part policy plan. She argued: First, we and our allies must work hand in hand to dismantle the networks
that move money and propaganda and arms and fighters around the world Second, here at home, we must
harden our own defenses. We have to do more to support our first responders, law enforcement, and
intelligence officers who do incredible work everyday at great personal risk to keep our country safe The third
area that demands attention is preventing radicalization and countering efforts by
ISIS and other international terrorist networks to recruit in the United States and
Europe. Clintons response might make sense in her position as a presidential candidate. She makes policy
interview on Monday morning, and a live speech in Cleveland in Monday afternoon.

suggestions. She offers practical resolutions and talks with depth and insight her Republican counterpart Donald

none of her statements have any plans or suggestions to

counter homophobia, transphobia, or the wide spread anti-immigrant rhetoric. She
Trump does not match. However,

does not mention a word about how she would repeal the hundreds of anti-LGBT
laws, regulations, and policies or work to tackle the widespread anti-LGBT and antiimmigrant sentiment. Perhaps most strikingly for a candidate who takes pride and runs part of her
campaign on her gender identity, she does not mention the role of hegemonic masculinity
and its disposition to conduct violence towards women and LGBT individuals. In the
only instance Clinton attempts to claim a sense of solidarity with the LGBT individuals at large
and brings up LGBT concerns in her speech, she states: From Stonewall to Laremy and now Orlando. Weve
seen too many examples of how the struggle to live freely, openly, and without fear has been met by violence. We
have to stand together. Be proud together. There is no better rebuke to the terrorists, to
all those who hate. Our open diverse society is an asset in the struggle against
terrorism, not a liability. It makes us stronger and more resistant to radicalization.
Unfortunately, Clintons rhetoric does not help Latinx queer individuals, who were
targeted by the attack, or others who are pushed to the margins of the society and
suffer from systematic oppression, laws and policies. On the contrary, her rhetoric is yet
another attempt to recruit queer subjects in to the normative fold of war against
terrorism narrative and the us versus them binary such narrative puts forth. In this
sense, Clinton asks that queer subjects should join the ranks of promoting global
violence and waging war. In framing openness and diversity as an asset in the struggle
against terrorism, she takes liberation and subordination out of the LGBT struggle
and attempts to replace it with confirming with the mainstream America in a
homogenized sense of diversity that unites in conducting warfare overseas. However,
queer subjects have always been a problem in the context of populist rhetoric,
policymaking, as well as scholarship. Cynthia Weber, who writes in the intersection of queer studies
and international relations, suggests this is not due to a lack of queer scholarship or a
symptom of indecency of those who engage in queer studies (Weber, 2015). Rather,
Weber argues queer subjectivities more than exceed binary logics of the either/or.
(Weber, 2016: 3). Queer and queernessas well as queer subjectsdo not lend themselves on a
stable position that could be pointed to or captured in a box; neither in public,
public policy, nor in scholarship. For this reason, as Markus Thiel notes, queer politics pose a
challenge to IR and mainstream LGBT organizing (Thiel, 2014). Clintons responses to Pulse
shooting showcases why that is the case. Clintons rhetoric, and the mainstream IR
policymaking it represents, not only ignores, but also relies on the erasure of queer
subjects for self-sustenance. Whether to recruit soldiers for the next battle, to frame
success in war against terrorism, or to argue that a trade deal such as TPP is good, statecentered mainstream IR policymaking that takes neoliberalism and neorealism to
heart owes its existence to enemy civilians who are killed and displaced in wars, people
who are deprived of basic necessities for living, those who sustain their lives in
borders, and workers who are exploited in trade deals. These subjects, who are
ignored and cast aside by mainstream IR scholarship and policymaking, are lost in
heated rhetorics after tragic events that call for action and unification. They are also
the very subjects that inform the central perspective of queer IR scholarship (Wilcox,
2014). Still, it is important to consider Clintons argument in the context of a series of declarations that seems to be
about displaying solidarity with the LGBT community at large to understand its function. Later in the speech she
gave Monday afternoon,

should behave.

Clinton cited the aftermath of 9/11 as an example of how America

She told the story of Bushs visit to a Muslim community to curb the possible rise of

Uniting as a nation
behind this tragedy, according to Clinton, is the epitome display of solidarity. Such
Islamophobia and peoples inevitable tendency to blame Muslims for the 9/11 attacks.

call for unity, however, irons out the intersections of identities that have been
targeted at the Pulse nightclub as well as have been historically subjected to
violence by the very apparatus Clinton seems to rally behind. Terms and conditions that
apply to such unity are that of ignoring the place of race in the massacre as well as in the war against terrorism
narrative Clinton sustains, ignoring the role of hegemonic masculinity in dealing violence
against those who are deemed other, and ignoring the history of the LGBT
movement that took a counter stance against normativities imposed by
heterosexuality and neoliberalism. Clinton, then, in her response tries to invoke what Puar
calls homonationalism, creating proper queer subjects via mobilizing the
discourse of openness and diversity and pitting them against terrorist bodies to
exemplify ethos of neoliberal democracy (Puar, 2007). In her same work, Puar writes that
Queer times require even queerer modalities of thought, analysis,
creativity, and expression in order to elaborate upon nationalist, patriotic, and
terrorist formations and their imbricated forms of racialized perverse sexualities and
gender dysphorias (Puar, 2007: 204). As such, it falls on queer scholars and activists to
deconstruct discourses and affective structures that attempt to put queer subjects
in binaries that wash away intersections and offer proper citizenship in exchange of
being a part of global warfare. Engaging with public debates, students, other scholars,
politicians, and policymakers on these issues and on the assumed binary positions is
the work that will disrupt the oversimplification required for recruiting
queer subjects into the normative fold.

Links

Anthro
To transgender is to go beyond humanness- focus on
speciesism misses the point. Transness is already non- and
anti-human.
Kier 11
Bailey Kier PhD Professor of American Studies, University of Maryland,
Interdependent ecological transsex:
Notes on re/production, transgender fish, and the management of populations,
species, and resources College Park, MD, USA Published online: 31 Jan 2011. Women
& Performance: a journal of feminist theory Volume 20, Issue 3, 2010 Special Issue:
The Transbiological Body
Transgender is a category associated mostly with post- industrialized nations of the
West, but which is also meaningful in other parts of the world. It is mostly used to
describe individuals who do not fit neatly into normative notions of human
re/production in which the category of sex has an imagined clear, distinctive, and
essential male and female. Transgender relies upon an understanding of gender
that is dependent and distinguished, yet closely associated with the category of
imagined essential sex. Gender is largely thought of as a constructed human
category, a cultural universal displaying diversity across cultures, while sex is
considered an essential universal of Nature, although much scholarship in the
humanities and social sciences now situates sex as a socially constructed category.
The prefix trans meaning to cross, go beyond, and to change when combined
with gender, means to go beyond, to change and to cross the anthropocentric
category of socially constructed gender. Transgender as a category is also closely
associated with ideas about human individual identities and imagined and real
human collective communities, even as David Valentine has shown that the
category conveys different meanings to many of those who use it and to those it is
used to describe in the same local contexts.6 So why does the term transgender
continue to commonly be held in close association with the human, when the term
literally means to change and disrupt the human-centeredness of the category of
gender itself? Transgender as a category is just as much about queering the human
as it is about queering sex and gender. Because of the human-centered paradox of
the category of transgender, I prefer the term transsex in this essay, in an attempt
to use another (just as problematic) signifier to expand the trajectory of transgender
studies and to describe the eco-systemic relations and negations of re/production of
multiple species and things. To change, go beyond and across normal meanings of
sex is to expose the queer relations of re/production of multiple species and things.

Border Disputes
Discourses of statehood reliant on stability, integrity, unity,
geographic coherence and which understand borders as
containers project a masculine notion of sovereignty that
constructs womens bodies as abject and as threatening to
practices of sovereignty. Their securitization requires the
abjection and elimination or confinement of women across and
within borders.
Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, 86-87)CJQ
Sovereignty produces the state as a unified, singular entity: the body politic has one
body and speaks with a single voice (Gatens 1996, 23). The body politic is
represented as a generic, individual body, but of course there is no such
thing. Rather, among other markers of difference, bodies are always sexed.
Feminists have argued that this body politic is not only constituted by the exclusion
of women, but also relies on masculine representations of bodies. The
analogization of the state to a body, characterized by sharply delineated
borders between inside and outside and between different units (other
states, other bodies), is a representation of bodies (and thus states) as
masculine and fully grown, without the inevitable decline of the life cycle
(Cavarero 2002, 114)the eternal body of the sovereign, rather than his
fleshy, decaying body. The unitary of the stateone sovereign speaking on
behalf of the state, and the social contract constituted by the voices of men
(Pateman 1988; Gatens 1996)is an erasure of sexual difference, using the
masculine to represent the human. The production of the state as a self-contained
and bounded body reproduces sovereignty as a masculine practice. The
representation of the state as a kind of container is sometimes considered a natural
or inevitable metaphor. Lakoff (1987) asserts that because we live in bodies that are
containers, we experience everything as inside a container or outside it. Because of
our embodied experience, the container model of the state has an essential basis
in our bodily life. However, the actual experience of embodiment for all people is
not of self-contained bodies demarcated from the world by the boundaries of the
skin, and experiencing ones body as a container is more common to men
than to women (Battersby 1999). The modern, self-contained, bounded body that
is seen as the normative body is culturally associated with white, heterosexual,
able-bodied men rather than women, racial others, sexual minorities, or disabled
persons. Womens bodies have not so much been constructed as absence, or
lack, but as leaking or fluid, through a mode of seepage or liquidity (Grosz
1994, 203; Shildrick, 1997). As such, womens bodies have been figured as abject in
their instability and their refusal to obey borders. These non-normative bodies are
seen as particularly vulnerable and, as such, not suitable for full status as a
sovereign subject.3 Sovereign practices reproduce subjects and states in terms of

masculine solidity and containment, which are destabilized by the practices of

suicide bombing that violate the boundaries that sovereignty erects.

[Anti-]Capitalism
Queering the economy is key to expose naturalizing
discourses of capitalism.
Kier 11
Bailey Kier PhD Professor of American Studies, University of Maryland,
Interdependent ecological transsex:
Notes on re/production, transgender fish, and the management of populations,
species, and resources College Park, MD, USA Published online: 31 Jan 2011. Women
& Performance: a journal of feminist theory Volume 20, Issue 3, 2010 Special Issue:
The Transbiological Body
Transsex intentionally queers economy, in order to illustrate that economies extend
far and wide beyond capital and the human. The classificatory infrastructure of
nature/culture is perhaps the broadest, most universal knowledge infrastructure,
engrossing several other major classifica- tory infrastructures such as
sex(nature)/gender(culture), and human(culture)/ animal(nature).23 We must
complicate the limits of solely socio-cultural paradigms by considering many other
dynamics and processes, both human and non-human, that enable and uphold
culture as a classificatory infrastructure guiding most scholarship in the humanities
and much of the social sciences.24 Works by scholars such as Lisa Duggan and
Aihwa Ong insist that cultural analyses are not enough, and a more accurate
theoretical framework in the neoliberal era requires considering the intersections of
culture, politics, and economics.25 But how can we continue talking about culture,
politics and economy without considering interdependent relational re/productive
ecological economies as the backbone of all three? Even the advent of the
bioeconomy, which speculates value, requires ecological symbioses and divisions to
make raw materials and energy, and labors to make the machines, computers, and
various infrastructures of the bioeconomy possible. My thinking of re/productive
orientations initially stemmed from Henri Lefebvres The Production of Space, for his
attempt to unearth and connect naturalized discourses about re/production, the
family, re/producing the labor force for capitalism, and re/producing the social
relations necessary for re/ production the family, capitalism, and culture. Lefebvre
explained three interrelated levels in which social space is produced: (1)
biological reproduction (the family); (2) the reproduction of labour power (the
working class per se); and (3) the reproduction of the social relations of production
that is, of those relations which are constitutive of capitalism and which are
increasingly (and increasingly effectively) sought and imposed as such.26 When
these three components are made visible, it becomes clear that a system of
symbolic representation works to maintain these social relations in a state of
coexistence and cohesion, displaying them while displacing them . . . concealing
them in symbolic fashion with the help of, and onto the backdrop of nature.27 In
other words, the production of space (or how capitalism produces space) becomes
naturalized, though for Lefebvre, the process is entirely social. Lefebvres work

allows for linking normative ideas of sexuality, human re/ production and the
management of labor and populations to the various compo- nents of economic
production involving the production and management of resources, populations,
species and the landscape. Through Lefebvres model, we can decipher that
capitalism is a human social process and structure, and the fitness and success
of white European and American exploitation, while hanging upon the backdrop of
nature, is in fact a social process made invisible through normative discourses
and the symbolic realm. There is nothing distinctively natural, or beyond the
grasp of humans, about the exploitations of capitalism; these exploitations are
political decisions made by groups of people about other groups of people,
resources, and species. Additionally, Lefebvres work allows us to shift thinking
about the category of sexuality to the realm of re/production, which expands
the category of normative sex, gender, and sexuality to account not just for humans
having babies, but also maintaining and managing labor pools, resources, species
and the social and economic relations necessary for those labor pools and resources
to re/produce for capitalism. However, Lefebvres work barely addresses the
material world and species beyond humans, except to briefly explain nature as a
source and resource, that is part of the forces of production and part of the
products of those forces.28 Lefebvres model can be expanded by adding a fourth
interrelated level ecological re/production to the production of space, which
consists of the non-human ecological relations, materials, and species that make
human reproduction possible in the first place. The literal re/production and
exponential growth of the human species would not be possible without the multiple
other species we rely on for food, food pollination, tools, labor, and the mitigation of
disease and predation. The list of what Donna Haraway calls companion species
is vast, and includes species of bees, cedar, dogs, rats, grass, fish, etc. This fourth
level of ecological re/production can produce space independently of humans,
outside of capitalism and the symbolic realm, but can also be manipulated, although
not completely controlled, by humans to produce space for capitalism. It is noticing
the discrepancies that arise between Natures ability to independently produce
space and human production of space through capitalism that has the potential to
illustrate useful tools and ideas for devising more equitable and ethical economic
orders. By paying attention to nature outside the human urge to control it, one can
see that Nature has a different system of valuation and profit than that of
capitalism. There is not one natural economy called capitalism but multiple
interactive and adaptive economies at work, in sync and in contestation with
capitalism. Paying attention, observing, and documenting Natures systems of
valuation and profit has further capacity to demystify capitalism as part of the
natural order, illustrating our interrelated co-constituted situatedness in global
ecological economies of people, resources, things, desires, and processes.
Interdependent transsex, as illustrated through transgender fish and the fear
EDCs invoke about human re/production, is just one example. Re/productively
altered factory cattle are another example, pumped with synthetic hormones and
antibiotics that humans consume directly as meat and milk and then indirectly
through waterscapes of agricultural runoff (EDCs) and also through the fish we
consume.

Generic
The West constructs itself as the savior to the underdeveloped
world and frames them through queer rhetoric that sustains
homonationalism
Nowicki 13 [Mel, 2013, Using the Queer to Construct the Non-West,
http://www.e-ir.info/2013/05/24/using-the-queer-to-construct-the-non-west/] AMarb
The figuration of the underdeveloped/non-white/non-Western as being trapped in a
state of arrested development, needing to be rescued by the white Westerner, is
further exemplified when addressing how the underdeveloped/non-white/non-Western is also figured in
relation to their gendered perversions. Despite white Western feminist literature promoting notions of
a global sisterhood that is, women, regardless of race or colonial context, live a shared experience simply

the non-white/non-Western woman

is characterised as a helpless, oppressed creature who, with the help of her white
Western sisters must break the shackles of her cultural imprisonment in order to
become a developed liberal feminist and join the correct path towards developed
civilisation (Parpart 1995; Brantlinger 1985). Rather than accounting for racial, colonial and historical contexts
because they are women (Goudge 2004) the reality remains that

surrounding gender inequalities in the non-white world, and how they might differ from gender inequalities

Western feminists instead appear to have adapted

Spivaks 1988 observation of the Western worlds relationship with the underdeveloped: from white
men saving brown women from brown men[1] (Spivak 1988: 93), to white women saving
their brown sisters from brown men. Despite assertions of a global sisterhood and shared experience,
women living in the developing world are figured as gendered, as well as racial,
failures. This is often seen in relation to the underdeveloped woman as , on the one hand,
the subject of sexual oppression, their sexual life controlled and dictated by (brown)
men (Reid 1997), and on the other, as inherently over-sexed and sexually perverse in
nature. For example, in nineteenth century Britain, prostitutes were treated as involved in a criminal act,
experienced by Euro-American women,

whereas Indian women were understood as belonging to a class, of being (ontologically and essentially) prostitutes
(Briggs 2002: 24). Unlike the white, British prostitute, who was deemed criminal and out of the ordinary, sex work
was accepted as an innate part of the underdeveloped Indian womans being. In many ways such paradoxical
figurations of the underdeveloped woman feed into the Western constructed narrative of the underdeveloped as in
need of guidance away from the degeneracy of their cultural lives and towards the Western pinnacles of liberalism

These somewhat contradictory

figurations of the underdeveloped as both sexually oppressed and sexually
degenerate can also be noted in relation to Western perceptions of the
(homo)sexuality of the underdeveloped, where the underdeveloped is figured as
sexually perverse, both in terms of sexual deviance and in terms of lacking sexual
enlightenment. In the first instance homosexuality, when applied to the figure of the underdeveloped, is
associated with sexual deviance, decadence and degeneracy. As Neville Hoad observes, decadence and
degeneracyare both developmental tropeswhat the decadent/degenerate
shares with the primitive is a position on the fringes of the normative evolutionary
narrative (Hoad 2000: 137). Homosexuality is consistently linked to the underdeveloped;
once again we return to this notion of arrested development in which the
homosexual is the figure of arrested development of the heterosexual, as the
primitive is the figure of arrested development of the civilised (ibid: 144). For example, the
academic William A. Rushing explains high HIV prevalence rates in sub-Saharan Africa as the
consequence of a hidden homosexuality. Despite overwhelming evidence that suggest that it is
and whiteness (or failing that, pseudo-whiteness). 2.3 Sexual Perversions

heterosexual sex that is the main cause of HIV transmission in the region, for Rushing the only accountable
explanation for such high instances of the disease on the African continent lay in degenerate homosexual activity

the underdeveloped is portrayed in

need of development through this narrative of their lacking sexual enlightenment
and tolerance. In contrast to the gay-friendly West, the developing world is
inherently homophobic, yet another sign in Western eyes that the Third World is in
need of development. The West has adopted attitudes to homosexuality as a marker
of how developed a nation is; the logic goes something like this: you are less developed than
us because you treat your gays badly. Thus the western state becomes guarantor of
lesbian and gay rights versus the threat constituted by the savage brutal other
(Rushing 1995; Oppong and Kalipeni 2004). Yet, at the same time,

(Binnie 2004: 76). This narrative of the West as protector of the homosexual, and the non-West as underdeveloped
due to their inability to treat their homosexuals with tolerance is exemplified in Western reactions to the regular reemergence of homophobic legislature in Uganda (to be discussed in more detail in a later section of this essay).

Western nations conveniently

ignore issues of homophobia that still rage within their own borders, as well as the
fact that the homophobia of the underdeveloped world has its roots in colonialism
and the spread of traditional Christian moralities in the Third World and that
homophobia may have been exported through colonialism (Binnie 2004). The Western
world expresses its whiteness as a badge of superiority (Goudge 2004: 8), in which their
supposed tolerance of homosexuality elevates them to the position of the
developed world, and the non-Western world is in need of development because
they apply no such tolerance. These figurations o f the underdeveloped as both homophobic and
sexually deviant emphasise the ongoing project of the Western world to fortify its hegemonic
position as developed, and the non-Western/non-white world as underdeveloped,
regardless of the often contradictory and hypocritical nature of the ways in which
the underdeveloped is figured as in need of development.
Whilst abhorrence at such homophobic legislature may be genuine,

China
IR Theory is inherently western- applying it to China makes no
sense and inevitably leads to policy failure.
Beeson 14 (Mark, Professor of International Politics at Murdoch University. Journal
of Asian Security and International Affairs 1(1) 123
http://aia.sagepub.com/content/1/1/1.full.pdf)
yet there is much about the historical East Asian experience that is significantly
at odds with the notional Western template. Not only has most of 'East Asia's'
history occurred in the complete absence of the Westphalian-style states that form
the core of most International Relations (IR) scholarship, but ideas about
international order, authority, not to mention the nature and locus of power, have
also been very different from their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. Even now, when the
state has become the default expression of geographically demarcated political
authority and power across the world, the role states play in Asia In underpinning
national security remains different and distinct and shows few signs of disappearing.
And

On the contrary, scholars in the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC), for example, are exploring that country's immense

China's
material transformation, which induces such alarm amongst traditional security
analysts (Mearsheimer, 2010), is also having important ideational consequences . Whether
history to develop a very different understanding of International order (Qin, 2011 Put differently,

this recognition will generate more accurate explanations of international development is moot, but it does serve as
a powerful reminder that our notions about the world we inhabit are socially constructed
(Searle, 1995; Wendt, 1999). Some of the theoretical implications of these initial observations are developed and
explained In the first part of the following discussion. The principal aim of the article, however, is to highlight some

ideas
about security in the region remain quite different and more broadly based than
they do in much of the West, and this has important consequences for security
practice and theory. Ironically, however, the preoccupation With state sovereignty
that is such a feature of recent regional development threatens to send the region
back to the proverbial future, as rather old fashioned-looking concerns about
territory undermine the essentially liberal 'logic of interdependence ' Paradoxically
therefore, East Asia continues to display some important differences, but also
threatens to reproduce some earlier Western tropes of which we might have hoped to see the
of the enduring differences that characterize thinking about security in East Asia I shall suggest that

last. The final section of the article details some of these problems and draws out their implications for the study of
Asian security The following discussion is framed in the language of 'security governance', or the efforts by states
acting alone or even cooperatively to manage or regulate security outcomes. One influential definition of security
governance that has been developed in a European context suggests that it is characterized by 'heterarchy; the
interaction of a large number of actors, both public and private; Institutionalization that is both formal and informal,
relations between actors that are ideational in character, structured by norms and understandings as much as by

East
Asia is plainly a very different place to Western Europe, but the framework usefully
highlights factors that are often neglected in many accounts of the region's
distinctive security practices and concerns. Even if security governance is
unrealized, it is a useful reminder that 'threats' , especially in the contemporary era,
are not simply about traditional military challenges to the nation-state _ On the contrary,
formal regulations; and finally collective purpose' (Webber, Croft, Howorth, Terriff & Krahmann, 2004, p. 8).

threats are now also very much about the 'systemic or milieu goals of states, the legitimacy or authority of state
structures, land / national social cohesiveness and Integrity' (Sperling, 2010, p. 5); a possibility that is especially
apparent in East Asia.

A queer re-reading of Sinophone studies is key to understand

Chinese policies and history only way to take into account
western imperialism in China
Yin Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages, Unraveling the Apparatus of
Domestication, Queer Sinophone Cultures, edited by Howard Chiang, whos research focuses on the intellectual
and cultural history of the Sinophone, and edited by Ari Larissa Heinrich, who received the Master's degree in
Chinese Literature from Harvard University,

2014, http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/Record/013795027

Rather than viewing Handong and Lan Yu as representative of an ongoing ideological

struggle within the PRCs aspiration for a socialist modernity and its contemporary
investments in a neoliberal capitalist world order, a queer Sinophone reading might
strategically bracket Handong, a figurative embodiment of Sinophone communities,
from Lan Yu, a symbolic character of socialist China. Indeed, the relationship between the PRC
and Sinophone communities is vividly captured early on in the film by the very first verbal communication between
the two characters. After watching a program that introduces the city of Los Angeles on TV, Lan Yu asked: Have
you been to America? to which Handong later replied, You come over, I have something for you. This scene

Lan Yus impression of the Western world is entirely mediated by what is

available in Chinese mass media, and his aspirations for them are able to be realized here and now,
through his affair with Handong. If Handongs invitation is reflective of Sinophone communities
self-awareness of possessing something that the PRC lacks, their very concrete alliances-economic,
political, and not just ideological-with countries such as the U nited States, not necessarily in
a hegemonic sense but in terms of minoritizing cultures, come across much clearer through this
Sinophone rereading. The relationship between Lan Yu and Handong, in other words, no
longer simply denotes a filmic representation of a queer space of China, but
registers an unruly tension of cultural and visual (dis)identification that transcends the
ideological and even geopolitical contours of (post-) socialist China. This strategy of
rereading Lan lu must be identified with the broader horizon of Sinophone production,
because its epistemological-historical pillars come from outside the geopolitical
China proper, including the legacies of British postcolonialism, American neoimperialism, the recontextualization of the Republican states scientific globalism
implies that

(recall my earlier argument that homosexuality emerged not in the post-Mao era but the Republican period), and
Hong Kongs cultural (which was in turn driven by economic) affiliations with other sub-regions of Cold War East
Asia, such as Taiwan and Japan. As it is well known, between the end of the Korean War in the mid 1950s and the
reopening of the Chinese Mainland in the late 1970s, Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, and Taiwan became U.S.
protectorates. One of the lasting legacies of this period, according to the cultural critic Kuan-Hsing Chen, is the
installation of the anticommunism-pro-Americanism structure in the capitalist zone of East Asia, whose

Inherent in the concept of the Sinophone

lies a more calculated awareness of the implicit role played by communist China in
the Cold War structuration of transnational East Asia.
overwhelming consequences are still with us today.82

Diplomacy
Chinese diplomats attempt to control nationalist discourse in a
way that papers over how certain bodies are affected by
institutions
Callahan 2015
(February, William A., professor of international relations at the London
School of Economics, Author of China Dreams: 20 Visions of the
Future, China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign
Policy and China: The Pessoptimist Nation, Textualizing
Cultures:Thinking beyond the MIT Controversy
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/578823#back - KSA)
The conclusion is not that Chinese students have been brainwashed by this
impressive multimedia campaign (that still continues to this day) or are pawns of
larger forces but to suggest that patriotic education/national humiliation education
provides the dominant template for understanding Chinese identity and security.
Chinas diplomats, scholars, and students often exude national pride when times are
good, but they quickly switch to national-humiliation themes when China faces an
international crisis.In other words, if it is common for us to assume that the general
public can be influenced by the media in the United States, why is it so difficult to
accept that Chinese citizens, whose subjectivity emerges in the context of wellorganized official media campaigns, cannot be likewise influenced? And isnt it a
proper critical stance to treat the century of national humiliation as a discourse
that needs to be explained in terms of power relations, rather than as a source of
facts that will explain Chinas behavior? Elsewhere, I conclude that the century of
national humiliation is less important as a set of facts than as a structure of feeling
that guides a certain form of politics. It is necessary, then, to understand national
humiliation not because it is true, but because understanding it is helpful for
critiquing this particular narrative of hostile international politics.22 Certainly,
individual Chinese express a wide range of views about their identity and history;
but it is still important to understand the discursive economy of the [End Page
136] PRCs propaganda system that not only censors information but also actively
shapes all forms of education and entertainment. 23Against the background of the
graphic display of mutilated Chinese bodiesincluding horrible photos of Japanese
soldiers beheading Chinese men and raping Chinese womenthat are commonly
displayed in discussions of the Nanjing Massacre in the PRC, it might seem odd that
Chinese students would complain about the prints picturing beheadings of Chinese
soldiers on MITs home page. But that would be missing the point; the controversy is
not about outrage at the violence of the images or the meaning of the individual
photos and prints. It centers on the production and distribution of Visualizing
Cultures.Although they might unproblematically consume the war porn of the
Nanjing Massacre albums at home in China, when abroad some felt that it was their
duty to assert control over images of ethnic Chinese people. As one student put it,

he and his classmates were angry not [at] the images themselves, but the lack of a
righteous standpoint.24 The righteous standpoint, he explains, is the one
supported by the Chinese state, that is, patriotic education. As the Internet
discussion shows, activists were particularly enraged that one of the authors had a
Japanese-sounding name, thus reaffirming the securitization of China against
Japan.25 Securitization here involves a focus on identity as difference in a zero-sum
game that distinguishes civilization from barbarism, and China from the rest of the
world.We saw such popular passions erupt again in 2008, when Chinese citizens
came out in force to defend the Olympic torch relays international Journey of
Harmony against foreigners who criticized Beijings crackdown in Tibet. Rather
than examine why Tibetans might protest Beijings rule, the dominant discourse
among Han Chinese around the world narrated the bias of Westerners who had
unfairly criticized the Chinese homeland. The Tibetan unrest was thus transformed
from a serious domestic issue of racial politics into an international issue of pride
and humiliation that pits China against the West.Beijing responded to international
criticism in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics with a propaganda campaign that
narrated the real China (zhenshi de Zhongguo), which Chinese officials and
netizens expected foreign [End Page 137] journalists to report.26 As China has grown
in global power over the past few years, this media campaign to present a singular
correct view of the PRC to international audiences has gained much traction:
Confucius Institutes are proliferating in universities around the world, and Chinas
new English-language cable news channel, CNTV, spreads the word in a slick CNNlike style. The importance of Chinas image policy was reaffirmed at the 2011
annual meeting of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which
focused on developing Chinas soft power and cultural security. 27Knowledge here
shifts from being the product of expertisethat is, the result of scholarly enquiry
to be the product of emotional feeling that one can only properly appreciate through
direct experience.28 It becomes a national commodity, an issue of national
sovereignty and discursive power (huayu quan), in which all Chinese, as a young
Chinese diplomat recently told me, instinctively know the meaning of harmony,
the PRCs recently declared national value. It becomes racialized in the sense that
only Chinese can talk about China (or at least have editorial control about how
others discuss it, as the Chinese students association suggested). This sense of
control sometimes takes blunt forms: the Chinese consulate in Manchester denied
visas to any of the fifty-thousand people who worked or studied at the university for
ten weeks in 2011; among other things, the consul-general was insulted by the
critical discussion of China at a keynote speech that was sponsored by the
Confucius Institute (and now is published as one of the articles in this special issue
of positions).29

Negotiations by global institutions work to suppress queer

bodies in Asian countries
Ho 2008

(Josephine, the foremost feminist sex-radical scholar in East Asia,

Founder and head of the Center for the Study of Sexualities at National
Central University, Taiwan, Is Global Governance Bad for East Asian
Queers? http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/251032#back
- KSA)
Yet, as the new global order has evolved in recent years, such euphoric feeling has
been punctured by growing retrenchment in the same region, as various states take
up measures quite inhospitable to queer existence. Police raids on Taiwans only gay
bookstore in 2003 and on gay home parties since 2004 fueled public impressions of
gay decadence and its resultant spread of HIV; subsequent litigation further
intensified fear and intimidation.3 Massive gatherings such as gay parties,
exhibitions, performances, forums, and even picnics were banned in Singapore in
2004 and 2007.4 On the grounds that lesbian and gay rights have not achieved
social consensus, gay-sponsored antidiscrimination legislation met with repeated
defeat in Hong Kong, and broad-based antidiscrimination legislation ended up
excluding sexual orientation in both Singapore and South Korea in 2007.5 Gay- and
lesbian-oriented radio program content was criticized by broadcasting [End Page
457] authorities as outright obscene in Taiwan in 2004 and characterized by
Christian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as biased towards homosexual
marriage and thus inappropriate for children in Hong Kong in 2007.6 Thanks to the
efforts of child-protection NGOs, helped in no small way by East Asias
sensationalizing media, a heightened sense of vigilance is now pervasive; as a
result, depending on the national context, legislation is either in place or under way
to circumscribe all sexual communication and contact on the Internet. While such
events are described as either the natural outcome of democratic processes or wellmeaning universal measures of obscenity and crime prevention, two significant
observations demonstrate otherwise. First, Christian-based NGOs were not only
actively involved in many of these processes but quite aggressive in promoting
social discontent and mobilizing opposition against the growing visibility of gay
lifestyles and the equity demands launched by queer activism. 7 Second, East Asias
new liberal states, interpreting democracy as majority rule, have made it
conveniently workable to claim respect for diversity while staunchly upholding and
reaffirming mainstream values. Curiously, these two developments often work
together to boost the public image and political power of both the Christian NGOs
and the liberal states. One cannot help but wonder: How do Christian NGOs achieve
such influential positions within East Asian societies despite the Christian
communitys minority status?8 And what do these recent developments reveal
about liberal democracys own limits in promoting marginal issues of social justice
in East Asia? This essay contends that answers to these important questions are
located in our current context of global governance and global civil society. As a
matter of fact, fortified by UN discourse and worldwide policy directives, set in place
by aspiring nation-states in collaboration with local NGOs (the most aggressive ones
being fundamentalist Christian), a new reign of civility, widely popularized in the
socially and politically volatile spaces of East Asia, is now producing detrimental
effects on queer lives through increased media sensationalism, police baiting,

recriminalization, and recurrent sex panic, not to mention new sex-repressive

legislative reform measures. The analysis that follows centers on two major aspects
of this development. First, the emerging global hegemony of morality has stepped
up its assault on queer representations and queer interaction through new local
legislation and litigation against queer social presence, as well as through
mobilizing and transforming conservative vigilance into an active surveillance
network that thrives on fanning sex panic. Second, the construction of child
protection as a universal imperative in actuality both reinforces heterosexual
monogamy and debunks cultural diversity as inherently confusing and thus harmful
for children. [End Page 458] This hegemony of morality and its child-protection
campaign constitutes an important and growing offensive by conservative forces as
they navigate the new world order of global governance.Since the 1990s,
governance has been used by such international organizations as the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to evaluate the political status of
countries in need of aid as well as their sustainability for a free market economy so
as to remove all obstacles to free trade while ensuring the countries ability to repay
debt. Viewed in this light, the release of the UN report Our Neighborhood: Report of
the Commission on Global Governance (1995), and the urgency and speed with
which global governance has been popularized and aggressively promoted in
various regions, reflect efforts to forge new social realities for economic
globalization. In place of state-oriented approaches to global politics, the UN report
proposes a new conception (and the emerging operation) of the institutions,
practices, and processes for organizing and negotiating global politics in the post
Cold War era. The new global order is to be conducted mainly through the multiple
and flexible interactions among intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the
UN, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the IMF, and their
various treaties; NGOs and their activisms; multinational corporations (MNCs) and
their operation; and existing, but allegedly weakened, state governments. In
addition to the usual powerful players in international politics, the UN secretarygeneral envisions NGOs as indispensable partners of the UN in the process of
deliberation and policy formation as well as in the execution of policies.9 The UN
thus enlisted an army of NGOs to raise public awareness of the need for
international cooperation and to advance the reports agenda, outlined as the
Charter for Global Democracy.10 Participation in such UN projects in turn adds to
the political weight of local NGOs, which now find themselves involved in global
negotiations and international politics, and capable of formulating rules of conduct
for nation-states.11 The resulting complex, explicit, implicit, and evolving system of
interlocking unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral bodies of rules and documents
gradually assumes the role of global principles and values, while new circuits and
networks of power continue to emerge.While the complex nature of and vast
differences among transnational NGOs are said to mitigate the possibility of a
benign and integrated global civil society working toward the common dual goals of
human rights and democracy, the actual politics of NGOs working across national
borders is much more volatile [End Page 459] and often variously implicated in
different circles of political involvement.12 There is, after all, nothing intrinsically
progressive or democratic about international civil society. Internationally based
NGOs have been known to set up branches in Third World nations not only as

channels for needed funding and aid but, more important, as a field where Western
values and interests can exercise their influence and foster checks and balances to
resist local state domination and control.13 Well-meaning development projects
executed by well-meaning NGOs may intend to promote population management,
disease prevention, and maternal and child health, yet they often end up
intentionally or unwittingly shaping ideas about what constitutes normal, and thus
acceptable, sexual practices and identities.14 Conversely, East Asias liberal states
are increasingly aware of the political expedience of inviting the right NGOs to
attend international gatherings so as to guarantee a presence but also safeguard
their national image; the choice of delegation naturally favors the mainstream and
normative over the marginal and difficult. Tensions and contradictions among NGOs
of different origins and ideologies are also complex. Within this new global public,
emergent indigenous social movements could even find themselves suffering more
from policy directives enforced by world powers at the urging of other NGOs than
from the usual culprit of the authoritarian state. 15 In these and other cases, the
intermingling of NGOs of different calibers with state governments of different
democratic forms further complicates regional differences, resulting in complex
webs of conflicting and collaborating forces that range far beyond the circuits of
power described by the so-called boomerang pattern of transnational
advocacy.16Despite the structural complexity of this expanding global civil society,
the consensus-building negotiations of global governance are predisposed to favor
visions and values that congeal toward mainstream normative values, now
expressed as global commonalities. The UN report calls for establishing a global
civic ethic based on a set of core values that can unite people of all cultural,
political, religious, or philosophical backgrounds. 17 As appealing as this imaginary
brotherhood or sisterhood may sound, such core values have had only partial
success and mostly on broad topics such as universal human rights or global
environmental concerns, but even there, disputes and cultural differences run deep.
The problems of universalism aside, the envisioned global and civic ethic with
its inherent assumptions about shared cultural commonality and cherished
nationalistic civility has tended to find its baseline of agreement in those areas
most deeply entrenched in benign but unreflexive humanism, areas where longstanding differences are glossed over and long-held prejudices and fears remain
buried and unchallenged, areas where modernization and the civilizing [End Page
460] process find ready and unproblematic targets of critique and what better
choice than the subject of sexuality!18 This also explains the compelling success in
the global ratification of international agreements on measures directed at, in
particular, (sex) trafficking, child pornography, pedophiles, and Internet content
monitoring.19The preference for such issues and their success in global negotiations
has a lot to do with the specific nature of power under global governance. As Raimo
Vyrynen points out:In the multicentric world, power not only is dispersed, but it also assumes more
forms than the traditional power analysis suggests. For instance, power can also be symbolic and
reputational, as well as material, and it may reflect conventions and narratives. The fluidity of soft power
means that it is difficult to capture and use for specific purposes. One implication of this state of affairs is
that, in the multicentric world, traditional power resources alone cannot assure stability and progress; the
management of power must be based also on norms and institutions.20Norms

and institutions
refer to structural constraints embodied in various international conventions and

agencies and more significantly in local legislations; in other words, they tend to
presume normative lifestyles and values that are to be regulated by legal
frameworks. Symbolic and reputational, on the other hand, signals a form of
power that rides mostly on gestures and tokens and consequently is extremely
sensitive and apprehensive about possible scandal, which finds its most potent
embodiment in things sexual. In other words, the nature and structure of the world
of diffused power also render it vulnerable to populist demands, demands that are
usually inclined to sidestep the difficult, the unpopular, and, in particular, the
stigmatized. The norms underlying global propositions thus tend to gravitate toward
respectability and toward norms that repress sexuality, bodily functions, and
emotional expression . . . the respectable person is chaste, modest, does not
express lustful desires, passion, spontaneity, or exuberance, is frugal, clean, gently
spoken, and well mannered. The orderliness of respectability means things are
under control, everything in its place, not crossing the borders. 21

The state will always crush anti-diplomatic sentiment in an

effort to preserve the squo
Tan 2005
(December, See Seng, Professor of International Relations at RSIS,
Deputy Director and Head of Research of the Institute of Defence and
Strategic Studies, BA Honors from Manitoba; MA from Manitoba, PhD
from Arizona State University, Previously an Assistant Professor in the
Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS), Nanyang
Technological University, Singapore, Non-Official Diplomacy in
Southeast Asia: Civil Society or Civil Service?
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/387965/pdf - KSA)
Likewise, another prominent analyst has noted that "in the long run it is Asia that
seems more likely to be the cockpit of great power conflict. The half millennium
during which Europe was the world's primary generator of war (as well as wealth
and knowledge) is coming to a close". Hence, "for better or worse, Europe's past
could be Asia's future" (Friedberg 1993/94, p. 7). Still another analyst (based in
Southeast Asia) has rendered the even more interesting assertion that "certain
primordial impulses, like ... a type of domination founded upon classical raison
d'tat [that are] inherent in the human condition will somehow remain dormant as
long as the peoples and governments of the AsiaPacific preoccupy themselves with
the business of making money" (da Cunha 1996, p. x). That such prognostications
about impending interstate conflict in the region have, in retrospect, generally been
off the mark is not at issue here (Alagappa 2003, pp. ix-xv). That they serve to
preserve and promote the reason-of-state principle and, in doing so, re-instantiate
long-standing diplomatic conventions and norms perceptibly threatened by nonofficial diplomatic attempts at institution-building through hyperrealist interventions

clearly underscore an inherent proclivity towards maintenance of the diplomatic

status quo

Diplomatic conversations in Southeast Asia always favor the

state and uphold the discursive methods that exclude
deviant bodies and results in the ignorance of human rights
violations
Tan 2005
(December, See Seng, Professor of International Relations at RSIS,
Deputy Director and Head of Research of the Institute of Defence and
Strategic Studies, BA Honors from Manitoba; MA from Manitoba, PhD
from Arizona State University, Previously an Assistant Professor in the
Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS), Nanyang
Technological University, Singapore, Non-Official Diplomacy in
Southeast Asia: Civil Society or Civil Service?
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/387965/pdf - KSA)
Ostensibly, non-official diplomacy provides venues for "thinking the unthinkable", as
it were. Members of the ASEAN-ISIS and CSCAP, for example, pride themselves on
dealing with issues deemed sensitive or even taboo by governments and
consequently excluded from the official diplomatic agenda. This is an equivocal
claim at best, however. On one hand, it is arguable whether political-security issues
are particularly sensitive in the light of the institutionalized and mostly bilateral
security ties between ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) member
states. Indeed, that ASEAN's very formation had to do with political-security rather
than economic reasons (as originally mandated), has never been in doubt except for
sceptics of ASEAN cooperation. On the other, the issue of human rights (that is, civil
and political rights and freedoms) for ASEAN regimes (and, one suspects, for
dominant sectors of civil society as well) clearly is; again, it was non-official
diplomatic agents who evidently took the lead in encouraging a security dialogue on
the matter, but arguably a "government-endorsed" dialogue (Hernandez 1994;
Katsumata 2003; Kraft 2000). Nevertheless, that non-official diplomatic discourse
seems almost always to gravitate to official positions only serves to highlight
everpresent dispositions and practices at patrolling and taming aspects of discourse
deemed radical, unruly, and hence potentially subversive to the state. To be sure,
non-official channels of diplomacy also stand at risk of being relegated by states,
which can either endorse or ignore the former depending on their preferences. In
other words, non-official diplomacy is an arena in which raison d'tat elements are
incessantly at odds with anti-diplomatic elements such that the contemporary
diplomatic culture of Southeast Asia today is partly defined by the "invasions and
distortions" that threaten its very purposes (KeensSoper 1973).

Diplomacy inherently has power dynamics sequestered within

it
Banks 11
(September, Daniel, PhD, Cofounder of DNAWorks, theatre director, choreographer,
educator,dialogue facilitator directed at the National Theatre of Uganda (Kampala), the
Belarussian National Drama Theatre (Minsk), The Market Theatre (Johannesburg, South
Africa), the Hip Hop Theatre Festival (New York and Washington, D.C.), the Oval House
(London), choreographer/movement director for productions at New York Shakespeare
Festival/Shakespeare in the Park, Singapore Repertory Theatre, La Monnaie/De Munt
(Brussels), Landestheater (Saltzburg), Aaron Davis Hall (Harlem), for Maurice Sendak/The
Night Kitchen. Faculty member of the Department of Undergraduate Drama, Tisch School of
the Arts, New York University and the MFA in Contemporary Performance at Naropa
University, founder and director of the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative, advisor in the Gallatin
School for Individualized Studies, on the Founding Board of the Hip Hop Education Center in
the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education in the Steinhardt School, aculty of the M.A. in
Applied Theatre at City University of NY, 2011 Ariane de Rothschild Fellow, recipient of the
National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Career Development
Program for Directors, Co-Director of Theatre Without Borders, founding member of the
Acting Together project in the Program for Peacebuilding and the Arts at Brandeis University,
on the Editorial Board of No Passport Press, the Advisory Board of the Downtown Urban Arts
Festival. Guest Lecturer at SUNY Stony Brook, University of California-Riverside, Stanford
University, Brandeis University, University of Western Michigan, University of WisconsinMadison, University of Central Florida, and University of Florida-Gainesville, University of
New Mexico, Rhodes College; ,Guest Artist at Williams College, City College of New York,
Marymount Manhattan College, and National Theatre Conservatory, Denver., Ph.D. in
Performance Studies from NYU. Author of "Unperforming 'Race': Strategies for Re-imagining
Identity" in A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (edited by Mady
Schutzman and Jan Cohen-Cruz, Routledge, 2006); "Youth Leading Youth: Hip Hop and Hiplife
Theatre in Ghana and South Africa" in Acting Together: Performance and the Creative
Transformation of Conflict, Vol 2, a project of the Coexistence Project, Brandeis University,
and Theatre Without Borders (New Village Press); The Question of Cultural Diplomacy:
Acting Ethically, Theatre Topics; From Homer to Hip Hop: Orature and Griots, Ancient and
Present, Classical World; and Re-Thinking Non-Traditional Casting, Black Masks, Editor of
Hip Hop Theatre plays Say Word!: Voices from Hip Hop Theater for the University of Michigan
Press, The Question of Cultural Diplomacy
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/449851 - KSA)

The United States' history of intervention can complicate international work (see
Adalet Garmiany 7 [Fig. 4]). Sometimes this presence is appreciated locally; other
times it is unwelcome. As US-based "emissaries" of cultural diplomacy, we carry this
history with us, whether we realize it or not. Therefore we need to plan responsibly,
with an awareness of the multiple levels of meaning of our presence. Local
participants are often not as helpless or disempowered as organizers and facilitators
might think, or be led to think. There can be great cachet in a local participant
aligning with a Western embassy or nongovernmental organization; while, in other
circumstances, there are great risks. When working in Palestine with Jewish Israeli
and Palestinian women, the women in Palestine asked that we never use their
names or images or reveal the specific location in which we met, due to a fear of

reprisals for attempting to bridge that particular cultural and economic divide. But
until the playing field is leveled, as Roberto Varea 8 describes (Fig. 5), or at least
more level, facilitators in situations of cultural diplomacy need to continue to
practice the "critical consciousness" that Freire advocates. The dynamics of "the
web" are complex and often misleading. As Levitow explains: "The cultural
diplomats think they are using culture intentionally to influence others; and seldom
consider that they are being used by those others in the context of local politics"
(personal communication, 29 April 2011). Cultural diplomacy is often set up in ways
that look like an organization or agency thinks it is in control of who is influencing
whom; but inherent in this structure is a "level of presumption" (ibid.). Artists and
organizations in these projects cannot afford to presume that there is no evolution
involved in these relationships and power dynamics. It has long been the practice of
disempowered groups to negotiate ways of manipulating entities with more political/
economic power and resources. I have met local artists and workers who have
either participated or chosen not to participate in moments of cultural diplomacy
and their webs of influence, especially if they are repeatedly selected as the "local
informant" or safe participant. An artist-diplomat needs to consider and interrogate
all these dynamics from moment to momentmaking no assumptions about local
contacts, participants, and colleaguesfor circumstances can change very quickly.

Data/Science
Data applies static labels to international relations which
recreates heterosexist violence and homonationalism
Sjoberg 14 Ph.D., University of Southern California School of International
Relations and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida
[Laura, Queering the Territorial Peace? Queer Theory Conversing With Mainstream
International Relations, International Studies Review, doi: 10.1111/misr.12186,
Wiley] AMarb
Mainstream IR theorists (Desch 1998) have argued that critical theory has limited
utility if it provides a more complicated explanation for a result a simpler
theory could predict. Giblers theory is simpler than my account, and my alternative account
is, in positivist terms, unprovable with available (and perhaps even attainable) data .
I suggest, though, using these arguments to halt the engagement is intellectually and politically problematic. This is
not least because Butlers account of performances of gender and sexuality, applied to performances of settled

Butler argues that

proscribing stability and an exclusive identification for subjects which are as
every subject is multiply constituted is both practically and normatively
problematic, the simultaneous production and subjugation of (heterosexual)
subjects. As distinct from feminist analysis of the role of stabilized gender identities on the production of
borders, suggests that Giblers notion of the benefits of territorial settledness is limited.

subjects (for example, Tickner, 1992) and poststructuralist analysis on the inherent instability of the concept of

the (heteronormative)
labeling and valorizing of stable borders, whether or not it contributes to a
decrease in military conflict among states, functions to enforce a reduction and
paralysis on the multiply constituted identities within that (actually unsettled)
territory, simultaneously producing the sovereign state and subjugating
those produced within it (Weber 1998a). Butlers work suggests that it is possible that both
the fantasy of territorial stability and Giblers rearticulation of it are themselves
acts of regulatory, heterosexist violence. A fifth insight that reading Butler onto the
sovereignty (Walker 1983; Ashley 1984), Butlers contribution suggests that

territorial peace provides is that it is not only state sovereignty that Giblers approach naturalizes and reifies, but
also the democratic peace thesis that Gibler critiques from within. While proposing a different causal mechanism for

Giblers work might be seen through Butlers lenses to enact a

(always yet never queer) resignification of norms of the democratic peace, given
that it does not question the normative value or empirical utility to democracy,
either generally or as a part of efforts to mitigate conflict among states. In this way,
Giblers work might be described in Butlers terms as a denaturalizing parody of
the democratic peace which reidealizes its norms without calling them into
question. Queer theorists have suggested that such resignification provides affirmation of
existing norms masquerading as critique, injuring the subject more than the
previous regulatory regime (see argument in Halberstam 2011, about failure). Rather than critiquing the
the democratic peace result,

fetishization of democracy, then, the territorial peace might reify it. Perhaps this short engagement functions to
suggest the potential productivity of (always fraught) conversations between mainstream IR research and queer
theory. While not all of the insights derived from Bodies That Matter for The Territorial Peace are unique to queer

this brief engagement suggests

that both queer methodological lenses and the substance of queer theorizing could
be useful interventions in mainstream IR. To that end, the point of this engagement has not been to
theorizing, and Bodies That Matter is a small subset of queer theorizing,

condemn Giblers territorial peace or valorize Butlers notions of the performance of the materiality of sex and the
regulation of sexuality. Instead, it is to suggest that the

logics of queer theorizing when inserted

into the research programs of mainstream IR produce not only recognition of
ambivalence, pretension, and drag in IR theory, but also a hybrid, plural group of
insights that could be fruitful for both approaches. Here, the logic of the materiality of sex in
Bodies That Matter can identify vagueness, ambivalence, and even alternate causal connections within the
territorial peace research program. Engaging territorial peace research with Butlers framework suggests both
macrotheoretical problems with the work and more micro-level changes to variable operationalizationsso
territorial peace researchers reading Butler might make the research better both on its own terms and as it
resonates with queer logics in IR research. I recognize there is a distinct possibility that this brief discussion will not
transform the territorial peace research program. If it does not, there remain benefits to discursive intervention
(Hamati-Ataya 2012). If it does attract a two-way engagement, its results could be creative and productive for both
approaches. Perhaps this is what Butler meant by seeking to engage in inhabiting the practices of ...rearticulation.
If not, perhaps it could be.

Approaching IR from a critical perspective re-politicizes ittheir so-called objective claims are circular logic which
produces disciplinary violence
Barkin and Sjoberg 15
(J. Samuel Barkin is a professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global
Governance at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Laura Sjoberg is a leading scholar of feminist
international relations and international security. Her research focuses on gender and just war theory,
womens violence in global politics, and feminist interpretations of the theory and practice of security
policy. The Failures of Constructivist Theory in IR Written for presentation at the 2015 Millennium
Conference. cVs)

knowledge cumulation in IR is a fantasy reified by paradigmatic clusters

and the mimicry of neopositivist research standards and practices. The evidence of
knowledge cumulation in the discipline comes as much from the ritualized practice
of research behavior as it does from any true or genuine notion of knowledge
cumulation. That ritualized practice at once is institutionalized as success and
institutionalizes the need for research success. One has succeeded in the
enterprise of political science/IR research by cumulating knowledge, and the
cumulation of knowledge as a standard of success in turn makes success possible
and desirable. It is our suggestion that it is crucial to at least consider the possibility that what
counts as knowledge in the field, in particular research programs and more generally, is
performative where standards are set by their utterance and repetition rather than
by some external objective standards of good science (narrowly) or good research (more broadly).
The iterative performance of standards of the measurement of knowledge has the
impact of rendering uninhabitable the methodological, epistemological, and political
space that falls outside of those performed standards quelling dissent. To escape this
recursive loop, we argue that it is important to see the possibility that knowledge
cumulation is not, and should not be, a given in IR research. We argue this from
two perspectives, that of explanation and that of silences. With respect to the former, the idea of
knowledge cumulation is firmly grounded in a neopositivist understanding of social
science, in which the role of theory is to collate observed empirical regularities
across cases, or what Waltz calls laws (Waltz 1979). But most constructivisms, and (arguably)
We argue that

all critical theories, do not ground themselves in this philosophy of social science.
Cumulation for them, therefore, is a term without clear conceptual content. It simply
is not the role of any reflexive theoretical approach to social science to generate cumulative knowledge as it is
understood by neopositivsts. The critical-constructivist synthesis, understood in opposition to the neo-neo
synthesis, distracts from a particular theorys internal conditions of possibility by introducing incompatible

any acknowledgement of the

idea of cumulativity from within specific exercises in reflexive IR creates the grounds
for necessary failure within those exercises. The question of silences requires elaboration at greater
length. As a foundation for this argument, we contend that it is as important to see what we do not
learn from IR analysis as traditionally understood as it is to see what we do learn
(perhaps even more important). Our silences tell us more about the state of knowledge
cumulation in the discipline than looking for standards that tell us what we do know.
conditions of possibility drawn from competition across syntheses. As such,

We derive this understanding from a long tradition of feminist research methodology that emphasizes how
important it is to search for where women are omitted, excluded, kept out, and not mentioned in order to
understand how women are constituted, where they are, and what happens to them in global politics (Keller, 1985;

we ask on principle what variables

does the research program not take account of? How could accounting for those
variables change the analysis? We are arguing that there are visible omissions (like
the variables that a research program fails to incorporate), and invisible omissions. Invisible
omissions are those that are unhearable by a research program normally left out or
Tickner, 1988; Charlesworth, 1999; Kronsell, 2006). Accordingly,

ignored by both the researchers that form the core of the research program and their critics. Unlike its visible
omissions variables that its scholars and their critics have added to, re-operationalized, expanded on, or

invisible omissions are unhearable within particular scholarly

boundaries. Leveraging this analysis of silence, we explore the argument that the
disciplines standards for knowledge production are political and performative rather
than given, objective, useful, or founded. We mean performativity in the sense that Judith Butler
suggested the inclusion of

uses it (Butler, 1990; Butler, 1993), particularly as she talks about it going hand-in-hand with a Foucauldian notion
of disciplining (Foucault, 2003; Edkins, 1999; Steans, 2003), 1 where performativity cannot be understood outside of
a process of interability a regularized and constrained repetition of norms which resonate as ritualized

This frames performativity as a specific modality of power as

discourse (139), where the politics of the signification and the politics of the sign
meet, an act of territoralization, of production, of installation which does not have
to be alone, singular, or unidirectional. Since performatives are their own referent (159), they
production (Butler, 1993: 60).

proliferate as manifestations of the power underlying them, and interact relatively on the basis of that relative
power.

This makes statements like this is good science and these results are
robust signs without referents used to discipline (Baudrillard, 1993). The invisible disciplining
nature of the performative standards of knowledge cumulation is half the story of Butlers understanding of
performativity. The other part is who is excluded by claims to knowledge cumulation (generally as well as in specific

These disciplinary standards (both in

the traditional and Foucauldian sense) make invisible their own impossibility.
paradigmatic situations), what is left out, and on what axes.

1 See Foucault (2003) where discipline is the operation of power which regulates individual behavior
within a social body through the regulated organization of activity, time, and space. See discussion in
Edkins, 1999. For discussion in specific reference to Feminist IR, see Steans, 2003: 428-454.

Pinkwashing
LGBT rights has been is used as a hegemony tool without
making actual progress
Weber 14 (Forum on Queer International Relations by Cynthia Weber, Amy
Lind, V. Spike Peterson, Laura Sjoberg, Lauren Wilcox, Meghana Nayak p. 11-13)
LGBTI rights discourse, has been
used as a tool of hegemony and empire by states as they struggle for power. On one hand, states
that recognize LGBTI rights bring much-needed visibility to oppressive situations. Yet
when states equate LGBTI rights with a particular, typically racialized brand of
democracy, development or progress, they are often pitting their own ideology
against that of states or national communities they view as uncivil, backward,
or terrorist. As Spike Peterson points out (this forum; also see Weber 1999, 2014a), a key aspect of queer
Specifically, in this essay I examine how queer visibility, especially

theorizing is the understanding that codes and practices of normalcy simultaneously constitute deviancy,
exclusions, and otherings as sites of social violence. Queer theory contests the normalizing arrangements of
sex/gender as well as the normalizing mechanisms of state power (Eng, cited in Peterson, this volume). Yet, as I
argue in this essay, queerness

itself has been normalized through state policy; for

example, as nationalist narratives of a good gay citizen (e.g., gender normative, white, middle
class, monogamous) are incorporated into exclusionary nationalist ideologies and mapped
onto broader political agendas such as national security or economic reform
(Duggan 2002; Puar 2007; Agathangelou et al 2008). I thus ask us to be cautious about claiming LGBTI
rights victories as always or necessarily emancipatory, especially when they are
promoted through neoliberal state logics of securitization and/or through the teleological
lens of progress and modernization. The celebratory global impulse toward same-sex
marriage (SSM) is one terrain in which these debates occur . SSM laws have now been passed in
at least sixteen countries and legislation is currently being proposed in several more. Some countries also
allow SSM in specific provinces or states (e.g., Mexico, US). Seen as a celebration of
lesbian and gay rights, heads of state promote their gay-friendly legislation as a
marker of progress and modernity: Following the July 2013 passage of SSM legislation in
the UK, David Cameron stated, I am proud that we have made same-sex marriage happen Making
marriage available to everyone says so much about the society we are in and the society we want to
live inIf a group is told over and over again that they are less valuable, over time they may start to believe it. In

inhibits the potential of the nation . (Cameron

idea of SSM as reflecting the potential or modernization of a
nation is often seen not only as ending discrimination but also as a move toward
capitalist prosperity and (neo)liberal modernity. The earlier 2006 passage of SSM in post-apartheid
South Africa framed SSM as part of the countrys broader democratic opening and as a
addition to the personal damage this can cause, it
2013, emphasis added). The

move toward liberal democracy; to achieve this, gay and lesbian activists focused on how queers would contribute
to South Africas progress toward neoliberal modernity as respectable, market-based citizens (Oswin 2007). In a

states utilize SSM and more generally LGBTI rights discourse to advance their
notion of political security and democracy, as in the case of the United States new branding
of foreign policy as gay-friendly (e.g., through USAIDs LGBT Global Development Partnership) and in
Israeli state promotion as the most gay-friendly country in the Middle East .
Ironically, neither of these states have federal SSM laws. In the case of Israel, the government
similar vein,

recognizes the marriages of individuals married abroad, and Tel Avivs large Gay Pride festival has led some

The Israeli states explicit promotion of

itself as gay-friendly has led to some of the most vocal critiques of what antiobservers to coin the city as the gay capital of the Middle East.

occupation activists in Israeli occupied territories have called pinkwashing , where

state officials seek to create a more positive image of their government, nation, human rights
record, economic policy framework, or foreign policy agenda, to name only a few, by promoting or
speaking about LGBT rights. These activists have claimed that as Israel promotes gay and lesbian
equality as part of its national agenda, it aims to create acceptance for its general human rights record in the

thus pinkwashing the human rights violations occurring in occupied

territories (Shulman 2012). This paradox, whereby gay rights are linked to Israeli democracy while other
forms of rights-such as Palestinian sovereignty-are overlooked, is but one example of the ambivalent
ways in which gay rights discourse has been constructed and appropriated in the
international arena. Importantly, non-hegemonic national(ist) communities also appropriate
LGBTI rights agendas and/or can themselves be heteronormative: Palestinian LGBTI rights
region,

activists argue, for example, that dominant notions of Palestinian sovereignty are themselves heteronormative, and
that change needs to occur from within as well.

Queerness shapes international and domestic policies

Cynthia et al 14 (Forum on Queer International Relations by Cynthia Weber,
Amy Lind, V. Spike Peterson, Laura Sjoberg, Lauren Wilcox, Meghana Nayak p. 2-4)
The first reason has to do with what queer studies and queer international theories are and do. Queer studies and

queer international theories primarily investigate how queer subjectivities and queer
practices-the who and the how that cannot or will not be made to signify
monolithically in relation to gender, sex, and /or sexuality-are disciplined, normalized,
or capitalized upon by and for states, NGOs, and international corporations. And they
investigate how state and nonstate practices of disciplinization, normalization, and capitalization might
be critiqued and resisted (Weber, 1994a, 1994b, 1999; Duggan, 2003; Puar, 2007). This is precisely what
Foucauldian-informed international relations scholarship does, albeit usually without an explicit focus on non-

genders, sexes, and

sexualities matters for the discipline of international relations is in part because
states and states leaders in particular have made it a focus of their domestic and
foreign policies. How states, for example, answer questions about the normality or
perversion of the homosexual and the queer and how these two figures are
related to one another currently influences how some states make domestic and foreign
policy. For example, claims made by Putins Russian and Musevenis Uganda that the
homosexual and the queer are perverse led each country to formulate domestic
policies that were to varying degrees punished by some states and international
organizations (Rao, 2010, 2012 and 2014; Weiss and Bosia, 2013). In contrast, the Obama
administrations figuration of the homosexual but not the queer as normal led it to
champion gay rights as human rights as part of its foreign policy (Clinton, 2011), a general and
specific foreign-policy position that queer scholars critique (Duggan, 2003; Puar, 2007, 2010;
Wilkinson and Langlois, 2014). Third, queer international theories explicitly engage with what
many IR scholars regard as the disciplines governing dichotomy-order versus
anarchy. Among the ways the order vs. anarchy dichotomy functions (and, importantly, fails to
function) in international relations is by articulating order vs. anarchy as normal vs.
perverse and, more specifically, as hetero/homo-normative vs. queer -which is one of the
dichotomies that queer theorists investigate and resist. When an order vs. anarchy dichotomy is
constituted and sustained by a hetero/homo-normative vs. queer dichotomy in
international practice (as it is in the above examples regarding Russia, Uganda, and the United States), any
distinction between a general IR and a specific so-called Queer IR disappears. For
monolithic genders, sexes, and sexualities. Second, why a focus on non-monolithic

investigating how these dichotomies function is (or ought to be) of central concern to both
queer international theorists and IR theorists more generally . Finally, the breadth of queer IR
investigations now extends to what are arguably the three core domains in which IR scholars claim expertise- war
and peace, international political economy, and state and nation formation

Realism

Generic
Realist theory relies on a naturalization of the human body
along gendered lines in order to legitimize the mythology of
the nation-state; political violence is the precondition of
sovereignty. This naturalization of the body invisibilizes other
violences and erases marginal discourses of resistance in favor
of sovereignty.
Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, Introduction, 1718)CJQ
In realism, violence is natural and inevitable, and violence also marks the boundary
between nature and human communities. Violence is sometimes necessary to
maintain the political community from external and internal threats. Realism draws
a sharp distinction between domestic and international politics, and maintains that
states must be able to use or threaten violence in order to maintain the states
status and survival in the world. The iconic figure in the realist tradition is Hobbes,
who is read as telling a relatively simple story of the establishment of the political
community that excludes violence from the domestic realm. Realist theories of IR
extend Hobbess state of nature from individual natural men to relations between
states. Violence in the form of interstate war is sometimes necessary because
states provide protection for citizens not only from other states, but from anarchy
and civil war, which could threaten individuals lives in the absence of state
authority. The objects that are to be defended by the state are, first and foremost,
the living breathing bodies of humans as organisms. Sovereign power, in the
artificial man of the Leviathan, is constituted precisely to protect the natural
man (Hobbes 1996 [1651], 9). It is their safety and bodily integrity that is to be
protected. In order to foster life, to prevent the life that is nasty, brutish and short,
the state must be convened. In this logic, the survival of the states citizens is
dependent upon the survival of the state itself. As Dan Deudney insists, Security
from political violence is the first freedom, the minimum vital task of all primary
political associations, and achieving [ 18 ] security requires restraint of the
application of violent power upon individual bodies (2007, 14). To the extent that
Hobbess work can be said to contribute to theories of embodiment, it is in
considering human community on the organic terms of the body politic. This is not
an entirely original insight in itselfafter all, it makes use of the ancient and
medieval philosophy of the great chain of being that orders God and the sovereign
king above human subjects. In setting up the figure of the sovereign state as a body
politic, Hobbes naturalizes the boundaries of the political community in the
boundaries of the human body. The metaphor of the state as body allows for
security threats being represented as bodily illnesses, contagions, or cancers,
existential threats that threaten the life of the state (Sontag 1990 [1978], 7287;
Waldby 1996; Campbell 2000 [1992], 59). The body that is protected by the state as
well as the body that is a representation of the state is not only a natural body, but

also one that is self-contained and self-governed, internally organized, and bound by
concrete borders. Security thus means establishing and protecting this selfgoverned body as an organism.1 Furthermore, the representation of the state as a
body stresses the unity of the body politic. As an individual, the sovereign is not
required to recognize any form of difference among his subjectsthe body politic
has one body and speaks with a single voice (Gatens 1996, 23). Sovereign power,
invested in the artificial body of the state, is constituted on the basis of a
metaphor of the body as indivisible, a singular totality that Rousseau characterizes
as the general will. As in Hobbes, the sovereign state is constituted in analogy to
a human body. As nature gives each man absolute power over all his members, the
social compact gives the body politic absolute power over all its members also; and
it is this power which, under the direction of the general will, bears, as I have said,
the name of Sovereignty (Rousseau 1997 [1762], 61). In naturalizing the state as a
human body, Hobbes and other social contract theorists further naturalize the
human body itself as a singular, indivisible entity whose freedom from violent death
is paramount. Hobbess story of the foundations of the state calls our attention to
the naturalization of political violence in a way that expressly relies upon analogy to
a particular conception of the human body. As this body is considered natural,
so too is the constitution of the state as body writ large. Just as threats to
the human bodys integrity are seen as contamination, so too are border incursions
and infiltrations that breach the states control over its territory and people.
Whereas in realism, sovereign power is constituted in order to protect life, in
liberalism, sovereign power is also recognized to be a threat to human life.

Realism is masculine state rationalities favor instrumental

reason and public sphere activities
V.S. Peterson is a Professor of International Relations in the School of
Government and Public Policy at the University of AZ, Sexing Political
Identities/Nationalism as Heterosexism. International Feminist Journal of Politics 1
(1): 3465. 1999.
This is particularly apparent in international relations (IR), the discipline now haunted by nationalist conicts.

Constrained by its positivist and mod- ernist commitments, IR theorists typically

assume a Euro-centric model of the agent (subject) as unitary, autonomous, interestmaximizing and rational. IRs realist commitments additionally cast subjects as
inherently competitive. So too with states. The latter are understood as the primary
(unifed, rational, self-interested and competitive) actors in international relations , and a collective
political identity is assumed rather than interrogated.4 Positivist/ modernist binaries reign in IR and, as feminists

these binaries are gendered (e.g. Lloyd 1984; Hekman 1990; Haraway 1998;
Peterson 1992a). Through conventional IR lenses, the dichotomy of publicprivate
locates political action in the former but not the latter sphere; the dichotomy of
internalexternal distinguishes citizens and order within from others and anarchy
without; and the dichotomy of culturenature (civilizedprimitive, advancedbackward, developed
undeveloped) naturalizes global hierarchies of power. Most telling for the study of
nationalism, positivist dichotomies that favor instrumental reason and public sphere
have persuasively argued,

activities fuel a neglect of emotion, desire, sexuality, culture and hence identity
and identifcation processes.

Realism is not the objective truth of the world it is

constructed through the experiences of a powerful few
theorists and forced upon the rest of the world in standards of
nation-states and economic development
Agnew 15 (John, Distinguished Professor of Geography at UCLA and editor-inchief of the journal, "Territory, Politics, Governance." The Geopolitics of Knowledge
About World Politics: A Case Study in U.S. Hegemony. Geographies of Knowledge
and Power (ebook). Volume 7 of the series Knowledge and Space pp 235-246
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-9960-7_11#)
Much of what goes for international relations theory today is the projection onto the
world at large of U.S.-originated academic ideas about the nature of statehood and
the world economy derived from a mixture of mid-twentieth-century European
premises about states and American ones about economies even when these ideas
can often depart quite remarkably from the apparent contemporary sources of U.S.
foreign-policy conduct. The theory reflects the application of ideas about how best
to model a presumably hostile world, which are drawn more from selected aspects
of U .S. experience and a U .S. reading of world history than from fidelity to how
actual U.S. policies are constituted from a mix of domestic interests and foreignpolicy inclinations. Contrast the predictions of a defensive U.S. neorealism, for example, which might counsel
prudence in invading other countries without a set of clear objectives and an "exit strategy," with recent U.S.
foreign policy in the Middle East driven by what Connolly (2005) calls a domestic alliance in the United States

The intellectually dominant realist

tradition of U .S. international relations theory (even its opponents, including liberals and idealists,
between "cowboy capitalism" and evangelical Protestantism.

share many of its assumptions) is based on a central assumption of "anarchy" beyond state borders (Agnew, 1994;

is not a straightforward objective fact about the world but a

claim socially constructed by theorists and actors operating in conditioning sites
and venues (premier universities, think tanks, government offices, etc.) who
unthinkingly reproduce the assumption, drawing on particular interpreta- tions of
unimpeachable intellectual precursors (such as the early modern European thinkers Machiavelli and
Hobbes) irrespective of its empirical "truth" status. Other related ideas, such as those
of a world irretrievably divided into territorial "nation- states" organized along a
global continuum of development, and even ideas often presumed to challenge the
mainstream view such as "rational choice" and "hegemonic succession," can be
thought of similarly as reflecting social and political experiences of particular
theorists in specific places more than as objective truth about the world per se. If
believed, of course, and if in the hands of those powerful enough, they can become
guides to action that make their own reality (Agnew, 2003). The constitutive ideas of so-called
Powell, 1994). This conception

realism as developed by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others have taken on a very different form in the hands of the
German refugee scholars in the United States, such as Hans Morgenthau, most responsible in the early Cold War
years for creating the realist perspective, and then in the hands of more Americanized theorists, such as Robert
Gilpin, than the originals might initially suggest could ever be the case (Inayatullah & Rupert, 1994). Most notably,
what became in the 1970s and 1980s the main consensus position, so-called neorealism, combines elements of
classical political realism and liberal economics that have traveled some intellectual distance from their
geographical roots in, respectively, Renaissance Italy (with Machiavelli) and late eighteenth-century Scotland (with

Adam Smith) (Donnelly, 1995). This American synthesis and related emphases have ruled the academic roost in
international relations much as the neoclassical synthesis has in U .S. academic economics.

Realism cant explain foreign policy it is centered too much

on the American position, and it is trapped in the domain of
the elite
Agnew 15 (John, Distinguished Professor of Geography at UCLA and editor-inchief of the journal, "Territory, Politics, Governance." The Geopolitics of Knowledge
About World Politics: A Case Study in U.S. Hegemony. Geographies of Knowledge
and Power (ebook). Volume 7 of the series Knowledge and Space pp 235-246
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-9960-7_11#)
In this understanding, states stand as naturalized abstract individuals, the
equivalent of individual persons in the realm of "international relations" ; the distribution
of technological and other economic advantages drives communication, competition, and cooperation; central or
hegemonic states rise and fall as they succeed or fail in capturing the economic benefits of hierarchy; and the
overall dynamic as far as each state is concerned is of gaining improvement in "advantage," either absolute
(typically realist) or relative (typically liberal), within the overall system (Agnew, 2003 ).

The heart of the

perspective is a conception of a state of nature in the world in which the pursuit of
wealth and power is projected onto states as the only way of escaping from the
grasp of anarchy. A Freudian egotism is translated from the realm of the individual
to that of the state (e.g., Schuett, 2007). Thus, a particular cultural conception of life is
projected onto the world at large (Inayatullah & Rupert, 1994, pp. 8182). More specifically, the
belief in spontaneous order long regarded in the American ethos as the persisting
motif of Americanism, as individuals pursue their own goals unhindered by
government and thereby reach a higher synthesis out of disparate intentions, is
thus brought to bear in the broader global arena with states now substituting for
persons, albeit now tinged with a Germanic-Lutheran pessimism that necessitates
interventions by the United States as the most benign and public-minded of
"powers" when the "best" order fails to arise spontaneously (Agnew, 2005, p. 97; Grunberg,
1990; Inayatullah, 1997; Nossal, 2001). The connection with actual U.S. foreign-policy making
is crucial. Though international relations has claimed both a basis in the eternal facts of human nature and/or
the state-systemic constraints on political action and an advisory role to the U.S. government in pursuit of its

As a putative policy field,

international relations has long attracted adherents more through its putative
practical appeal than through its intellectual rigor (Kahler, 1997). Kripendorff (1989, pp. 3132)
refers to this attraction as the "Kissinger syndrome" or the "ambition to be accepted by or
adopted into the real world of policy making, to gain access to the inner halls of
power." He sees this ambition as something specifically American in its desire to
provide a fixed intellectual foundation for why international relations must remain
the domain of a specialized elite rather than be subject to democratic discussion
and critique. In his view, since the inception of the field following the Second Word War,
the goal of international relations was the training of specialists and practitioners,
not the creation of a "critical scholarly enterprise " (Kripendorff, 1989, p. 36). In fact, considerable
particular interests, it has been the latter that has tended to dominate.

energy in academic international relations today in the United States and elsewhere focuses on the weaknesses of
the neorealist synthesis even as the master's programs continue to churn out would-be practitioners often oblivious
to the political and theoretical bases of the arcane debates among some of their teachers (Long et al., 2005).

The

continuing, even revived, appeal of the neorealist synthesis seems to lie in its ritual
appeal to U.S. centrality to world politics (the "necessary nation," "the lender of last
resort," etc.) and in the enhanced sense since the end of the Cold War and after
9/11 of a dangerous and threatening world that must be approached with
trepidation and preparation for potential violent reaction and intervention as
mandated by realist thinking. Yet in practice there is a massive gap between the
predictions of such theorizing and what actually goes into the making of U.S. (or any
other) foreign policy, much of which has to do with persisting geopolitical orderings
of the world and domestic interests and their relative lobbying capacities (Hellmann,
2009; Oren, 2009).

China Specific
Realism is a consequence of American hegemony and
Eurocentrism when applied to Northeast Asia, it fails to
understand the motives of security
Beeson 14 (Mark, Professor of International Politics at Murdoch University. Journal
of Asian Security and International Affairs 1(1) 123
http://aia.sagepub.com/content/1/1/1.full.pdf)
And yet one of the most important theoretical innovations in broadly conceived security studies over the last few
decades has been the constructivist turn in particular (Ruggie, 1998; Wendt, 1999), and a more general
appreciation of the importance of non-material factors in shaping security outcomes .

It has become
increasingly obvious that national attitudes to security and the policy priorities they
generate are the consequence of complex, dialectical processes in which
international interaction affects domestic struggles within states over the definition
of the collective interest (Legro, 2005, p. 21). In other words, even such realist staples as the
national interest are socially constructed artefacts and reflections of very different
trajectories and experiences of development (Weldes, 1996). As a consequence, as Reus-Smit
(1999, p. 27) points out, states not only develop different ideas about the purposes to
which state power might be put, but the structures of governance are
institutionalized in significantly distinctive ways too. If we want to understand and
try to account for continuing differences in state behaviour, we need to take
historical contexts and the variations in state forms they generate rather more
seriously than realists do. The potential importance of differences in the internal architecture of states for
security outcomes has long been recognized (Huntington, 1968). What is striking about recent scholarship,
however, is the attention given to questions of culture and identity in explaining national variations in security
practice. The seminal contributions of Peter Katzenstein (1996), Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein (1996) and
Katzenstein and Sil (2004) in particular has significantly broadened debates about security in ways that help explain
the continuing differences in security practice and thinking in Asia. The key point to emphasize here is not that
norms or identity will necessarily trump material factorsalthough they are plainly more likely to exert an influence
in an era of declining inter-state conflict (Pinker, 2012)but that they provide a part of an explanation for variations

The interest in strategic culture offers one way

of thinking about why militaries respond differently to supposedly universal and
timeless threats (Alagappa, 2001; Johnston, 1995). Once again, historically contingent contexts provide a
compelling part of the explanation of continuing difference. In this regard, Asias history is more
consequential than most. Because so much IR theory is predicated on a limited,
comparatively recent Western historical experience, there is a real danger of
overlooking or underestimating the significance and the contemporary legacy of the
larger part of human history. China is known among other things for being the worlds oldest continuing
civilization, not to mention a source of some of the most important innovations that distinguish the modern world .
It is a testimony to the powerful influence of Eurocentricism that such historical
patterns and influences are frequently dismissed or underestimated (Hobson, 2012),
even when the focus of analytical behaviour is East Asia or China itself. And yet it
would be remarkable if some aspects of Chinas unique history were not reflected in
the way its leaders and general population thought about themselves. We have,
after all, become accustomed to the people and leaders of the US believing that
they have a unique historical mission, which helps explain, if not legitimate, their
prominent role in recent international history (Smith, 1994). Why would we expect China (or
in security policy and attitudes around the world.

anywhere else for that matter) to be any differentespecially at a historical moment when they have the

It is
important to recognize that one reason we are collectively and so heavily influenced
by American IR theory is not simply because there are a lot of excellent IR scholars
in that country, but because the US is the hegemonic power of the era and has a
capacity to exert an ideational influence that other countries simply cannot match
wherewithal to actively promote a vision of themselves on the international stage (Zhang, 2013).

(Smith, 2002). Such considerations assume a renewed importance in the current era for a number of reasons. First,
many believe the US to be in at least relative decline, partly as a consequence of its domestic economic and
political problems, but primarily because of the remarkable rise of China (Brzezinski, 2012; Layne, 2012). Under
such circumstances, we might expect to see a concomitant decline in the USs soft power and the growing
influence of alternative narratives about historical development and the future of the international system. That is

Asias alternative historical

experience potentially assumes such importance. If Asias past is unlike the Wests
there is no reason to suppose that its current or future developmental experiences
will necessarily replicate the Wests either. Before we consider the possible implications of this
precisely what appears to be happening (Bremmer, 2012), which is why

claim, it is worth spelling out just how different Asias past actually was.

The security rhetoric of the aff locks in supremacy of one

power in Northeast Asia as a violent, self-fulfilling prophecy
vote neg to reject the passive-aggressive discourses that
constantly imply containment
Beeson 14 (Mark, Professor of International Politics at Murdoch University. Journal
of Asian Security and International Affairs 1(1) 123
http://aia.sagepub.com/content/1/1/1.full.pdf)
There are, then, widely noted parallels between East Asias historical development and Europes, although in this
case it is Europe of the nineteenth, rather than the twentieth century (Friedberg, 2000; Joffe, 1995). Although the
USs role as an offshore balancer is rather different to that of Britains in the nineteenth century, some see this as
a natural evolution of American grand strategy (Layne, 1997). More recently, a number of scholars have argued
that the durable balance of power that Europe developed in the nineteenth century actually offers a model for

Developing a similar regional concert of

powers would, the argument goes, allow Chinas inevitable rise to be
accommodated peacefully. For Hugh White (2012, p. 6) Asias alternative futures are not
American or Chinese supremacy. They are escalating rivalry, or some form of greatpower accommodation that constrains that rivalry. Americas real choice is not
between dominating or withdrawing from Asia: it is between taking China on as a
strategic rival, or working with it as a partner . Whatever the merits of Whites claims, the
recent pivot suggest there is little appetite among US policymakers for accepting a
diminished role on the region (Clinton, 2011). The net consequence of the USs decision
to reassert itself, however, as noted China-watcher Robert Ross (2012, p. 81) points out, is that by
threatening China and challenging its sovereignty claims over symbolic territories,
Washington has encouraged Chinese leaders to believe that only by adopting
belligerent policies will a rising China be able to guarantee its security.
Unsurprisingly, Chinas strategic elites do, indeed, see the recent shift in US policy
as an effort to contain them (Swaine, 2012b). In this regard, the evolving strategic context in
East Asia looks rather more like the bipolarity of the Cold War than a concert
powers. Whichever historical analogy proves more apt, the contemporary reality is
rather deflating and arguably at odds with what seemed until recently to be the
most immediate and very tangible security threats confronting the region (Dupont,
maintaining stability in East Asia in the twenty-first.

2001). Self-evidently, the continuing economic development upon which the legitimacy and political authority of the
regions elites continues to depend would be profoundly affected by any actual conflict. In this regard the liberals do

the economic and political risks of conflict have made war and conquest
completely irrational. This is not to say, of course, that this rules conflict out. An even more
unambiguous threat to continuing development and stability is climate change and
the damage being inflicted on the natural environment across the regiona clear
and present danger if ever there was one (Dyer, 2010), but an issue that is being
sidelined by the growing preoccupation with more traditional threats to national
security. Indeed, for all the talk of transnational threats and opportunities at the beginning of the twenty-first
have a point:

century, it is remarkable how the strategic calculus of the regions elites continues to reflect the thinking of their
counterparts in the twentieth and even the nineteenth centuries.

Economy
Chinas socialist structures are a guise because the state still
participates in capitalist activities we must embrace a
Marxist approach to queer IR to understand how specifically
oppressions are experienced in a supposedly socialist country
Rofel 2012
(Lisa, Professor of Anthropology at The University of California, Santa Cruz, B.A.,
from Brown University, M.A., and Ph.D., from Stanford University, Author of
Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture.,
Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism, Engendering
China: Women, Culture and the State , "Modernity's Masculine Fantasies,
"Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents," and "'Yearnings': Televisual Love
and Melodramatic Politics in Contemporary China," - Queer Positions, Queering
Asian Studies Published by Duke University Press,
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/477200/pdf - KSA)
Positions has enabled a queering of Asian studies through this queer Marxism. For
rather than insisting on separable domains of study or a universalizing approach to
the study of capitalism or nonnormative desires, positions encouraged tracing the
embodied entanglements between the erotic, desire, and political economic and
geopolitical power in its broadest sense. Queer Marxism in this guise does not
adhere to the Enlightenment dream of a common humanity, with a universal
subjectivity in relation to Western capitalism and its aftermath. Queer activists in
Asia and Asian studies, espe- positions 20:1 Winter 2012 188 cially those who
challenge normativity in all its guises, live and think from a place of displacement,
and therefore have abandoned such a dream. A queer Marxist Asian studies means
transforming the relationship of power/ knowledge from this displaced positionality
based in bodily pleasures that challenge normative desire and alienated labor, as
they have been constructed in racialized imperial regimes. This queer Marxism
obviously informs the special issue of positions, Beyond the Strai(gh)ts, that
Petrus Liu and I coedited. It also informs my recent work. My ability to write Desiring
China was a personal breakthrough in bringing together what had been treated as
disparate concerns.9 In Desiring China, I was able to demonstrate how the
production of desire lies at the heart of neoliberal global processes. I argued that an
analysis of the relationship between neoliberalism and the formation of new
subjectivities in China necessitates attention to heteronormative politics and their
subversions as well as the formation of gay identities in the midst of neoliberal
ambivalence about licit and illicit desires. I brought this analytical lens to bear on
what otherwise would have seemed a disparate array of issues, everything from gay
identity formation in China to Chinas entry into the World Trade Organization.
Several of my new projects continue in this vein. Broadly speaking, I am both
participating in and analyzing transnational relations of desire and production. My
participation has entailed political discussions with queer activists in China and
currently a translation project of Cui Ziens writings.10 Cui Zien, a professor at the

Beijing Film Institute, is a well-known queer experimental lmmaker and novelist. He

is one of the most visible, out gay activists and intellectuals in China. In addition to
his lms and novels, Cui Zien is one of the main organizers of Beijings bi-annual
Queer Film and Culture Festival. This activism has hurt his career in China, though
he has not landed in jail. In his essay in Beyond the Strai(gh)ts, Cui playfully
argues that the underground activities of lesbian and gay organizations in China
formed the rst Communist International.11 And just as with previous communist
organizing, the fear of homosexuality in China has to do, according to Cui, with the
fact that homosexuality has a globalized presence. To me, he wrote, the concept
of the nation has been dissolved by queerness.12 The politics of translation has
been widely discussed in academia.13 One pragmatic aspect that often goes
unremarked is that translation from a Rofel Queer positions, Queering Asian
Studies 189 country not yet dominated by English and of authors marginalized in
their own countries is a political project of establishing a transnational politics, in
this case, of queer activism. This translation work has shaped one of my new
projects, on nomadic activism in China. I am beginning to write about political
activism in China across a range of politics: queer, environmental, land rights,
animal rights, and labor. Rather than reinforce the dichotomies that lead people to
write on only one of these issues, I plan to write across their seemingly disparate
concerns to address how their activism overlaps as well as diverges, how it draws
from transnational as well as nationalist concerns, and, most importantly, how it
draws on memories of socialist notions of justice as well as creates novel ideas
about human and nonhuman survivability. In my essay on queer activism in China,
for example, I chart its hybrid sources of inspiration, including neoliberalism, the
Marxism that infused life in China for over forty years, and the history of socialism in
China that continues to be required reading in school.14 Queer activism in China is
shaped not only by the utopian goals of social equality and social justice inspired by
Chinese Marxism but also by some of the specic strategies used by Communist
Party organizers prior to the revolution. But queer activism in China is also shaped
by the contemporary contours of neoliberal power in which and through which LGBT
activists try to imagine and enact livable lives. Queer activists in China today thus
grapple with the conjunctural articulations of utopian dreams that Marxist-inspired
national liberation struggles unleashed and that have not been laid to rest, the
sedimented forms of power the socialist state has put into place that always have
gaps, and neoliberalisms commodied hopes and dreams that provide grounds for
pushing against boundaries marking licit from illicit desires. Moreover, the fact that
Chinese socialism continues to be the formal rhetoric of the state means that
citizens protesting various social injustices have repeatedly called upon the state to
live up to its socialist rhetoric in the face of the capitalism the state has encouraged
and helped to create.15 I further argue that in the current moment in China, there is
no way for activists to demand rights from the state. China currently has the formal
rule of law, but only those involved with property, commerce, and consumption can
claim something called rights. While rights associated with positions 20:1 Winter
2012 190 consumerism, commercial progress, and intellectual property seem to be
developing rapidly, other kinds of rights are marginalized. Rights associated with
sexual minorities are a good example. In this context, I argue, the difculty of doing
politics on the terrain of rights opens up a space that enables a different kind of

political creativity. The fact that rights are not currently viable means that lesbians
and gay men have the opportunity not to capitulate to heteronormative social life.
That is, the ability to press for a nonassimilationist, nonnormative life is enabled by
this context.16

Focus on maintaining healthy economies is reaffirms rigid

gender hierarchies
Cohen and Lee 13
Mordecai Cohen (M.C.) Ettinger has been engaged in social justice struggles for the
last 12 years on multiple fronts ranging from queer/transgender/intersex liberation,
to Palestine liberation solidarity. He worked with TransAction since its inception and
co-founded Jews for a Free Palestine.Alexander Lee is a transgender person on the
FTM spectrum of Chinese and Taiwanese descent. He is a second-generation
immigrant, originally from Orange County, CA. He is also the founding director of
the TGI Justice Project, a nonprofit organization that works to end human rights
abuses against transgender, gender variant and intersex people in prisons and
jails.Lessons for the Left from the Radical Transgender Movement
November 10, 2013 http://bodyeclectic.net/lessons-for-the-left-from-the-radicaltransgender-movement/
Despite (or because of) being pushed out of the leadership of the new LGB
movement that emerged in the decades following the uprisings at Stonewall and
Comptons, the rampant discrimination and grinding poverty experienced by many
transgender people has changed very little. The transgender community continues
to experience extreme levels of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness.
Transgender women of color in particular are most vulnerable because of the
multiple layers of oppression they experience as women, as women of color, and as
transgender women of color. Not surprisingly, transgender women are vastly
overrepresented in US criminal justice systems, and at the same time are overrepresented as the victims of individual and state-sponsored hate crimes. Even a
transgender person with race, class, or educational privilege is likely to face
downward class mobility as a consequence of transphobia. Leslie Feinberg, well
known multi-issue radical and transgender activist, has proposed in hir book
Transgender Warriors that colonization and industrialization have intensified rigid
gender hierarchies for the benefit of the perpetuation of capitalism. Thus passing
unambiguously as a woman or man, or fitting into the gender binary is necessary
to avoid stigma and marginalization from the gender-rigid free market economy. The
pressure to pass has only intensified as globalization creates a huge low-wage
service sector, which demands an intelligible gender expression from its workers.
For those whose gender expressions or identities do not or cannot pass, the only
option left is to find work in the criminalized economies of drugs or sex work.
Participation in this underground economy of course leads to police profiling and
disproportionate representation in the prison industrial complex. Transgender and

gender variant people also experience transphobia within the field of health care.
Psychiatric professionals currently act as gatekeepers for people who may opt for
hormone therapy or surgery as part of their gender transitions. More dangerous still
is the rampant mistreatment of transgender people within the medical industrial
complex, which systematically denies humane treatment of a broad range of health
issues from life threatening to the mundane. There are well documented cases of
transgender women being left to die during life saving emergency procedures when
medical personnel discovered their transgender status and either refused or were
too shocked to resume treatment.

Taiwan
Queer analysis is necessary to understand relations with
Taiwan.
Yin Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages, Unraveling the Apparatus of
Domestication, Queer Sinophone Cultures, edited by Howard Chiang, whos research focuses on the intellectual
and cultural history of the Sinophone, and edited by Ari Larissa Heinrich, who received the Master's degree in
Chinese Literature from Harvard University,

2014, http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/Record/013795027

While the previous section aims to show how female romantic friendship in the story deserves critical attention, this

the distinctions and intersections between that ambiguous

intimacy and female homosexuality, and how such relationships may call for a more
nuanced perspective of East-West cultural dynamics with the case of Sinophone
Taiwan. Going back to the novella, a revealing fact about the narrative is that although the narrator has
elaborated intensely her desire for A. she has consistently shambled the notion of
tongxinglian, the orientation to have sexual attraction with persons of the same sex.
section hopes to further reflect on

Instead of either identifying herself as a tongs/11' (at least for a period of time) or showing absolute dis-

the narrator determinedly positions herself in a gray area

where her relation to the hetero-marital regime is not bound by traditions and is
strategically open. In the pages that follow, I argue such a gray area is indicatively woven by her
generations long-distance American Dream and Japanese Dream, as semicolonial subjects aspiration for real liberation in a nominally postcolonial age. I argue
that the gray area says a lot about how Taiwanese elites imagined themselves at the
edge of the Pacific Rim in the Cold War, especially as enlightened indigenous agents
carrying the international initiative to modernize their Oriental patriarchal culture. By
attending to the multi-layered investments in cultural translation embodied by the narrator, t he nanative, and
by extension the Taiwanese elites in the shadow and aftermath of the U.S.-centered
Cold War order, this section concludes with thoughts on how the Sinophone
paradigm may ameliorate teleological restrictions in conventional area studies.
identification with homosexuality,

Antiblackness
Static sex and gender categories are sites of intelligibility
which render racial discrimination possible- it opens categories
of un-humanness which establishes other forms of
discrimination.
Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, 116-117)CJQ
Butlers performative theory of gender argues that one cannot meaningfully
distinguish between gender as a product of human ideas and culture, and sex,
which is presumed to exist naturally as a brute fact outside human influence. In
other words, Butler argues that sex is not to nature what gender is to culture;
rather, gender designate[s] that very apparatus of productions whereby
the sexes themselves are established (Butler 1999 [1990], 11). Sex
differences are not only reproduced through discourses of gender, but both sex and
gender are produced and regulated by what Butler refers to as the heterosexual
matrix. It is not only gender norm, but also the heterosexual matrix that produces
the illusion of the naturalness of sex and gender. Norms of heterosexuality
stabilize both sex and gender through a grid of intelligibility. Intelligible genders
are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and
continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire (Butler 1990, 17).
Heteronormativity is premised on the belief that males are supposed to act
masculine and desire females, and females are supposed to act feminine and desire
men. If sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire do not line up in the way in
which the heterosexual matrix demands, the subject will be unintelligible,
not fully human. Any break between biological sex, gender performance, and
desire is foreclosed as non-normative and unreal (Butler 1990, 17). Butler
theorizes materiality not as a question of epistemological reality, but as a matter
of the livability of certain lives: whether the norms governing gender, race,
sexuality, nationality, and other categories allow one to be recognized as a human
subject. If lives deviate from crossIng Bor der s , secur Ing BodIe s [ 117 ]
recognizable, viable subjectivity, their lives will be unreal; they will not be bodies
that matter. The experience of trans- and genderqueer people, as those embodied
in a way that does not cohere with the norms of the heterosexual matrix, provides
insight into how norms of gender are embedded into the airport security
assemblage. Gender norms are not fixed or universal, nor do they exist in a
vacuum. Gender norms are also linked to the production of racial distinctions, for
example; Somerville argues that black people in the United States have been
medically and culturally understood to have racialized physical characteristics that
directly connect to their perceived abnormality in terms of gender and sexuality
(2000). Stoler has also shown that gender and sexuality were sites in which
European racial superiority was produced and maintained through the

eroticization of racialized bodies and the surveillance of white bodies

(Stoler 2002, 185197). African-American women with natural or Afro style hair
have had their hair patted down, despite not having set off any alarms or any other
signs of suspiciousness in US airport security screening procedures (most
famously in the case of Solange Knowles in 2011) (Sharkey 2011). As such,
competently practicing gender in airport security practices also means
conforming to ideas about proper gender appearance, which are grounded
in ideals of whiteness, class privilege, and heterosexuality (see also
Beauchamp 2009).8

Independently, the 1ACs spectacle of pain legitimizes the

sentimental politics that affectively undergird neoliberal
governance
Strick 14 [Simon, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Literary and Cultural
Research Berlin, American Dolorologies, 2014, p. 132-6]
The concluding argument concerns late modern figurations of the body in pain.
Spectacles of pain have proliferated in many forms in the contemporary American
public sphereif indeed pain hasn't become its primary and all-pervading
obsession. Confessional TV shows exchange narratives of personal trauma and hurt
for public intelligibility; cinematic spectacles of suffering, from The Passion of the Christ (2004) to
torture-porn favorite Hostel (2005), exhibit the body in pain for profit, thrill, and public outrage; news reports
narrate national-scale catastrophes through individual testimonials of pain; reality game shows such
as Survivor measure their contestants' bodily pain capacities against their resistance to (or aggressiveness in)

There is also a proliferation of political discourse

disclosing the injuries caused by contemporary forms of governing : public movements
traumatizing and abusive group dynamics.

raise consciousness for excluded and abjected forms of living, feeling, and aching in Western democracies;

critical discourses continue to shed light on the structural violence of regimes

of power; the interventions of identitarian movements and groups successfully expand public
recognition of social and political injury, changing the scope of intelligibility in the
process. These diverse affective phenomena are not always readily
distinguishable in neoliberal regimes. Scholars such as Wendy Brown or Sara Ahmed have
pointed out the coopting of identitarian politics in contemporary
governmental regimes. These critical voices urge "[c]aution . . . against the
assumption that 'speaking out' and 'making visible' within so-called radical politics can be
separated from the conventions of self-expression in neoliberal forms of governance "
(Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 4). Bill Clinton's infamous tagline "I feel your pain" or Barack Obama's ongoing
focus on a "politics of empathy"1 are only the presidential cases in point for an ongoing politics of
pain that links recognition of suffering to democratic progress . Academic debates have
matched this capitalization on pain and compassion as necessary ingredients
to the development of politics, ethics, or community making, such as in Rosi Braidotti's
call for the unification of feminist, gay, lesbian, and transgender identity politics under the label of a "community of

various diagnoses of America as "wound culture" (Seltzer 1998) or "trauma

culture" (Kaplan 2005), in this view, describe a highly disparate, tension-laden, and ambivalent
field of affective discourse, rather than a unified or unifying fixation on pain in
contemporary Western societies. Lauren Berlant has argued that these politics of
the suffering."2 The

affect dictate the continuous envelopment of the political in sentimental

rhetoric. Sentimentalism holds up the promise that subjectivity is granted in the
recognition of pain and that democracy is realized as the participation in an ideal of common suffering and
compassion. Sentimental discourses "locate the human in a universal capacity to suffer
and romantic conventions of individual historical acts of compassion and transcendence. [ They] imagine a
nonhierarchical social world that is . . . 'at heart' democratic because good
intentions and love flourish in it" (2008, 6). Sentimental rhetoric produces a public
sphere assembled around pain bonded by feeling with what is unspeakable: a
commonality of passionate and compassionate bodily subjects , or a "fantasy of
generality through emotional likeness in the domain of pain" (Berlant 2008, 6). These arguments
suggest a fundamental link between the sentimental evocation of pain and the discourses imagined as "at heart

the emancipatory project of democracy relies on articulations of pain, the

recognition of those suffering, and a unified politics as remedy of this suffering. This is certainly true
for American culture and its foundational ideas of promise and exceptionalism. The cultural
sites I have pointed to participate in this evocation of a public sphere, where oppressive
hurtings and social injuries are "counted in" toward a better politics of integration,
understanding, and recognition . The sentimental linkage of emancipation through the
circulation of pain and compassion as politics indicates a larger genealogy that dominates
American culture and that this book has tried to elucidate. This genealogy was traced back to
America's emancipatory foundation as a nation freed from colonial injury , and
informed by a national history of successful incorporations of marginalized subjects
into the national project (suffrage, abolitionism). American dolorologies has related this
discourse to an apparatus of cultural technologies such as compassion , testimony to
oppression, and articulations of affect and pain, and the materializations of race and gender
they covertly enact. My analysis concurs with Berlant's observation that the various claims to pain as
democratic." Indeed,

identity disarticulate their marginalizing effects in a rhetoric of universalization: In the liberal tradition of the United
States [testimony of pain] is not simply a mode of particularizing and puncturing self-description by minorities, but
a rhetoric of universality located, not in abstract categories, but in what was thought to be, simultaneously,

sentimentality has
long been a popular rhetorical means by which pain is advanced , in the United States, as
the true core of personhood and citizenship. (2000, 34) This connection of pain, nation, and
subjectivity has, on the one hand, led to the public sphere becoming more and more a site of
intimate "affect" exchange. This transformation is visible in the proliferation of
mediatized forms of confession, testimony, and other articulations of traumatized
selfhood, such as reality TV or the culture of therapeutic discourse. These governmental forms of achieving
particular and universal experience. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that

public subjectivity through speaking pain imitate and appropriate the critical formulations of differential experience
from identitarian movements, at times becoming indistinguishable from them: " We

can also see a . . .

collusion between liberal, capitalist forms of mass entertainment and individualist
therapies, and the feminist importance of the personal " (Ahmed 2000, 12). The achievement of
public visibility through the articulation of trauma and pain is furthermore supplemented by
mainstream political discourse becoming compassionate and revolving primarily
around the recognition of bodies in pain.3

Their over focus on the ontological determination of blackness

in the continental United States excludes those who would
seek to identify with blackness as a deterritorializing diaspora
Moten 14. Fred Moten, professor of poetry at Duke University, Notes on Passage
(The New International of Sovereign Feelings), Palimpsest: A Journal on Women,
Gender, and the Black International, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014, pg. 59
At stake is precisely what it is that the thought of middle passage, that remaining in
the supposedly viewless confines of the hold, makes it possible to imagine and
improvise. Its not just that there are flights of fantasy in the ships hold but also
that such fantasy calls into more refined and brutal existence every regulatory
structure through which we identify the modernity of the world. The problem
has to do, in the end, with the exhaustive deprivationsin their relation to the
revolutionary forcesthat mark the lived experience of statelessness, which is,
before its exclusionary imposition, a general and inalienable sociopoetic insurgency.
In other words, the operative distinction is neither between the postcolonial state
and diaspora nor the (neo-)imperial state and diaspora; the problem is the
relationship between the state, however it is conceived and instantiated, and
statelessness. How do we inhabit and move in statelessness? How is statelessness
not only an object but also a place of study? The address of this question
requires brushing up against a problematic implication. That implication is not that
African American Studies bears the special responsibility of bracketing its
own local concerns in the interest of a systemic analysis of the postcolonial
state, an imperative that is underwritten by the assumption that certain kinds of
attention paid to certain local conditions of black American social life not
only imply but also enforce fixed notions of blackness that exclude some
who would seek to claim blackness as (inter) national identity. Rather, the
implication is that African American Studies must ever more fully repress its own
comportments toward the interplay of anticoloniality and statelessness in
the interest of analytic devotion to the post- colonial (African) state. When
questioning the value or necessity of attention to certain local conditions of
and within the striated generativity of black social life in the United States
(where the pitfalls of the consciousness of passage seem to have their greatest
intensity) is given as a kind of methodological imperative for those in the
advanced guard of professional Afro-diasporic intellectual life; when we are
constrained to wonder how the most enduring modes and experience of
statelessness, lived and enacted by those who are said now to have a preWestphalian ontology and epistemology, have come to signify not only the most
powerful manifestation of the Westphalian state but, more generally,

something that seems to show up for Clarke and

Wright as a kind of willed, self-imposed,
exclusionary form of identitarian stasis;
perhaps it is because a choice has already been

made, at the most general level, for political

order over social insurgency. The straight, deictically
determined linearity implied by the distinction between pre-Westphalian and
Westphalian delivers the brutal kick of a Hegelian historiographic and
geographic cocktail, one designed to produce maximal effect by way of
minimal flavor. This time, in the light of the state, which is manifest as deadly
shade, Africa is a zone of relative advance. But what theoretical force is held in the
ongoing generation of what is called the pre-Westphalian? What work does that
force allow? Where did it come from? Is this a problematic of dialogue, as J. Lorand
Matory, or retention, as Melville J. Herskovitz, would have it?27 Or is the real issue
the preservation of the ontological totality that Cedric Robinson indexes to black
radicalism, which is given in general as the enactment of the refusal of the state
and which is, as Laura Harris argues, to be found in every instance of the aesthetic
sociality of blackness, in every exorbitant local inhabitance of the motley crew that
is instantiated by those whom Michel Foucault might also have called prisoners
of the passage.28 Outside the history of sovereignty, self-determination, and
their violent dispersionthat general and genocidal imposition of severalty,
of the primacy and privacy of home, that Theodore Roosevelt prescribed for
the indigenous people of North America as if it held the pestilential increase of
a Matherian blanketblackness keeps moving in its Mntzerian way. It does so in
honor of the ways that the Peasants War continues to disrupt the Peace of
Westphalia, which it anticipates, whose brutalities it brings online in the way that
insurgency always brings regulation online. Such combinations of precedence
and fracturein addition to the simple fact that the slave trade continued two
centuries after the series of treaties signed in 1648 that initialized the
Westphalian systemcall severely into question any historical calculus that
places the middle passage and its modes of study (as opposed to its
epistemology) under the rubric of the pre-Westphalian. However, under a
Hegelian influence whose strenuous critique she elsewhere studies and extends as a
mode of becoming (black), statelessness and nonarrival are objects of correction for
Wright even as Clarke implies that adherence to the Peace of Westphalia, which is
imagined to be applicable to Africa, whose pillage it foretells and propels, might
guarantee the sovereignty of the postcolonial African state.29

Thinking blackness through ontology and structuralism locks it

within pre-determined grids of intelligibility only an approach
that emphasized the formed nature of identity through
assemblage theory can map a line of escape
Koerner 11. Michelle Koerner, professor of womens studies at Duke, Lines of
Escape: Gilles Deleuzes Encounter with George Jackson, Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2
Summer 2011 pg. 161-64
The force of Jacksons line in Deleuzes booksconsidered as an insinuation of
blackness in the sense discussed aboveis intensified when we consider the
historical circumstances that drew Soledad Brother into Deleuze and his col-

laborators orbit (the links between prison struggle in France and in the United
States, the GIPs interest in Jackson, Genets involvement in the publication and
translation of Soledad Brother). And this force becomes even stronger when we
consider the deeper trajectories of black resistance it carries. It is here,
however, with respect to the question of history and of blacknesss relation to
history, that a serious problem asserts itself. Each time Jacksons name appears in
Deleuzes work it is without introduction, explanation, or elaboration, as though the
line were ripped entirely from historical considerations. There is a temptation to
dismiss this use of Soledad Brother as an ahistorical appropriation of Jacksons
thought by a European theorist or, worse, a decontextualization that effectively
obscures the intolerable social conditions out of which Jacksons letters were
produced. But to do so would perhaps miss the way blackness claims an unruly
place in philosophy and philosophies of history.
In The Case of Blackness Moten (2008b: 187) perceptively remarks, What is
inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies. What if we were to think
of blackness as a name for an ontology of becoming? How might such a
thinking transform our understanding of the relation of blackness to history and its
specific capacity to think [its] way out of the exclusionary constructions of history
and the thinking of history (Moten 2008a: 1744)? Existing ontologies tend to reduce
blackness to a historical condition, a lived experience, and in doing so
effectively eradicate its unruly character as a transformative force. Deleuze
and Guattari, I think, offer a compelling way to think of this unruliness when they
write, What History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or
in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency,
in its self- positing as concept, escapes History (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110).
To bring this relation between blackness and becoming further into the open
toward an affirmation of the unexpected insinuation of blackness signaled by the
use of Jacksons line as an event in its becominga few more words need be said
about Deleuzes method.
The use of Jacksons writing is just one instance of a procedure that we find
repeated throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where we constantly encounter unexpected injections of quotations, names, and ideas lifted from other texts,
lines that appear all of sudden as though propelled by their own force. One might
say they are deployed rather than explained or interpreted; as such, they
produce textual events that readers may choose to ignore or pick up and run
with. Many names are proposed for this methodschizoanalysis, micropolitics,
pragmat- ics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography (Deleuze and Parnet
[1977] 2006: 94)but the crucial issue is to affirm an experimental practice
that opposes itself to the interpretation of texts, proposing instead that we think
of a book as a little machine and ask what it functions with, in connection
with what other things does it or does it not transmit intensities? (Deleuze and
Guattari [1980] 1987: 4).8 Studying how Soledad Brother functions in Deleuzes
books, connect- ing Jacksons line to questions and historical issues that are not
always explicitly addressed in those books, involves one in this action. And further,

it opens new lines where the intensities transmitted in Jacksons book make a claim
on our own practice.
This method can be seen as an effort to disrupt the hierarchical opposition between
theory and practice and to challenge some of the major assumptions of Western
Marxism. In an interview with Antonio Negri in the 1990s, Deleuze (1997: 171)
clarifies that he and Guattari have remained Marxists in their concern to analyze
the ways capitalism has developed but that their political philosophy makes three
crucial distinctions with respect to more traditional theoretical approaches: first, a
thinking of war machines as opposed to state theory; second, a consideration of
minorities rather than classes; and finally, the study of social lines of flight rather
than the interpretation and critique of social contradictions. Each of these
distinctions, as we will see, resonates with Jacksons political philosophy, but
as the passage from Anti-Oedipus demonstrates, the concept of the line of flight
emerges directly in connection to Deleuze and Guattaris encounter with Soledad
Brother.
The concept affirms those social constructions that would neither be determined
by preexisting structures nor caught in a dialectical contradiction. It names a force
that is radically autonomous from existing ontologies, structures, and historical
accounts. It is above all for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari insist that society
be thought of not as a structure but as a machine, because such a concept
enables the thinking of the movements, energies, and intensities (i.e., the lines of
flight) that such machines transmit. The thinking of machines forces us not only to
consider the social and historical labor involved in producing soci- ety but also the
ongoing potentials of constructing new types of assemblages (agencement).
One of the key adversaries of this machinic approach is interpretation and
more specifically structuralist interpretations of society in terms of
contradictions. According to Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 293), structuralism
persisted in the submission of the line to the point and as a result produced a
theory of subjectivity, and also an account of language and the unconscious, that
could not think in terms of movement and construction. Defining lines only in
relation to finite points (the subject, the signifier) produces a calculable
grid, a structure that then appears as the hidden intelligibility of the system
and of society generally. Louis Althussers account of the ideological State
apparatus as the determining structure of subjectivity is perhaps the extreme
expression of this gridlocked position (an example we will come back to in a later
section). Opposed to this theoretical approach, diagrammatism (to invoke one of the
terms given for this method) maps vectors that generate an open space and the
potentials for giving consistency to the latter.9 In other words, rather than tracing
the hidden structures of an intolerable system, Deleuze and Guattaris method aims
to map the ways out of it.

Exclusive focus on anti-Blackness and white supremacy

obscures queerness and masks real violence #BlackLiveMatter proves
Shackelford 15(Ashleigh Shackelford is a radical queer Black fat femme based
in Richmond, VA. Ashleigh is a cultural producer, body positivity advocate, pop
culture enthusiast, and a run-on sentence repeat offender. They are a community
organizer at Black Action Now and the director of Free Figure Revolution. The
Politics of Erasure: Too Queer to Be Black, Too Black to Be Queer. December 23,
2015. http://www.forharriet.com/2015/12/the-politics-of-erasure-too-queer-tobe.html#axzz4EDqFUMLS) // JRW
Years ago, I was invited to a discussion about coming out experiences for queer
folks, and the whole room was white except for me. When it was my turn to talk
about my personal experiences in coming out to my family, I was asked if I had
difficulty being gay in my community and if my family was surprised because it was
rare to be a gay black woman. I shut the whole room down and immediately
addressed how anti-Blackness and queerphobia makes me more of a target for
violence from white people than my own people. But I realized mid-justified-rage that it wasnt
worth educating these particular white queer folks because it was labor that came at the cost of my mental health. I
let it go as a one-time bad experience, and tried to hope for the best in the next queer spaces I was invited to. The
next time I attended a queer spacethat, based off the invite list, seemed more multiracial compared to the one I

again. I walked into the room and was greeted with

cultural appropriation and fetishizing off jump. Hey, gurl, yasssss, your whole life is
on fleek! Can we not? Being tokenized as a bridge to Black queer culture and
language (EX: shade, bae, read, YAS bitch YAS, tea, slay, gag, etc.) and Black pop culture references
(Beyonc, Nicki, Trina, Lil Kim, etc.) is extremely violent and dehumanizing. I am also
tokenized as a Black fat femme vending machine that only exists to give everyone
else life with my confidence (re: inspiring white people with my resilience and power). Or to perhaps
start a fight for you if shit goes down in a social setting (re: Love & Hip Hop politicking ). I only get praise for
my Blackness when it is commoditized as social currency or for my ability to support
other non-Black folks in being the token Black fat femme. When I parade my
Blackness (and pride in being Black) within my queer navigation of the world, I'm
often met with silence and discomfort. Even more so, I'm met with violent denials of
non-Black privilege or stereotypes of Black people being very queerphobic. I have many
stories of how I am targeted more by the police, erased from queer resources,
romantically ignored in queer spaces, and never taken seriously when I talk about
intimate partner violence due to my intersecting identities (re: not being viewed capable of
victimhood). I am often erased from writing opportunities or scholarship in discussing
my queerness because I cannot separate my experiences from my Blackness . In
had previously attendedI was set up yet

addition, when I was arrested while participating in a #BlackLivesMatter protest, none of the queer multiracial
groups within my local area reached out once to protect any of the queer Black folks assaulted by the police. On the

in most Black spaces, my queerness takes a back seat unless it is defined

as a Black queer space. It is important to note that Black spaces aren't more
queerphobic than other designated spaces but rather that many Black spaces are
operating under white supremacist guidelines that restrict everyone to adhere to
notions of heteronormativity and have limited access to tools of certain language.
Within this heteronormativity and inaccessibility comes a deeply misguided belief
that queerness doesn't need to be uplifted or centered in a way that challenges the
other hand,

hegemonic idea that everyone is straight, cis-identifying, or cisnormative. (I use

queerness as an umbrella term for sexuality, gender identity, and gender presentation that is considered deviant.)

Queerness is seen as the minority, a once in a lifetime friend you meetbut not a
thriving community that many Black people belong to, and thus, worth integrating
into our idea of what normal is. These ideas of normal for open Black spaces
usually uplift Black cisgender, straight people. In my work within the
#BlackLivesMatter movement, I am overwhelmed by how often I put my queerness
aside to remain palatable for crowds and behind-the-scenes politicking. For
example, I once attended a Black Caucus event specifically to bring together
various Black folks from the city together to build a coalition against local issues of
anti-Blackness and classism. There was a direct incident in which pronouns were not
respected and people were not addressed by their chosen pronouns, because some
members didnt understand the importance of this act. The facilitator wanted to
parking lot the issue of pronouns until another time for the sake of building with
everyone in the room. The problem with this mentality is that we cant build with each other if
we do not respect everyones humanity. None of us are perfect in our politicizing,
but intentionally respecting people, even if you dont understand their identity and
truth, is required. The most violent part of all this is that Ive felt forced to choose
between and prioritize parts of my identity. In creating this hierarchy of my identity, I'm merely
trying to survive the non-intersectional world that requires adapting to this violence
to navigate it. I realize that I choose Black spaces over queer spaces because for
me, there is more violence in spaces that do not qualify my Blackness as worthy
rather than my queerness. Yet, in doing this, I am still terrified to be in spaces where
patriarchy, misogyny, queerphobia, and transphobia are found, and I still fear for
my life and mental health in Black spaces. There is a deep rooted reality that antiBlackness is pervasive and perpetuated in our everyday navigation, and to be in a
space of non-Black people perpetuating that violence is more triggering than to
collect my own people for not seeing me fully. It hurts either way, but I have a
preference in what hurt I engage in. In so many ways, I thrive in Black spaces in
ways that I cannot anywhere else. Blackness is so foreign, so cancerous, and so
illicit to white supremacy that it is overwhelmingly powerful to be in a room of
unapologetic Black peopleproblematic or not. But queer spaces do not make me
feel unified in anything, not even within my sexuality or gender identity. I am queer
sexually, in that I date and engage with anyone who peaks my interest regardless of
their gender or sexual identity. I am agender, in that I do not identify with a gender. In these
components of my identity, my Blackness defines each of them because Blackness is inherently deviant, therefore
everything about me will never fit within the confines of white supremacist conformity .

I feel community in
being Black and being around Black people. However, the power of that space alone
is not enough to sustain me, though, nor does it change the reality of how violent
these spaces can be to my well-being and safety. I want more from our overall
community than only being able to guarantee safe spaces when Im part of creating
them. But more importantly, I need more to survive and to be my whole self,
because I will not compartmentalize my humanity for the sake of everyone else. The
sake of everyone else in the Black community speaks to power systems of who is worthy, who is normal, and who is
dominant. Black queer folks have been here, doing the work, surviving the matrices of violence, and still showing

Liberation is not just dependent on Black racial justice. It must

include all intersections of our identities. Choosing Blackness out of survival for my
own personal navigation and political understanding does not address the reality
up for everyone else.

that we must push our community as a whole to address our Black queer identities,
existence, and humanity. Its not enough to say #BlackLivesMatter and only mean
some.

Activism and resistance against anti-Black violence in a

radical, intrinsically queer act
McCune 2015 (Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr. is an Associate Professor of Women,
Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Performance Studies, as well as the Director of
the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Program, at Washington University in St. Louis. He
is the author of Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing
(University of Chicago Press, 2014). He is a scholar, activist, and artist. Queerness
of Blackness: Ferguson and Black Death. Summer 2015.
https://www.academia.edu/14204027/Queerness_of_Blackness_Ferguson_and_Black
_Death) // JRW
The frequency of black death is itself queer. Strange. Out of place. Awkward. August
9, 2014 marked a reminder of the queerness in being and living black, when Michael
Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. This killing,
occurring in the center of the nation, became the fulcrum for a national response to
years past crimes of the state, such as the murders of Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell,
Renisha McBride, and too many others. After hundreds of days of unrest, protest,
and peacemaking, the return of Prosecutor McCulloughs nonindictment was more
than a bad moment in the court system, but a queer way of saying that black lives
did not matter. This act of juridical disrespect both in the dismissal of witness accounts and the prosecutors
defensive tonesaid loudly that public resistance, riots, or demands for redress would not be met with great

For many who had hope for AT LEAST a trial, this moment of denial was
tethered to a litany of moments where anti-black violence was met with little to no
retribution or resolve. Upon the reading of the grand jurys decision to not bring the
case to trial, the blackness of Browns body would be queered in the public
rendering of the jurys heard testimony, strangely and reminiscently deformed in
public view. In Darren Wilsons statement in front of the grand jury, he referred to
Michael Brown as a demon and like Hulk Hogan, historically racialized
phantasmagoria which evokes fear and often requires defense. This reverting to what I call
seriousness.

canonical prejudice1 constituted a historic deformation of black bodies in order that they cohere in historic of

The queerest of positions is to be the vulnerable

and made criminal, in order to deny victimage for the sake of white narrative of
defense against all things black. Indeed, while Darren Wilsons words queerly
made Michael Brown merely a thinga source of evil that could only be destroyed
through termination he gave the public ammunition to demand a reimagining of
the value of black life, as well as an institution of policies and procedures that would
protect and serve the most vulnerable. Indeed, this forum attempts to respond to the scene even
victims, at the hands of a very powerful state.

resurrecting Brown and others through action and activism, through a collective reflection on the meaning of now,
and marking the significance of multiple types of players (activists, scholars, preachers, and artists) in the

To be a death-bound subject2 is to be a queer

subject, always in danger of being destroyed. Physically. Spiritually.
Representationally. To reflect in the now, the question most pressing in the twentyfirst century: How does it feel to be a death-bound subject? The response for many
seems to be #BlackLivesMatter beyond their deaths and, therefore, the work
reshaping of the dark American landscape.

continues. In this way, the queerness of blackness is not just about how tethered life
seems to death, but also its relationship to living and creativity. What has emerged
from the site of Ferguson, Missouri, are many queer things: Art. Activism. Advocacy.
Anti-Racist Mobilization. Action. As a resident of the St. Louis community, I was able
to be a part of the mass mobilization of folks who shut shit down. Beyond the proverbial
and symbolic disruption in business as usual of state agencies and the everyday lives of St. Louis metropolitan
residents with segregationist politics, I witnessed mostly young people of color generating a queer enclave of folk:

activists, artists, and scholars from various struggles. Together, they combat the
states collusion in anti-black terror. In many ways, I feel that this moment might
evoke a feeling of queer temporality, moments where one leaves the temporal
frames of family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. For me, the events in
Ferguson and beyond disrupt the timeline in which black lives matter most at the
cross-section of straight and black, but rather at the murky plain where gender and
sexualities are ever-presentthough often unremarked, even for many of those
killed in the line of activist duty. Here, the operational time seems fast, fueled by bodies from various
time zones, traditions, and acceptance of risks that speak to the importance and urgency of the now .
Queerness of this black moment is also marked in the ways that suspension and
suspicion cooperate, as folks engage with nonnormative bodies, sexualities, and
genders as sometimes inside and sometimes outside. The oscillation here is also an
allegory, for the life of nonnormative subjects within marginalized spaces feeling
at once free and trapped at sites of solidarity. Here, I attempt to bring together
artists, activists, scholars, and performers who see themselves as queerly placed,
liminal subjects existing across communi- ties, while also living as black people or
amongst black peoplewitnessing mass terrorism on repeat in their everyday lives.
Together these voices represent not only broad perspectives, but also offer original
and insightful thoughts on the past, present, and future of blackness in these queer
times. Scholar-poet-activist Javon Johnson reminds us of the painjoy dialectic present at the site of antiblack violence and crimes. Taking us a bit away from sorrow songs, he provides poetry and
prose that introduce black joy as a critical hermeneutic through which to visit
scenes of violence. Reuben Riggs, brave activist and undergraduate at Washington University-St. Louis, who
spent many days in the thick of Ferguson protests, introduces us to complex scenes where queerness and blackness
meet, entangle, conflict, and create emergent knowledges. Jennifer Tyburczy, scholar-curator-activist, draws
connection between multiple state violences and draws out the queer use of evidence, while crafting an archive
that provides us with new considerations for the possibilities and limitations of the visual in distilling anti-black
violence. To this end, Nyle Fort and Darnell Moore provoke new thoughts on anti-blackness through the creative
crafting of critical sermons, which utilize the last words of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin to craft a theology

These contributions illuminate the queerness of blackness,

through the performance of critical scholarship committed to justice for black
people, the strange inability to write the self in the texts due to the nature of the
crimes, and the determination to witness for, against, and with the dead, the
injured, and the too often forgotten. Indeed, the blackness of this forum is indicative
of the queerness of this moment. Sadly, as I introduce this forum, a new viral video circulates social
rooted in anti-state violence.

media: the assassination of Walter Scott. This black South Carolina citizen was shot down by police officer Michael
Slager while Scott was running after being tasered during a taillight stop. My social worlds are in uproar and
rightfully so. However, what is jarring for me is the way in which this mans run is symbolic of the queer fear that is
a part of police black relations, a constant feeling that one is death-bound. In this America, it seems to stand still,
to run, or to acquiesce, all cosign the black contract with death. Likewise, this now-viral video of Walter Scotts
assassination paints vividly the queer position of black people in Ferguson and beyond: as runners from violent
authority and institutions; seemingly eternal sojourners of freedom.

Identity/ Subject Formation

Their conception of identity presumes an intersection of
positions from which to demand accountabilitythis rendering
of the social field reproduces disciplinary power and locks us
into the grid of positionality, preventing change
Puar 7. Jasbir Puar, professor of womens and gender studies at Rutgers
University, Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 211

There is no entity, no identity, no queer subject or subject to queer, rather

queerness coming forth at us from all directions, screaming its defiance,
suggesting a move from intersectionality to assemblage, an affective
conglomeration that recognizes other contingencies of belonging (melding,
fusing, viscosity, bouncing) that might not fall so easily into what is sometimes
denoted as reactive community formations-identity politics-by control
theorists. The assemblage, a series of dispersed but mutually implicated
and messy networks, draws together enunciation and dissolution,
causality and effect, organic and nonorganic forces. For Deleuze and Guattari,
assemblages are collections of multiplicities: There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the
object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object, or
"return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only
determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in
number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore
increase as the multiplicity grows ).... An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity

There are no points or

positions.... There are only lines.21 As opposed to an intersectional model of
identity, which presumes that components-race, class, gender, sexuality,
nation, age, religion-are separable analytics and can thus be
disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that
merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency,
and permanency.22 Intersectionality demands the knowing, naming, and
thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, relying on the logic of
equivalence and analogy between various axes of identity and generating
narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative aspects of
identification: you become an identity, yes, but also timelessness works to
consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every space .
Furthermore, the study of intersectional identities often involves taking
imbricated identities apart one by one to see how they influence each
other, a process that betrays the founding impulse of intersectionality,
that identities cannot so easily be cleaved. We can think of intersectionality as a
hermeneutic of positionality that seeks to account for locality, specificity, placement, junctions. As a tool of
diversity management and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism,
intersectionality colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the statecensus, demography, racial profiling, surveillance- in that "difference" is
that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.

encased within a structural container that simply wishes the messiness of

identity into a formulaic grid, producing analogies in its wake and
engendering what Massumi names "gridlock": a "box[ing] into its site on
the culture map." He elaborates: The idea of positionality begins by subtracting
movement from the picture. This catches the body in cultural freeze-frame.
The point of explanatory departure is a pin-pointing, a zero point of stasis .
When positioning of any kind comes a determining first, movement comes a
problematic second.... Of course, a body occupying one position on the grid
might succeed in making a move to occupy another position.... But this doesn't
change the fact that what defines the body is not the movement itself, only its
beginnings and endpoints.... There is "displacement," but no
transformation; it is as if the body simply leaps from one definition to the
next. ... "The space of the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid,
falls into a theoretical no-man's land."B Many feminists, new social
movement theorists, critical race theorists, and queer studies scholars
have argued that social change can occur only through the precise
accountability to and for position/ing. But identity is unearthed by Massumi as the
complexity of process sacrificed for the "surety" of product . In the stillness
of position, bodies actually lose their capacity for movement, for flow, for
(social) change. Highlighting the "paradoxes of passage and position,"
Massumi makes the case for identity appearing as such only in retrospect:
a "retrospective ordering" that can only be "working backwards from the
movement's end." Again from Massumi: "Gender, race and sexual orientation also
emerge and back-form their reality, ... Grids happen. So social and cultural
determinations feed back into the process from which they arose .
Indeterminacy and determination, change and freeze-framing, go
together."24

The 1AC operates within grids of intelligibility, affixing the

body to a state of gridlocked, identarian stasis that cannot
account for the movement of energy and matter
Massumi 02. Brian Massumi, professor of communications at the University of
Montreal, Parables For the Virtual, pg. 2
"The Body." What is it to The Subject? Not the qualities of its moving experience.
But, rather, in keeping with the extrinsic approach, its positioning. Ideological
accounts of subject formation emphasize systemic structurings. The focus on the
systemic had to be brought back down to earth in order to be able to integrate into
the account the local cultural differences and the practices of resistance they may
harbor. The concept of "positionality" was widely developed for this purpose.
Signifying subject formation according to the dominant structure was often
thought of in terms of "coding." Coding in turn came to be thought of in terms of
positioning on a grid. The grid was conceived as an oppositional framework of
culturally constructed significations: male versus female, black versus white,
gay versus straight, and so on. A body corresponded to a "site" on the grid

defined by an overlapping of one term from each pair. The body came to be
defined by its pinning to the grid. Proponents of this model often cited its ability
to link body-sites into a "geography" or culture that tempered the universalizing
tendencies or ideology.
The sites, it is true, are multiple. But aren't they still combinatorial permutations
on an overarching definitional framework? Aren't the possibilities for the
entire gamut of cultural emplacements, including the "subversive" ones,
precoded into the ideological master structure? Is the body as linked to a
particular subject position anything more than a local embodiment of
ideology? Where has the potential for change gone? How does a body
perform its way out of a definitional framework that is not only responsible
for its very "construction," but seems to prescript every possible signifying
and countersignifying move as a selection from a repertoire or possible
permutations on a limited set of predetermined terms?

How can the

grid itself change?

How can what the system has pinpointedly

determined flip over into a determining role capable of acting on the systemic level?
The aim of the positionality model was to open a window on local resistance in the
name of change. But the problem of change returned with a vengeance.
Because every body-subject was so determinately local, it was boxed into its
site on the culture map.

Gridlock.

The idea of positionality begins by subtracting movement from the picture.

This catches the body in cultural freeze-frame. The point or explanatory
departure is a pinpointing, a zero-point of stasis. When positioning of any kind
comes a determining first, movement comes a problematic second. After all is
signified and sited, there is the nagging problem of how to add movement back
into the picture. But adding movement to stasis is about as easy as multiplying
a number by zero and getting a positive product. Of course, a body occupying one
position on the grid might succeed in making a move to occupy another position. In
fact, certain normative progressions, such as that from child to adult, are coded in.
But this doesn't change the fact that what defines the body is not the movement
itself, only its beginning and endpoints. Movement is entirely subordinated to
the positions it connects. These are predefined. Adding movement like this adds
nothing at all. You just get two successive states: multiples of zero.
The very notion of movement as qualitative transformation is lacking. There is
"displacement," but no transformation; it is as if the body simply leaps from one
definition to the next. Since the positional model's definitional framework is
punctual, it simply can't attribute a reality to the interval, whose crossing is
a continuity (or nothing). The space of the crossing, the gaps between positions on
the grid, falls into a theoretical no-body's land. Also lacking is the notion that if
there is qualitative movement of the body, it as directly concerns sensings as
significations. Add to this the fact that matter, bodily or otherwise, never
figures into the account as such. Even though many of the approaches in
question characterize themselves as materialisms, matter can only enter in

indirectly: as mediated. Matter, movement, body, sensation. Multiple mediated

miss.

Security/IR
Securitization posits China as a perverse homosexual that
threatens the homeland this ontological drive to home
desires is inevitable in IR absent the alt
Weber 16 Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex
[Cynthia Weber, 2016, Queer International Relations Sovereignty, Sexuality and the
Will to Knowledge, pgs 101-103, Oxford University Press] AMarb
queer migrations scholars demonstrate
how any attempt to posit home and homeland as secure ontological places
is confounded by encounters with movement and queerness inside the
home/land (Eng 1997; Ahmed 2000; Fortier 2001; 2003; Luibhid 2002; 2008;2013; Luibhid and Cant 2005;
Luibhid, Buffington, and Guy 2014). As this chapter demonstrates, their conclusion is as true in IR as
it is in queer migration studies. For the (sometimes) queer movements of the unwanted
im/migrant and the al-Qaeda terroristas civilizational and sexual development
on the move and as civilizational and sexual barbarism on the moveoccur across,
between, and within heteronormatively understood homes, homelands, and
sexualities in ways that expose these foundational sites of
national/civilizational reproduction as irregular, indeterminate, and
transposable. Western responses to these irregularitiesto these intricately produced
anarchiesare rooted as much in the desires of Western populations for ease in
the homeland as they are in their desires for ease in the home. This is why
Western (post)developmental (Bigo 2002) and security narratives reoppose to the
Islamic civilizational family their figuration of the Western civilizational family as
the foundation of national/civilizational sovereignties. This is why these discourses
contrast the properly patriotic and cultural attachments to nation, culture, and
home/land of the Western civilizational family with the improper attachments of
the Islamic family to nation, culture, and home/land (Puar and Rai 2002; Puar 2007). And this
is how these discourses fix the unwanted im/migrant and the al-Qaeda terrorist as
the necessary civilizationally and sexually perverse figures who are called upon to
normalize Western individual, familial, and national/civilizational figures and
attachments to civilized, developed sovereign man and t he sovereign orders he
authorizes as rational, reasonable, and just. These homing desires (Brah 1996,
187)these desires to feel at home achieved by physically or symbolically
(re)constituting spaces which provide some kind of ontological security in
the context of migration (Fortier 2000, 163)are usually understood to be the desires of
im/migrating or diasporic subjects. What this analysis suggests is that the civilizational and sexual
movements of figures like the unwanted im/migrant and the al-Qaeda terrorist
implant homing desires in Western subjects. These homing desires take practical
form in Western (post)developmental and security discourses that attempt and fail
to manage unease in the homeland (Bigo 2002) and also in the home by figuring a
Western civilized, developed sovereign man as the manager of their unease by
being the manager of their security. In so doing, they expose the anxious labor (Luibhid
2008, 174) Western discourses expend to create binary sexual figurations of and in the
In their analyses of queer migration and queer diaspora,

home and homeland that might sustain heteronormative sexualized orders of

international relations (also seePeterson 1999). Chapters 3 and 4 on the underdeveloped, the
undevelopable, the unwanted im/migrant, and the terrorist, considered together, suggest
that these homing desires have long been a feature of how Western
heteronormativities put sex into discourse in intimate, national, and international
relations. The tropes of home and homeland participate in creating these four
figurations of the perverse homosexual as the primary performativities that
(post)colonial subjects can inhabit. These tropes tie the underdeveloped, the
undevelopable, the unwanted im/migrant, and the terrorist to specific places, times, and desires
that establish specific figuresthe normal sovereign versus the perverse
antisovereignwho guarantee various either/or anarchy-versus-order binaries as
perverse-versus-normal binaries. And these tropes mobilize these binaries to create
specific (albeit unreliable) mappings of the world to contain the movements of these
dangerous figures in that world, which no amount of determined work can contain
geopolitically or sexually. In all of these ways, then, heteronormative Western
discourses script the underdeveloped, the undevelopable, the unwanted
im/migrant, and the terrorist as perverse homosexuals who are foundational
to traditional either/or Western logics of statecraft as mancraft and Western
sexual organizations of international relations. What we will see in chapter 5 is how this
freighted labor is mobilized again, this time through homonormativities, in ways that both reply upon and disavow
figurations of the perverse homosexual in order to birth a very specific figuration of the normal homosexual.

Notions of security disavow bodily vulnerability but

constitutively rely on vulnerability in order to generate the
fear of sovereignty that would naturalize the global order of
violence. Sovereignty requires the continuous displacement of
the abject into the domain of the enemy and the inhuman:
their threats are not only constructed through discourse but
are also the inevitable effects of performances of state power.
Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, 200-201)CJQ
While the field of security studies is fundamentally about overcoming, containing, or
applying rational controls to vulnerability (or more precisely, the distribution of
vulnerability), the violence of the selfs very founding reveals vulnerability to be an
inescapable aspect of our being. Bodies, under the sign of sovereignty, are
vulnerable bodies seeking to eliminate this vulnerability through the political action
of constituting the sovereign state and the sovereign man under the regime of
rights. Bodily vulnerability thus functions as that which simultaneously
must be overcome, but which can never be overcome. The concept of risk in
International Relations illustrates a logic that attempts to overcome this constitutive

vulnerability through technological superiority and expert knowledge. Theorizing

bodies as ontologically as well as physically precarious necessitates a different view
of violence in IR, in particular, that violence is an expression of the instability of
bodies in their social existence and relations to one another. Biopower, as the
governance of populations, is a practice that seeks to deny the precarity of life
through classifying individuals according to their differences, insulating groups from
contact with other groups, and normalizing groups suffocating difference within
groups. Biopower also legitimizes and sometimes institutionalizes these strategies
to manage and eliminate difference through the creation of discrete, homogenized
units by making such strategies appear natural (Ettlinger 2007). While Butlers
recent work on bodily vulnerability is primarily framed in terms of state violence,
rather than the differential material conditions for life that exist in the contemporary
political economy (although see Butler and Athenasiou 2013),1 her concepts of
normative violence and bodily precarity are useful for thinking through how to
theorize violence when taking into consideration an embodied subject. When
normative frameworks establish in advance what kinds of lives will be
livable, what lives are worth preserving and mourning, these views
implicitly justify contemporary practices of violence. Butler suggests the
possibility that a politics of bodily vulnerability could provide an alternative to the
sovereign strategies of managing violence: denying vulnerability by appearing
impermeable, and/or becoming violent oneself. Violence is an act that attempts to
eradicate ones vulnerability and relocate it elsewhere; it produces the illusion that
one is invulnerable. Violence, then, is a manifestation of the instability and
undecidability in the constitution and management of contemporary political
subjects as embodied subjects. Rather than a reversion to a previous era, and a
betrayal of liberal political values, violence expresses the instability in the founding
of subjects that is the result of the constitutive outside, which provides the energy
for the disruption and renewal of the ever-precarious subject. In contrast to the
liberal vision of eliminating violence from political life, Talal Asad (2003) reminds us
that liberal, modern societies have never been free of physical pain and cruelty. It is
not cruelty per se that is perceived as wrong, but excessive cruelty beyond what is
needed to control and discipline subjects. Torture has been defined as the infliction
of unnecessary cruelty and suffering (if it is deemed necessary, it is euphemized as
enhanced interrogation), and certain technologies of war are considered to be
unnecessarily cruel (such as chemical and biological weapons) as opposed to others
(aerial bombing). Excessive cruelty and pain inflicted upon subjects are seen as a
sign of backwardness and a lack of civilization. Though we have mechanisms to
regulate and redirect the exercise of violence, in fact, we have simply made the
expression of these energies more civilized in their violent precisionthrough
complicated legal rationales and procedures for enhanced interrogations and
through legally and technologically enabled bombings. We are shocked by
expressions of political violence such as suicide bombings, which seem barbaric and
irrational by comparison, but which may in fact be a similar indication of the abject,
or the excess, that haunts the seemingly uncorrupted subject. Violence is thus not
only a destructive practice that is to be avoided, or only a rational course of policy,
but rather, is also in some sense a creative force, as an outside that is not fully
expelled, that lingers and drives the production of bodies and subjects. Such

violence challenges the myth of the sovereign man. It is a commonplace in political

theory that sovereignty exceeds legal codes. Sovereignty is performatively
produced; that is, it is made to exist through practices, through the Schmittian
decision on the exception, or Agambens homo sacer, for two examples. Twentiethcentury political thought from Kantorowicz (1957) to Foucaults performative theory
of the sovereign has considered sovereignty something exceeding the law,
bestowing the ability to inflict violence on others. The sovereign state is not
only founded and maintained by violence or the fear of violence, but the
sovereign man is produced by violent exclusions to maintain the
appearance of wholeness and integrity. The appearance of sovereign men and
sovereign states is thus predicated upon bodily vulnerabilityfor the sovereign to
exist, bodies must be made vulnerable to the violence of the sovereign

And, liberal and realist explanations of International Relations

alike mask gendered violence or reconstitute is as natural: a
feminist orientation challenges the naturalness of vulnerability
and security. Understanding the performative nature of
security allows for it to be understood as socio-politically
calculated rather than neutral or natural.
Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, Introduction,
28-29)CJQ
If we think of security as not something that can be absolutely obtained, but as a
set of practices that produces embodied subjects, we are called upon to think about
violence not as only an act of self-preservation or something that happens at the
margins beyond the boundaries of the social contract, but as performative, that is,
producing and sustaining embodied subjects within a broader social order. Feminist
theorists in IR have been at the forefront of efforts to bring bodies back into the
study of International Relations. To understand their contributions, as well as some
of the potential pitfalls of feminist work, requires some understanding of the
multiplicity of feminist positions on the relations among bodies, subjects, and
violence, and the tensions between different positions. These tensions can be both
productive and problematic. While International Relations has by and large
accepted an ontology of bodies as natural beings to be protected by
state apparatuses, feminists have questioned the naturalness of this
body to be protected and what politics are enabled by this protection. The
question of the ontological status of the body is of particular concern for feminists,
who have had to battle scientific and medical discourses of womens natural bodily
inferiority, as well as the erasure of the potential of their intellectual achievements,
due to the bodily influences of hormones, reproductive processes, and muscular
frailty. Feminist thought has challenged discourses of womens nature, which
considered women nurturing and motherly, and incapable of the abstract political,
economic, or scientific thought that characterizes the full subject of liberalism.
Discourses of womens natural vulnerability and weakness have constituted women

as inherently in need of protection by the state. While men could partake in the
provision of this protective state apparatus, not the least of which includes serving
in militaries, womens exclusion from such institutions perpetuated their social,
political, and economic marginalization and dependency. Feminists also critique
liberalisms presumption of womens bodies as weak and inadequate, in which
women are seen as embodied subjects unfit for participation in the public realm.
The feminist critique of liberal theories of politics and International Relations is
based on liberalisms presumption of a rational, universal, and disembodied subject.

Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, Introduction,
2)CJQ
In this book, I draw on recent work in feminist theory that offers a challenge to the
deliberate maintenance and policing of boundaries and the delineation of human
bodies from the broader political context. Challenging this theorization of bodies as
natural organisms is a key step in not only exposing how bodies have been
implicitly theorized in [ 2 ] IR, but in developing a reading of IR that is attentive to
the ways in which bodies are both produced and productive. In conceptualizing the
subject of IR as essentially disembodied, IR theory impoverishes itself. An explicit
focus on the subject as embodied makes two contributions to IR. First, I address the
question vexing the humanities and social sciences of how to account for
the subject by showing that IR is wrong in its uncomplicated way of
thinking about the subject in relation to its embodiment. In its rationalist
variants, IR theory comprehends bodies only as inert objects animated by the minds
of individuals. Constructivist theory argues that subjects are formed through social
relations, but leaves the bodies of subjects outside politics as brute facts (Wendt
2001, 110), while many variants of critical theory understand the body as a medium
of social power, rather than also a force in its own right. In contrast, feminist
theory offers a challenge to the delineation of human bodies from subjects
and the broader political context. My central argument is that the bodies that
the practices of violence take as their object are deeply political bodies, constituted
in reference to historical political conditions while at the same time acting upon our
world. The second contribution of this work is to argue that because of the way it
theorizes subjects in relation to their embodiment, IR is also lacking in one
of its primary purposes: theorizing international political violence. This
project argues that violence is more than a strategic action of rational actors
(as in rationalist theories) or a destructive violation of community laws and
norms (as in liberal and constructivist theories). Because IR conventionally
theorizes bodies as outside politics and irrelevant to subjectivity, it cannot see how
violence can be understood as a creative force for shaping the limits of how we
understand ourselves as political subjects, as well as forming the boundaries of our
bodies and political communities. Understanding how war is a generative force like
no other (Barkawi and Brighton 2011, 126) requires us to pay attention to how
bodies are killed and injured, but also formed, re-formed, gendered, and
racialized through the bodily relations of war; it also requires that we

consider how bodies are enabling and generative of war and practices of
political violence more broadly. Security studies, the subfield of IR that focuses
on violence, has defined its topic of study as the study of the threat, use, and
control of military force (Walt 1991, 212), with emphasis on the causes of war and
the conditions for peace. Despite the traditional focus on military force, security
studies has by and large ignored the bodies that are the intended or inevitable
targets of the use of such force.

The logic of security does not originate from a neutral site of

ontological privilege: it arises from the sovereign
administration of bodily movements and relations. An account
of security that does not foreground a feminist theorization of
the body fails to account for the conditions of legibility that
demarcate the outer limits of the definition of the human.
Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, 165)CJQ
In this work, I have argued that contemporary practices of violence and security
demonstrate the need to take the embodiment of the subject seriously in ways that
neither conventional International Relations theory nor biopolitical approaches have
thus far. Feminist approaches, on the other hand, argue that it is inadequate to
separate something called the body from the broader social, political, and
environmental milieu. Bodies have no independent existence as such, but require
supplementation in a variety of ways, from the work needed to conceptualize bodies
as the objects of torture or as legible to security apparatuses, to the material and
discursive relations needed to make certain bodies killable in the regime of
precision warfare. Sovereign power is one form of supplementation of the body
insofar as sovereign power is necessary to live a life free of violence, deprivation,
and an early death, in the Hobbesian state of nature. In a biopolitical reading, the
bodies that comprise the populations are constituted, as I have argued, as bodies
that not only must be managed, but also must be known; that is, they must be
constituted as objects of knowledge in order to survive and thrive under responsible
stewardship. The existence of bodies qua bodies is the result of political
interventions, though bodies also possess productive or agentic capacities for
altering political relations. The framework that this work has developed for thinking
about bodies, subjects, and violence suggests that ethical accounts of political
violence should take into account more than the injuring or killing of natural bodies;
they should also be responsive to the ways in which social relations
including security practicesare implicated in (and reliant upon)
producing different kinds of bodies and configurations of bodily relations.
In this chapter, I show how the theorization of bodies that I have developed in this
project can be applied to critique an emerging framework for understanding and
addressing contemporary security threats: the doctrine of responsibility to
protect, often abbreviated RtoP or R2P. In light of the previous chapterswhich

argued that bodies are both produced by, and are pro- ductive of, politics
and are not contained in themselves or in their relations to otherswe can
now think about bodies in connection to RtoP in a way that challenges the terms of
responsibility by thinking about not only harm done to existing bodies, but also
the production of certain bodies as those that can be harmed. Specifically, I attempt
to think through the paradigm of RtoP from Butlers theorization of vulnerable
bodies, which is in accord with the dimensions of bodily life that this work has
developed. I show that thinking through the ethical implications of RtoP from an
ontology of vulnerability has broader implications for the way in which we think
about ethics and responsibility. Butlers thesis of bodily vulnerability and ontological
precariousness is an argument that bodies do not exist in their own right, but rather
exist only in virtue of certain conditions that make them intelligible as human.
Humans are not only vulnerable to violence as natural bodies that can be harmed;
they also are vulnerable precisely because they exist only in and through their
constitution in a social and political world, in and through their relations with other
bodies. Human bodies are vulnerable to each other precisely because there is no
we or I outside the other. Butler writes, if the ontology of the body serves
as a point of departure for such a rethinking of responsibility, it is
precisely because, in its surface and its depth, the body is a social
phenomenon: it is exposed to others, vulnerable by definition (2009, 33).
This sentence highlights the connection between rethinking the subject as
embodied and rethinking the terms of ethics and responsibility that attend to us as
embodied subjects. Having shown in preceding chapters that bodies targeted,
harmed, or protected by practices of violence and its management are unnatural
(as they are produced by political relations as well as productive of relations), that
bodies are both material and symbolic, and that they are formed in ongoing
relations with one another, I put this formulation to work in a critique of the
responsibility to protect, a recent development in International Relations that
redefines sovereignty

Security must not just be thought of in the context of the affs

extinction scenarios, rather in the context of how gender is securitized
by the Sovereign, and how it will always be cast aside when more
poignant issues of security arise
Hansen 2001
(April, Lene, Author of Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War and
The Evolution of International Security Studies Worked on Gender, Security, and Cyber
Security at the Danish Debate on the European Union, director of "Images and International
Security for The Danish Council of Independent Research, Gender, Nation, Rape
http://www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~alexroni/IPD%202015%20readings/IPD%202015_7/Gender
%20,%20Nation,%20Rape%20%20Lene%20Hansen.pdf - KSA)

The juxtaposition of the security of the individual and the security of the national
community in feminist security analysis, as well as in Security Studies more broadly,
involves two dichotomies: the rst one pitches an individual concept of security
against a collective one; the second pitches the nation against the gendered

community.6 Although the security debate is centred around these two

dichotomies, it should be noted that in some important ways these dichotomies
constrain the debate itself. The juxtaposition between an individual and a
collective/national concept masks the actual interconnection between individual and
collective security. The realist concept of state security is in fact dependent upon
the transfer and institutionalization of individual security onto the state, without
which, the Hobbesian fear is, we would return to the state of nature (Campbell
1992: 634; Williams 1998). The concept of individual security on the other hand
must still confront the question of how collective solutions or priorities can be
negotiated. In short, a tension between the individual and the collective (the state)
rather than a choice is at the core of security. To gain an understanding of the
dominance of state security we need to look at the way in which security has
become intimately connected to the principle of state sovereignty. This is so not
because the state is an immortal entity or because security is objectively provided
by the state, but because the meaning of security is tied to historically specic
forms of political community (Walker 1990: 5) In the case of war, the governmental
prerogative on dening what constitutes threats to national security relies upon a
set of discursive practices that inscribe state sovereignty and national identity as
the privileged reference point for security. Gendered security problems have, as a
consequence, been 58 International Feminist Journal of Politics Downloaded by
[Kobe University] at 20:11 14 April 2014 recognized by governments to the extent
that they followed the national logic (Walker 1992; Hansen 2000b). Gender
security cannot therefore be studied in isolation from national security if one
wishes to understand the dominant constructions of security. Yet it remains crucial
to emphasize that the discourse of national security might silence womens
security problems when womens problems con ict with the securities of the
national community. Thus, feminist studies must examine constructions of the
relationship between gender and nation not to make them correspond, but in order
to analyse how the political structures of patriarchy and state sovereignty condition
the way gender security can be thought.

IR- Trans Specific

Trans studies are key to effective IR because they provide a
better starting point from which to understand liminality
their authors completely ignore this
Sjoberg 12
(Laura Sjoberg is a feminist scholar of international relations at the University of Florida department of
political science. Toward Trans-gendering International Relations? in International Political Sociology
vol. 6 iss. 4, 6 December 2012, accessed 27 September 2015, cVs)

Even assuming a clear ability to both recognize and treat fairly potential actors in
global politics as objects of study, scholars of IR still struggle with how (if at all) to
account for change in those actors, their identities, and their relationships. In particular,
critical theorists have suggested that realist and liberal accounts (particularly at the
systemic level) are ill-equipped to account for change (for example, Checkel 1998). On the
other hand, Kenneth Waltz (2000) suggests that scholars are witnessing changes in the system and that those
factors which do change continue to be less important than those properties of the system that remain constant.

some theorists have argued that IR needs to account for changehow does the
international arena change over time? What cycles does it go through (Goldstein 1988)?
What are the unique causes of individual wars and conflicts (or lack thereof)
Still,

(Suganami 2002)? Is the system still an anarchy (Waltz 2000)? If it is, how has that anarchy changed? If it is not,

If IR as a discipline has been uncertain about how best to account for

change in global politics, it has also been uncomfortable dealing with questions of
liminality and unrest. Liminal states are transitional, uncertain, and unidentifiable,
structurally as well as functionally. While some scholars have addressed questions of liminality (for
example, Higgott and Nossal 1997; Rumelili 2003), IR has, for the most part, understood change
as moving from one state to another, rather than examining the uncertainty in
between. When IR has thought about process (such as democratization), it has often
been in terms of approximating the end result, rather than focusing on the period of
in-betweenness. This is an area where trans-theorizing could provide a helpful
intervention. Much of trans-theorizing is about change, and much of the gaze
focused on trans-people is related to the process of transition from one sex to another. As
Krista Scott-Dixon explains, non-trans-observers and clinical practitioners fixate on the
transition demanding with oblivious gender privilege to look, to know, and
to judge the most intimate details and private representations of trans-people's
physical selves (2006:4344). In other words, not only is the change seen as the relevant part of theorizing
what is it now?

the trans-experience, the change is the trans-experience, and therefore needs to be understood, deconstructed,

why do only some people have to describe

themselves in detail, while others do not? (2007:53). The answer to Bettcher's question can be
found in the combination of the uncertainty of the observer (what is that person?), the assumption that
clarity can come from understanding what parts a person has (oh, that person has a
penis, therefore, that person is a man), and an intolerance for confusion and
liminality in our understandings of trans-bodies. Therefore, trans-theorizing has
prioritized thinking about the significations of liminality, work which can enhance
IR's views of change. Christine Sylvester sees that liminality suggests borderlands that defy fixed
and examined in intimate detail. As Bettcher laments,

homeplaces in feminist epistemology, places of mobility around policed boundaries, places where one's bag
disappears and reappears before moving on (2002:255). We can, then, think of human interactions in terms of
different subjectivities, different travelling experiences, which we can think of as mobile, rather than fixed, criss-

What trans-theorists add to

this conception of liminality is a reminder that home might be as dangerous as
the liminal, and that there might (as Bell Hooks (1990) suggests about marginality) be
empowerment in embracing liminality. The murky waters of passing, crossing,
and disidentifying (all liminal states) might be safer for some persons and groups in
global politics than the certainty of membership, identity, and home that so many IR
theorists are interested in locating for global politics marginal/liminal participants.
crossing borderlands rather than staying at home (Sylvester 2002:255).

Engaging in cis privilege is key to interrogating privileges in

the context of IR allows politicians to better engage in
difference
Sjoberg 12
(Laura Sjoberg is a feminist scholar of international relations at the University of Florida department of
political science. Toward Trans-gendering International Relations? in International Political Sociology
vol. 6 iss. 4, 6 December 2012, accessed 27 September 2015, cVs)
Conclusion: Looking Crossways Catherine MacKinnon once argued that inequality comes first; differences come
after. Inequality is substantive and identifies a disparity; difference is abstract and falsely symmetrical (1987:8). In
other words, MacKinnon was arguing that difference only becomes recognizable/significant to the extent that

There are many places where we do not yet fully

understand how difference works in global politics, and even more where we do not
yet fully grasp how it maps onto inequality. Yet, some argue these dimensions are
the essence of understanding global politics and should be the priorities of scholars
in the field of IR. This article has worked to establish the initial plausibility of a new approach to studying
inequality is distributed along it.

difference by arguing that (feminist) IR should come to value trans-gender theorizing, not only toward the end of
making the world safe and just for people of all genders and sexualities (Serano 2007:358), but also that of better
explaining and understanding global politics generally. This article does not mean to argue that trans-gender
studies provide the way to think about global politics, or even the direction feminist work in IR needs to take.

through looking at global politics from a trans-feminist perspective, it

suggests the fruitfulness of applying the concepts of trans-theorizing to help us
understand IR, and the ways that trans-theorizing might improve our
understandings of global politics. Trans-theorizing is likely to be especially useful to
theorizing global politics to the extent that it shows that basic conceptualizations
ways of opposing home and the economy, the political and personal, or system and
lifeworldpresuppose and reinforce (Warner 1993:xxiii) masculine, heterosexual,
cissexual norms. Though IR is coming to recognize privileges associated with gender, race, class, and
nationality, trans-theorizing suggests it is necessary to look further. Not only is cisgender privilege
an important axis of privilege to recognize (even as the other to it, trans-people, are often
invisible), it also begs the question of what other privileges in the theory and practice
of global politics are assumed to be so normal that they are invisible. It behooves IR
theorists to ask what other social, political, or cultural attributes or characteristics
are so normalized that we do not even see when the alternative to them is being
oppressed or silenced, as well as where cisprivilege manifests in global politicsa
productive research agenda as IR looks to build research programs taking difference
seriously.
Instead,

IR has a flat concept of identity inserting trans perspectives

into IR is key to understanding undefined components in the
relationships between states
Sjoberg 12
(Laura Sjoberg is a feminist scholar of international relations at the University of Florida department of
political science. Toward Trans-gendering International Relations? in International Political Sociology
vol. 6 iss. 4, 6 December 2012, accessed 27 September 2015, cVs)

Critics of IR theory have also expressed concern with the discipline's flat or static
concept of identity. Much IR theorizing often conveys a sense that, among states,
self remains self and other remains other. Often, this is discussed in terms of primordial
culture (Huntington 1996) or intransigent conflicts (Jackson 2007). Seeing trans-genders, however,
brings this apparently simple relationship between self and other into question and
interrogates the naturalness of stagnant identification. Crossing in trans-theorizing is
generally used to refer to the process of changing one's appearance and gender representations. Deidre McCloskey
(2000) describes crossing as changing tribesshe was once an accepted member of the tribe men and
behaved in the manner expected of members of that tribe. She then joined the tribe women and behaved in the
manner expected of members of that tribe. In other places, McCloskey describes crossing in cultural terms
(crossing cultures from male to female is big; it highlights some of the differences between men and women, and
some of the similarities too (2000:xii)) and in psychological terms (as change, migration, growing up, selfdiscovery (2000:xiii)). Roen (2002) describes the act of crossing as a political one, moving from one defined and
exclusive group to another.

As one crosses, in trans-theorizing, many trans-people express

concern about passing.10 A trans-person is said to have passed when the people around them in a
given social or professional situation believe that they are of the biological sex which they see themselves
as/understand themselves to be/have changed their physical appearance to resemble.11

A trans-person

may pass to some and not to others, likewise someone may be able to pass in a distant or sterile
work environment, but not in an intimate setting.12 The idea of changing defined groups is not
new in IR; people change religions and state citizenships frequently, even as we
think that identities fundamentally matter in defining international conflicts. People
cross sides of wars and conflicts (such as those people seeking peace in Israel/Palestine despite their
governments behaviors, or, more explicitly, Prussia's changing sides in the Napoleonic Wars). Though IR speaks of
it less, people also cross ethnic groups and castes (Dirks 2001). For example, some of the leading Hutu
perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide had been born to Tutsi parents, but become accepted into the tribe of
Hutus, even when acceptance or rejection was a question of life or death (for example, Landesman 2002). At the

IR often cannot account for the process, logic, or consequences of these

crossings between seemingly un-crossable divides. While we assume that ethnic
group or national group membership is an ontological fact that one simply is, rather
than something flexible, the world out there does not reflect such a simple
construction. Understanding that people cross even the deepest and most clearly
understood boundaries in social and political life (and often pass as crossers) makes it
important to rethink what those boundaries mean, both to crossers and more
generally. While boundaries, borders, and expected social mores are clearly salient,
and often key to the world's most brutal conflicts, they are also porous , and
same time,

understanding the lives and actions of those who cross them might help us understand those pores. A simple
example is women crossing the gender divide in conflicts. Stories of women passing as men are common

Historic
and mythic figures (such as Joan of Arc) posed as men to get around prohibitions against
women fighters and women leaders, along with many other women who remain
nameless and faceless in history, including in the United States Civil War (Blanton and Cook 2002), the
throughout history for those women interested in being a part of military forces or state leadership.

Napoleonic Wars (Wilson 2007), the Crusades (Vining and Hacker 2001), the Trojan War (Spear 1993), and other
conflicts. Very often this passing is historically described as heroic, but was met with substantial disapproval at

Thinking about crossing might help us understand how states and other
actors in the global political arena experience ontological change from one thing to
another, and what can be gained and lost in the process. Thinking about passing
while crossing or once crossed might help us understand how to identify and deal
with the unseen in global politics. For example, spies rely on crossing national and/or ethnic groups
the time.

and then passing as a member of the group that they are charged with getting to know. Many military maneuvers
are built on crossing into enemy social and political life and passing either as local or as part of the surrounding

there is utility in considering what

passing means for how we understand global politics. In particular, useful questions
to ask include what trans-people passing means for the meaning of sex and
gender, what the ability to pass means for the stability of the categories we take
for granted in our analysis of global politics, and if (and if so where) more subtle
passing takes place in the relationships between states, nations, and ethnic
groups.
landscape. These and other instances of passing suggest that

Their theorization of security and stability produces an

ontology of cisgender privilege as birthright of biological
gender, erasing trans scholarship and embodiment as a routine
theoretical maneuver.
Shepherd and Sjoberg 12
Laura J. Shepherd Laura J. Shepherd is an Associate Professor of International
Relations at the School of Social Sciences and International Studies, Faculty of Arts
and Social Sciences, at the University of New South Wales,..and Laura Sjoberg
University of Florida Department of Political Science JD Boston College, PhD in IR
USC trans- bodies in/of war(s): cisprivilege and contemporary security strategy
Feminist Review June 2012 google scholar
Feminist scholars have asked what assumptions about gender (and other markers of
identity, including but not limited to race, class, nationality and sexuality) are
necessary to make particular statements, policies and actions meaningful in
security discourses (see, inter alia, classic interventions by Tickner, 1992; Peterson,
1992a,b; Zalewski, 1995; and more recent overviews provided by Blanchard, 2003;
Sjoberg and Martin, 2010; Shepherd, 2010b). Looking at global politics, feminists
see that gender is necessary, conceptually, for understanding international
security, it is important in analysing causes and predicting outcomes, and it is
essential to thinking about solutions and promoting positive change in the security
realm (Sjoberg, 2009: 200). They have therefore argued that the performance of
gender is immanent in the performance of security and vice versa, and looking at
security without gender or gender without security necessarily renders both
concepts partial and analytically inadequate (Shepherd, 2008: 172).However, even
these nuanced accounts of the immanence of gender in global politics as a noun, a
verb and an organisational logic do not explicitly interrogate transgender and
genderqueer logics of security. In fact, frequently they focus on a
dichotomous or binary understanding of sex/gender to read gendered logics of
security. This is not to deride or dismiss the important and varied contributions of

these scholars, but rather to suggest a way in which we might contribute in this
article to the literature on which we draw, and in relation to which we wish to situate
ourselves. Feminist scholars of security have emphasised the analytical salience of
gender and, in doing so, raised questions about the possibility of security/ies of the
self, particularly in reference both to (corpo)realities of gendered violence (see, for
example, Bracewell, 2000; Hansen, 2001; Alison, 2007) and to the ontological
security of gender identity itself (see, for example, Browne, 2004; Shepherd, 2008;
MacKenzie, 2010). Opening to critical scrutiny, however, the practices through
which gender uncertainty is erased and gender certainty inscribed the practices
through which the ontological presumption of gender difference is maintained and
gender fluidity denied. Fallows scholars to develop different understandings of the
ways in which in/security is not only written on the body but is performative of
corporeality.

Nationalism
Nationalism as an indicator of state action is masculine
hierarchy of male and female identities drives the concept
V.S. Peterson is a Professor of International Relations in the School of
Government and Public Policy at the University of AZ, Sexing Political
Identities/Nationalism as Heterosexism. International Feminist Journal of Politics 1
(1): 3465. 1999.
the analysis of nationalism is notoriously inadequate . Jill Vickers
observes that this diffculty of understanding nationalism as a form of self-identification
and of group organization re ects the profound difculty that male-stream thought,
in general, has had in understanding the public manifestations of the process of
identity construction (Vickers 1990: 480). For Vickers, the publicprivate dichotomy codifes a
false separation between the public sphere of reason and power and the private
sphere of emotion and social reproduction , where identity construction which enables group
reproduction presumably takes place. Group reproduction both biological and social is
fundamental to nationalist practice, process, and politics. While virtually all feminist treatIn spite of its current potency,

ments of nationalism recognize this fact, they typically take for granted that group reproduction is heterosexist. I
refer here to the assumption institutionalized in state-based orders through legal and ideological codifcations and

heterosexuality is the only

normal mode of sexual identity, sexual practice, and social relations. Heterosexism
presupposes a binary coding of polarized and hierarchical male/masculine and
female/feminine identities (ostensibly based on a dichotomy of bio-physical features) and denies all
but heterosexual coupling as the basis of sexual intimacy, family life, and group
reproduction. And heterosexism is key to nationalism because todays state-centric
nationalisms (the focus in this article) engage not only in sexist practices that are now well
documented by feminists, but also take for granted heterosexist sex/gender identities and
forms of group reproduction that underpin sexism but which are not typically
interrogated even in feminist critiques.8 Because a critique of heterosexism is central to this article,
naturalized by reference to the binary of malefemale sex difference that

and relatively undeveloped in treatments of nationalism, I briey summarize the underlying argumentation before
addressing gendered nationalism more directly.

State
Visibility in politics can serve as a hindrance to true struggles
identity politics outside of legal structures are key to solve
Sapinoso 2009
(Joyleen Valero (JV), PhD in Philosophy, University of Maryland, FROM
QUARE TO KWEER:TOWARDS A QUEER ASIAN AMERICAN CRITIQUE
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/9567/Sapinoso_umd_0
117E_10599.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y - KSA)
Why visibility as a privileged telos? Its become a critical commonplace (though no
less true) that visibility is a necessary first step in the founding of communities
based on shared identity. (Stokes 160) Not only is being visible an effective strategy
for building community based on shared identities, as this quotation from Mason
Stokes book The Color of Sex points out, but maintaining visibility of multiple
identities is also important to developing an identity politics that, although rooted in
specific experiences of individuals lives, avoids the pitfalls of essentialism and
presumed homogeneity. Given the historical exclusions of queer Asian Pacific
Americans in the U.S.legally through immigration exclusion acts, culturally
through their lack of representation in the media, and socially through the stigma of
always being alien and outsider visibility and the insistence of being recognized
as subjects of the nation-state are significant to my project of exploring the
dynamics of nationality and national belonging at play within a U.S. context of queer
identifications, and of making kweer interventions into LGBT Studies and queer
theory. In his essay The Challenge of Lesbian and Gay Studies Jeffery Weeks
points out four commonalities of lesbian and gay studies. The first of these four
commonalities is that lesbian and gay studies must be about the recognition of the
need to learn to live with differences and to find ways of resolving differences in
dialogue with one another in an open and democratic fashion (4). A kweer
approach calls exactly for a greater attention to differences through the recognition
and visibility of queer Asian American subjects and 206 subjectivities, as well as
other queers of color. Yet, as Stokes quotation makes clear, visibility is but a first
step. Visibility has certainly proven not to be a panacea, especially in the absence of
a consciously-organized group political movement. Indeed, in the chapter Politics
and Power of her book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian
Liberation, Urvashi Vaid discusses the danger of visibility. She writes, gay and
lesbian visibility in mainstream politics fools us. We think we are stronger and more
powerful than we actually are (211). Emerging in part from Vaids experiences
formerly serving as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Forces Policy Institute
Director118 as well as from her other experiences fighting for LGBT civil rights, Vaid
warns us about relying solely on mainstream visibility as indication of political
success. In addition, there is also the danger of becoming too transfixed at the

sight/site of oneself. For example, Stokes writes, although this history of whiteness
studies shows it to have a rich and varied past, its also clear that white scholarly
attention to whiteness too often reproduces what could be called the founding
tenets of white critical practice: narcissism and an extreme narrowness of vision
(182). I would argue, however, that identity politics when carried out in tandem with
intersectional analyses do not produce a narrow vision that is restrictive like the
white scholarly attention to whiteness that Stokes critiques, but rather a vision that
is at 118 After publishing Virtual Equality Vaid also served as the Executive Director
at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. 207 once more extensive and also more
specified that allows for more careful and precise understandings of differences.119
It is in this vein of working towards a more nuanced understanding of the
intersections of race, sexuality, and immigration that I conduct a kweering of
immigration discourses. For many in the LGBTQ community, the stakes to stay in
the closet about their immigration status are high. Bau writes: Some [LGBTQ
people] have entered into heterosexual marriages in order to remain in the United
States, risking detection, criminal prosecution, and deportation for marriage fraud.
Others remain undocumented or with false documentation, severely restricting their
ability to obtain work, receive 119 In her book Selling Out, Alexandra Chasin warns
against the dangers of identity-based practices. She writes, identity-based
movement and market activitywhile indispensable and inevitable on both
individual and group levelsultimately promote sameness, leaving difference
vulnerable to appropriation and leaving it in place as grounds for inequality (244).
While there is certainly the danger of promoting sameness when identity politics is
narrowly carried out, what I argue here is that the promotion of sameness is not the
inevitable conclusion of identity politics, in particular when intersectionality remains
in the foreground. Chasins own work, however, as evidenced by her analogy
between gay and ethnic identity (110) demonstrates her lack of attention to the
intersectionality of sexuality and ethnicity. Given this oversight in her own work, it is
no wonder that she does not imagine identity politics as ultimately desirable.
Moreover, Chasin is further unwisely biased against identity politics in so far as she
thinks that the popularity of identity politics is based in the wish that the kind of
psychic and cultural safety often felt in a community of origin would equate to
political solidarity (235). Such an appeal to safety and easy solidarity fails to
acknowledge the rich body of third-world and women of color feminist texts that
have argued, and continue to argue against understandings of home and
community that fail to acknowledge the ways in which these are contested
concepts fraught with conflict. See for example Crenshaws Mapping the Margins,
Anzalda and Keatings This Bridge We Call Home, Reagons Coalition Politics, and
Hull et al.s All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, but Some of Us Are
Brave. In contrast, writing in response to what she labels as the Post-Identity
Politics Paradigm advocated by Riki Wilchins, gender activist and executive director
of GenderPAC (Gender Public Advocacy Coalition), Pauline Park discusses the danger
of such a paradigm. In arguing for identitybased politics Park presents two positions
that speak to often cited critiques of identity politics. First, she argues that sexual
orientation is not only an important component of legal discoursewithout which
anti-gay discrimination cannot be addressedit is also a legitimate organizing
principle (752). In raising the necessity of identity in legal discourse, Park

demonstrates the necessity of subjection before the law. This point is also raised by
Chuh in Imagine Otherwise (10). Second, Park argues that identity-politics and any
exclusion it may entail are preferable to the post-identity politics standpoint that
any exclusion is bad, and that all exclusions are equivalent to one another (752),
which does not take into account power differentials and the way in which the
exclusion of dominant groups from identity-based movements is not racist, but a
response to racism. For more on racism, see Wallersteins Ideological Tensions of
Capitalism in Race, Nation, Class. 208 government benefits, or travel freely in and
out of the United States. When other family membersspouses, children, parents,
and siblingsare either dependent on the queer immigrant for their own
immigration status or are involved in the interrelationships that hide the
undocumented status of the queer immigrant, the stakes become even higher. (60)
Although acknowledging the risk and fear for those queer immigrants without legal
status, or whose legal status is tenuous at best, for those who are now U.S. citizens
or have legal permanent resident status Bau says they can afford to speak out
about immigrant rights. He does little to acknowledge the fears or risks they face,
instead emphasizing only their personal responsibility to take action.

Attempting to engage in politics is always a move towards

assimilation into straight culture means that we should reject
the law as an entity that can be redeemable from the dominant
discourse that shapes institutions
Hansel 11
(April, Nora, Wesleyan University Degree for Bachelor of Arts with
Departmental Honors in American Studies and Feminist, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies,Rethinking Relations: Queer Intimacies and Practices
of Care http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1621&context=etd_hon_theses - KSA)
These forms of queered relationships are not, it should be clear, limited to gay and
lesbian relationships. Heterosexual relationships can be queer just as gay and
lesbian relationships can be heteronormative. The power and hegemony of The
Family can be seen in recent campaigns for the legalization of same-sex marriage.
While marriage has historically been a patriarchal institution of heterosexual
privilege, the current mainstream gay rights movementvery much a neoliberal
projectis seeking equality through inclusion in marriage and assimilation to the
heteronormative nuclear family form and domestic relationship model. As Lisa
Duggan argues, such a politics can be understood as homonormative because it
does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but
upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay
constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and
consumption (2002: 179). A politics that strives for same-sex marriage is a politics
that legitimates and reproduces the normativity and hegemony of The Family. It is
also a reproduction of the normative, monogamous, long-term relationship model,
enforcing its regulatory constructions of commitment and intimacy as privileged and

natural. Furthermore, such political work means that family forms that do not
revolve around marriage or the normative relationship will be stigmatized as well as
blamed for their own desubjugation for choosing not to marry. As Michael Warner
argues, marriage, in short, would make for good gaysthe kind who would not
challenge the norms of straight culture, who would not flaunt their sexuality, and
who would not insist on living differently from ordinary folk, but rather, conform to
the normative nuclear family form through domestic monogamy, private property,
64 appropriate consumption, and proper articulations of intimacy (1999: 131).
Marriage as an institution is the central point around which the ideology of The
Family revolves and is reproduced. Same-sex marriage, like all marriage, is also the
consolidation of heteronormative organizations of privatized intimacy, commitment,
and affect. In working towards inclusion in such an institution, gays and lesbians are
not seeking to transform it, but rather, are making an appeal to normativityare
working to be considered proper consumer citizen subjects. In this way, the
normativity of The Familythe construction of long-term monogamy, home
ownership, and consumerism as the only acceptable or possible lifeis reinforced
through the main stream gay and lesbian fight for marriage equality.

IR is queer the state is a constantly changing and fluid entity.

Current formulations of IR result in traumatic deadlock
Nayak, Meghana. Professor in the Political Science department at Pace University. "Thinking About Queer
International Relations Allies."International Studies Review 16.4 (2014): 615-622.
While it is beyond the scope of this article to examine and engage with this house metaphor , I find it useful in the
classroom, con ersations with my peers, and my scholarship to consider that some subfields of IR can unsettle the
entire household. The house itself is a construction, an edifice that seems sturdy, unquestionable, hetero- and cisnormative, with clear boundaries (different floors and inside/outside) but is actually on shaky ground.

the shakiness when studying global politics.

We see

What we learn from the other pieces in this forum

the state
itself is queer. By this I mean that the state has no settled, natural gendered and
sexualized identity (straight, cis-gender, masculine) precisely because the state
must constantly shift, anticipate, and revise how its gender and sexuality appears.
Just as, per Judith Butler, sex, sexuality, and gender are in a traumatic deadlock [such
that] every performative formation is nothing but an endeavor to patch up this
trauma (Zizek 1993:265; quoted in Weber 199 8a:93), so is foreign-policymaking an attempt to
deal with the trauma of not being able to decide and settle the
representation/recognition/identity of states (Weber 1998a:93). So, what we see is states acting in
and Queer IR studies is that states attempt to act queer-friendly but do so without recognizing that

simultaneously homophobic and homopositive/homoprotectionist ways, because protection of and

extension of rights to LGBTQ communities is meant to be an indicator of being civilized, where countries can

When countries pinkwash or promote homonationalism, they act as straight allies, unable to
distinguish themselves from straight persecutors. With this understanding of IR
(understood as political practices and deci- sions), as unsteady, frantically trying to
normalize distinctions and categories between us and them, good and bad,
strong and weak, let us return to the question of being an ally to a discipline. IR,
not just in terms of what political actors do, but also as a discipline, is in a
move toward neoliberal modernity if they treat queers right (Lind, this forum).

traumatic deadlock.

When Weber (2014a,b, this forum) asks what Queer IR means for the discipline, I
am curious not only about the possibilities of erasure and gentrification of Queer IR but about what Queer IR reveals
about the IR disciplines incoherence, insta bil- ity, inability to be straight. If queer, as Sjoberg notes in this forum,
can complicate the idea of stable borders in the context of states and territories, then so can queer complicate the
idea of borders around and within disciplines.

Queer Asian Americans are already denied citizenship means

they have no place for the government to recognize them and
that policies can never reach what is construed as non-citizens
Sapinoso 2009
(Joyleen Valero (JV), PhD in Philosophy, University of Maryland, FROM
QUARE TO KWEER:TOWARDS A QUEER ASIAN AMERICAN CRITIQUE
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/9567/Sapinoso_umd_0
117E_10599.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y - KSA)
Acknowledging Limits of Legal U.S. Citizenship While legal U.S. citizenship needs to
be more firmly established within conceptualizations of queer citizenship, relying on
a binary of legal versus non-legal structures of oppression that they purport to
erase (108). Manalansan makes clear his position that gaining same-sex marriage
rights, gay adoption rights, etc. simply helps to push queer people to assimilate to
and maintain the heteronormative mainstream, fashioning a parallel
homonormativity. The pressure for queer people, immigrants, and queer immigrants
of color to assimilate is a legitimate threat that I do think needs to be highlighted
and addressed. I agree with Manalansans argument that we must challenge the
very foundations upon which structures of oppression have been built. However,
while Manalansans argument seems to portray seeking same-sex marriage rights
and gay adoption rights as necessarily assimilationist, viewing them as part of the
oppressive structures he wants to challenge, my viewpoint differs in that I argue
that the safe and secure access to legal rights of citizenship (including, but not
limited to marriage and adoption rights) is a key component of nationality and
national belonging. Although certainly not the only component, or even in all
circumstances the most important component, I hesitate to dismiss the importance
of seeking legal rights in challenging structures of oppression. Moreover, because
queer people are pushed to assimilate in ways beyond the realms of marriage and
adoption, Manalansans critique of fighting for legal rights only partially addresses
the pressures to assimilate that queer people face. 61 My intention here is not to
minimize the effects of second-class citizenship status. Indeed, the subordination
and marginalization of second-class citizens is real, and their struggles legitimate.
Rather, my aim is to draw attention to the fact that second-class citizens do have
legal citizenship which does afford them rights and recognition, albeit limited, that
people without legal citizenship do not have. 94 status is problematic. Too narrow a
focus on legal status alone can not account for the strategic deployment of
citizenship affected by dimensions of difference such as race, ethnicity, class, sex,
gender, and sexuality. The shortcomings of such a binary are revealed particularly
when the experiences of Asian/Pacific Islander (API) U.S. immigrants and legal
citizens are taken into account. Employing an intersectional approach helps us to

understand the distinct effects of systems of knowledges, and structures of power

and meaning (including, but not limited to public policies, laws, and cultural
productions) on different populations. Centering API U.S. immigrants and legal
citizens demonstrates how their lived material realities are connected variously to
being denied, obtaining, and losing legal status as immigrants and citizens. More
specifically, I argue that despite their status as legal U.S. citizens, many Asian
Americans are not recognized as such, nor extended the protections of such legal
status, and so experience their citizenship as precarious and instable..

Their liberal IR, no matter how nice it is, is necessarily

constructed around American exceptionalism they are not
exempt from the ontological commitment of their place and
how it affects this space
Agnew 15 (John, Distinguished Professor of Geography at UCLA and editor-inchief of the journal, "Territory, Politics, Governance." The Geopolitics of Knowledge
About World Politics: A Case Study in U.S. Hegemony. Geographies of Knowledge
and Power (ebook). Volume 7 of the series Knowledge and Space pp 235-246
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-9960-7_11#)
the marketplace of ideas is never a level playing field. There is a
geopolitics to knowledge production and circulation. Which knowledge becomes
"normalized" or dominant and which knowledge is marginalized has something to
do with who is doing the proposing and where they are located (Agnew, 2005). In the
context of world politics, all knowledge, including that claiming the mantle of
science, is socially conditioned by the rituals, routines, and recruitment practices of
powerful educational and research institutions. On a global scale perhaps the
outstanding feature of past centuries has been the way most places have been
incorporated into flows of knowledge dominated by Europeans and extensions of
Europe overseas, such as the United States. This phenomenon is the story, in Wolf's (1982)
The first premise is that

evocative phrase, of "Europe and the people without history." The second premise is that, as Geertz (1996, p. 262)
said, "No one lives in the world in general." Actual places, both as experienced and as imagined, serve to anchor
conceptions of how the world is structured politically, who is in charge, where, and with what effects, as well as

Americans and U.S. policymakers bring to their actions in the world a whole set of presuppositions about the
world that emanate from their experiences as "Americans," particularly narratives
about U.S. history and the U.S. "mission" in the world, which are often occluded by
academic debates about "theories" that fail to take into account such crucial
background geographical conditioning. As Anderson (2003, p. 90) has noted, much of the
"liberal tradition" that has shaped social science in the United States has had "a
geographical, territorial association." She quotes Prewitt (2002) in support of this idea: The project
of American social science has been America . This project, to be sure, has been in some tension
what matters to us in any given place in question. Thus, for example,

with a different projectto build a science of politics or economics or psychology. But I believe that a close reading

the "American project" has time and again taken

precedence over the "science project" and that our claims to universal truths are,
empirically, very much about the experience of this society in this historical period .
(p. 2) Of course, the very idea of requiring a "scientific" theory of politics may itself be
seen as arising out of a specifically American desire to account for the United States
and its place in the world in such terms. Third, universalizing creeds must recruit adherents beyond
of disciplinary history would demonstrate that

their places of origin in order to become hegemonic. Gramsci 's (1992) concept of "hegemony" is helpful in trying to
understand how elites (and populations) accept and even laud ideas and practices about world politics and their

If part of American
hegemony in the contemporary world, for example, is about "enrolling" others into
American practices of consumption and a market mentality (and, crucially,
supplying intellectual justifications for them, such as those provided by various
management gurus and journalists), it also adapts as it enrolls by adjusting to local
norms and practices (Agnew, 2005). This facility is part of its "genius." During the Cold War, the Soviet
place in it that they import from more powerful countries and organizations.

alternative always risked political fission among adherents because it involved adopting a checklist of politicaleconomic measures rather than a marketing package that could be customized to local circumstances as long as it
met certain minimal criteria of conformity to governing norms. Today, the conflict between militant Islam and the
United States government is largely about resisting the siren call of an American hegemony associated with
globalization that is increasingly detached from direct U.S. sponsorship and that has many advocates and passive

knowledge about world politics (or anything

else) from one place is not necessarily incommensurable or unintelligible relative to
knowledge produced elsewhere. Cross-cultural communication goes on all the time without everything
supporters within the Muslim world itself. Fourth,

being lost in translation. Cultures in the modern world never exist in isolation and are themselves assemblages of
people with often cross-cutting identities and commitments (Lukes, 2000). From this viewpoint, culture is "an idiom
or vehicle of inter-subjective life, but not its foundation or final cause" (Jackson, 2002, p. 125). Be that as it may,

knowledge creation and dissemination are never innocent of at least weak

ontological commitments, be they related to nation, class, gender, or something else. But the history
of knowledge circulation suggests that rarely are ideas simply restricted within rigid
cultural boundaries. Rather, with powerful sponsors, international and transnational networks arise to carry
and embed ideas from place to place (e.g., Sapiro, 2009). Taken together, these premises make the case
for referring to the geopolitics of knowledge: The question of where brings together
under the rubric of spatial difference a wide range of potential ontological effects . At
the same time, however, massive sociopolitical changes in the world are shaping how we (whomever and wherever
we are) engage in how knowledge is ordered and circulated. Cross-global linkages are arguably more important
today than at any time in human history, not so much in terms of the conventional story of producing places that
are ever more alike, but more especially in terms of creating opportunities for interaction between local and longdistance effects on the constitution of knowledge. As a result, anomalies in established dominant theories can be

The subsequent limits to the conventional theoretical

terms in which social science theories have been organized states versus markets, West
versus rest, religion versus secularism, past versus present, the telos of history versus perpetual flux pose
serious challenges to the disciplinary codes that have long dominated thinking
about world politics. Perhaps the most serious issue concerns the continuing relevance of the idiographic
exposed as the world unleashes surprises.

nomothetic (particularsuniversals) opposition that has afflicted Western social science since the Methodenstreit of

Knowledge is always made somewhere by particular persons

reflecting their place's historical experience. "Universals" often arise by projecting
these experiences onto the world at large (Seth, 2000). What is needed are ways of
understanding how this process occurs and drawing attention to the need to
negotiate across perspectives so that world politics in itself can be less the outcome
of hegemonic impositions and more the result of the recognition and understanding
of differences, both cultural and intellectual (Agnew, 2009).
the late nineteenth century.

Fem IR
Fem IR is not enough Queer IR Key to challenge
heteronormativity within climate studies and break down rigid
social binaries
Alaimo 09 (Stacy Alaimo is a Professor of English, Distinguished Teaching
Professor, and Director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Minor at the
University of Texas at Arlington, Insurgent Vulnerability and the Carbon Footprint of
Gender, KVINDER, KN & FORSKNING NR. 3-4 2009, Date Accessed: 7/12/16,
https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/KKF/article/view/44306/84085, sabz)
some feminist organizations that castigate the gender-blind policies of
governing bodies ignore sexual orientation. The Issues Paper of the 52nd session of the
Ironically,

Commission on the Status of Women on Gender Perspectives and Climate Change, charges that there are
important gender perspectives in all aspects of climate change but fails to mention matters of sexual orientation
(52nd Session 2008). The Global Gender and Climate Alliance, lays out many more categories of concern,
acknowledging that the impacts of global climate change will be differentially distributed among different
regions, generations, age, classes, income groups, occupations, and between women and men. Poor women and

surely
people who are marginalized, denigrated, ostracized or criminalized for their sexual
orientation or gender identity may be more vulnerable during a national disaster;
they may even be blamed or punished for causing the disaster. (In the U.S. for example,
men, especially in developing countries will be disproportionately affected (Global Gender 2009). But

gays have been blamed for all sorts of disasters, with the charge that homosexuality incites the wrath of God.)

the very emphasis on gender can erase the existence of GLBT peoples
by sedimenting heteronormative gender roles as universal . For example, the United
Unfortunately,

Nations document, Mainstreaming Gender into the Climate Change Regime begins: The UN is formally committed
to gender mainstreaming within all United Nations policies and programmes. In all societies, in all parts of the
world, gender equality is not yet realized. Men and women have different roles, responsibilities, and decision-

this
sort of framing casts men and women into clear-cut, universal categories, the
objective-sounding statement declaring that they have different roles,
responsibilities, and decision-making powers freezes gender polarities in a way
that erases social struggle and contestation as well as denying any space at
all for those who do not, in fact, fit within these rigid and static categories. 6 Similarly,
making powers (United Nations 2004). While it is crucial to address gender-blind science and policymaking

the Canadian document, Gender Equality and Climate Change, asserts universalized gender differences,
untempered by ethnicity, class, culture or sexual orientation: Women and men experience different vulnerabilities
and cope with natural disasters differently; therefore, an increase in the magnitude and frequency of natural
disasters will have different implications for men and women (Canadian International 2009). Feminist
organizations, which aim for gender mainstreaming within climate science and policy, may inadvertently be
mainstreaming gendered heteronormativity and homophobia by erasing queer people from consideration.

Space
Colonization of space maintains power relations and
exploitative practices- they just replicate their harms in
another location. Only queering space solves.
Oman-Reagan 15 [Michael Oman-Reagan, anthropologist of space, science, & social
movements. His doctoral research in the Department of Anthropology at Memorial University of
Newfoundland examines space science, interstellar space, SETI, astrobiology, plants in space, and
speculative fiction, Queering Outer Space https://medium.com/space-anthropology/queering-outerspace-f6f5b5cecda0#.p2lahzwjf, ED]
Queering Outer Space I could write academically about this topic (and I am elsewhere), but right now, I want to riff
on some ideas that have been bubbling under the surface for a while, in conversations on Ive had on twitter, and
elsewhere. And write from my feelings as I listen to space discourse, and as I watch the direction of space
programs. And I want to do it outside the rules of academic writing, which can be so stifling, and so unqueer. This is
incomplete, full of mistakes, waiting for you to help me out, add your voice, point out where I messed up. Ill keep

Its time to queer outer space. Since the Space Shuttle program was
retired in 2011, the U.S. space agency NASA has turned over much of the work on space
transportation to private corporations and the commercial crew program . As venture
capitalist space entrepreneurs and aerospace contractors compete to profit from space exploration, were
running up against increasingly conflicting visions for human futures in outer space.
Narratives of military tactical dominance alongside NewSpace ventures like
asteroid mining projects call for the defense, privatization, and commodification of
space and other worlds, framing space as a resource-rich frontier to be settled
in what amounts to a new era of colonization (Anker 2005; Redfield 2000; Valentine 2012).
However, from at least the 1970s, some space scientists have challenged this trajectory of
resource extraction, neo-colonialism, and reproduction of earthly political economies
with alternative visions of the future (McCray 2012). Todays visionary space
scientists imagine space exploration as a source of transformative
solutions to earthly problems such as climate change , economic inequality,
conflict, and food insecurity (Grinspoon 2003; Hadfield 2013; Sagan 1994; Shostak 2013; Tyson 2012;
editing as you do.

Vakoch 2013). Elsewhere Im doing research on all of this as a PhD student in anthropology, but here I want to

we must go even further than academically interrogating the military and

corporate narratives of space exploration and colonization. We must water,
fertilize,and tend the seeds of alternative visions of possible futures in space, not
only seeking solutions to earthly problems which are trendy at the moment, but
actively queering outer space and challenging the future to be even more queer.
Im queering the word queer hereI want to use it to call for more people of color, more
indigenous voices, more women, more LGBTQetc., more alternative voices to the
dominant narratives of space programs and space exploration. I want to use queer
to stand in for a kind of intersectionality that I can speak from without appropriating
or speaking on behalf of others, as a queer person. So by saying queer, Im not trying to
subsume other identities and struggles into the queer ones, but calling out to them
and expressing solidarity and respect for difference in joint struggle, Im inviting you
all. I also dont want to write intersectionalize outer space but its basically what I mean. So, when I use it here
argue that

queer is not marriage equality and the HRC and heteronormativity mapped onto cis, white, gay, male characters
ready for a television show. Its also not me with my own limited corner of queer, minority, and disability
experience. Queer is deeply and fully queer. As Charlie, an awesome person I follow on twitter calls it: queer as
heck.

So in this way queer is also, if youll permit it, a call-out to mad pride, Black

power, sex workers, disability pride, Native pride, polyamory, abolitionist veganism,
the elderly, imprisoned people, indigenous revolutionaries, impoverished people,
anarchism, linguistic minorities, people living under occupation, and much more. Its
all those ways that we are given no choice but to move in the between spaces of social, economic, and
environmental life because the highways and sidewalks are full of other people whose identity, behavior, politics,
and sensitivities arent questioned all the time, and they wont budge. I n

a sense, its the old definition

of queer as oddbecause when they tell you that you dont belong, you dont fit it,
youre unusual, then youre queer. Its that feeling that youre walking behind those five people walking
side-by-side who wont let you pass because youre not one of them. Queer is radical, marginal, partial, torn,
assembled, defiant, emergent selvesqueer is also non-humanfrom stones and mountains to plants and
invasive species. I know, youre thinking: then what isnt queer? But, if youre asking thatthe answer might be
you.

Expansion into space represents the eradication of queersEVERY PERSON living in space is cisgendered, hetereosexual
by design- focus on reproduction in space means queer lives
are uniquely devalued and destroyed. Turns the aff- loss of
scientific creativity through queer thought destroys tech.
Oman-Reagan 15 [Michael Oman-Reagan, anthropologist of space, science, &
social movements. His doctoral research in the Department of Anthropology at
Memorial University of Newfoundland examines space science, interstellar space,
SETI, astrobiology, plants in space, and speculative fiction, Queering Outer Space
https://medium.com/space-anthropology/queering-outer-spacef6f5b5cecda0#.p2lahzwjf, ED]
people living in outer space from five
are all cis-gendered, heterosexual men from the
dominant ethnic/racial group of their nation (please astronauts, correct me if Im wrong here).
When the NASA space station motto declares Off the Earth, For the Earth we need
to ask: which Earth? whose Earth? Beyond representation and tokenism which
assumes people of color have a common racialized experience, we need to look to
sciences where women, people of color, queer people, and others are fighting
against great odds to participate in disciplines, be treated as colleagues, and have
any visibility when we do. Astronaut Sally Ride was queer, a fact that wasnt
publicly revealed until after her death. Of 330 American astronauts, that means one has been
I. Queer Lives in Orbit When I began writing this, there were nine
countries, as best as I can determine they

identified as queer, and only after death. Part of this is certainly related to the fact that most astronauts came to

This begs
further and obvious questions about what we are bringing to space, what
kind of culture? What ideas, traditions, and practices? Are they exclusively
military? And what does that mean for our futures in space? If expressions of
personal identity are seen as running counter to scientific neutrality , and
are marginalized within science because of that we have only to look to the history
of science to see how un-neutral this normative notion of neutrality is . And how
counterproductive this is for science and creativity (e.g., Kuhn on paradigms and scientific revolutions),
and for honoring, respecting, and learning from indigenous knowledge and wisdom
about the Earth and about space. Why shouldnt expression, affect, sensitivity, and identity be a part
the program through the military, which until recently didnt allow queer identity to exist openly.

of our movement into space? Arent we, in some sense, coming out as a species onto a galactic or even universescale stage? And arent we a diverse species, a colorful, even queer species with all of our material, emotional,
architectural, technological accoutrement, and other fascinations? Perhaps weve been out for a while as a species,
since our television and radio transmissions started leaving Earth and heading out into interstellar space. Although

So, when
we talk about sending messages to alien civilizations, we may also want to talk
about what were already saying. Carl Sagan talked about, quite rightly, how similar we all are when
those transmissions started with Hitler and are currently mostly about Donald Trump and Kim Davis.

seen from space. And in my field of anthropology there are many debates about what it means to look at universals
vs. particulars. Is focusing on difference a problem for justice and universal rights? We need to think about

But sometimes the way we think about and

promote similarity serves to erase differencesserves to whitewash, straightwash,
genderwash, abilitywash people in an attempt to say that universal humanity is
somehow represented by nine able-bodied, cis men floating in the International
Space Station. But it isnt. In Pale Blue Dot (1994), Carl Sagan wrote about the profound photograph of
Earth taken from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager I spacecraft: Look again at that dot. Thats
here. Thats home. Thats us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know,
everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives .
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies,
and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every
creator and destroyer of civilization , ever king and peasant, every young couple in love, every moth
similarities, many will argue, not difference.

and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every
superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived thereon a mote of

But its not just everyone you know and everyone youve
heard ofits everyone you dont know, everyone youve never heard ofall the
marginalized, muffled, silenced, timid, and erased voices. All the many kinds of
queer voices of Earth are also there, suspended in that sunbeam. This is why we
have to stake a claim in the territory of space programs now. We need to add our
voices, perspectives, plans, our cares. There isnt time to wait. We cant sit back and
say: Space isnt urgently important, we should be looking at problems here on Earth .
dust suspended in a sunbeam.

First of all, much of space science is looking at and working on problems here on Earth (from conflict, migration, and
drought to climate change, deforestation, and more). Secondly, SpaceX, Boeing, and others are preparing new craft
and taking humans into space nowand human technology is leaving the solar system. Perhaps its not happening
on the timeline you would prefer, but its already happening and has been for decades, and theyre pretty much
doing it without us because for the most part weve decided that it isnt an area we want to engage in.

Space initiatives condemn queers to death- we are viewed as

disposable by reproductive-oriented missions. Explicit focus on
queering space is key to ensure hetero and cissecurities are
not replicated, rendering their impacts inevitable.
Oman-Reagan 15 [Michael Oman-Reagan, anthropologist of space, science, &
social movements. His doctoral research in the Department of Anthropology at
Memorial University of Newfoundland examines space science, interstellar space,
SETI, astrobiology, plants in space, and speculative fiction, Queering Outer Space
https://medium.com/space-anthropology/queering-outer-spacef6f5b5cecda0#.p2lahzwjf, ED]
III. Extraterrestrial Allies The Interstellar Message Composition program at the SETI
Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) advocates sending messages

across the stars because the universe beckons (Shostak 2015). I happen to agree
theres a lot out there and if there wasnt life elsewhere, life that we might be
able to talk to, it would certainly be an awful waste of space (as Carl Sagan
wrote). And yet on the flip side when NASA releases vintage-style travel posters for
newly discovered exoplanets featuring apparently white, binary-gendered, human
couples, what message are we already sending both to Earth and beyond? That we
expect the entire universe to look at act like us? Not all of us of course, just the elite
few, the white, cis-gendered, heterosexual colonialist aristocracy in evening wear. I
realize this is supposed to be a light-hearted poster and its all in good funso
even writing this critique makes me sound like Im absolutely no fun. Quite the
opposite, I think that poster is no fun! Why couldnt it depict other life? Like multigendered whale-cats dancing instead? Or humans who dont look like these two? Or
something else, anything elseanything otherwise. Where is the imagination? Is
this transposition of earthly aristocrats into space the best we can do? Its more
evidence that we need queer visions of life elsewhere, of exoplanets, of alien
worlds. We need more of what Haraway (2013), drawing on Marleen Barr (1992),
calls speculative fabulation. This isnt just me saying what about my ideas or
include me in your gamebecause weve actually been there since the
beginning. Weve been imagining different worlds since we were born into a world
where we often werent wanted, didnt fit, and werent following the rules by just
being us. Queer folk, of all kinds, are at least united by having the most incredible
skills in speculative fabulation in envisioning every possible different future, bright
and abysmal, and we do it because its something we learned as a survival tactic
and later honed as an art form. IV. Generations of Queer Futures Queerness has
been discussed and debated in terms of the concept of no future. When thinking
about outer space, this could mean the freedom to disrupt normative futuresto
remix, twist, adjust, tear, collage and queer the future. As anthropologist Naisargi
Dave said about the idea: I think queerness is precisely about what it means to
pursue an orientation to the world, philosophically and politically, that doesnt need
to reproduce itself in recognizable forms. Being freed from recognizable
reproduction means opening up multiple possible futures, even queer futures. When
space science and fiction imagines a generation ship, in which generations of
crew live and die during a thousand-year voyage to a distant star (e.g., Ceyssens et
al. 2012), we should ask how queer lives fit into these models of reproduction in
space. In the recent Sci-Fi series Ascension (Williams 2014), queer people were
excluded from a generation ship experiment. When one character said
homosexuals or anyone who avoids procreation were left out because theyre
superfluous a queer character responded: We do tend to pop up where you
least expect us... If we consider science fiction as a repository of modifiable
futures in science (Milburn 2010) then we can look at how to de-colonize that
fiction and challenge the reproduction of normative futures through imagination and
science. William Lempert has examined the way indigenous Sci-Fi does this in his
article Decolonizing Encounters of the Third Kind: Alternative Futuring in Native
Science Fiction Film (2014), and a recently published collection of science fiction
stories from social justice movements Octavias Brood (Imarisha and Brown 2015)
reminds us that imagination, as philosopher John Dewey said, is our common faith
(1934)the shared human capacity to conceive of a better future and work

together to make it a reality. Science fiction is a repository of modifiable futures

not only in science but also in society. Sci-Fi has been a site of racism, sexism, and
xenophobia, as often as it has been the site of imagining better worlds and
liberation (Haraway 2013). The recent battle over the Hugo awards demonstrates
the lengths that some will go to to protect their visions of hostile, racist, misogynist,
anti-queer, normative futures. So whats next? Weall us queer, trans, disabled,
black, native, etc. folk and morewe need to fight back, take back, de-colonize and
re-imagine our futures in outer space, we need to pop up where they least expect
us.

Explicitly queer approach key- aff reifies neoliberal hegemony

in space.
Oman-Reagan 15 [Michael Oman-Reagan, anthropologist of space, science, &
social movements. His doctoral research in the Department of Anthropology at
Memorial University of Newfoundland examines space science, interstellar space,
SETI, astrobiology, plants in space, and speculative fiction, Queering Outer Space
https://medium.com/space-anthropology/queering-outer-spacef6f5b5cecda0#.p2lahzwjf, ED]
II. De-colonizing Mars and Beyond When NASA received a signal from the Voyager 1
spacecraft in 2012, they called it the sound of interstellar space and marked the
data as the moment human exploration crossed into the space between stars
(NASA JPL n.d.). And while science and technology take us to the edges of the solar
system and beyond, venture capital is planning how they can terraform new worlds
a neoliberal, capitalist project which has, of course, already stolen the phrase
Occupy. In response, we need to pre-emptively Occupy Mars while taking one of
the many important lessons offered by indigenous people to the Occupy movement,
and de-colonize Mars in the process. Which means injecting all of our queer and
indigenous selves into the discussions about settling and colonizing Mars, into
these plans to fundamentally change the surface of another planet, to reproduce
Earth there. Lisa Messeri, anthropologist and historian of science and technology,
points out that if I use queering to mean something odd then something like Elon
Musks plan to nuke Mars, for example, might be seen as queer. Her excellent
question about this and our chat on Twitter inspired me to clarify. Im looking at
Musks terraforming language from the position that Mars is already queer.
Remaking Mars in Earths image, and uncritically assuming this is a great idea, is
exactly the kind of process that queering works against. Nuking mars is an unqueer
thing to do because it uses the model of razing and rebuilding, cutting it all down to
make it possible to build a normative landscape on top of the ruins. We need to
think about the ways that terraforming is not always a utopian idea, but can also be
seen as a violent imposition of earthly normativity on landscapes elsewhere, a
colonialization of existing queer-otherworld landscapes. Biologist DNLee has asked
exactly the kind of questions about Elon Musks language and the discourse of Mars
colonization that need to be asked: Whos version of humanity is being targeted
for saving? And with the language of proposed interplanetary exploration and
settlement using generous references to Christopher Columbus and New World
Exploration and British Colonization and US American Manifest Destiny I was halted.

Im not on board for this type of science adventure. [] Why arent other voices
and perspectives at the table? How much is this conversation being controlled
(framed, initiated, directed, routed) by capitalist and political interests of the (few)
people at the table? Social scientists, activists, queer theorists and others need to
ask themselves why they arent asking these same questions (and joining those of
us who are). Aside from a few examples, why have sociology, anthropology, and
other social sciences and humanities left space science and exploration alonewhy
do they consistently fail to recognize the importance of work by those who do
research in these areas? Astrobiologist David Grinspoon critiqued this frontier
mentality early on. Writing about the ethics of colonizing Mars in 2004, he notes
that its not only problematic for all of the above reasons, it also sets us up to
reproduce the failures that come with thinking we can conquer a planet: If we go
to Mars with the idea that we can charge ahead and subdue a new world, our efforts
are doomed [] Mars does not belong to America, nor to Earth, nor to human
beings. As DNLee also points out, were talking about widespread discourse with
massive national and corporate funding to support a new era of colonizationisnt
this a subject worth studying? Worth funding studies of? Worth getting involved in?
Space scientists are also working on the problem of how we can create the
capabilities to visit another star, trying to figure out what we need to do now here
on Earth to make that happen in 100 years. There are many interstellar projects,
and its a fascinating convergence of calls for longer-term thinking with planning
and innovation in space science. When astronaut Mae Jemison describes 100 Year
Starshipthe project to achieve interstellar travelshe talks about creation stories,
mythology, science fiction, and her hopes of discovering a better version of
ourselves in space (100YSS 2014). We can join with visionaries like her to ensure
that the better version of ourselves isnt a vision that ends up reproducing
inequality, injustice, and oppressions from Earth out there in space. Space
advocates like Jemison, the first black woman in space, will be leaders and allies in
the quest to discover not only diversity in outer space but a better kind of diversity
one that is aware of colonial histories, oppressive pasts and presents, ongoing
violences here on Earth. A queer diversity.

Warming/ Enviornment
Alt comes first Climate studies can only be understood after a
thorough investigation of power relations
Kaijser and Kronsell 14 (Anna Kaijser is a LUCID Phd Graduate with an
academic background is within Social Anthropology, International Development and
Gender Studies, Annica Kronsell is a professor of Political Science at LUND university
who specializes in Climate politics, feminist and intersectional perspectives,
Climate change through the lens of intersectionality, Environmental Politics
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2014, pg 417-433, Date accessed: 6/29/16, sabz)
Investigations of the interconnectedness of climate change with human societies
require profound analysis of relations among humans and between
humans and nature, and the integration of insights from various academic fields.
An intersectional approach, developed within critical feminist theory, is
advantageous. An intersectional analysis of climate change illuminates how
different individuals and groups relate differently to climate change , due to their
situatedness in power structures based on context-specific and dynamic social
categorisations. Intersectionality sketches out a pathway that stays clear of traps of
essentialisation, enabling solidarity and agency across and beyond social
categories. It can illustrate how power structures and categorisations may be
reinforced, but also challenged and renegotiated, in realities of climate change. We
engage with intersectionality as a tool for critical thinking, and provide a set of
questions that may serve as sensitisers for intersectional analyses on climate
change.

Intersectional analysis is prerequisite to understanding climate

change
Kaijser and Kronsell 14 (Anna Kaijser is a LUCID Phd Graduate with an
academic background is within Social Anthropology, International Development and
Gender Studies, Annica Kronsell is a professor of Political Science at LUND university
who specializes in Climate politics, feminist and intersectional perspectives,
Climate change through the lens of intersectionality, Environmental Politics
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2014, pg 417-433, Date accessed: 6/29/16, sabz)
As climate change has gradually become a more recognised and apparent threat,
the issue has also gained prominence on the political agenda, where responsibilities
and strategies to handle the challenges are debated. There is also an increasing
interest in climate-related research, evident in the calls from research foundations.
Since the effects of climate change are mediated through social, cultural, and
economic structures and processes, the need for social analyses in relation to the
issue have become more recognised. As climate change research was originally
shaped within natural science, social scientific and humanist research on the issue

was scarce. During recent years, climate change has gained increasing attention
within these academic fields and social aspects of climate change have increasingly
been acknowledged (Mearns and Norton 2010, Dempsey et al. 2011). While social
and political dimensions are now being addressed to a growing extent (see e.g.
Giddens 2009, Newell and Paterson 2010, Held et al. 2011, Urry 2011), issues of
equity and intersectionality are largely absent from this literature (cf. Terry 2009). It
is widely noted that the emissions of greenhouse gases triggering global warming to
a large extent originate in unsustainable lifestyles among the worlds more affluent
minorities, mainly in the so-called developed regions (IEA 2011). At the same time,
those most exposed and vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change are
poor and marginalised people living particularly in low-income areas. These groups
tend, moreover, to be underrepresented at all levels of decision making regarding
climate issues (Hemmati and Rhr 2009, Okereke and Schroeder 2009). The
existence of climate-related injustices between different countries and areas is
recognised by scholars and political actors, and is a focus in international climate
negotiations. Yet, geographical and economic factors are not exhaustive for
explaining climate injustice. The situation is complex with great inequality regarding
the causes and effects of climate change largely due to unequal power
relations, which also apply to human relations with other species (Donovan and
Adams 1995, Lykke 2009b, Mallory 2010, Gaard 2011). Our aim here is to explore
how intersectionality can be employed as an a nalytical framework for
understanding complex dimensions of climate change . Our aspiration goes
beyond simply acknowledging the relevance of intersectionality for studying climate
issues. We suggest ways to understand how individual and group-based differences
are implicated in contexts of climate change, in material and institutional as well as
normative senses. We side with Winker and Degele (2011) who propose that
intersectional analyses need to be multilevelled in order to grasp how relations of
power are manifested at different levels, from social structures to symbolic
representation and identity construction. We first briefly outline intersectionality
before discussing intersecting power relations in the context of climate change.
Then we address a range of theoretical approaches that we suggest are helpful for
intersectional analyses of climate change, and thereafter go on to explore how
intersectionality is manifested in institutional practices, norms, and symbolic
representation of climate issues.

Study of power relations key to make decisions on climate

change
Kaijser and Kronsell 14 (Anna Kaijser is a LUCID Phd Graduate with an
academic background is within Social Anthropology, International Development and
Gender Studies, Annica Kronsell is a professor of Political Science at LUND university
who specializes in Climate politics, feminist and intersectional perspectives,
Climate change through the lens of intersectionality, Environmental Politics
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2014, pg 417-433, Date accessed: 6/29/16, sabz)

The responsibility, vulnerability, and decision-making power of individuals and

groups in relation to climate change can be attributed to social structures based on
characteristics such as gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, nationality, health,
sexual orientation, age, and place. Moreover, the impacts of climate change, as well
as strategies for mitigation and adaptation, may reinforce or challenge such
structures and categorisations. As social dimensions are increasingly recognised in
climate change research, more aspects of social relations are brought into the
debate. For instance, there is a growing body of literature on gender and climate
change (Denton 2002, Rhr et al. 2008, Hemmati and Rhr 2009, Dankelman 2010,
Glazebrook 2011). Although studies and political initiatives that focus on one single
variable (such as place, gender, or economic status) are valuable for illuminating
power relations in the face of climate change, they often fail to consider how this
base for inequality is intertwined with and even reinforced by other structures of
domination. There is also a tendency for simplification. For instance, the gender
aspect is often reduced to narrow manwoman binaries, in which women are
depicted as vulnerable, marginalised victims (as in Denton 2002, Demetriades and
Esplen 2010, Oparaocha and Dutta 2011), or given the role of caretakers with some
special, almost divine, connection to nature (see Plant 1989, Shiva 1989, Gaard
1993). There is a risk here of reinforcing categorisations, and not taking into
account how differences are socially constructed and context-specific, and how they
may shift in realities of climate change. Apart from fixing difference and turning it
into categories, it also excludes those who do not fit in these static categories and
denies social struggle, contestation, and the complexity and fluidity of identities
(Alaimo 2009, pp. 3033). To address these issues, Lykke (2009b) suggests that
intersectional analysis should be employed in relation to climate change. However,
this has not yet been done to any significant extent. From an intersectional
understanding, how individuals relate to climate change depends on their positions
in context-specific power structures based on social categorisations. Tuana provides
an illustrative example of how climate change is interconnected with power
relations, erasing the imaginary boundaries between social and natural. In her
study of hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005, she sheds light on how
the hurricane was mediated through materialised and non-materialised power
structures. Arguing that [t]he knowledge that is too often missing and is often
desperately needed is at the intersection between things and people, between feats
of engineering and social structures, between experiences and bodies, Tuana
(2008, p. 189) places the devastation of New Orleans in relation to various
intersecting forms of marginality. Marginalised people were less likely to be able to
evacuate and to afford to live somewhere else, and had poorer prospects if
displaced. Katrina was in some respects a wake-up call to the Western world,
making visible how climate change impacts may interact with social structures.

Current research fails Only alt can fix

Kaijser and Kronsell 14 (Anna Kaijser is a LUCID Phd Graduate with an
academic background is within Social Anthropology, International Development and
Gender Studies, Annica Kronsell is a professor of Political Science at LUND university

who specializes in Climate politics, feminist and intersectional perspectives,

Climate change through the lens of intersectionality, Environmental Politics
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2014, pg 417-433, Date accessed: 6/29/16, sabz)
On the other hand, research that seeks solutions to environmental problems often
lacks a deeper understanding of social relations and power structures, hence
underestimating the need for profound analysis of complex social and
political dimensions (Stephens et al. 2010, Jerneck et al. 2011). This tension
between different academic fields is reflected in the often-contradictory goals
articulated by social movements that strive for equal rights and opportunities (often
in material terms) and the downshifting lifestyle strategies that have been
suggested by environmental movements. To emphasise the interconnectedness of
the different goals (e.g. equality, improved conditions for marginalised groups, and
environmental sustainability), and thereby reconcile the academic and political
projects promoting them, should be a central mission for intersectional research on
climate change.

Study of human relations to nature prerequisite to

understanding human-induced climate change
Kaijser and Kronsell 14 (Anna Kaijser is a LUCID Phd Graduate with an
academic background is within Social Anthropology, International Development and
Gender Studies, Annica Kronsell is a professor of Political Science at LUND university
who specializes in Climate politics, feminist and intersectional perspectives,
Climate change through the lens of intersectionality, Environmental Politics
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2014, pg 417-433, Date accessed: 6/29/16, sabz)
Intersectionality relies on theories across disciplines. Despite this, theories relating
to nature and the environment have to date had less influence on intersectional
research than those focusing on social aspects. We argue that in order to study
climate change, it is necessary to include insights from various strands of
theorising on relations among humans and human relations to nature. We
propose that questions such as How is nature represented? and How are relations
between humans and the environment portrayed? be addressed in any
intersectional analysis of climate change.

Intersectionality is about studying power relations Alt does

this proves its key for climate change issues
Kaijser and Kronsell 14 (Anna Kaijser is a LUCID Phd Graduate with an
academic background is within Social Anthropology, International Development and
Gender Studies, Annica Kronsell is a professor of Political Science at LUND university
who specializes in Climate politics, feminist and intersectional perspectives,
Climate change through the lens of intersectionality, Environmental Politics
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2014, pg 417-433, Date accessed: 6/29/16, sabz)

Intersections of power can be found in all relations on all levels from institutional
practices to individual actions (de los Reyes and Mulinari 2005, Lykke 2009a). Social
categorisations, often in combination (e.g. working-class man, indigenous woman),
serve as grounds for inclusion and exclusion, and for defining what is considered
normal or deviant, and what is attractive to aspire for. Yet, these categories are not
necessarily explicitly referred to; rather, they reflect underlying and implicit power
patterns often depicted as natural differences (Winker and Degele 2011). Power
relations are expressed in many ways: as injustices in material conditions and
normative expressions, within societal structures and institutions of various kinds,
and lived, expressed, and reproduced through social practices. In this article, we
focus on the power relations that are of specific interest in relation to climate
change. We propose that intersectionality can be used to generate critical and
constructive insights. It provides a critique of existing power relations and
institutional practices relevant for climate issues and, thus, adds significantly to
the framing and understanding of climate change. Moreover, intersectionality
can generate alternative knowledge crucial in the formulation of more effective and
legitimate climate strategies. Intersectional analysis has a normative agenda, as
feminist and critical theories generally do. It is related to the feminist
epistemological position that regards knowledge as derived from social practice
(Harding 2004). This way, intersectionality also highlights new linkages and
positions that can facilitate alliances between voices that are usually marginalised
in the dominant climate agenda. Although we provide some examples from
empirical studies, the contribution of this article is mainly theoretical. While
intersectionality is recognised as valuable for understanding power, its empirical
applicability has been debated (Davis 2008, Cho et al. 2013). How may complex
power relations be studied in practice? Intersectionality is not by default associated
with any specific methodology, but attempts have been made at outlining methods
for applying intersectionality empirically (see e.g. McCall 2001, Winker and Degele
2011). Intersectional analysis generally relies on a range of social theories
about identity formation and power relations. Which particular theories are
drawn from depends on the researchers perspective and the intersectional relations
that are the focus of analysis. We argue that for intersectionality to be useful for
studying politics of climate change, it needs to be informed also by theories
generated in research fields that look at the relationship between society and
nature. We will return to this. Intersectional methodology can be as straightforward
as Matsudas asking the other question approach. When I see something that looks
racist, I ask, Where is the patriarchy in this? When I see something that looks
sexist, I ask, Where is the heterosexism in this? When I see something that looks
homophobic, I ask, Where are the class interests in this? (Matsuda 1991, p. 1189)
Or it can be as elaborate as Winker and Degeles (2011) eight-step model of
intersectional multilevel analysis. While we think that Matsudas asking the other
question tactic can be a useful starting point to sensitise oneself to the
intersections of power in social practices, an approach that provides a more
thorough analysis of the intersections of power in terms of how they are
institutionalised would be necessary in an academic context. For that purpose, in
concluding, we propose a number of questions that we believe may be useful in
intersectional analyses of climate change issues.

Current nature studies are heteronormative Exploring

intersectional relations key
Gaard 11 (Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's
academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of
composition and literary criticism, Green, Pink, and Lavender: Banishing Ecophobia through Queer Ecologies,
Ethics & the Environment, Volume 16, Number 2, Fall 2011, pp. 115-126 (Article) Published by Indiana University
Press DOI: 10.1353/een.2011.0011, Date Accessed: 7/11/16,
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Greta_Gaard/publication/236821656_Green_Pink_and_Lavender_Banishing_Eco
phobia_through_Queer_Ecologies/links/559c2d1d08ae7f3eb4cff9a4.pdf, sabz)
Drawing on a range of queer and ecological theories rather a single orthodox perspective, the thirteen essays in

a strong argument for queering environmentalisms and greening

queer theory, in three steps: challenging the heteronormativity of
investigations into the sexuality of nature, exploring the intersections
between queer and ecological inflections of bio/politics (including spatial politics),
and ultimately queering environmental affect, ethics, and desire . Clearly, notions of
sexuality have shaped social constructions of nature, as seen in the familiar concepts and
Queer Ecologies develop

creation of wilderness, national and urban parks, and car camping. As the first book-length volume to establish the
intersections of queer theory and environmentalisms at such depth, Queer Ecologies covers a broad range of
topicsgay cruising in the parks, lesbian rural retreats, transgressive sexual behaviors among diverse species,

establishes topics for future development,

i.e., exploring the intersection of speciesism and heterosexism in queer ecologies,
and developing a focus on the constitution of the non-white queer subject.
literary and cultural narratives of queer/nature. It also

Climate change is a result of masculinity

Alaimo 09 (Stacy Alaimo is a Professor of English, Distinguished Teaching
Professor, and Director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Minor at the
University of Texas at Arlington, Insurgent Vulnerability and the Carbon Footprint of
Gender, KVINDER, KN & FORSKNING NR. 3-4 2009, Date Accessed: 7/12/16,
https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/KKF/article/view/44306/84085, sabz)
THE CARBON FOOTPRINT OF MASCULINIST CONSUMERISM Whereas trans-corporeality blurs
the boundaries of the human as such, insisting that we are part of the material interchanges of the world, a peculiar
sort of hypermasculinity of impervious but penetrating subjects has emerged in the United States.

The U. S.,

which is, per capita, most responsible for global climate change has under the Bush regime
been infamous for its swaggeringly dismissive attitude toward this staggering crisis .
Although Bonnie Mann, in her article, How America Justifies Its War: A Modern/Postmodern Aesthetics of Masculinity

the
hypermasculine style that she diagnoses has been fuelled not only by the pervasive
post 9/11 fear of terrorist attacks, but also by a lurking, though repressed, dread of
climate change and other environmental disasters. Such a posture, or as Mann puts it, such a
style of masculine, impenetrable aggression, has been evident in Bushs refusal to
acknowledge, until recently, the threat of global warming . But the desire for hypermasculine hard
and Sovereignty (Mann 2006) does not discuss climate change or other environmental problems, I suspect

bodies, in Susan Jeffords term (Jeffords 1994) has also emerged as a consumer phenomenon that has increased
U.S. carbon emissions. If, as Jeffords argues, the indefatigable, muscular, invincible masculine body became the
linchpin of the Reagan imaginary, (Jeffords 1994: 25), a similar, rigidly masculine corporeality characterizes the

a nationalistic stance of impenetrable masculinity that serves only to

exacerbates the climate crisis.
Bush Jr. era,

The science of climate studies is gendered

Alaimo 09 (Stacy Alaimo is a Professor of English, Distinguished Teaching
Professor, and Director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Minor at the
University of Texas at Arlington, Insurgent Vulnerability and the Carbon Footprint of
Gender, KVINDER, KN & FORSKNING NR. 3-4 2009, Date Accessed: 7/12/16,
https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/KKF/article/view/44306/84085, sabz)
Gendered stances, styles, practices, and modes of thought permeate the
representations of the science of climate change, the activist response to climate change, and
modes of consumerism responsible for releasing massive quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. T his article critiques
the masculinity of aggressive consumption that has increased the carbon footprint
of the U.S. and the freefloating, transcendent perspective presented by the official U.S. accounts of climate change. The
Gendering Climate and Sustainability1 conference poster features the stunning artwork of Kirsten Justesen [Front-cover]. The sheer
aesthetic power of this image is remarkable the radiant light, the interplay of blue and white, the translucent yet solid surfaces of
ice. Justesen has staged other works involving ice, including the Melting Time series she created in Greenland in 1980, before the
recognition of global climate change. She states in an interview: The environmental and political aspect of these works has been
growing in proportion to the consciousness of global warming. That was not my intention in 1980 (Adler 2008). It would be difficult
now, however, given the growing consciousness of climate change, not to read Justesens Ice Pedestal series in that context. The
melting pedestal evokes the massive glacial thawing caused by global warming. All that is solid melts away and the very ground
disappears the arctic, the seacoasts, even entire island nations. The performances pair melting ice with human flesh suggesting
the mutual vulnerability of both planet and people. Her nakedness bespeaks human exposure, an openness to the material world in
which we are immersed. Justesen has said that her work investigates meeting points for surfaces using [her] body as a tool (Adler
2008). As flesh meets ice it usually recoils, but here, in the stillness of the photos, human flesh remains in contact with chilly reality.
The figure in Ice Pedestal #2 embraces the pedestal, exhibiting protection and care, even in the midst of its own vulnerability
exhibited by the childs pose. Whereas the naked body performs vulnerability, the thick black boots and gloves punctuate the
performance with insurgence and strength. The stance of the figure in Ice Pedestal #3 is selfprotective, with arms crossed in front of
the body. As the figures hair blends perfectly with the ice, however, the image suggests that defending oneself and defending the

the Ice Pedestal series embodies a

quintessentially feminist stance toward environmentalism an insistence on what I
call trans-corporeality1a the recognition of the substantial interconnections
between human corporeality and the more-than-human world. Despite its emphasis on
embodiment, transcorporeality is not a phenomenological or individualistic stance. Tracing the material
interchanges between bodies and global environmental, political, and economic
systems requires access to scientific knowledge even as it provokes recognition that
those very knowledges are shaped and sometimes distorted by political forces .
environment are the selfsame gesture, extending body to place. In short,

Indeed it would not be possible to re-read Justesens work as a performance of transcorporeality without some cognizance of the
science, politics, and popular images of global climate change.

Warming representations are dominated by hegemonic

masculinity
Alaimo 09 (Stacy Alaimo is a Professor of English, Distinguished Teaching
Professor, and Director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Minor at the
University of Texas at Arlington, Insurgent Vulnerability and the Carbon Footprint of
Gender, KVINDER, KN & FORSKNING NR. 3-4 2009, Date Accessed: 7/12/16,
https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/KKF/article/view/44306/84085, sabz)
Despite the gender panic dramatized by these novels and by the rampant
masculinist consumerism of U. S. popular culture, another form of hegemonic

masculinity lurks in the representations of climate change science . This is the

form of masculinity with the most power the invisible, unmarked, ostensibly perspectiveless perspective. The
perspective that need not speak its name. Climate change, as a vast, complex, scientific phenomenon, demands a

This aspect of
global climate change may reentrench traditional models of scientific objectivity
that divide subject from object, knower from known, and assume the view from
nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally that Haraway has critiqued (Haraway
multitude of mathematical calculations, and not just abstract but virtual conceptualizations.

1991:191). Just when feminist epistemologies and popular epidemiologies are emerging in which citizens become
their own scientific experts within the global campaign against toxins, environmental justice movements, green
consumerism, AIDS activism, and feminist health movement official U. S. representations of global climate change

Delusions of hyperseparation, transcendence, and dominance

only engender denial of the many global environmental crises.
present a transcendent view.

Intersectional analysis solves

Alaimo 09 (Stacy Alaimo is a Professor of English, Distinguished Teaching
Professor, and Director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Minor at the
University of Texas at Arlington, Insurgent Vulnerability and the Carbon Footprint of
Gender, KVINDER, KN & FORSKNING NR. 3-4 2009, Date Accessed: 7/12/16,
https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/KKF/article/view/44306/84085, sabz)
response to global climate change must not only challenge the
impenetrability of big science and the hegemonic masculinity of aggressive
consumption but also the tendency to reinforce gendered polarities and
heteronormativity. It is my hope that environmental organizations, feminist organizations,
activists, (green) consumers, and ordinary citizens will continue to create and transform modes
of knowledge, forms of political engagement, and daily practices that contend with
global climate change from positions within not above the vulnerable, yet forceful, everemergent world. Perhaps it is possible to foster an insurgent vulnerability that does not entrench
gender polarities but instead endorses biodiversity, cultural diversity, and sexual
diversity, and recognizes that we all inhabit trans-corporeal interchanges,
processes, and flows. We can promote sustainable practices of care and revolt, politics and pleasures.
A feminist

Middle Eastern War

Mainstream media and scholars view Middle Eastern instability
through a lens of masculinity this justifies violent warfare
and misconstrues the reality behind politics in the region.
Queer theories are key to re-examine this essentializing view.
Paul Amar, Associate Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of California Santa Barbara.
MIDDLE EAST MASCULINITY STUDIES DISCOURSES OF "MEN IN CRISIS," INDUSTRIES OF GENDER IN REVOLUTION,
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. Special Issues: Middle East Sexualities. ProQuest. Fall

2011. 36-70,129.

Many observers initially responded to the emergence of popular uprisings that spread from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya

public analysts,
bloggers, and media commentators drew, again and again, upon the bottomless well of
vernacular Middle East masculinity theories to resolve their questions: What
caused masses of Arab youth to rise up against their governments? Perhaps the
young men among them were sexually frustrated by the paucity of jobs that prevented
them from fulfilling their manhood by marrying and becoming heads of household
(Krajeski 2011)? What caused the violence of police and thugs against protesters, particularly
women, in Tahrir Square? Perhaps it was the predatory sexuality of the "Arab street"
whose undisciplined male aggression revealed that the people of the region were
not really ready to govern themselves in civil democratic fashion (Bayat 2011)? What
caused the "chaos" of "tribal protests" in Yemen? Perhaps it was the surplus of
daggers and guns in a culture where "having weapons is a sign of masculinity"? 5
What caused the armed forces in Tunisia and Egypt to align themselves with
protesters and against dictators? Perhaps it was the paternalism of the generals
who offered protection in exchange for acceptance of their patriarchal values. What
caused the more brutal response of the regime in Libya as compared to those of the
regimes in Tunisia and Egypt? Perhaps it was because Muammar el Qaddafihad
manned up? Perhaps he learned that the flaccid tactics of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak would lead
and beyond in 2011 with shocked incomprehension. To fill this perceived intelligence gap,

to failure, so he stood firm and summoned the supposedly ruthless masculinity of black African mercenaries to

The New York Times has been particularly consistent in

deploying its version of masculinity studies to explain violence in and from the
Middle East: In the video documentary, Portrait of a Terrorist: Mohamed Atta, it
traces the motivations of the lead September 11th hijacker back to his awkwardness
with girls and wounded male pride (Coombes and O'Connor 2002). In the epic investigative essay,
"Where boys grow up to be Jihadis," the New York Times describes how frustrated
young men in Morocco, having failed as soccer players and drug dealers and having
failed to use John Travolta haircuts to attract girls, then turned to bombing the
Madrid metro and joining the insurgency in Iraq (Elliott 2007). Thus it was only natural for the
crush the rebels (Rawls 2011).

Times, when revolution began in Tunisia in 2011, to trace the revolt's origins back to the frustrated masculinities of
the two men they deemed to be the instigators of this new kind of uprising: Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who
invented his social network supposedly because his girlfriend dumped him, and Mohamed Bouazizi, the selfimmolated fruit-vendor and martyr invoked in the first epigraph above, whose pride was gravely shamed when the
policewoman would not let him "yank back his apples" (Fahim 2011). These public-discourse versions of masculinity
studies and everyday etiologies of racialized Middle Eastern maleness operate as some of the primary public tools

The same sets of vernacular theories

also prop up intelligence services and terrorology industries whose wildly inaccurate
for analyzing political change and social conflict in the region.

studies of Islamism and of politics in general in the Middle East are often built upon
pseudo-anthropological or psychological-behavioralist accounts of atavistic,
misogynist, and hypersexual masculinities. These institutionalized methods of
masculinity studies have shaped geopolitics and generated support for
war, occupation, and repression in the region for decades. In this light, when one
embarks upon an attempt to reframe Middle East masculinity studies, it must be done with full self-consciousness.

Although this field is seen by some as a cutting-edge, progressive corner of feminist

and queer studies, its vernacular avatar is a primary node of domination. In a line of
research I am developing, in which this article represents a first phase, I examine how everyday theories of
masculinity and vernacular discourses of "masculinity in crisis" play crucial
roles in misrecognizing, racializing, moralistically-depoliticizing, and classdisplacing emergent social forces. Vernacular, public discourses and theories of
masculinity help to render illegible the social realities of twenty-first-century
multipolar geopolitics and the origins of insurgent racial, humanitarian, and
securitized nationalisms and globalisms. I am searching for gender/sexuality/coloniality-conscious
ways to reframe and render legible emergent formations and patterns that are rising up to challenge, reappropriate,
or humanize security-state and police-state governance forms. These governance forms, which I group under the
term "human security states" (Amar 2011b), emerged in part through the retrenchment and market-making
structures referred to as neoliberalism. However, these governance forms now seem to be abandoning economistic
rationalization and market liberalization frames for legitimization. They instead justify coercive state action through
the humanization or humanitarianization of security governance, without reference to market rationales. They do so
by invoking the rescue or cultivation of securitized human subjects, particularly those of sexualized gender and
racialized class, as informed by both colonial legacies and new imperatives of transnational humanitarian
discourses and parastatal security industries. Faced with this colonial return and the intensification of security-state
governance forms, I argue that critical scholarly approaches need not resort to totalizing metaphors of "bare life"
(Agamben 1998), emergency sovereignty, and imperial domination, as some contemporary European critical theory

By adopting a more conjunctural mix of post-disciplinary empiricism and

alternative bodies of political and cultural theory, fields such as gender and
sexuality studies, women's studies, queer studies, race and neocolonialism studies,
and Middle Eastern studies can examine critically subjects of masculinity and their
hypervisibility in these contexts. By hypervisible subjects I mean fetishized figures
that preoccupy public discourse and representations but are not actually
recognizable or legible as social formations and cannot speak on their own terms as
autonomous subjects rather than as problems to solve. They cannot be recognizable
in their own socio-economic context of production. Moralized, criminalized,
racialized, colonized masculinities in the Middle East are some of the most popular
subjects of modern geopolitical hypervisibility, twinned with their fetishized Others
or victims-the supposedly suppressed traditionalized veiled woman and the
supposedly Occidentally-identified modernized gay man.
has done.

Model Minority
Reject the myth of the model minority its particularly
harmful to Asian queers because of how homogenizing it is
only an intersectional approach can solve
Sapinoso 2009
(Joyleen Valero (JV), PhD in Philosophy, University of Maryland, FROM
QUARE TO KWEER:TOWARDS A QUEER ASIAN AMERICAN CRITIQUE
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/9567/Sapinoso_umd_0117E_
10599.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y - KSA)
A third way in which to reconsider immigration through a kweer lens and make
queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities central is by challenging the myth
of the model minority and its connections to sexuality and immigration. Though
Asians have not always been welcomed as immigrants into the U.S., since changes
to the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 the percentage of Asian Americans
who are foreign-born in comparison to the total population of Asian Americans has
increased dramatically. According to the 2007 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics by
region, it is people from Asia and North America that have consistently accounted
for the two largest groups of people obtaining legal permanent 226 resident status
from 1998 to 2007 (12). While about half of the people from North American
obtaining legal permanent resident status are born in Mexico, the representation of
Mexican immigrants as undocumented continues. In contrast, representations of
Asian immigrants often tend to reflect model minority stereotypes that portray
Asian Americans as particularly high achieving in education, working at good jobs,
earning a good living, and who through their hard work have achieved the
American dream, also setting an example, a model, that other minorities should
follow. In keeping with this stereotype, Asian immigrants are often imagined and
portrayed as successful doctors, engineers, and other professionals even though, as
Claire Jean Kim points out, statistics reveal that Asian immigration to the U.S. is
distinctively bifurcated: many Asian immigrants are poor and unskilled and end up
at the margins of the low-wage service economy, but many others are highly
educated, skilled, and affluent (23).128 The echoing of model minority stereotypes
in representations of Asian immigrants homogenizes Asian immigrants and prevents
the experiences of immigrants from distinct Asian communities and countries from
emerging.129 Moreover, the predominance of the myth of the model minority in
Asian immigration overshadows the experiences of a large portion of Asian
immigrants who have struggled to immigrate, and continue to struggle living in the
U.S. In these ways, the immigration discourses that do focus on Asians (instead of
the more usual focus on Latinos) become narrow and do not fully allow for the 128
For example, according to the 2007 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, even though
in 2007 the number of Asians immigrating to the U.S. based on employment-based
preferences outnumbered those coming from any other one region, even both
Europe and North America, the number of asylees and refugees from Asian
countries was also higher than the number from any other region (27). 129 For a

more in-depth discussion of the model minority stereotype, see Stacey J. Lees
Unraveling the Model Minority Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. 227
consideration of the diverse range of Asian American subjects and subjectivities,
including those who are queer. When it comes to queer Asian Americans in
particular, the effects of the model minority myth on their experiences of
immigration are significant. To begin with, the model minority myth assumes
heterosexuality. Although heterosexuality is not usually named explicitly in most
definitions of model minority, it is specifically the assimilation into dominant white
heterosexual middle-class culture that images of the model minority myth idealize.
In addition, the overwhelming representation of homosexuality as a white, American
phenomenon succeeds in distancing Asian American immigrants from queerness
even more. In both these cases, there is little space for imagining the existence of a
queer Asian American immigrant. The model minority myth and its underlying
compulsory heterosexuality and the underlying racism of stereotypes of queers as
white can become internalized, and affect queer Asian American immigrants on a
more pernicious level, especially for those whom maintaining strong ties to racial
and ethnic communities are a high priority. For example, countless stories in Russell
Leongs anthology, Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian
Experience, express the difficultly of coming out because of tensions within both
queer communities (around race and immigration), and Asian American
communities (around sexuality) and the constant feeling of needing to have to
choose one over the other.130 In the face of this false dilemma of having to choose,
a kweer approach invested in an identity politics that allows for 130 See for
example: Dana Y. Takagi Maiden Voyage; Martin F. Manalansan, IV Searching for
Community: Filipino Gay Men in New York City; Cristy Chung, Aly Kim, Zoon
Nguyen, and Trinity Ordona, with Arlene Stein In Our Own Way: A Roundtable
Discussion; and Gayatri Gopinath Funny Boys and Girls: Notes on a Queer South
Asian Planet. 228 intersectionality is useful in fighting against the homogenizing
force of the model minority myth and re-asserting an attention to differences among
Asian American immigrants, as well as among queer community members.

Nuclear War
Current IR theories are not enough to understand why actors
go to war
Wilcox, 2014
(August 5, Lauren, Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of
Cambridge, Deputy Director of the Centre for Gender Studies PhD in
Political Science, University of Minnesota, Embodied Subjectivities in
International Relations http://www.e-ir.info/2014/08/05/embodiedsubjectivities-in-international-relations/ - KSA)
The body or, rather, the embodiment of the subject is often an absent presence in
International Relations (and in social and political theory, more generally). In my forthcoming book, Bodies
of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations,I argue that theories of war and
violence in IR depend on assumptions about the relationship between bodies,
subjectivity, and violence that are often more implicit than explicit. There is no singular
theoretical apparatus or philosophy for theorizing the subject as corporeal or embodied; contemporary social and
political theorists as diverse as Michel Foucault, Elaine Scarry, Franz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Iris
Marion Young have all dealt with this topic at length. However, as feminist scholars have been at the forefront of
theorizing the subject and, in particular, the embodiment of the subject as a site of political struggle, this essay will
focus on feminist theorization and particularly the work of Judith Butler. In her highly influential Sex and Death in

Cohn evocatively describes the

disembodied ways in which nuclear strategists talked about the possibilities and
outcomes of nuclear war. Cohn notes not only that bodily violence is invisible in discourses
of nuclear war, but contemplation of such violence is necessarily impossible within
the strategic discourse of the nuclear strategists. Whats more, Cohn talks about her
experience as a participant observer learning to think and speak like a defense intellectual:
The experience of mastering the words infuses your relation to the material. You
can get so good at manipulating the words that it almost feels as though the whole
thing is under control (Cohn 1987, 704). Her critique of the disembodied nature of theory, her emphasis on
her own experience as an embodied individual in this space, and the connection between
disembodiment and control are three features that contribute to making Cohns piece a classic in the
the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals (1987), Carol

field, but also speak to key themes of feminists in their insistence on taking seriously what it means to be a subject
that is embodied.

Terrorism
Terrorism and strict gender binaries are inextricably linked.
Any discussion of the Terrorist and the security state must be
first be engaged through an understanding of the Trans/Queer
Beauchamp 09
Toby, Assistant Professor, Gender and Women's Studies PhD, Cultural Studies, UC
Davis Areas of Interest and Expertise: Feminist and Queer Theory Transgender
Studies Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies University of California, Davis, USA
Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Article Transgender Bodies and U.S.
State Surveillance After 9/11 Surveillance & Society 6(4): 356-366.

On September 4, 2003, shortly before the two-year anniversary of the attacks on

the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
released an official Advisory to security personnel. Citing ongoing concerns about
potential attacks by Al-Qaeda operatives, the advisorys final paragraph emphasizes
that terrorism is everywhere in disguise: Terrorists will employ novel methods to
artfully conceal suicide devices. Male bombers may dress as females in order to
discourage scrutiny (Department of Homeland Security 2003). Two years later, the
Real ID Act was signed into law, proposing a major restructuring of identification
documents and travel within and across U.S. borders. Central components of this
process include a new national database linked through federally standardized
drivers licenses, and stricter standards of proof for asylum applications. In response
to both the Advisory and the Real ID Act, transgender activist and advocacy
organizations in the U.S. quickly pointed to the ways trans populations would be
targeted as suspicious and subjected to new levels of scrutiny. Criticizing what they
read as instances of transphobia or anti-trans discrimination, many of these
organizations offer both transgender individuals and government agencies
strategies for reducing or eliminating that discrimination. While attending to the
very real dangers and damages experienced by many trans people in relation to
government policies, in many cases the organizations approaches leave intact the
broader regulation of gender, particularly as it is mediated and enforced by the
state. Moreover, they tend to address concerns about anti-trans discrimination in
ways that are disconnected from questions of citizenship, racialization or
nationalism. Nevertheless, by illuminating the ways that new security measures
interact with and affect transgender-identified people and gender-nonconforming
bodies, transgender activist practices and the field of transgender studies are
poised to make a significant contribution to the ways state surveillance tactics are
understood and interpreted. The monitoring of transgender and gendernonconforming populations is inextricable from questions of national
security and regulatory practices of the state, and state surveillance
policies that may first appear unrelated to transgender people are in fact
deeply rooted in the maintenance and enforcement of normatively
gendered bodies, behaviors and identities. I argue here that transgender and

gender-nonconforming bodies are bound up in surveillance practices that are

intimately tied to state security, nationalism and the us/them, either/or rhetoric
that underpins U.S. military and government constructions of safety. At the same
time, the primary strategies and responses offered by transgender advocacy
organizations tend to reconsolidate U.S. nationalism and support the increased
policing of deviant bodies.

Essentializing the War on Terror masks the complex politics

behind it demonizes the enemy and forces them to further
conform to acting as the demon a feminist/LGBTQ critique
is key to break out of it
Nadine Naber is at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Zeina Zaatari is at the University of
California, Reframing the war on terror: Feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)

2014

activism in the context of the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Cultural Dynamics,
, Vol. 26(1) 91 111,
http://www.academia.edu/6981816/Reframing_the_war_on_terror_Feminist_and_lesbian_gay_bisexual_transgender_
and_queer_LGBTQ_activism_in_the_context_of_the_2006_Israeli_invasion_of_Lebanon._Cultural_Dynamics_2014_26_
1_91-111_co-authored_with_Nadine_Naber

Developing such a feminist/LGBTQ critique is also essential precisely because of the

framing of the war on terrors militarized campaigns using post-racial discoursea
totalizing discourse that masks the intersection of multiple forms of oppression
through a discourse and logic of obliteration and binarism (with us or against us).
Communities threatened by militarized crises respond with the logic of emergency
that inadvertently colludes with this campaign to flatten out social complexity and
marginalize those whose experiences do not fit in binarized political hierarchies.
Since 2004, a new generation of feminist and LGBTQ activists has formed various organizations and collectives in
Lebanon. These activists refer to their work as grassroots and revolutionary, in one way or another. While distinct,
their work, considered together, can be said to constitute a new feminist and LGBTQ social movement in Lebanon.
Our research set out to explore the concepts of family, gender, and sexuality that circulate in this movement within
the broader context of military invasion, civil conflict, and the politics of a nation-state structured by
heteropatriarchy, sectarianism, classism, and racism. During the 2006 invasion, many of our interlocutors were
involved in organizing among feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive organizations, coalitions, and political parties.

Orientalism
Orientalist discourses feed into conceptions of sexuality today
they are inextricably tied together we have to look at how
the aff has constructed China as the Other using the same
discourse of subordination that has fed war for centuries
Owens, 10
(November 19, Patricia , Senior Lecturer at the School of Politics and International Relations,
Queen Mary University of London, Senior Researcher at Oxford-Leverhulme Program on
Changing the Character of War, author of Between War and Politics: International Relations
and the Thought of Hannah Arendt , Torture, Sex and Military Orientalism
https://www.academia.edu/10243784/_Torture_sex_and_military_orientalism_Third_World_Qu
arterly -KSA)

Orientalist discourses have much in common with discourses about gender and
sexuality. Like the Orient in the Western imaginary, gender and sexualitya r e
h i s t o r i c a l c o n s t r u c t s ; the reality of their distinctions is not uncovered through
scientific inquiry or confession of ones true nature but is produced through
discourse. The binary opposition of Orient/Occident is not asymmetrical relation;
neither is that of male/female or homo/hetero. T h e feminised/homo/Orient is
subordinated to the masculinised/hetero/Occident.The celebrated side of the binary
only acquires its meaning through subordination and exclusion of the Other the
sexually deviant Orient. A n d y e t the homohetero binary u l t i m a t e l y contradicts
and undermines itself. Efforts to construct stable sexual subjectivities must fail,
belied by the u l t i m a t e i n s t a b i l i t y o f a c t u a l p r a c t i c e ; t h e r e i s n o
sexual being behind thedoing. If, as Edward W Said rightly argued,
without examining Orientalism ... one cannot possibly understand ... [how]
European culture was able to manageand even producethe Orient politically,
sociologically, militarily, ideologically, then one cannot understand Orientalism
without examining how modern Western culture is fundamentally structured by
theeffort to establish a clear binary distinction between homo- and hetero-sexual
populations. In Eve Sedgwicks words, an understanding of virtually any aspect
o f m o d e r n We s t e r n c u l t u r e must be, n o t m e r e l y i n c o m p l e t e , b u t
damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a
critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. T h i s b i n a r y distinction,
which emergednot coincidentallyalongside the rise of formalEuropean empire,
is central to all Western identity and social organisation,including military
socialisation and associated forms of cultural and gender- based
subordination.

Women/ Men
Every time they use the term women to denote a common
identity they have turned the case. Women is not a stable
signifier-their reading of womens material bodies slaps an
identity onto bodies and overdetermines the experience of
individual bodies with labels, eliminating subjective
experience.
Butler 90 (Gender Trouble, pg. 3)
Apart from the foundationalist fictions that support the notion of the subject,
however, there is the political problem that feminism encounters in the
assumption that the term women denotes a common identity. Rather than a
stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports to
describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome
term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety. As Denise Rileys title suggests, Am
I That Name? is a question produced by the very possibility of the names
multiple significations. If one is a woman, that is surely not all one is; the
term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered person transcends
the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always
constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and
because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional
modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes
impossible to separate out gender from the political and cultural
intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained.

Their treatment of males as equivalent to men, the oppressor,

is an act of division that forecloses all other options besides
dialectical reversal. This is a with us or against us approach
to biological sex that eviscerates those whose identity is
caught somewhere in between.
Azaldua in 99 [Borderlands/La Frontera, pg 80]
Lumping the males who deviate from the general norm with man, the
oppressor, is a gross injustice. Asombra pensar que nos hemos quedado en ese pozo oscuro
donde el mundo encierra a las lesbianas {its amazing to think that we have been stuck in this dark well
where the world encloses lesbians}. Asombra pensar que hemos, como feministas y lesbianas, cerrado
nuestros corazones a los hombres, a nuestros hermanos los jotos, desheredados y marginales como
nosotros. {Its amazing to think that we, as feminists and lesbians, have closed our hearts to men, to our
brothers the gays, disinherited and marginalizes like us} Being

the extreme crossers of

cultures, homosexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian,
Native American, Latino [Latin@] and with the queer in Italy, Australia and the rest of the planet.
We come from all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods. Our role is to

link people with each other- the Blacks with Jews with Indians with Asians with
whites with extraterrestrials. It is to transfer ideas and information from one
culture to another. Colored homosexuals have more knowledge of other cultures; have always been at
the forefront (although sometimes in the closet) of all liberation struggles in this country; have suffered more
injustices and have survived them despite all odds. Chicanos need to acknowledge the political and artistic

The mestizo and the

queer exist at this time and point on the evolutionary continuum for a purpose.
We are a blending that proves that all blood is intricately woven together, and
that we are spawned out of similar souls .
contributions of their queer. People, listen to what your joteria is saying.

The idea that women/other groups are more vulnerable than

others is incorrect and rooted in the strict gendered binary
that exists in current climate change science
Alaimo 09 (Stacy Alaimo is a Professor of English, Distinguished Teaching
Professor, and Director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Minor at the
University of Texas at Arlington, Insurgent Vulnerability and the Carbon Footprint of
Gender, KVINDER, KN & FORSKNING NR. 3-4 2009, Date Accessed: 7/12/16,
https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/KKF/article/view/44306/84085, sabz)
Although the hypermasculine consumerism that has dominated the U. S. in recent decades may seem a far cry from
transcendent scientific perspectives, they both detach themselves from vulnerability precisely the sort of
vulnerability that emerges from a serious consideration of how we are all immersed within, rather than floating

the globalizing visions of some of the discourse on climate

change impose a rather troubling binary between universal (masculine)
scientific knowledge and the marked vulnerability of impoverished women .
Vulnerability, has, in fact, become a key term in the risk assessments of climate change,
above, this world. Moreover,

where it enables researchers to identify the risk differentials of various groups and regions. Even as it has been
important for scholars and womens organizations to assess the ways in which women may be more vulnerable to

this emphasis on female vulnerability brings at least three

problems: 1) it results in a gendered ontology of feminine vulnerability as opposed
to the scientific (or masculinist) imperviousness discussed above; 2) it may provoke
a model of agency that poses nature as mere resource; and 3) it reinforces, even
essentializes gender dualisms in a way that undermines gender and sexual
diversity. Even as it is crucial to consider the specifically gendered forms of vulnerability that global climate
the effects of climate change,

change may exacerbate, a feminist and an LGBT-affirmative5a politics must avoid reinstalling rigid gender
differences and heteronormativity. Moreover, it seems commonsensical to ask that climate change advocacy be
environmentally-oriented, in the sense that it should promote the inestimable value, significance and force of
ecosystems and natural creatures not as mere resources for human use, but as truly valuable in and of
themselves.

2NC Ballot Framer

Queer ethics is an impact framing issue- the boundaries
between research and discipline enable state control over
bodies, reproducing their impacts.
SHEPHERD '12 (Laura Shepherd, teaches international politics at the University
of New South Wales, "Transdisciplinarity: The Politics and Practices of Knowledge
Production," The Disorder of Things, 11/23/2012
[thedisorderofthings.com/2012/11/23/transdisciplinarity-the-politics-and-practicesof-knowledge-production/])
The idea of a discipline (noun), in the academic sense, clearly derives from the verb:
both relate to establishing clear boundaries between what is right and good
(behaviour/research) and what is wrong and bad (behaviour/research); both have
ways to correct transgression when an uninitiated (or resistant) person strays. We
are trained to recognize the boundaries of our discipline and to stay within them;
historians dont usually apply for jobs as social workers just as creative writing
majors dont generally win contracts for the redesign of shopping centres. The
problem is that the boundaries between good and bad behaviours are a fiction. I
do not mean that there are no boundaries, or that there shouldnt be any
boundaries, but rather that we can always find the exception that confounds the
rule. If we begin to unpick the rule, however, it becomes very difficult to defend or
justify any point of principle at all, which generally makes people feel very
uncomfortable. So when I say that the concept of discipline (in academia) is a
fiction, I mean that it is something held to be true because it is expedient to do so.
It suits us to believe in disciplinary boundaries, just as it suits us to believe that
there are solid and unbreakable rules about what is good and bad (which is why
we have laws and so on). These boundaries that we establish between little pockets
of knowledge in the academy are a fiction. Transdisciplinarity, to my mind, is about
challenging the fiction of disciplines, about recognizing that knowledge isnt
something that can be carved up into neatly bounded parcels that we then work
either in (to produce disciplinary knowledge); at the intersection of (to produce
interdisciplinary knowledge); or with (to produce multi- or cross-disciplinary
knowledge). Transdisciplinary work subverts the very foundations of the concept of
the discipline, resisting and transcending the always arbitrary and fictive
boundaries between; borrowing from Foucault, I suggest that talk of disciplines
and disciplinary boundaries bring into being the categories themselves
and such categories are always normative. Michel Foucaults work on discipline
specifically leads me further away from the idea that disciplines are neutral and
administrative categories. Foucault takes the OED idea one step further, implicating
political economy in the concept of discipline. Discipline increases the forces of the
body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political
terms of obedience) As I understand it, Foucault argues that in order to be

functional in contemporary society, one must be disciplined. Without discipline,

we as subjects are of no use to the political elite, the institutions of
governmentality with which he was also concerned. We are disciplined
through primary education. In the Anglophone West, primary schools meet all of
the requirements of a disciplinary site of power: They are enclosed spaces (usually
situated in buildings with walls) and limited temporally (in that one doesnt usually
stay in primary school for ever); There is a hierarchy of observation (with the unruly
brand-new students at the very bottom and the Principal [or equivalent] at the top.
Everyone else fits somewhere in between: older students can be prefects or
monitors, junior teachers gratefully follow the guidance of more senior colleagues
and so on); There are clearly delineated assessment processes that act as a
form of normalizing judgement (and so we see statements along the lines of the
following: By the end of Key Stage 4 a student should be able to); Schools exist
to provide training (in social skills, writing skills, oral communication, numeracy,
motor skills both gross and fine and a multitude of others). Crucial to Foucaults
analysis is the idea that without this basic training we do not learn to be functional
(productive) members of society and if we are not functional and productive
members of society then we are a net cost. Put simply: the more obedient we
are, the more useful we are. Our utility is directly proportionate to the extent to
which we are disciplined. Foucault was, of course, writing about Anglophone
Western society as a whole, not about academia specifically. Its clear from the
above, however, that the disciplinary techniques evident in primary schools function
in exactly the same way in the academy. We enroll students by the dozen and we
teach them what it means to be an IR scholar. Students stay with us for three
years, maybe four, and during that time they have to submit hundreds of
assessments that have clearly delineated standards that students must attain in
order to pass. From the outset, we offer in our course guides clear indications of the
normalizing judgement employed in our courses: Upon successful completion of
this course, you should be able to. We chose textbooks carefully, mindful of the
students tendency to accept textbooks as the Source Of All Truth, and we teach the
basics of our discipline. We set exams, we write learning outcomes, we teach
students how to write evidence-based argument and to integrate theoretical
discussion with empirical analysis. We grant credit points to students that meet our
requirements; students eventually accrue enough credit points to graduate and they
do so. At no point, usually, do we encourage students to question why
theyre doing what theyre doing. Sometimes, in fact, such questioning is
positively discouraged seen as impertinent, troublesome, ill-disciplined. We
perpetuate the narrative that they are in university to receive training in their
discipline and that they will graduate as members of their discipline. Everything that
we do as scholar-educators eases this progression. We teach first years the
disciplinary basics (what is considered to be the appropriate object of study, what
are the various theoretical perspectives common to work on those objects of study,
how we can make claims to know something about those objects) and we reaffirm
those basics in every course thereafter. In IR, those disciplinary basics are usually
(in order) as follows: the state and related but much less significant non-state
actors; the theories of realism, liberalism and (maybe) the others (see also the
structure of the discipline as organized by the Great Debates); we make claims to

know on the basis of scientific enquiry. Truly transdisciplinary IR would, then,

subvert these basic truths. As noted above, I have historically been quite illdisciplined. I teach IR as a politics of the everyday; I ask students to locate
themselves in the practices of global politics. I recount the discipline as a series of
narratives and challenges to those narratives and my work is explicitly antipositivist. Does this mean I have transcended IR? Along with others, in my research
I have enacted methodologies drawn from other disciplines (Cultural Studies,
Anthropology, Literature), engaged with the world from a situated and
contextual perspective that I acknowledge and reflect upon, and made
fundamentally different types of knowledge claim than those permissible
within a scientistic framework. I dont think, though, that these transgressions
of disciplinary codes have enabled me to transcend IR. At the heart of every
discipline is its knowledge. Knowledge, as we know, is power; at the heart of
every discipline, then, is its politics of knowledge production . What counts
as knowledge? How can we evaluate the credibility of a claim to know? In Dance, we
can enact or perform and judge technique. In Mechanical Engineering, we can build
a bridge from A to B and judge its structural integrity. In Medicine, we can diagnose
a patient or carry out a surgery and judge accuracy of diagnosis or the success of
the surgical intervention. We have no such markers in Social Science; we
have only the strength of our arguments and we measure that strength by
its evidence base. We may disagree over what counts as evidence (does a
Presidential statement carry the same weight as an anonymous comment on a blog
somewhere?); over whether claims to know are universal or particular; over whether
knowledge is objective, subjective or constituted as knowledge through the specific
discursive conditions of its emergence. We might frame our knowledge
production as hypothesis testing or story telling and we might offer our
conclusions as one possible interpretation among many or as The Proven
Truth; whatever our framing, however, what we are framing is evidencebased. At the heart of the discipline of IR, there is a fetish for evidence, a
fetishisation of evidence-based argument. On this, implicitly or explicitly, IR scholars
agree. We want evidence in my own work, and we demand it from my students.
What is the basis of this claim?, I scribble in margins. You cant just assume that
this is the case. Whats your evidence?. Disciplines are constituted by their nonnegotiables. They are fictive, but given meaning through our continued invocation
of them as meaningful categories. They teach us how to behave in our intellectual
pursuits and, while disciplines allow vigorous debate over ontological assumptions,
epistemological positions and methodological choices, there are boundaries that
cannot be transgressed without corrupting the notion of disciplinary belonging.
Transdisciplinarity is a chimera. Once you are there, you are not-there, because to
transcend a discipline illuminates the arbitrary nature of all disciplinary boundaries
and the fiction that provides us with spaces between. Roland Bleiker wrote a
profound and brilliant paper years ago exhorting the discipline to forget IR theory.
Perhaps the only way to transcend the discipline is to forget IR . In IR, I think
that means problematizing our fetish for evidence and investigating how else we
might construct a contribution to knowledge, if not a claim to know: experiential
accounts; art; fiction writing; poetry. Perhaps if International Studies Quarterly
publishes a collection of poems and photographs that stand alone as a comment on

practices of global politics, then we will know we have forgotten, have transcended
IR.

We should queer US diplomatic history centralizing the

question of how power shapes and works through sex,
intimacy, and affective life is key to accurate studies of the
process of diplomatic engagement
Capo, et. al., 2016(Julio Cap, Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and
Commonwealth Honors College. Shanon Fitzpatrick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
History and Classical Studies at McGill University. Melani McAlister is Associate Professor of
American Studies, International Affairs, and Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington
University. David Minto is the Fund for Reunion-Cotsen Fellow in LGBT Studies at the Society of
Fellows in the Liberal Arts. They are co-authors of the colloquy Queering America and the World"
from Diplomatic History, Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World.
February 12th 2016.http://blog.oup.com/2016/02/queer-diplomatichistory/#sthash.qgEdrOJN.dpuf) // JRW

We had him down as a rent boy, remarked a bartender in Brussels about Salah
Abdeslam, one of the suspected jihadists in the recent Paris attacks. Several reports
noted that Abdeslam frequented gay bars and flirted with other men. These
revelations were difficult to slot into existing media narratives and stood in uneasy
relation to his posited allegiance with the group best known in the United States as
ISIS. After all, there have been numerous credible reports of ISISs violent
condemnation and abuse of queer people. In many instances, the penalty for
homosexuality has been death. Meanwhile, a select number of those who have fled
war-torn Syria to seek resettlement in the United States have identified as LGBTQ.
Their fears are many: the violence of a state takeover by ISIS, the oppressive regime
of President Bashar Assad, being found out as queer, and becoming stateless,
among others. But the process for resettlement is long, tenuous, and mired with red
tape meant to keep them from entering the United States, where expressions of
populist anti-Islamic sentiment (and pushback against gay marriage) are
mainstream news. Furthermore, refugee policies in North America favor
heteronormative families, while popular culture often pathologizes both migrant
sexualities and foreign regimes of LGBTQ oppression. A few months ago, we were
invited to contribute to colloquy in the journal Diplomatic History on the topic of
Queering America and the World. With all of these realities so pressing, it seems
like queering US diplomatic history in its various expansive manifestations shouldnt
be particularly hard. But it is. Although the reasons are many, one is particularly
significant: What do we mean by queer and queering? The field of queer studies has
tackled this question for over two decades. We are not reinventing the wheel, but
rather emphasizing what the United States and the World field has to contribute to
this conversation, and how it may be implicated in it. Of course we mean to insist on
a focus on queer peoplethe soldiers, state department officials, transnational
activists, aid workers, merchants, artists, and those, like Ugandans targeted by
Christian leaders, who find themselves under the shadow of US influence. At times,
this includes those who identify, or are identified, as queer, as well as those whose
lives and work are shaped by that reality. Perhaps they are vulnerable to attack:

roughed up, tortured, or fired from work and harassed at home. Perhaps, even at
the same time, they are involved in sexual rights movements, protests, and the
creation of new domestic and international politics. All the while, queer perspectives
also acknowledge the kinships, passions, and playful and sexy encounters
oftentimes jumbled togetherthat lead to new understandings in the United States
and across borders. When satirists send dildos to Oregon militias or use Photoshop
to superimpose them on terrorist or GOP-wielded AK-47s we are treated to a
different vision of US militancy. But beyond such mockery, imperialist and foreign
affairs have long been loaded with tropes and practices of seduction, intimacy,
dominance, and penetration, as well as binary models of gendered power. Whether
were talking about the secrets shared by spies, the partnerships between
statesmen and women, or the transnational bonds linking gay activists, we aim to
take the relationships part of special relationships seriously. In the end, we also
want queering the United States in the World to mean asking hard questions about
the archive, about how stories are told and meanings are stabilized. It isnt enough
to talk about sex, although we want that too. We imagine also asking about what
kinds of narratives the archives allow us to tell, and what is gained by viewing them
askew, newly, or in a way that is off the straight and narrow path. The richness of
queer life, after all, rarely finds reflection in official records, even when
they speak strongly to its probing and regulation . Reversing that dynamic
and queerly interrogating our source base aligns us to the important work of many
others unwilling to be shaped by the priorities and orientations of historys
victors. Some might fear that moves to queer the field of the United States and the
World may trivialize its work, but we think the opposite: queerness is and should be
everywhere, including queer people, and sexual politics, and methods of thinking
queerly. Its urgent to examine how power, including manifestations such as settler
colonialism and consumer capitalism, both shapes and works through sex, intimacy,
and affective life. But queering, while informed by political needs in the present,
also helps us understand many historical events and processes that continue to
exert tremendous effects in the world. Recent stories from Europe and the Middle
East only remind us of that longer history. Like earlier revelations about US torture,
they reveal sexualitys complex imbrication with transnational circulations and
geopolitical affairs, including US-sponsored wars and their aftermaths. Like any
intervention in a scholarly field, the practices of queering the history of US foreign
relations will evolve as they are tested and reoriented. And we have to remain
vigilant to ensure that in queering the study of the United States and the World we
dont court ahistorical thinking about what queerness means or looks like, or
encourage forms of US exceptionalism. Yet it is exciting to imagine how US
diplomatic historians skills and strengthsincluding their attention to international
relations, creative use of multi-sited archives, and interest in changing power
relations between people and nationsmight enhance ongoing processes of
queering happening in other subfields and disciplines. Our colloquy points to
keywords, research questions, and methodologies through which queering promises
to provide fresh impetus and complexity, even as it acknowledges that the bounds
and definitions of the term queer, much like the fates of many LGBTQ refugees
and activist projects, remain in flux.

Impacts

Diplomacy
The aff redeploys the rhetoric of the West as a savior to the
underdeveloped nations that causes necropolitical violence
and makes diplomatic engagement unattainable
Weber 16 Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex
[Cynthia Weber, 2016, Queer International Relations Sovereignty, Sexuality and the
Will to Knowledge, pgs 49-52, Oxford University Press] AMarb
The figure of the underdeveloped is a relatively recent arrival to international
relation theory and practice. The underdeveloped was incited in postWorld War II
popular and institutional discourse as a potentially threatening figure emerging out
of crumbling Western colonial empires. From a Western perspective, the underdeveloped
could threaten the West if he were to denounce his ties to his former colonizers
and align himself instead with the newly emerging Soviet bloc .2 This thinking placed the
underdeveloped at the crossroads of a choice between global capitalism and global communism, whichif made

To
woo the underdeveloped away from communism was to maintain him within the
Western capitalist bloc; the underdeveloped was stabilized in international relation
theory and practice as a specific problem that the Western bloc of sovereign states
urgently had to address. This was done by figuring the underdeveloped as socially,
psychologically, economically, and politically primitive through modernization and
development theory, the latest manifestation of a Great Dichotomy between more primitive and more
incorrectlycould imperil Western international order and throw international politics into dangerous anarchy.

advanced societies (Huntington 1971, 285). Borrowing primarily from the structural-functionalist evolutionary

the stages of growth evolutionary economic analysis of

comparative and international relation theorists created systems
theories (Easton 1957; 1967) and development theories (Almond and Powell 1966) that
stabilized the underdeveloped as a primitive ignorant species-life whose political
socialization and political development required Western guidance. This guidance
invariably recommended implanting the underdeveloped with a desire for the right
kind of development and then placing him on a civilizing course from decadence to
decency that mapped exactly to a political and economic progression from
irrational, local tribalism toward modern Western capitalism and (usually) political
liberalism (exceptionally, see Huntington 1969). In this way, The bridge across the Great Dichotomy between
sociology ofTalcott Parsons (1966) and
Walt Rostow (1960),

modern and traditional societies [became] the Grand Process of Modernization (Huntington 1971, 288). At the

the modernization and development process identified the undevelopable

as those who would not or could not achieve Western-style development and who
were accordingly cast as pure threats to Western global security. By adapting the Great
Dichotomy to international political theorizing, comparative and international relation theorists
stabilized all those understandings found in the Great Dichotomy and refined them
for political analysis and public policy. Their sovereign man and his opposite were
precisely those of the Great Dichotomycivilized, rational, modern, often imperial,
presumptively Christian and always developed man in his singular, ahistorical abstraction opposed to
potentially dangerous, plural, uncivilized (or uncivilizable), irrational, traditional
underdeveloped or undevelopable man mired in (while often excluded from modern)
history. These theorists organized these figures into an order-versus-anarchy dichotomy that hierarchized
same time,

developed over underdeveloped and undevelopable populations and territories and designated developed

populations and states as a form of Western sovereign man who should be aspired to by underdeveloped
postcolonial populations as the foundation of their newly emerging sovereign nation-states. They located these
figures within the linear, progressive logic of modernization, albeit at different moments (the beginning of the
modernization process for the underdeveloped; not a part of the modernization process for the undevelopable)
and in different geographic locations (the non-West or the South vs. the West or the North). And they
understood the process of modernization as a mechanism for implanting a desire for capitalist development in
underdeveloped populations and newly emerging sovereign nation-states, as a way to solve the Western blocs

the underdeveloped and the

undevelopable were regimented in a diverse array of foreign policies. US foreign policies
offer some examples. President Harry Trumans policies, which encouraged modernization as a
function of nation building as a way of containing communism while avoiding
direct wars (Merrill 2006), and President Kennedys establishment of the Peace Corps
(Almond 1970a, 23) are but two illustrations. Such policies were often less focused on having the
underdeveloped much less the undevelopable achieve the end goal of development than they
were with maintaining the underdeveloped and the undevelopable in
systems of biopolitical surveillance, administration, management, and constant
correction and securitization, first in support of and supported by a globalized
liberalism and later by a globalized neoliberalism (Doty 1996;Duffield 2007). For the
undevelopable, the biopolitical management of life gave way to the necropolitical
management of death (Mbembe 2003), since the undevelopable not only could not
be assimilated through the development process, but constituted a pure threat to
the development process itself. Sometimes this occurred directly through violent wars
(in Korea and Vietnam, for example); other times it occurred through the defensive
containment of dangerous difference. For example, before he became secretary of state, Henry
Kissinger claimed, We must construct an international order before a crisis
imposes it as a necessity (1966, 529). This claim is rooted in Kissingers observation that the
problem of the underdeveloped as a global security issue. Finally,

instability of the contemporary world order may have at its core a philosophical schism between the West and
the new countries, which have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost

making Western-style development and its

accompanying domestic political structures and international diplomacy
unattainable (also see discussion in Said 1978, 4647). As secretary of state, Kissinger acted on this claim to
completely internal to the observer (1966, 528),

oppose revolutionary states and their prophetic leaders in Vietnam (1966). Through each of these sometimes

modernization became a securitizing system of management

and rule to be imposed by the developed on the underdeveloped and the
undevelopable to tame or to destroy their dangerous anarchy thatif left
unmonitored, unmanaged, and unmodernizedthreated Western capitalist states
and Western civilizational order itself (Doty 1996).
very different foreign policies,

Overkill
The impact is overkill- this goes beyond bodily killing to
include the erasure of queers from past, present, and future.
Stanley, fellow in departments of Communication and Critical Gender Studies,
2011, [Eric A. Stanley, Presidents Postdoctoral fellow in the departments of Communication and Critical
Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Along with Chris Vargas, Eric directed the
films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers(2013). A co\editor of the anthology Captive Genders: Trans
Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) which won the Prevention for a Safe Society award
and was recently named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, Erics other writing can be found in the
journals Social Text, American Quarterly, and Women and Performance as well as in numerous collections, Near
Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture, http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/29/2_107/1.abstract,
2011] ED

Overkill is a term used to indicate such excessive violence that it pushes a

body beyond death. Overkill is often determined by the postmortem removal of
body parts, as with the partial decapitation in the case of Lauryn Paige and the
dissection of Rashawn Brazell. The temporality of violence, the biological time when
the heart stops pushing and pulling blood, yet the killing is not finished, suggests
the aim is not simply the end of a specific life, but the ending of all queer life. This
is the time of queer death, when the utility of violence gives way to the pleasure in
the others mortality. If queers, along with others, approximate nothing, then the
task of ending, of killing, that which is nothing must go beyond normative times of
life and death. In other words, if Lauryn was dead after the first few stab wounds to
the throat, then what do the remaining fifty wounds signify? The legal theory that is
offered to nullify the practice of overkill often functions under the name of the
trans- or gay-panic defense. Both of these defense strategies argue that the
murderer became so enraged after the discovery of either genitalia or someones
sexuality they were forced to protect themselves from the threat of queerness.
Estanislao Martinez of Fresno, California, used the trans-panic defense and received
a four-year prison sentence after admittedly stabbing J. Robles, a Latina
transwoman, at least twenty times with a pair of scissors. Importantly, this defense
is often used, as in the cases of Robles and Paige, after the murderer has engaged
in some kind of sex with the victim. The logic of the trans-panic defense as an
explanation for overkill, in its gory semiotics, offers us a way of understanding
queers as the nothing of Mbembes query. Overkill names the technologies
necessary to do away with that which is already gone. Queers then are the
specters of life whose threat is so unimaginable that one is forced, not
simply to murder, but to push them backward out of time, out of History,
and into that which comes before.27 In thinking the overkill of Paige and
Brazell, I return to Mbembes query, But what does it mean to do violence to what
is nothing?28 This question in its elegant brutality repeats with each case I offer.
By resituating this question in the positive, the something that is more often than
not translated as the human is made to appear. Of interest here, the category of
the human assumes generality, yet can only be activated through the Social Text
Published by Duke University Press 10 Stanley Near Life, Queer Death Ahuja

Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar specificity of historical and politically located
intersection. To this end, the human, the something of this query, within the
context of the liberal democracy, names rights-bearing subjects, or those who can
stand as subjects before the law. The human, then, makes the nothing not only
possible but necessary. Following this logic, the work of death, of the death that is
already nothing, not quite human, binds the categorical (mis)recognition of
humanity. The human, then, resides in the space of life and under the domain of
rights, whereas the queer inhabits the place of compromised personhood and the
zone of death. As perpetual and axiomatic threat to the human, the queer is the
negated double of the subject of liberal democracy. Understanding the nothing as
the unavoidable shadow of the human serves to counter the arguments that
suggest overkill and antiqueer violence at large are a pathological break and that
the severe nature of these killings signals something extreme. In contrast,
overkill is precisely not outside of, but is that which constitutes liberal
democracy as such. Overkill then is the proper expression to the riddle of the
queer nothingness. Put another way, the spectacular material-semiotics of overkill
should not be read as (only) individual pathology; these vicious acts must indict
the very social worlds of which they are ambassadors. Overkill is what it
means, what it must mean, to do violence to what is nothing

Neoliberalism
The neoliberal order necessitates violence against bodies
constructed as deviant because they fall outside the norms of
The Nuclear Family
Hansel 11
(April, Nora, Wesleyan University Degree for Bachelor of Arts with Departmental
Honors in American Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies,Rethinking
Relations: Queer Intimacies and Practices of Care
http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1621&context=etd_hon_theses - KSA)
The previous chapter outlined the historical production of the normative nuclear
family to demonstrate how The Family works hand in hand with the state and with
capitalism to perpetuate ruling class domination and hegemony. The Family
operates as an ideology because it indoctrinates subjects with specific ideas and
representations through which to interpret, articulate, and experience interpersonal
relations. In this case, the specific ideology is one of relatedness, of what a
relationship is, of who family members are, and of the role of a family in an
individuals life. As queer studies after Butler has established, compulsory gender
normativity is an ideology that constructs binary gender roles as natural so as to
violently stigmatize and police subjects whose genders to not easily cohere to such
a binary. While the ideology of gender normativity is in part produced and reinforced
through normative kinship and relationship structures, the ideology of The Family
must be afforded its own analysis. The ISA of The Family constitutes
heteronormative notions of kinship and relationship structures and obscures the
ultimately performative and constructed existence of social, sexual, and intimate
relations. It is also, as I discussed in the last chapter, neoliberal. The neoliberal
global economy both produces and capitalizes on difference so that more consumer
markets and production mechanisms can be developed (Harvey 2007: 20). This
means that a single family form is not only not possible in modern 32 day
capitalism, it is also not desirable. However, it is still in the service of neoliberal
capitalism to punish and police difference constructed as deviance because social
hierarchies justified through rhetoric of the rational individual are necessary for
exploitation. Thus, while a singular family form is not beneficial in practice to a state
of neoliberal capitalism, it is beneficial as ideology. Neoliberalism, then, is central to
The Family as a regulating ideology because, as an idealized image to strive for, it
serves as a justification for social inequalities. Neoliberalism not only constructs the
subject as always already rational, but it also constructs rationality itself so that
certain behaviors or modes of existence are understood as inherent and natural.
Neoliberal rationality is one whose point of reference is no longer some pre-given
human nature, but an artificially created form of behavior and, as an ideology, it
endeavors to create a social reality that it suggests already exists (Lemke 2001:
199, 202). It then violently reinforces and polices such social rationality. The Family
and its ideology is one site that this is materialized. As an artificially created form

of behavior, domestic long-term monogamy and the white nuclear family have
become engrained in U.S. cultural consciousness as a predetermined given of
human existence and social reality, effectively guaranteeing the reproduction of the
exploitative conditions necessary for late capitalism. The attribution of systemic
oppression to peoples failure to conform to white middle-class notions of the proper
nuclear family form serves both to disguise the root causes of oppression as well as
to further reproduce the nuclear family as normative in opposition to deviant others.
Since the function of ideology is to 33 reproduce itself as natural by disguising
material reality, it should come as no surprise that while family support policies in
the United States are the weakest in the industrial world, no society has yet to come
close to our expenditure of politicized rhetoric over family crisis (Stacey 1996: 47).
In this case, the ideology of the normative nuclear family is reproduced through its
construction of failed families as the cause of poverty, while further reproducing
such oppression through the construction of the nuclear family as normative and
natural. Neoliberal ideology of The Family blames systemic inequalities such as
poverty and racism on the unruly families of poor people and people of color, thus
reproducing white middle-class values as normative and natural. It constructs the
citizen subject as one who makes rational choices so as to pathologize oppression
and construct poor people, people of color, and queers (and many others) as
deviants responsible for their own desubjugation. Thus, the production of the white
middle-class nuclear family as normative and natural operates as ideology because
it has the meaning making power to construct any other kinship form as deviant
pathological other and, consequently, to blame institutional inequalities on such
families failures to reproduce monogamy, domesticity, private property, and
consumption Like all dominant state ideologies, The Family (and neoliberalism) is
intricately connected to the ideology of heteronormativity. Heteronormativity
constructs the heterosexual and heterogendered order of society as privileged and
natural: heterosexual culture [has the] exclusive ability to interpret itself as
society (Warner 1993: xxi) because it controls and determines those relations of
power that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth (Butler
2004: 57). 34 Heteronormativity constructs certain modes of being as essential and
normal: binary gender (woman/man), binary sex (male/female), binary sexuality
(homosexual/heterosexual), and binary relationship types (friend/lover or
erotic/nonerotic) produce subjects whose identities do not fit nicely into these
binaries as deviant pervert others. It is through the constructionand the violent
policingof these others, that heteronormativity is able to reproduce itself. For
example, in opposition to gender normativity, people whose genders do not easily
fit into the categories of man or woman are constructed as pathological deviants
or impossible humans. In the same way, relations of care or intimacy that do not
easily fit into the organizing logic of kinship and relationship normativity are
produced as invalid and punished in discursive as well as material ways. The Family
is a heteronormative ideology because it constructs certain kinship forms and
specific relationship structures, modes of care, and practices of affect as privileged
and natural while, at the same time, marking forms of intimacy that do not cohere
according to the dominant lexicon as deviant or impossible others.

Under capitalist structures the Nuclear family is constantly

reproduced as the norm that overshawdows queerness
Hansel 11
(April, Nora, Wesleyan University Degree for Bachelor of Arts with
Departmental Honors in American Studies and Feminist, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies,Rethinking Relations: Queer Intimacies and Practices
of Care http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1621&context=etd_hon_theses - KSA)
The Family is reproducedits normativities sustainednot merely through
consumption, but through specific consumption practices in which The Family as a
commodity is what is consumed. As distinct from industrial capitalism and the
transitional 1950s and 1960s, in late capitalism of the post-1980s, the structural
opposition between production and social reproduction has collapsed (Lowe
1995: 127). The reproductive labor necessary for sustaining the private sphere of
the 5 This is not to say that every subject in the U.S. is of the capitalist consumer
class but that the idealized normative subject is constructed as such and that this is
the role of the U.S. in global economic relations. 25 home and family can no longer
be understood as distinct from the public sphere of labor relations. In previous eras,
this public/private binary and the opposition between familial life and work life that
it engendered worked to mutually constitute the normative nuclear family as site of
emotional affect in opposition to the harsh realities of capitalism. This obscured the
real conditions of exploitation inherent in capitalism. While this ideology still
remains, the collapse of such binaries means that the social reproduction (still)
necessary for capitalism has itself been commodified (Lowe 1995: 92). The Family is
a unit of consumption not only because it is made to consume commodities, but
also because these commodities are consumed through reproductive labor. The
Family is now sustained and made to exist through consuming commodities. As
Lowe argues, commodified goods and services for natal production, health care,
child- and preschool care, urban/suburban socialization, and formal education and
training have almost totally replaced the non-exchangist socialreproduction
practices formerly provided by household, kin, and local community (Lowe 1995:
92). The commoditization of reproductive labor demonstrates how The Family is
produced in the current era of global neoliberal capitalism: the commoditization and
privatization of social services characteristic of neoliberalism (such as pre-schools)
combines with the increased global consumption of household goods. In consuming
goods and services tied to reproductive labor, the normative nuclear family and its
ideals of intimacy, monogamy, and white suburbia is also consumed. Through
media, advertising, and the circulations of images and signs, the ideology of The
Family is marketed, consumed, and reproduced as normative and 26 natural. At the
same time, through the goods consumed and the privatization of social
reproduction, The Family as normative entity is effectively commodified.

We must question the norms that go into interpersonal

relations that have allowed for the construction of the nuclear
family instead we must take a queer approach towards social
relations to redefine notions of intelligibility
Hansel 11
(April, Nora, Wesleyan University Degree for Bachelor of Arts with
Departmental Honors in American Studies and Feminist, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies,Rethinking Relations: Queer Intimacies and Practices
of Care http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1621&context=etd_hon_theses - KSA)
While ideology functions to obscure the processes through which desire is manifest,
subjective experiences of social reality and interpersonal relations are constituted
through contextually contingent and symbolically significant meaning making
processes. Heteronormativity constructs certain bodies, life styles, and identities as
privileged, proper, and pure in opposition to those constructed as deviant,
impossible, and others (Warner 1993: xxi). This system pervades all of social
reality so that interpersonal relations and the social organization of contact are
produced through and policed by their relation to normative meaning making
processes of signification. Fundamentally constitutive of subjectivity, social relations
are important sites for the reproduction and consolidation of processes of
normativity, privilege, and power. Subjects consistently make agentic decisions
about the means 3 and modes of contact they have with others. These decisions are
always already imbued with normative meanings, yet social interaction does not
necessarily have to reproduce normativity on its own termsand in a sense, it
never quite does. In rethinking and reorienting the normative logic that organizes
social relations and in recognizing that engaging with an other does not necessarily
follow easy codes of signification, a vital aspect of heteronormativity is challenged.
This thesis is a discussion of the normative values and meanings that organize and
produce social interaction and forms of relatedness. My purpose is twofold: to
discuss the ways that socio-historical, political, and economic processes have
produced hegemony around family, relationships, and social lifestyles. And to argue
that the meanings that inform this hegemony can be exploited and reworked so as
to foster a social reality not bound and gagged by normative social codes. This
thesis asks: what would it mean to interact queerly? The nuclear family comprised
of two married adults with the children they produce, who reside, consume in, and
produce outside of a common domestic unit (understood as home) is a material
manifestation of neoliberal capitalist and antifeminist values (among others) aimed
at social control, inequality, and an unquestioned reproduction of the
heteronormative order. Social hegemony structures how and with whom we relate
and what our relations mean. As an institution of heteronormativity, the nuclear
family has developed through socio-historical material processes and has
consolidated as both privileged and natural the norms governing interpersonal
relations. Lifestyle normativities of monogamy, private property, whiteness,
middleclass aspiration, and consumer nationalist citizenship are upheld 4 and

reproduced through subjects unquestioned adherence to the nuclear family and

normative romantic relationship. The development of the nuclear family as
heteronormative institution with the meaning making power to produce and police
subjectivity is the subject of chapter one. The domestic long-term monogamous
relationshipthe basis of the nuclear familyhas become the compulsory way to
organize ones socio-sexual and affective processes of care. Its organizing logic of
futurity, commitment, sexual fidelity, and affect has produced the heteronormative
domestic relationship as the privileged and privatized site of intimacy and social, as
well as material, reproduction. Docile citizen subjects are produced and policed
through the codes that regulate their social interactions. The hegemonic
organization of social interaction is maintained by binary constructions of meaning,
including but not limited to erotic/non-erotic, friendship/kinship, friend/lover,
physical/emotional, self/other, in-love/love, and sex/gender. Because institutions of
social reproduction are coupled to the forms of hetero culture, these binaries and
other normative processes of signification not only police but fundamentally
produce subjective desires for and experiences of interpersonal relations (Berlant
and Warner 1998: 561). The heteronormative domestic monogamous relationship as
a privileged and compulsory mode of organizing interpersonal life and its meaning
making processes is the subject of chapter two. Queer politics and practices refuse
and resignify categories and signifiers of normativity that construct certain bodies
and lives as deviant others through and in opposition to those privileged as
natural and pure. Queering, as a process, is about 5 naming and resisting
heteronormative demarcations of intelligibility, of who and what counts as
personhood. Because subjects are necessarily produced and materialized in relation
to normative meaning making processes, it is not possible to simply escape such
violent systems of signification (Butler 1993: 241). Rather, queer politics finds
resistance in subverting and exploiting normative values and meanings. It is a
privileging and proliferation of those bodies, lives, and identities constructed as
incoherent through normative processes of signification so as to call into question,
and offer a critical perspective on, the norms that confer intelligibility itself (Butler
2004: 73). Limited binaries of signification structure and fundamentally produce our
desires for and experiences of self and other. Understood as ontologically distinct,
the self and other are produced through strictly regulated codes of social
interaction. However, recognized as necessarily relational, subjectivity and social
interaction take on new meanings through expanding the values people attribute to
their social relations and the meanings assigned to any social, interpersonal, or
physical interaction that transcribes between subjects. The reproduction of
heteronormative society is dependent on the reproduction of normative kinship and
relationship forms. The social organization of intimacy as well as social and material
resources necessary for the reproduction of life is a system of normativity that
violently otherizes as it creates meaning. Because it is through social interaction
that both subjective reality and the material conditions constitutive of life are
reproduced, interpersonal relations and kinship constructions are important sites for
subverting and resignifying social processes in ways not conducive to normativitys
reproduction. As Judith Butler argues, the task at hand is to rework 6 and revise the
social organization of friendship, sexual contacts, and community to produce nonstate centered forms of support and alliance (Butler 2002: 21). This thesis extends

queer theory towards a consideration of interpersonal relations to advocate for a

politics that recognizes relationships as embodied experiences and performative
social constructs (Butler 1988: 521). To this end, I rely on the concept of queer
friendship as an analytical framework through which to think the queer potential of
social relations. That is, because friendship is non-dyadic, personal, and not rigidly
defined, it is useful for queering concepts of intimacy, commitment, affect, and care
that regulate and organize normative relationship forms and kinship structures. By
using friendship to expand and complicate the meaning making processes
constitutive of interpersonal relations, I will explore intimacy as a spectrum not
necessarily bound to normative social structures and relationships, but rather a
fluid, context-contingent interactive process. Thus, with an understanding of the
ways in which sociohistorical processes consolidate as natural and produce as
normative specific ways of organizing and experiencing interpersonal relations,
chapter three is a partial exploration of alternative kinship organizations and
relationship structures. It focuses on those queer others produced through
heteronormativity and the possibilities they present for reworking normative
conceptions of intimate and affective life. In it, I suggest a radical shift away from
coupledom as the focal point of intimacy (Jamieson 2005: 200) and I argue for
valuing a fuller range of practices of intimacy and care not held to normative
standards of kinship structures or relationship forms (Roseneil 2005: 251). By
recognizing the ways that non-normative intimacies explode binaries 7 of
friend/lover, erotic/non-erotic, and kinship/friendship, we might challenge the
hegemonic social order that reproduces heteronormativity. As what I call
counterprivates, 2 queer interpersonal relations and intimacies subversively rework
dominant meanings of commitment, care, and intimacy that structure and produce
normative social relations. Thus, chapter three is an attempt at multiplying the ways
in which queer organizations of social relations and practices of care can resist and
call attention to the violence of heteronormative constructions of intimacy and
relationship forms

Homonationalism
Statecraft as mancraft operates through the West projecting
itself as the gay rights holder in contrast to the
underdeveloped states that mistreat homosexuals that logic
justifies Homonationalism resulting in imperial agendas
Weber 16 Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex
[Cynthia Weber, 2016, Queer International Relations Sovereignty, Sexuality and the
Will to Knowledge, pgs 193-196, Oxford University Press] AMarb
the end of man is . . . the end of all these forms of individuality, of
subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego on which we build and from which we
have tried to build and to constitute knowledge. ...The West has tried to build the
figure of man in this way, and this image is in the process of disappearing. MICHEL
FOUCAULT (1971) The figure of manas capturable and containable within a singular
subjectivityis the fulcrum of modern Western knowledge production (also see Sedgwick
1993). My argument in this book is that Western statespeople and scholars have tried to build
the figure of man in this way (Foucault 1971), so he may function as a singular,
sexualized sovereign man who grounds a political community, on the one hand,
and a community of scholarly knowledge producers who typically render him as if
he were sexualized or sovereign on the other. By reading two broad and overlapping bodies of
scholarship together(transnational/global) queer studies and (queer) international relations I have
attempted to trace some of the dominant figurations of modern man as sovereign
man that are produced through attempts to answer the questions: What is
homosexuality? and Who is the homosexual? This will to knowledge about the
homosexual who is understood as that figure who somehow embodies
homosexuality, I argue here, is a feature of modern statecraft as modern mancraft.
Statecraft as mancraft expresses those attempts by a modern state (or other political
community) to present its sovereign foundationits sovereign manas if it were the
singular, preexisting, ahistorical ground that authorizes all sovereign decisions in its
political community. Rooted in Victorian understandings of the perverse homosexual, this will
to knowledge about the homosexual produced some surprising figurations of
primitive man who was opposed to modern sovereign man. These include the
underdeveloped and the undevelopable. Reading IR literatures with queer studies literatures, I
argue that these specific figurations of the homosexual appear in IR theories of
modernization and development and are reworked in contemporary immigration and security debates
as the unwanted im/migrant and the terrorist. In making these arguments, I point to the
specific (neo)colonial/(neo)imperialsexualized heteronormative orders of
international relations these various figurations help to make possible. While these
figurations of the perverse homosexual persist to this day, they are now accompanied by
increasingly dominant homonormative figurations of the normal homosexual. As
noted by many transnational/global queer and queer IR theorists, while the normal homosexual
especially as the gay rights holderis a figure who rightly has the right to claim
rights, this figure also makes possible (neo)colonialist/(neo)imperial
sexualized orders of international relations that divide the world into
normal states and pathological states depending upon how well these
What I mean by

states are deemed to be treating their homosexuals. Read together, the story these
chapters tell is one in which figurations of the homosexual emerge, stabilize, and
restabilize international theory and practice. In so doing, figurations of the
homosexual seem to be constantly proliferating. For example, contemporary
figurations of the perverse homosexual as the unwanted im/migrant and the al-Qaeda terrorist
now sit alongside ever-proliferating figurations of the normal homosexual as the
LGBT, as the gay patriot, and as that domesticated figure who forms half of the
gay married couple. This proliferation of figurations of the homosexual is occurring in spite of Foucaults
claim made more than forty years ago that the Western image of modern man upon whom these specific
figurations of the homosexual are variations of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego on which
we build and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge is in the process of disappearing

a
Western will to knowledge about the homosexual is not leading to the end of this
homosexual man. Yet this conclusion depends upon making two problematic moves. One is to disregard
Foucaults genealogical accounts of modern man, which demonstrate that man was never a singular
subjectivity. Man was never singularly sane or insane (Foucault 1965) or law-abiding or criminal (Foucault
1975) or heterosexual or homosexual (Foucault 1980). Rather, man had to be produced as if he
were singular so thatin Richard Ashleys termshe could function in modern statecraft as
modern mancraft as the subject who supports or opposes sovereign man. The second
(1971). This proliferation of figurations of the homosexual might suggest that Foucault was wrongthat

problematic move required to accept this conclusion is to consider the production of the homosexual

the figure of the

homosexual who appears in statecraft as mancraft is produced through two
logicsa traditional logic of the either/or and a queer logic of the and/or. The former
logic attempts to impose subjectivities as if they were singular to establish
singular sexualized orders of international relations; the latter attempts to
understand and critique this imposition, while appreciating the logics by which
subjectivities and orders are (produced as) plural in relation to sexes, to genders,
and to sexualities. The logic of the either/or is not blind to the fact that man takes plural forms. This is why
figurations of man proliferate . Yet these plural forms of man are always reducible to one singular,
independently from the specific logics that produce him. My argument in this book is that

generalizable man. My discussions of the perverse homosexual and the normal homosexual evidence this. What

these discussions demonstrate is that like any either/or figure, the homosexual in
modernist discourse is understood as a singular man (p.195) who takes plural forms.
Generally, the homosexual is that figure who is somehow associated with homosexuality. But that association
depends upon the specific historical and geopolitical arrangements of space, time, and desire that constitute

those regimes of knowledge in

either/or logics create a specific homosexual by containing every register of his
potential plurality within a binary logic that is constructive (but never deconstructive) of the
homosexual by adding together his either/or attributes to create him as a specific
kind of homosexual. Let me unpack this procedure. For example, sex, gender, sexuality,
reproduction, race, class, ability, authority, civilization, and so on are recast in
binary terms as male versus female, masculine versus feminine, heterosexuality versus
homosexuality, progressively reproductive versus dangerously (non)reproductive,
specific regimes of knowledge about specific homosexuals. And

white versus black, bourgeois versus proletariat, abled versus disabled, ruler versus ruled or unruly, modern versus

civilized versus uncivilized or uncivilizable, territorialized versus on the move. A specific

figuration of the homosexual is produced by adding up his unique binary qualities.
The underdeveloped, on this logic, equals the perversely homosexualized + the
feminized + the racially darkened + the primitivized + the ruled + the dangerously
reproductive + the civilizable + the territorialized. The al Qaeda terrorist equals the perversely
primitive,

homosexualized + the feminized + the racially darkened + the primitivized + the unruly + the dangerously

The LGBT equals

the normalized homosexual + the masculinized + the racially whitened + the
bourgeois + the progressively productive + the modern + the ruler + the civilized +
the territorialized. And on and on. As more categories of difference become (produced as if they were)
nonreproductive + the socially, politically, and religiously uncivilizable + the on the move.

known, regimes of knowledge about the homosexual proliferate, creating new possibilities to craft additional
figurations of the homosexual as or against sovereign man. This is how traditional statecraft as mancraft inserts
the singular homosexual in his plural forms into its intimate, national, regional, and international games of power

this is how modern man as

sovereign man proliferates and persists.
that effect sexualized orders of international relations. And

Homonationalism, as a global force, seeks to create docile

patriots for the sake of propping up modernity and its
imperial agenda
Weber 16 Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex
[Cynthia Weber, 2016, Chapter: The Normal Homosexual in International Relations
in Queer International Relations Sovereignty, Sexuality and the Will to Knowledge,
pgs. 107-115, Oxford University Press] AMarb
Human rights have long been a feature of Western liberal discourses, which confer
political rights onto those subjects whom a political community (often the state)
recognizes as human. Initially, the category of the human had been the sole
reserve of the white, male, usually Christian, bourgeois heterosexual. Throughout history,
this category has expanded to include women, children, religious minorities, and ethnic and racial
minorities because those whom Western discourses deem to be different have
engaged in lengthy political struggles first to be recognized as human and then to
be granted their rights as human members of a political community. This historical
struggle is a feature of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans*, queer, and intersexed individuals
and groups as well, which has been variously marked by key events in LGBTQI history like
Stonewall or the activities of ACT UP in the face of the HIV crisis as well as by the day-to-day institutionalized work
of organizations like Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and
numerous regional LGBTQI organizations (e.g., Gould 2009; Garcia and Parker 2006;Schulman 2013). It is in the

the gay rights holder emerges as a

politically contested figure in international relations. The gay rights holder is
incited as a problem before various Western states not only because he exposes the
illiberalism of liberalism, which Foucault persuasively argued is a necessary feature of both Kantian
philosophy (Foucault 1980) and biopolitics (Foucault 2004; and on necropolitics, see Mbembe 2003). The
gay rights holder also poses a dilemma for Western modernization and
development and/as security discourses that depend upon various inscriptions of
the underdeveloped, the undevelopable, the unwanted im/migrant,
and the terrorist as perverse homosexuals who in part underwrite
continuing (neo)liberal, (neo)imperial, and (neo)colonial sexualized
organizations of international relations. How, then, to solve this dilemma? How might Western states
context of this historical struggle for LGBTQI human rights that

include the homosexual as a normal human in their liberal political communities while simultaneously preserving

how might this move be accomplished so

that this new figuration of the normal homosexual continues to underwrite
various figurations of the homosexual as perverse? And

(neo)liberal sexualized organizations of international relations? Western statesand

particularly the United Stateshave attempted to solve this dilemma by making
four moves. First, they abandon same-sex sexual desires as the axis that
differentiates the normal sexualized subject from the perverse sexualized subject.
The universal figure of the perverse homosexual implanted with the perversions of homosexuality whom Foucault
described as emerging out of the Victorian era is abandoned. This figure is no longer necessarily considered to be
an alien strain (Foucault 1980, 4243) because his desire for same-sex relations is not necessarily seen as a

What matters in this discourse is whether or not his sexual desire is tied to
specific (neo)liberal values. This brings us to the second move. Western discourses rely upon
institutions and cultural understandings of what Lisa Duggan calls homonormativity to express
what these (neo)liberal values should be in the context of sexuality. As noted earlier,
Duggan describes homonormativity as a new neoliberal sexual politics that does
not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds
and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and
a privatized, depoliticized gay in domesticity and consumption (2003, 50). To unpack this
perversion.

claim, let me return to how Berlant and Warner describe heteronormativity. Heteronormativity refers to those
institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that

make [normative sexualities like]

coherentthat is, organized as a sexualitybut also privileged
(Berlant and Warner 1998, 548 n. 2). As we saw in chapters 3 and 4, heteronormativity divides
sexualized figures into normal and perverse. The normal sexualized figure is in or on
its way to maturing into a (usually) white, Christian, bourgeois, ableized,
cisgendered, heterosexual, reproductive family that functions as the
biological and social engine of reproduction for the Western state. Perverse
heterosexuality seem

not only

sexualized figures stray from how normal sexuality is modeled, matured, and reproduced. Among these perverse
figures is the perverse homosexual. Duggan argues that homonormativity expands the category of the normal
sexualized figure to include some figures who were previously understood by heteronormativity as sexually

To be properly attached to
neoliberalism means embracing neoliberal modalities of domesticity and
consumption (e.g., Edelman 2004; Ahmed 2010; Berlant 2011;Halberstam 2011; Muoz 1999; N. Smith 2015).
perverse so long as they are properly attached to neoliberalism.

Proper domesticity is modeled on the normalized reproductive family described above. This model of the family
simply expands under homonormativity to recognize that some homosexuals also mature into, model, and
reproduce normal domesticated familial relations on behalf of the neoliberal state. This is because these
homosexual families comprise two-parent monogamous couples who raise children together in ways that are
intended to support social/national/civilizational reproduction (Peterson 2014a; 2015). All that is different about
them is that the two parents are of the same sex. In every other way, they are a normal family because, as Karen

Duggan argues that being a normal family

includes having a proper attachment to neoliberal consumption. 2Proper
consumption is about engaging uncritically in the market as a private consumer ,
usually as part of or on behalf of the private family unit. This proper attachment means that any challenge to
neoliberal policies of fiscal austerity, privatization, market liberalization, and government
stabilization [that] are [the] pro-corporate capitalist guarantors of private property relations locally, nationally
and internationally are forfeited by same-sex individuals in the name of being (in) just
another normal family. Duggan argues that the normal homosexual in or maturing into
the normal neoliberal family repudiates this progressive left agendaan agenda
many nonconforming (because undomesticated and improperly consuming) queers have
historically embraced (see, for example, Muoz 2009; Halberstam 2011)because the normal
homosexual has been co-opted by the false promises of superficial neoliberal
multiculturalism (Duggan 2003, xx). Neoliberal multiculturalism is a form of equality disarticulated from
Zivi puts it, they embody repronormativity (2014).

material life and class politics to be won by definable minority groups like LGBTQIs (Duggan 2003, xx). Duggan
calls this type of equality Equality, Inc. For

it is a brand of equality that widens the realm of

acceptable homosexuality for some neoliberal homosexuals while simultaneously

remarking the boundary of unacceptable homosexuality at a range of what Duggan reads as
queer practices and queered figures3 that/who do not fit in with a conservative understanding
of domesticable sex, sexuality, consumption, and politics (Duggan 2003, chap. 3). In all of
these ways, homonormativity shifts the axis of perversion from same-sex sexual desires to desires around
neoliberal domesticity and consumption. The homosexual who shares these neoliberal desires, who organizes his
life around them, and who becomes depoliticized as a result of living in proper domesticity and consumption is no
longer perverse. What is perverse is a desire for a different political, economic, and social life that is incompatible

The 'new normal sexual subject in the new homonormativity, then,

is the homosexual whose desires for domesticity and consumption are the same as
those of the straight neoliberal subject. Together, these first two moves make a third move
with neoliberalism.

possible. This is the refiguration of the normal subject whoin Hannah Arendts termshas the right to have rights

This new normal subject is the multicultalized white(ned), ableized,

domesticated, entrepreneurial subject who is (re)productive in/for capitalism,
regardless of whether he is heterosexual or homosexual. By inscribing this particular figuration
of the homosexual as worthy of rights, homonormative discourses simultaneously figure
which homosexuals are unworthy of rightsracialized and disableized sexual,
social, psychological, economic, and political degenerates and deviants who
cannot or will not developmentally mature into this new normal sexual subject.
(1994).

What this means, then, is that figurations of the underdeveloped, the undevelopable, the unwanted im/migrant,
and the

terrorist persist as dangerous domestic and international forces to be

opposed, who are joined in this categorization as dangerous by a new variety of
deviants and degenerates the new homonormativity marks as perverse. By
identifying a new developmental trajectory for the normal homosexual, Western homonormative
discourses in particular reinscribe and indeed purify what it means to be modern for
individuals and for states (Puar 2010; also see Rahman 2014), as if Western populations indeed embodied
or were well on their way toward embodying this purified modernity (for critique, see Latour 1993).4 Queer studies

We were like
them, but have developed, they are like we were and have yet to develop (2002, 148).
scholar Neville Hoad sums up that spatialized, temporalized developmental trajectory like this:

This understanding of development consolidates a fourth move. This move now measures an individuals modernity
not against his development from a perverse homosexual into a normal heterosexual; rather, it measures his
modernity against that individuals desire for neoliberal domesticity and consumption, which, once embraced,

A states modernity is now

measured against its recognition and (where necessary) its protection of the
(potentially emerging) new normal homosexual as a full and equal member of
his political community who is part of a minority human population of human rights
holders. This reinscription of modernity has international consequences. For it
obligates enlightened Western states to defend this new normal sexualized
subject where he is oppressed, even though these states do so selectively in
practice (Rao 2014b; Wilkinson 2013; 2014). Transnational/global queer studies scholar Jasbir Puar refers to
as homonationalism this constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the
relationship between the state, capitalism and sexuality that produces what she calls
the human rights industrial complex (2013, 337, 338; also see Puar 2006; 2007). In very general
terms, homonationalism expresses a combination of homonormativity with
nationalism that figures good homosexuals who are worthy of the states
protection while preserving bad homosexuals as threats to the state (Puar 2007).5 All of
this functions through what Puar calls the human rights industrial complex, which continues to
proliferate Euro-American constructs of identity (not to mention the notion of a
sexual identity itself) that privilege identity politics, coming out, public visibility,
bestows on the new normal homosexual the right to have rights.

and legislative measures as the dominant barometers of social progress

(2013, 338).
On Puars reading, because this human rights industrial complex narrative of gay rights as human rights is a
narrative of progress for gay rights [that is] built on the back of racialized others, for whom such progress was once

these gay-friendly declarations by states

are also inherently homophobic (Puar 2013, 338; also see Agathangelou 2013; Weiss and Bosia 2013a;
Rao 2014b). In this context, Puars political project is to mobilize the analytic of
homonationalism as a deep critique of lesbian and gay liberal rights discourses and
how those rights discourses produce narratives of progress and modernity that
continue to accord some populations access to citizenshipcultural and legalat
the expense of the delimitation and expulsion of other populations (2013, 337; also see
achieved, but is now backsliding or has yet to arrive,

Butler 2008). Puar also mobilizes homonationalism to critique docile patriotism (Puar and Rai 2002) and gay
patriotism (Puar 2006; 2007)nationalist expressions of patriotism that bind straight and homosexual subjects
to homonormative nationalist state policies, be they the extension of gay rights as human rights or the combating

These homonationalist state policies function by

dividing primarily national populations into unpatriotic and patriotic. Unpatriotic subjects
of international terrorism, for example.

are those sometimes monstrous perverts whose illiberalism threatens the security of the state. In specific times and
places, they

might be figured as the underdeveloped, the undevelopable, the

unwanted im/migrant, or the terrorist(as we saw in chapters 3 and 4). In contrast,
straight and homosexual docile patriots are those properly domesticated, properly white or
whitened, neoliberal, consuming, familial national subjects who are called forth by antinational,
anti(neo)liberal racialized monsters like the homosexualized terrorist to enact
their own normalizationin the name of patriotism (Puar and Rai 2002, 126). In other words, it
is their patriotic opposition to unpatriotic threats to the nation/civilization that
hetero/homonormativized docile patriots embody. 6 Within this neoliberal geopolitical and
historical context that Puar describes, states like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel, for example,
cynically promote LGBT bodies as representative of their (vision of) modernity and democracy (Puar 2013, 338).
This type of cynical promotion of gay rights as human rights is what Puarfollowing a number of queer activist
calls pinkwashing.7 In the contexts Puar has examined in the most depth, the US-led War on Terror and the Israeli
occupation of Palestine, Pinkwashing works in part by tapping into the discursive and structural circuits produced
by U.S. and European crusades against the spectral threat of radical Islam or Islamo-fascism and is only one
more justification for imperial/racial/national violence within this long tradition of intimate rhetorics around victim
populations (Puar 2013, 338). Pinkwashing can also take the form of a kind of homointernationalism (Nath 2008).
Through homointernationalism, gay rights as human rights are promoted as global rights for all LGBT people by
Western states in particular. But the obligation to defend the LGBT is cynically called for by these states in relation
to the global South, even though Western states enforce these standards less stringently if at all in relation to
Northern states (e.g., in relation to Russia, see Wilkinson 2013; 2014) and even though Western states themselves
fail to measure up to the standards they impose upon the global South (Spade 2013).8 This has led

homointernationalism
is homocolonialist (Rahman 2014), because the Wests defense of gay rights as human
rights is a tool of empire (Rao 2012; see also Morgensen on settler homonationalism; Morgensen
transnational/global queer studies scholar Momin Rahman to claim that this type of

2011; 2012). As recent scholarship in queer IR and transnational/global queer studies demonstrates, there are
numerous ways to investigate local, national, and international relationships among various figurations of the gay
rights holder and the gay patriot and hetero/homonormativities9 and how they function in and in relation to
global homophobias (Weiss and Bosia 2013a). Among the most influential expressions of these relationships is
found in former US secretary of state Hilary Clintons Gay rights are human rights 2011 Human Rights Day speech.
Given the power of this address and the US power behind this address, I will analyze Clintons speech in some detail
to highlight how it can be read as illustrating the homonormative and homo(inter)nationalist moves discussed
above (also see Agathangelou 2013).10 It arguably does this by stabilizing one specific set of understandings of the
normal homosexual and the perverse homosexual in international relations to craft Clintons specific rendering of
the normal homosexual as that sovereign man whom the US deploys in its foreign policy to regiment a
homocolonialist (Rahman 2014) sexualized order of international relations. Before I launch into this analysis,
however, I want to offer two notes of caution. One has to do with the dangers of applying terms like
homonormativity and its spin-off term homonationalism as if they described universal, reified institutional and
structural arrangements. The second has to do with the dangers of assuming that (Western) calls for gay rights as
human rights are always made exclusively in support of a (neo)imperialism. First, like the institutions, structural
arrangements, and practical dispositions that compose heteronormativity, arrangements described as

homonormativity and homonationalism are also both geopolitically and historically specific as well as malleable.
This means that how they become intertwined with the homosexual is complex and distinctive in specific times
and places. Duggan, in particular, makes this case. For example, in her articulation of homonormativity, Duggan
takes pains to caution her readers against any universalist renderings of either capitalism or liberalism, two terms
upon which her notion of homonormativity depends. She does this by reminding her readers that capitalism has
never been a single coherent system. Liberalism has therefore morphed many times as well, and has contained
proliferating contradictions in indirect relationship to the historical contradictions of capitalism (2003, xxi).
Furthermore, Duggan explicitly states that the analysis of neoliberalism that generates her understanding of
homonormativity is historically specific. The neoliberalism she discusses developed primarily in the U.S., and
secondarily in Europe from the 1950s onward (2002, xixii), and she goes on to focus her analysis on neoliberalism
within the U.S. specifically (2007, xii) before explaining how a hegemonic United States institutionalized
neoliberalism in international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. Duggan also takes pains to remind her
readers that this US-led neoliberal hegemonic world order is in crisis, having gone from boom to bust over the past
four decades, suggesting that postneoliberalisms are or may be on the horizon (Duggan 20112012). In so doing,
she emphasizes the malleability of neoliberal institutions, understandings, and practical orientations. Likewise,
Duggan carefully details how her conceptualization of the new homonormativity arose in relation to her
consideration of a historically and geopolitically specific set of practices, how the International Gay Forums agenda
of gay equality illustrated what she called their new neoliberal sexual politics (2007, 50). While Duggan makes it
clear that this new neoliberal sexual politics is illustrative of what she calls Equality, Inc., her analysis is always
grounded in specific examples. Yet as homonormativity has been taken up and applied by some scholars and
activists, this geographical and historical specificity sometimes falls away, leaving us with universalized, reified
understandings of neoliberalism and homonormativity that seemingly apply in the same ways across time and
space. Similarly, Jasbir Puars related concept of homonationalism was developed to describe a very specific
historical issuehow the gay patriot as a biopolitical figure was opposed to the terrorist as a racialized

Puar has argued that

homonationalism is also an ongoing process, one that in some senses progresses
from the civil rights era and does not cohere only through 9/11 as a solitary
temporal moment (2013, 337). In this vein, Puar later extended her analysis of homonationalism to the
Israeli occupation of Palestine (e.g., 2010; also see Schulman 2012; Remkus Britt 2015), and others have
taken up homonationalism and its queer necropolitics as (if they were) global
phenomena (e.g., Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 2013a; 2013b; 2014; although exceptionally see Lind
necropolitical figure in the United States during the War on Terror. More recently,

and Keating 2013; Fitzgerald 2014).

Biopower
Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, 169)CJQ
This is a shift from prior definitions of sovereignty. Sovereignty as it is traditionally
theorized in International Relations bestows a formal equality on all states and
enables them to use violence and make war legitimately. We are still within the
terms of sovereign power, but RtoP is a way in which security is now also
articulated in biopolitical terms. Evans and Sahnoun write, at the heart of this
conceptual approach is a shift in thinking about the essence of sovereignty, from
control to responsibility (2002, 101). The reformulation of sovereignty as
responsibility casts sovereignty in biopolitical terms: no longer the power to take life
over a specific territory, sovereignty is a beneficent form of patriarchal power,
governing the population with its best interests in mind (Foucault 2007, 100, 129).
RtoP takes seriously the concept of human security, itself a critique of how the
narrow perception of security leaves out the most elementary and legitimate
concerns of ordinary people regarding security in their daily lives (ICISS 2001, 15).
Failing to protect citizens from hunger, disease, flooding, unemployment, and
environmental hazards are given as examples of human security issues that RtoP is
designed to address. Such phenomena take place not at the level of
individuals, but at the level of population. By recasting sovereignty as
responsibility, RtoP installs a biopolitical understanding of sovereignty as promoting
the lives of citizens as a population of organismspreventing mass violent deaths
and ensuring the proper circulation of basic necessities. However, the responsibility
to protect explicitly applies only to the four violations of genocide, war crimes,
ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanityinstances of calamities such as
HIV/AIDS, climate change, or natural disasters are explicitly considered to
undermine the consensus over the concept (UN General Assembly 2009, para. 10b).
RtoP is meant to protect against certain forms of violence but not others: it protects
against forms of widespread direct violence usually associated with wars or mass
atrocities, but not broader forms of structural violence, deprivation, or
precaritization.

Cis-Security
Their theorization of security and stability produces an
ontology of cisgender privilege as birthright of biological
gender, erasing trans scholarship and embodiment as a routine
theoretical maneuver.
Shepherd and Sjoberg 12
Laura J. Shepherd Laura J. Shepherd is an Associate Professor of International
Relations at the School of Social Sciences and International Studies, Faculty of Arts
and Social Sciences, at the University of New South Wales,..and Laura Sjoberg
University of Florida Department of Political Science JD Boston College, PhD in IR
USC trans- bodies in/of war(s): cisprivilege and contemporary security strategy
Feminist Review June 2012 google scholar
Feminist scholars have asked what assumptions about gender (and other markers of
identity, including but not limited to race, class, nationality and sexuality) are
necessary to make particular statements, policies and actions meaningful in
security discourses (see, inter alia, classic interventions by Tickner, 1992; Peterson,
1992a,b; Zalewski, 1995; and more recent overviews provided by Blanchard, 2003;
Sjoberg and Martin, 2010; Shepherd, 2010b). Looking at global politics, feminists
see that gender is necessary, conceptually, for understanding international
security, it is important in analysing causes and predicting outcomes, and it is
essential to thinking about solutions and promoting positive change in the security
realm (Sjoberg, 2009: 200). They have therefore argued that the performance of
gender is immanent in the performance of security and vice versa, and looking at
security without gender or gender without security necessarily renders both
concepts partial and analytically inadequate (Shepherd, 2008: 172).However, even
these nuanced accounts of the immanence of gender in global politics as a noun, a
verb and an organisational logic do not explicitly interrogate transgender and
genderqueer logics of security. In fact, frequently they focus on a
dichotomous or binary understanding of sex/gender to read gendered logics of
security. This is not to deride or dismiss the important and varied contributions of
these scholars, but rather to suggest a way in which we might contribute in this
article to the literature on which we draw, and in relation to which we wish to situate
ourselves. Feminist scholars of security have emphasised the analytical salience of
gender and, in doing so, raised questions about the possibility of security/ies of the
self, particularly in reference both to (corpo)realities of gendered violence (see, for
example, Bracewell, 2000; Hansen, 2001; Alison, 2007) and to the ontological
security of gender identity itself (see, for example, Browne, 2004; Shepherd, 2008;
MacKenzie, 2010). Opening to critical scrutiny, however, the practices through
which gender uncertainty is erased and gender certainty inscribed the practices
through which the ontological presumption of gender difference is maintained and
gender fluidity denied. Fallows scholars to develop different understandings of the

ways in which in/security is not only written on the body but is performative of
corporeality.

Normalized regimes of state security require the contemporary

projection of insecurity onto trans and genderqueer people:
unruly bodies which cannot be coded and managed by security
experts become risks to the nation, requiring the abjection
and expulsion of trans and genderqueer bodies. Sex and
gender are categories that serve to naturalize the fiction of
security by exposing those who cant conform to increasingly
intense insecurity.
Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, 114-115)CJQ
The airport security assemblage is site of the states investment in gathering
information and classifying bodies as part of a project of state building. David
Campbells book Writing Security (2000 [1992]) influentially argued that security is
a discursive practice through which states demarcate certain forms of life
as normal, healthy, civilized, and worthy, and others as abnormal, sick,
and barbaric. Contemporary security practices surrounding the body scanners are
an example of this practice by producing deviant, suspicious bodies through their
simultaneous objectification and dematerialization of bodies. Such bodies are the
biologized internal enemies against whom society must defend itself (Foucault
2003). The biometric practices of state surveillance, including body scanners, take
the body as the ultimate sign of truth. Margrit Shildrik reminds us that these
categories of safe bodies and unruly, monstrous bodies are unstable: monstrous
bodies after all, are disruptive; they refuse to stay in place and displace the
distinctions that show the border of the human subject (Shildrick 2002, 4).
Security is not so much about identifying deviant bodies, but about
producing deviant bodies that serve to define safe, healthy, and moral
bodies. In the transformation of bodies to digital images at the border,
deviant or unruly bodies are made to confess. This has the effect of
outing trans and genderqueer people and constituting them as potential threats in
the non-alignment of bodily morphology and gender presentation and/or the use of
prosthetics to create unnatural bodies. The airport security assemblage
becomes a site revealing the states investment in securing gender and
the conditions under which certain bodies can lead livable lives. The virtual
strip search of the body scanners is not experienced as virtual but rather affects
the experience of lived embodiment. The bodily experience of the airport security
assemblages undermines the distinction between a really existing body and a
virtual body, or a body of pure information. The experience of trans- and
genderqueer bodies shows more than how certain bodies are produced as

unruly or deviant; these deviant bodies show the instability of bodies as

signs of the truth of either sex or gender and refocus our attention on
how regimes of truth produce certain lives as intelligible and others as
unreal. The airport security assemblage is thus both a site for the production of
abject bodies of information and a site that reveals what is at stake in certain
understandings of the materiality or realness of bodies. Airport security
assemblages produce a narrative about bodies in which biological sex is immutable
and determined by the body, and is either one of two categories (M or F); while
gender might be socially constructed, it is produced in a predictable relation to sex
such that ones sexed embodiment matches ones gender identity and gender
presentation. A misalignment between gender presentation and sexed
embodiment that may be revealed by a body scanner therefore represents a
security threat to trans- individuals, as would a gender presentation that does
not match the sex listed on a persons government ID, required by Secure Flight.
The National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) has reported that one in five
transgender travelers have felt harassed by TSA agents, and has
documented stories of transgender people who were detained for several hours
because their bodies did not conform with the agents expectations in either body
scan images or pat-downs. Transpeople have been subject to detention, strip
searches, humiliating questions, and reviews by bomb squads because their bodies
do not match the expectations of security personnel (Keisling, Kendall, and Davis
2010; Bohling 2014; Sjoberg 2014, 8590; Coyote 2010, Costello 2012). The airport
security assemblage orders bodies according to a normative sex/gender regime that
casts trans-, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming people as threats
and unruly bodies. The point here is not only that a relatively small number of
people are discriminated against in airport security assemblages, although this is
certainly true, and it is undoubtedly true regarding other non-normative bodies as
well, such as the racialized bodies or the bodies of people with disabilities. What is
also at stake is how materiality and language are understood in terms of
securing bodies. In a regime in which the materiality of ones body is supposed to
be the ultimate sign of riskiness, or truthworthiness, the experience of trans- and
genderqueer people challenge the terms in which materiality is understood.

Cis security is a reification of the biopolitical principle of

necropolitics through which trans people must conceal their
transness through passing to be deemed worthy to live. Those
who fail are subject to microaggressions and violence which
culminate in erosion of life and systematic extermination.
Stryker 14
(Susan Stryker is associate professor of gender and womens studies and director of the Institute for
LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona and serves as general coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly. Her most recent publication is The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (coedited with Aren Z.
Aizura, 2013), winner of the 2013 Ruth Benedict Book Prize. Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 1,
Numbers 12 http://tsq.dukejournals.org/content/1/1-2/61.full.pdf. cVs)

The term biopolitics dates to the early twentieth century (Lemke 2011), but it is only in Michel Foucaults work from
the 1970s forward that the concept (sometimes denominated by him as biopower) begins to be considered a
constitutive aspect of governance within Eurocentric modernity (Foucault 1978, 1997, 2004). Biopolitics, generally
speaking, describes the calculus of costs and benefits through which the biological capacities of a population are
optimally managed for state or state-like ends. In its Foucauldian formulation, the term refers specifically to the
combination of disciplinary and excitatory practices aimed at each and every body, which results in the
somaticization by individuals of the bodily norms and ideals that regulate the entire population to which they
belong. In Foucauldian biopolitics, the individualizing and collectivizing poles of biopower are conjoined by the
domain of sexuality, by which Foucault means reproductive capacity as well as modes of subjective identification,
the expression of desire, and the pursuit of erotic pleasure. Sexuality, in this double sense of the biological
reproduction of new bodies that make up the body politic as well as the ensemble of techniques that produce
individualized subjectivities available for aggregation, supplies the capillary space of powers circulation throughout
the biopoliticized populus. To accept Foucaults account of sexualitys biopolitical function is to encounter a lacuna
in his theoretical oeuvre: the near-total absence of a gender analysis. This is perhaps unsurprising given the
anglophone roots of the gender concept, which was developed by the psychologist John Money and his colleagues
at Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s during their research on intersexuality, and which was only gradually
making its way into the humanities and social science departments of the English-speaking academy in the 1970s
when Foucault was delivering his first lectures on biopolitics in France (Germon 2009; Scott 1986).

Yet as an
account of how embodied subjects acquire behaviors and form particularized
identities and of how social organization relies upon the sometimes fixed,
sometimes flexible categorization of bodies with differing biological capacities,
gender as an analytical concept is commensurable with a Foucauldian perspective
on biopolitics. Gendering practices are inextricably enmeshed with sexuality. The
identity of the desiring subject and that of the object of desire are characterized by
gender. Gender difference undergirds the homo/hetero distinction. Gender
conventions code permissible and disallowed forms of erotic expression, and gender
stereotyping is strongly linked with practices of bodily normativization. Gender
subjectivizes individuals in such a manner that socially constructed categories of
personhood typically come to be experienced as innate and ontologically given. It is
a system filled with habits and traditions, underpinned by ideological, religious, and
scientific supports that all conspire to give bodies the appearance of a natural
inevitability, when in fact embodiment is a highly contingent and reconfigurable
artifice that coordinates a particular material body with a particular biopolitical
apparatus. Approached biopolitically, gender does not pertain primarily to questions
of representation that is, to forming correct or incorrect images of the alignment of a signifying sex (male
or female) with a signified social category (man or woman) or psychical disposition (masculine or feminine).

Gender, rather, is an apparatus within which all bodies are taken up, which creates
material effects through bureaucratic tracking that begins with birth, ends with
death, and traverses all manner of state-issued or state-sanctioned documentation
practices in between. It is thus an integral part of the mechanism through which
power settles a given population onto a given territory through a given set of
administrative structures and practices. Transgender phenomenaanything that
calls our attention to the contingency and unnaturalness of gender normativity
appear at the margins of the biopolitically operated-upon body, at those fleeting
and variable points at which particular bodies exceed or elude capture within the
gender apparatus when they defy the logic of the biopolitical calculus or present a
case that confounds an administrative rule or bureaucratic practice. Consequently,
transgender phenomena constantly flicker across the threshold of viability,
simultaneously courting danger and attracting death even as they promise life in
new forms, along new pathways. Bodies that manifest such transgender
phenomena have typically become vulnerable to a panoply of structural oppressions

and repressions; they are more likely to be passed over for social investment and
less likely to be cultivated as useful for the body politic. They experience
microaggressions that cumulatively erode the quality of psychical life, and they
also encounter major forms of violence, including deliberate killing. And yet,
increasingly, some transgender subjects who previously might have been marked for death now find themselves
hailed as legally recognized, protected, depathologized, rights-bearing minority subjects within biopolitical
strategies for the cultivation of life from which they previously had been excluded, often to the point of death. The
criterion for this bifurcation of the population along the border of life and death is race, which Foucault (1997: 254)
describes as the basic mechanism of power. Certainly,

trans bodies of color (particularly if they

are poor and feminized) are disproportionately targeted by the death-dealing,
necropolitical operations of biopower (Mbembe 2003), while bodies deemed white are more likely
to experience viability. However, Foucault critically disarticulates race and color to enable a theorization of racism
capable of doing more than pointing out that people of color tend to suffer more than whites, and this theorization
is particularly useful for transgender studies. Foucault (1997: 80) understands racism as an artificial biologization of
social, cultural, linguistic, or economic differences within a supposedly biologically monist population that is, as a
selective evolutionary process of speciation through which new kinds of social entities that are considered

The racism through which biopower operates can

be described as a somatechnical assemblage (Pugliese and Stryker 2009: 23) that brings
together a hierarchizing schema of values and preferences , sets of lifeaffirming or deathbiologically distinct from one another emerge.

making techniques that enact those values and preferences, and a variety of phenotypic, morphological, or

upon which those techniques

operate. Race and racism are therefore broadly understood as the enmeshment of
hierarchizing cultural values with hierarchized biological attributes to produce
distinct categories of beings who are divided into those rendered vulnerable to
premature death and those nurtured to maximize their life. Race thus construed
conceptually underpins the biopolitical division not only of color from whiteness but
of men from women, of queers from straights, of abled-bodied from disabled, and of cisgender from
transgender, to the extent that a body on one side of any of these binaries is
conceptualized as biologically distinct from a body on the other side. The caesura, or
genitative qualities and characteristics associated with individual bodies,

break, that race introduces into the body politic allows the population to be segmented and selected, enhanced or
eliminated, according to biological notions of heritability, degeneracy, foreignness, differentness, or unassimilability

Contemporary transgender identities,

populations, and sociopolitical movements exemplify this process of biopolitical
racialization. Biopower constitutes transgender as a category that it surveils, splits,
and sorts in order to move some trans bodies toward emergent possibilities for
transgender normativity and citizenship while consigning others to decreased
chances for life. Recent work in transgender studies addressing this biopolitical problematic includes Dean
Spade 2011, Toby Beauchamp 2009, Aren Z. Aizura 2012, and C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn 2013. A
critical theoretical task now confronting the field is to advance effective
strategies for noncompliance and noncomplicity with the biopolitical
project itself.
all in the name of defending society and making it pure.

To end violence against trans folx, we must correct the

transphobic idea that trans people are threats to be
securitized. Reading and studying the stories of trans people
positions gender, rooted in the flesh but expanded to
intersocial relations, to give meaning to inherently-politicized
bodies. This performance is neither invisible nor hypervisible;
rather, it accesses trans liberatory potential.
Alexander 5
(Jonathan Alexander is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Award for Best Articles in the field of
Computers and Composition Studies. His books have been nominated for various awards, including the
Lambda Literary Award. In 2011, he was awarded the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished
Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing Studies. From 2010-2013, Jonathan was named a
UCI Chancellor's Fellow in recognition of his scholarly achievements. Jonathan's work focuses primarily
on the use of emerging communications technologies in the teaching of writing and in shifting
conceptions of what writing, composing, and authoring mean. Jonathan also works at the intersection
of the fields of writing studies and sexuality studies, where he explores what discursive theories of
sexuality have to teach us about literacy and literate practice in pluralistic democracies. Transgender
Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body Vol. 57, No. 1 (Sep., 2005), pp. 70-72 cVs)

What can we learnpersonally, politically, and pedagogically-from experimenting with Califia-Rice's call
to compose narratives of virtual gender swapping? In "On Becoming a Woman: Pedagogies of the
Self," Romano remarks on some of the potential goals of feminist compositionist practice. She suggests that what
may be "crucial to the production of equitable discourse is the possibility that when
many women are present and differ in their self-representations, then 'women' as a
category-represented variously-can be taken back from its reductive forms and
rebuilt as multiple" (462). Part of the goal of my paired fiction exercises was certainly to expand students'
sense of the multiple ways that women-and men-exist as gendered beings in the world. But we also
experienced, in writing and analyzing those narratives, a sense of the gendered
body and how gender finds itself written on-and read from-the bodies we inhabit
and through which we both derive and articulate a sense of self. Those bodies,
though, are never simply personal; they are profoundly politicized bodies, called to
a gendered scrutiny, sculpting, and legibility that determine which bodies are male and female, powerful
and weak. Interestingly enough, transgender and transsexual theorists such as Prosser have
argued forcefully that it is in the examination of narrations of gender that we come
to a fuller and richer understanding of its "composition"- both personally and
politically, in mind and on body. Prosser argues, for instance, that "transsexual and
transgendered narratives alike produce not the revelation of the fictionality of
gender categories but the sobering realization of their ongoing foundational power"
(11). We might be tempted to think of gender as a set of roles, many stereotypical,
that can be critiqued and cast off, like so many changes of clothing. But Prosser maintains, as my
students' narratives reveal, that gender inscribes itself at the level of the flesh. This
is particularly true when considering narratives of gender transition: "Transsexuality
reveals the extent to which embodiment forms an essential base to subjectivity; but
it also reveals that embodiment is as much about feeling one inhabits material flesh
as the flesh itself" (7). For Prosser, examining such narratives is the key to opening up a
more expansive and thorough discussion of gender; as he maintains, "To talk of the
What does such an approach to writing about gender teach us and our students?

strange and unpredictable contours of body image, and to reinsert into theory the
experience of embodiment, we might begin our work through [ ..] autobiographical
narratives" (96). As a pedagogue invested in the expansive possibilities of feminist compositionist practices, I
must ask myself what potential for actual critical agency lies in a closer attention to the body and its composition in

my students may have encountered powerfully in

the paired fiction exercise how gender functions in our society to condition certain
expectations and norms for how women and men are to behave-at least
stereotypically. In this way, the exercise is in line with Will Banks's recent call for working with students on
gender narrations. On one hand, I believe that

creating "embodied writing":' or writing that takes into consideration the specific needs, desires, and beingness of

such writing "offers us and

our students spaces to think through all those multiple and shifting signifiers at
work on us so that we come up with sharper understandings of ourselves and those
around us" (38). At the same time, though, the narrative "performances" of my students are suggestive of the
particular bodies and of particular experiences of the body. As Banks suggests,

double bind of gender-a double bind neatly evoked by transsexuality, which itself evokes tropes both of boundary

transsexuality [...] is
simultaneously an elaborately articulated medico-juridical discourse imposed on
particular forms of deviant subjectivity, and a radical practice that promises to
explode dominant constructions of self and society. (594) In a new historical survey and analysis,
crossing and the power of boundaries to (re)inscribe norms. For Stryker,

How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, Joanne Meyerowitz argues in a similar vein-that
transsexuality in particular is a simultaneous reification, on one hand, of gender norms and expectations, and, on
the other hand, a mobilization of gender: Transsexuals, some argue, reinscribe the conservative stereotypes of male
and female and masculine and feminine. They take the signifiers of sex and the prescriptions of gender too
seriously. They are "utterly invested" in the boundaries between female and male. Or they represent individual

some theorists identify transsexuals as emblems

of liberatory potential. (11, 12) Did my students experience that liberatory potential? Our discussions
autonomy run amok in the late modern age. [...]

postexercise were revealing, thoughtful, and even critical. We could spot stereotypes "in action,:' noting how we
craft stories for ourselves-and others in which the most limiting and even sexist of gender norms are deployed
again and again, for both "traditional" sexes and genders.

Ethics
You should focus on the differential allocation of humanness:
this structural inequality patterns the entirety of the sovereign
global order, justifying the discursive forces that distribute
access to safety, security, and intelligibility along the
demarcating line of the construction of the human. You are
compelled not to question which team mitigates against the
most physical violence, because this approach will always
replicate the patterns of hegemony. You should focus on
disrupting the forces that control the production of the human
by prioritizing resistance to normative violence, which
prefigures and predetermines the orientation, intensity, and
flow of sovereign violence.
Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, 187-188)CJQ
The core conclusion that the previous discussion suggests is that ethics and
responsibility cannot only be considered a matter of responding to others as if we
and they existed as socially and politically separate entities. By taking
embodiment seriously as an effect of, and cause of, entangled engagements,
responsibility is rethought as accountability for who and what matters in the world
and who and what does not matterin sharp contrast to discourses of
responsibilization that shift the site of ethics onto individuals, as in neoliberal
discourses. We are mutually entangled with each other such that we cannot
separate. Our bodies themselves do not precede social entanglements, and thus we
cannot consider an ethics of violence differently from existing frameworks that
separate bodily existence from power. Rather than ethics being conceptualized
as the proper treatment of others, ethics is therefore not about the right
response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and
accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a
part (Barad 2007, 393). Responsibility has to do less with seeking security than
with resisting regimes of inequality by addressing what Athena Athenasiou
describes as the differential allocation of humanness; the perpetually
shifting and variably positioned boundary between those who are
rendered properly human and those who are not (Butler 2013, 31). The
broader implications of theorizing bodies as precarious and bound to one another in
their production as seemingly autonomous entities is that the question of ethical
responsibility lies not only in protecting or rescuing those who have been
constructed as grievable but also in the challenging of those discursive practices
that constitute some people as grievable tragedies in death, others as justifiably
killable. Because we are formed through the violence of norms, it is
incumbent upon us to resist imposing the same violence on others (Butler

2009, 169). Butler posits a mode of protection, but it is clear that she does not
mean, or does not only mean, the protection of an existing body from violence.
Protection from violence is also a struggle with the social and political norms that
structure the production of livable lives: to be responsible, to protect from violence
in this instance is to work to lessen the violent effects of the norm, to trouble the
power of bodily norms to mark certain lives as unlivable and unreal. Responsibility is
about where the cut between self and other is made. We do not have recourse to
the gods eye view, to approach the question of ethics in terms of a disconnected
appraisal of a situation in which we have no part. Our constitution in and through
the world is not only a matter of our perspective being limited or partial. Our
subjectivity is a material engagement in the world, creating it as it produces
knowledge about it. Taking seriously the bodily precariousness means being
attentive to the discourses that produce certain subjects as inhuman or as only
bleeding, suffering bodies outside the full political context under which we and they
are constituted.

War
Traditional gender roles reproduce conditions necessary for
war.
Sjoberg 2015 (Laura, Department of Political Science, University of Florida,
Seeing sex, gender, and sexuality in international security, International Journal
0(0) 120)CJQ
Another place that women arenamely, in the American militarybegs a different set of gender-based questions.

traditional gender roles have played very important parts in

the organization of militaries and the ways in which soldiers are motivated to fight .47
Joshua Goldstein found that men will fight for women even when they are averse to conflict
and have nothing else to fight for.48 Jean Elshtain found that this is because male just
warriors are held to an expectation of the provision of protection, and female
beautiful souls are the object of that protection. 49 In other words, protection of women
is defined into masculinities, and men are expected to be masculine. These
dynamics create what scholars have recognized as militarized masculinities, that is,
expectations of masculinities related to militarization, war-making, and
warfighting.50 To say that the United States military has an institutional culture of militarized masculinity does
Research has suggested that

not make sense to many people, however: they point out that its one-third women. How can it have a masculine

changing masculine institutional cultures requires

more than just putting women into those institutions .51 In fact, in their attempt to critique the
culture? Feminist scholars have argued that

assumption that adding women automatically produces representation for both women and femininity, feminists

the
masculinized expectations of militaries remain in place when women are integrated
into their ranks, until and unless values associated with femininity are (also)
integrated.53 The result is holding male and female members of militaries to
expectations of militarized masculinities, high levels of sexual violence within
militaries, and aggressive (and even homoerotic) military cultures based on highly
gendered structures and functioning in highly gendered ways .54 In Libya, as in Iraq and
have called the approach just add women and stir.52 Instead, these scholars have pointed out the ways that

Afghanistan, sex and gender integration of the US military, and in militaries around the world, is complicated and
incomplete.

Conflict between states is a result of the gendering that occurs

by and to institutional bodies- war is a result of competition
over the best masculinity.
Sjoberg 2015 (Laura, Department of Political Science, University of Florida,
Seeing sex, gender, and sexuality in international security, International Journal
0(0) 120)CJQ
Feminists have also argued that because gender-based factors have not been taken
into account, the causes of war and conflict have been incompletely understood.
Some would respond quickly that gender did not cause the civil war in Libya.
Feminist scholars have countered by suggesting a number of ways in which gender

matters in how war happens. They have argued that gender is a structural
feature of international politics: that is, while relative positions between
genders and the relationships between sexes and genders have varied
over time, place, and culture, gender hierarchy has been a feature of
political organization throughout recorded history.60 In other words, gender
is a social organizing principle in states and other political actors, and it is relatedly
a social organizing principle among states and other political actors.61 Systemstructural gender hierarchy means that states are incentivized to behave in ways
that emphasize traits associated with masculinity (e.g., the challenge to Obamas
masculinity for failing to intervene in Libya quickly enough), and to feminize their
enemies (e.g., the characterizations of Gaddafi as so weak that he needed to be
defended by women and teenagers).62 This has been a condition of possibility of
warfighting in global politics.63 The characterization of Gaddafis use of women
as weak can also be read as gendered on the dyadic (or between-state) level.
States, national groups, and ethnic groups compete along a number of
axes: one is which group is more masculine and/ or displays the best
masculinities. The post-Cold War United States has focused on a tough but
tender notion of masculinity that combines strength and protection,64 while the
Gaddafi regimes notion of masculinity has been characterized as hypermasculine,
unfettered, and brutal.65 Each side implicitly or explicitly characterized its
masculinities as superior, agreeing only on the contention that state masculinity is
desirable. Gender analysis has revealed the ways that states compete for
superiority along hierarchies of gender in the international system.66 Pre- and postrevolution Libya did that in very different ways.

Humanism
Humanity is produced through the creation of inhuman
populations this is integral to the work of the sovereign
state, which abjects deviance in order to create conditions for
political community. The notion of a uniquely human ethical
responsibility becomes a justification for indiscriminate
military intervention and the massacre of the socially dead.
Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bodies of
Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, 184-185)CJQ
The production of humanity as subjects to be saved, who must be made to live by
subjects who are always already alive and invulnerable, implies a constitutive other,
an inhuman subject. This inhuman subject is primarily those who perpetrate the
crimes of genocide or ethnic cleansing on behalf of the state or whom the state
cannot or will not prevent from committing such crimes. In constituting the
invulnerable subjects of the international community that speaks on behalf of
humanity in terms of human rights and human security, these subjects of
inhumanity are the abject, that which is excluded as the founding repudiation of
such a subject. To have a humanity that is embodied, we must have an
inhuman embodiment as well (Devji 2008, 2627). The naming of the human
entails the drawing of a boundary demarcating the constitutive outside, the
inhuman (Butler 1993, 8). The subject of the international community is linked to
an older discourse of civilization that speaks on behalf of the human, claiming that
it represents humanity against an inhuman(e) other. The condition of
inhumanity in the contemporary world order cannot be separated from
the sovereign foundation of the state in protecting the natural life of
citizens. States involved in not only killing people, but also committing genocide
the killing of populationsare subject to military intervention. In the war on terror,
as in so many conflicts, the enemy is seen as synonymous with a particular
callousness and inhumanity toward human life. The Talibans lack of respect for
human life and the abysmal conditions in Afghanistan leading to premature deaths
under Taliban rule are both justifications given for US-led military operations in
Afghanistan (Elshtain 2003, 60). Condemnation of the practice of suicide bombing is
focused on the celebration of the deaths of martyrs who are willing to die in order
to kill non-combatants. Similar conditions constitute the inhuman others of RtoP, as
interventions are justified in terms of the lack of respect for life and subsequent
mass killings. Killing or failing to prevent the deaths of populations, under the
doctrine of RtoP, makes one a legitimate target of violence, as do acts of terror,
although violence is not intended as the first step to addressing such atrocities. As
those who can be killed, the existence of such subjects of inhumanity blurs
with the populations that RtoP attempts to save, the people who are already
targets of extermination, who are already socially dead. Under such

conditions, the vulnerable bodies of the population in need of protection can be

killed as collateral damage in attempts to save them by using violence against
their killers: both are already constituted as bodies that do not matter. The
broader implications of this include the legitimation of violence against those who
are deemed to have insufficient respect for life. Importantly, this inhumanity in
not protecting life in RtoP only applies to the domestic population; one might ask
why states that do not exhibit the kind of respect for the lives of populations in
other states are not subject to the same sovereign violence. This is, of course, not a
defense of genocide or any other violent practices but an examination and critique
of the terms in which RtoP constitutes certain forms of violence as ethical. We may
have very good reasons to do soto make decisions to use force to stop genocide
but this kind of decision does not exhaust our ethical responsibilities. The
question of normative violencethe violence that attends to the formation of
subjectsis another site of our ethical responsibilities. Butlers turn to Levinas can
be seen in light of the concern with normative violence and her rejection of
methodological individualismthat individuals are the basic unit of ontology and,
thus, ethics. The question of how one responds to other humans fails
precisely when the subject of the address is not recognized as human. Her
engagement with Levinas is a way of struggling with the question of ethics not only
as a question of how one treats existing individuals, but of a responsibility that
attends to the subject that preexists the subjects very formation. It is a sense of
violence that is prior to violence as we usually understand it.

Alternatives and Methods

Queer IR
Wilcox 2014 (Lauren, University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy
Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Queer
Theory and the Proper Objects of International Relations, International Studies
Review, 2014)CJQ
An important feature of Queer IR, whether or not it is written in the disciplinary
spaces of IR, is that the object of study is not necessarily the identities or individual
sexual practices of particular individuals. Queer IR challenges heteronormative
assumptions in IR theory by arguing that certain actors in global politics can be read
as queer; in so doing, such work challenges the dichotomization of masculine and
feminine, straight and gay. This reading of international politics as queer is
echoed in Jasbir Puars provocative work of queer assemblages which posits
queerness in the ability of a terrorist, for example, to defy binary classifications and
embrace paradoxes in relation to categories of gender and sexuality (Puar and Rai 2002;
Puar 2007). In keeping with queer theorys critique of sexuality as a stable identity, these works emphasize
identifications rather than identities as shifting, fluid, and sometimes contradictory. Judith Butlers theory of

Gender and sexuality

are performances that do not reflect an underlying reality, but materialize reality in
ways always unstable and subject to multiple interpretations (Weber 1998a; Butler 1990;
performativity conceptualizes gender as a performance of imitation and parody:

Sjoberg, this forum). This approach is exemplified in Cynthia Webers reading of post-phallic US foreign policy in
the Caribbean, in which the United States never really held the phallus in the first place (1999). While her first
reading traces the tensions and inconsistencies in the symbolic politics of sexuality and gender, her second reading

neither masculine or feminine, nor gay or straight are subject

positions that can ever be fully occupiedthey are always troubled. Weber also argues
that United States as victim of attack and al-Qaeda as attacker cannot be read as
easily as feminized victim and racialized, hypermasculine aggressor. Rather, the
sexual/symbolic politics of al-Qaeda are far more complicated: al-Qaeda can be read
as feminine in terms of its representation as fluid and unlocatable, but its gender is
also changeable as in the hypermasculinity of evil in the figures of the airline
hijackers. Al-Qaedas sexuality is also ambiguous: while its ideology is of strict
heterosexuality in pursuit of a violent homosociality, its global presence makes it
open to foreign flows that might penetrate it as well . The America that was under attack on
argues that

September 11, 2001 can be read not only as feminized homeland, but also the masculine site of the projection of
military power (the Pentagon) and World Trade Center as site of neoliberal globalization that is the morally neutral
ground for the adjudication of moral claims. Weber refers to this dual symbolic gender and sexuality as both/ and
and describes it as queer in contrast to the either/or logic of sexual difference (Weber 2002:143, and also the

US hegemonic
military masculinity is not premised upon exclusion and distancing from the
feminine and queer, as theorists of hegemonic masculinity have argued. Rather, military
masculinity often entails an embrace of these very qualities. In his study of
introduction to this forum). Belkin (2012) performs a similar theoretical move, arguing that

sexuality at US military academies, Belkin argues based on the experience of cadets that being sexually penetrated
is not necessarily a feminizing act, but can also be a manly act of endurance, while being forced to penetrate can
also be understood as a loss of control and masculinity.

Trans-Disidentification
Thus, the alternative is trans-disidentification- this is a process
that requires destabilizing heteronormative social relations in
order to disidentify with broader national and cultural
relations that underwrite global conflict
Sjoberg 12
(Laura, December 2012, Associate Professor at the University of Florida, (BA, University of Chicago; Ph.D.,
University of Southern California School of International Relations; J.D. Boston College Law School, author of Gender,
Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (Lexington, 2006), Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Womens Violence in Global Politics
(with Caron Gentry, Zed Books, 2007), and Gendering Global Conflict: Towards a Feminist Theory of War, has
previously taught at Brandeis University, Merrimack College, Duke University, and Virginia Tech, Toward Transgendering International Relations?, International Political Sociology Volume 6, Issue 4, pages 337354, JKS)

IR has struggled with what Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney call the
problem of difference (2004). The question of the role difference plays in global political interactions has
As mentioned above,

garnered a fair amount of attention in the discipline in recent decades. For example, Peter Katzenstein (1996)
collected the ideas of a number of scholars who argued that culture plays a definitive role in national security
identity and strategizing. Mark Salter (2002) has argued that perceived civilization and perceived barbarity impact
the likelihood of conflicts and the nature of them. In much more rudimentary forms which garnered more attention,
Samuel Huntington (1996) and Francis Fukuyama (1992) argued that culture and identity were major faultllines in
international interactions. Postcolonial scholars (Bhabha 1994; Muppidi 2006) have argued that the continued
power of colonial dynamics in global politics is not only defining but ultimately destabilizing. Scholars interested in
religion and politics (Fox 2001; Dark 2000) have argued that religious difference is a crucial determinant of
conflictual relations in global politics. Scholars have also pointed out that differences in regime type (Russett 1994),
governance values (Russett and Maoz 1993), economic system (Mousseau 2010), and values related to womens
rights (Hudson et al 2009; Caprioli 2000). Even post-colonial feminists have argued that the differences among
feminists can translate into conflict and oppression (e.g., Chowdhry and Nair 2002; Mohanty 1988; 2003). These IR
theorists who think about difference deal with it in different ways. IR theorists have dealt with difference by trying
to understand it (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004), emphasizing it (Huntington 1996), downplaying it (Booth 2005), or
trying to overcome it (Ruane and Todd 2005). Some scholars have noted that difference can be leveraged
counterproductively in global politics. As Inayatullah and Blaney have noted, knowledge of the other, inflected by
the equation of difference and inferiority, becomes a means for the physical destruction, enslavement, or cruel

While difference in global politics may be incendiary

and it may be undertheorized or mistheorized in IR, trans- theorizing about
disidentification might offer another path. Disidentification (derived from but
separate from the psychological use of the term in the 1960s and 1970s) in transtheorizing plays two roles: discussion of the irritation of feminist disidentification
with trans- bodies (why does feminism eschew trans- persons when an affinity
seems natural?), and discussion of trans- peoples disidentification with their
assigned biological sex (what does it mean for identity that people can reject their
sex?). The lesson from the first discussion for IR might be tolerance. As Heyes explains : Much that has
been written about trans people by non-trans feminists has not only been hostile
but has also taken an explicit disidentification with transsexuals experiences as its
critical standpoint. This move runs counter to familiar feminist political commitments to respecting what the
marginalized say about themselves and seems to ignore the risks of orientalism, (Heyes 2003, 1096) The
second sort of disidentification discussed in trans- theory, of trans- disidentification
with assigned biological sex and corresponding social genders, might be more
interesting for the study of global politics. First, it suggests that, contrary to the
debate about culture and identity in IR, the question of whether identity is
primordial and fixed (Woodward 1997) is not a yes/no question, and can be answered
exploitation of the other (2004, 2, 11).

with hybridity (Bhabha 1994). Many trans- people see their gender identity as
primordial/fixed while their sex identity needs to be changed to reach accord with
their gender identity. Others see their sex identity as primordial/fixed but not
represented in their physical being. Still others see their sex identity and their
gender identity as both fluid and flexible . Asking when people disidentify with
their assigned or primordial states, nations, ethnic groups, and genders
may be a more productive way to get at the question of conflict and
difference in global politics generally and the question of intransigent
conflict specifically. Also, asking when people are disidentified from their primordial
groups, either by explicit rejection or by the experience of misrecognition, this
uneasy sense of standing under as sign to which one does and does not belong
(Munoz 1999, 12, citing Butler 1993) might help us to understand both cultural conflict and
individual violence in global politics. Perhaps disidentification as an action is
interesting, but so is disidentification as a strategy. As Munoz explains, to
disidentify is to read oneself and ones own life narrative in a moment, object, or
subject that is not cultural coded to connect with the disidentifying subject (1999, 12).
In other words, the process of disidentifying is the process of divorcing ones perception
of self from both in-group and out-group narratives of belonging and identification in
sociocultural contexts, asking what would I be were I not situated in a particular
context? While feminist theorizing has shown the risk of decontextualizing scholarly work and political
perspective, especially for the purpose of purporting objectivity, the trans scholarship suggests a
different purpose for disidentification both as a thought experiment and an event
and/or series of events. Munoz notes that disidentificatory performances circulate
in subcultural circuits and strive to envision and activate new social
relations [which] would be the blueprint for minoritarian counterpublic
spheres (1999, 5). Two important elements of this idea stand out: first, that the public/private
dichotomy is unrepresentative of the lived experiences of trans people, who often
experience a counterpublic sphere where political and social interaction takes
place, but does not mirror the hegemonic public sphere . Second, disidentification
changes social relations. In these terms, it is not ignoring context in the ways that we
have come to think about it in IR (as ignorance of contingency, power, and
interaction), but instead denying context the power to dictate how we interact, such
that disidentification is the survival strategies that minority subject practices in
order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or
punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform (Munoz 1999, 4). It is
possible, then, to think of disidentification as a potential (theoretical and
empirical) tool to diffuse conflicts and synthesize among differences . In
theoretical terms, feminists have argued that knowledge is always perspectival and always political, and cannot be
divorced from the knowers subjectivities (e.g., Tickner 1988). They have noted that recognizing the perspectival
and political nature of knowledge means that feminists should engage in dialogue and empathetic cooperation with
the other to try to see and/or feel the perspective of others (e.g., Sylvester 2000; Citation to author removed;

Intentional disidentification with ones own perspective and looking for

the alterity in self can broaden our theoretical viewpoints as students of global
politics. Beyond theoretical synthesis, however, it is possible that strategic
disidentification might be useful as a tool of conflict resolution in the policy world,
useful as one of many potential tools to reconcile interests that appear to be
diametrically opposed.
Confortini 2010).

2NC- Ext
IR sustains itself by obscuring difference- only trans-theorizing
can rupture the structures that give IR credence in global
politics- vote negative to disidentify yourself from the
affirmative
Sjoberg 12
(Laura, December 2012, Associate Professor at the University of Florida, (BA,
University of Chicago; Ph.D., University of Southern California School of
International Relations; J.D. Boston College Law School, author of Gender, Justice,
and the Wars in Iraq (Lexington, 2006), Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Womens
Violence in Global Politics (with Caron Gentry, Zed Books, 2007), and Gendering
Global Conflict: Towards a Feminist Theory of War, has previously taught at
Brandeis University, Merrimack College, Duke University, and Virginia Tech,
Toward Trans-gendering International Relations?, International Political
Sociology Volume 6, Issue 4, pages 337354, JKS)
Catherine MacKinnon once argued that inequality comes first; differences come after. Inequality is substantive and
identifies a disparity; difference is abstract and falsely symmetrical (1987, 8). In other words, MacKinnon was
arguing that difference only become recognizable/significant to the extent that inequality is distributed along it.

There are many places where we do not yet fully understand how difference works
in global politics, and even more where we do not yet fully grasp how it maps onto
inequality yet, some argue, these dimensions are the essence of understanding
global politics and should be the priorities of scholars in the field of IR.
This article works to establish the initial plausibility of a new approach to studying
difference by arguing that (feminist) IR should come to value trans- gender
theorizing, not only towards the end of making the world safe and just for people of
all genders and sexualities (Serrano 2007, 358) but also towards the end of better
explaining and understanding global politics generally. This article does not mean to
argue that trans- gender studies provides the way to think about global politics; or even the direction feminist work

through looking at global politics from a

trans- feminist perspective, I am interested in exploring the ways the concepts of
trans- theorizing might help us understand IR, and the ways that trans- theorizing
might help us better understand existing theories and practices of global politics .
Trans- theorizing is likely to be especially useful to theorizing global politics to the
exent that it shows that basic conceptualizations - ways of opposing home and the
economy, the political and personal, or system and lifeworld presuppose and
reinforce masculine, heterosexual, cissexual norms. Therefore, at the very least, as IR has
come to recognize privileges associated with gender, race, class, and nationality ; trans- theorizing
suggests IR theorists look further. Not only is cisgender privilege an
important axis of privilege to recognize (even as the other to it, trans people, are
often invisible), it also begs the question of what other privileges in the theory and
practice of global politics are assumed to be so normal that they are invisible . It then
behooves IR theorists to ask what other social, political, or cultural
attributes or characteristics are so normalized that we do not even see
when the alternative to them is being oppressed or silenced.
in IR needs to take to approach global politics. Instead,

Statecraft
Reject the affirmatives static view of IR and instead embrace
the queer logic of statecraft only the alternative can create
an understanding of IR that reorients the pluralness of
queerness and IR
Weber 16 Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex
[Cynthia Weber, 2016, Chapter: Queer Intellectual Curiosity as International
Relations Method in Queer International Relations Sovereignty, Sexuality and the
Will to Knowledge, pgs 39-46, Oxford University Press] AMarb
The above research questions go some way toward elaborating queer IR research programs informed by a queer
intellectual curiosity. Yet I suggest here that they are limited by Derridas initial understanding of deconstruction and

Derrida argues deconstruction

is not something we bring to a text; rather, it is something that is inherent in a text.
This is because meanings in a text (or, in Foucaults broader terms, a discourse) are always
already plural. The logocentric procedure that tries to impose a singular meaning
upon a text or a discourse, then, is always as political as it is impossible. This
explains why politicslike the politics of statecraft as mancraftendlessly loops
through circuits in which states (or other political communities) attempt to impose order on
anarchy. By critiquing the logocentric procedure as it functions in domestic and especially international politics,
its relationship to the logos and the plural. In the texts Ashley consults,

Ashleys analysis takes us some way toward understanding how paradigms of man are themselves tools of power
(Ashley 1989, 300), not just in specific times and places (as in, e.g., Kuntsman 2009; Puar and Rai 2002; Puar 2007),

these impossibly singular normal or perverse

paradigms of sovereign man attempt to figure impossibly singular normal or
perverse international orders in their own image. This is how actors attempt to
impose order onto anarchy. As powerful as this account is, I suggest it overlooks a crucial aspect of how
but more generally. For Ashley explains how

figurations of sovereign man are mobilized to craft domestic and international orders. What is missing is an account
of how not just a singular logos but a plural logoi potentially figures sovereign man and orders international politics
in ways that construct and deconstruct these figures and orders. Why this matters in queer IR contexts is because

this plural logoi can be understood as simultaneously normal and/or perverse as it is

enacted through sexes, genders, and sexualities as well as through various registers
of authority (something I will explain further with reference to Neuwirth/Wurst). A plural logoiespecially a
normal and/or perverse logoiappears, on the face of it, to be counterintuitive. This is especially the case because
of how Derrida initially sets up the logos as the necessarily singular (and presumptively normal) word that he
opposes to the necessarily plural (and possibly perverse) text.13Following Derrida, A shley

analyzes
accounts of sovereign man as the necessarily singular (and presumptively normal)
sovereign orderer who is opposed to the necessarily plural (and presumptively
perverse) anarchy. While Ashley insists on the plurality of man,14 he does not consider how this plural man
might function as a sovereign man who might be necessarily plural. As a result, Ashley neglects to consider how the
plural might be empowered not just because it is foundationally normal(ized) but because it is also foundationally
perverse (perverted). Ashleys analysis therefore misses opportunities to investigate how the normal and/or
perverse plural might function as a possible or even necessary foundation of meaning in a logocentric system,

What might a plural logoi

look like, and what might its implications be for understandings of statecraft as
mancraft? My notion of a plural logoi comes from Roland Barthess (1994 and 1976) description of the rule of
rather than always in opposition to the singular (presumptively normal) logos.

the and/or. To explain what the and/or is and how it functions, I use illustrations of sexes, genders, and sexualities
first to contrast the and/or with the more traditional either/or and second to pluralize the rule of the and/or itself.

The either/or operates according to a binary logic, forcing a choice of either one
term or another term to comprehend the true meaning of a text, a discipline, a

person, an act. For example, in the binary terms of the either/or, a person is either a
boy or a girl. In contrast, the and/or exceeds this binary logic because it appreciates
how the meaning of something or someone cannot necessarily be contained within
an either/or choice. This is because sometimes (maybe even always) understanding someone or
something is not as simple as fixing on a singular meaning either one meaning or another.
Instead, understanding can require us to appreciate how a person or a thing is
constituted by and simultaneously embodies multiple, seemingly contradictory
meanings that may confuse and confound a simple either/or dichotomy. It is this
plurality that the and/or expresses. According to the logic of the and/or, a subject is both one
thing and another (plural, perverse) while simultaneously one thing or another
(singular, normal). For example, a person might be both a boy and a girl while simultaneously being either a boy or
a girl. This might be because a person is read as either a boy or a girl while also being read as in between sexes
(intersexed), in between sexes and genders (a castrato), or combining sexes, genders, and sexualities in ways that
do not correspond to one side of the boy/girl dichotomy or the other (a person who identifies as a girl in terms of
sex, as a boy in terms of gender, and as a girlboy or boygirl in terms of sexuality). In these examples, a person
can be seen as and while simultaneously being or because the terms boy and girl are not reducible to traditional
dichotomous codes of sex, gender, or sexuality either individually or in combination, even though traditional
either/or readings attempt to make them so. While Barthess rule of the and/or is derived from his description of the
castratos body that he reads as combining two sexes and two genders (1974), the plural that constitutes a

For a subjectivity can be one thing and

another and another, and so on, as well as one thing or another or another, in
relation to sexes, genders, and sexualities, as there are multiple sexes, genders,
and sexualities individually and in combination (Fausto-Sterling 1993). This suggests both the
subjectivity can also be more than one thing and/or another.

limitations of deploying Barthesian plural logics as if they expressed a singular rule of the and/or and the expansive
possibilities of plural logics that pluralize the rule of the and/or itself. This discussion makes two significant points.
First, the

singular choice we are forced to make by an either/orlogic (e.g., boy or girl)

excludes the plural logics of the and/or. Plural logics of the and/or contest binary
logics, understanding the presumed singularity and coherence of their available
choices (either boys or girls, either normal or perverse), their resulting subjectivities (only boys
and girls), and their presumed ordering principles (either hetero/homonormative or
antinormatively disruptively/disorderingly queer) as the social, cultural, and political
effects of attempts to constitute them as if they were singular, coherent, and whole.
Therefore, it is only by appreciating how the (pluralized) and/or constitutes dichotomydefying subjectivities and (anti)normativities that we can grasp their meanings.
Second, when the (pluralized) and/or supplements the either/or, meanings are mapped differently. For in the
(pluralized) and/or, meanings are no longer (exclusively) regulated by the slash that divides the either/or. Instead,

meanings are (also) irregulated by this slash and by additional slashes that connect
terms in multiple ways that defy either/or interpretations. Importantly, Barthes does not argue
that either/or logics are unimportant. He suggests it is both the either/orand the (pluralized) and/or that constitute
meanings. Yet he stresses texts should not be reduced to aneither/or logic, so we can appreciate what plural
constitutes a text, a character, a plot, an order (Barthes 1974, 5). Releasing the double [multiple] meaning on
principle, the logic of the (pluralized) and/or corrupts the purity of communications; it is a deliberate static,
painstakingly elaborated, introduced into the fictive dialogue between author and reader, in short, a

The (pluralized)and/or, then, is a plural logic that the

either/or can neither comprehend nor contain. It is how the (pluralized) and/or
introduces a kind of systematic, nondecidable plurality into discourse as that which
confuses meaning, the norm, normativity [and, I would add, antinormativities]
(Barthes 1976, 109;Wiegman and Wilson 2015) around the normality and/or perversion of sexes,
genders, and sexualities rather than just accumulating differences (as intersectionality
sometimes suggests; Crewshaw 1991) that makes it a queer logic (Weber 1999, xiii). For a (pluralized)
countercommunication (1976, 9).

Barthesian and/or accords with Sedgwicks definition of queer as the excesses of meaning when the constituent
elements of anyones gender, of anyones sexuality arent made (or cant be made) to signify monolithically (1993,

8) as exclusively and or as exclusively or. Identifying these often illusive figurations, the now queer Barthesian
and/or suggests how we shouldinvestigate queer figures. Barthess instruction is this: read (queer) figures not only
through the either/or but also through the (pluralized) and/or. While Barthes offered this instruction in the context of

his queer rule of the (pluralized) and/or applies equally to foreign

policy texts and contexts. For sovereign man as a plural logoi in a logocentric procedure can figure
reading literature (1974),

foreign policy and (dis)order international politics.15 For example, as we will see in chapter 6, the case of the 2014
Eurovision Song Contest winner Tom Neuwirth and/as Conchita Wurst offers an illustration of how the normal and/or
perverse homosexual can function in logics of statecraft as mancraft as both a singular sovereign man and a
plural sovereign man. Debates about Neuwirth/Wurst as the normal homosexual, the perverse homosexual, and
the normaland/or perverse homosexual suggest that statecraft as mancraft is less straightforward than Ashley

Because the logos/logoi of the logocentric procedure can be plural as well as

singular by being normal and/or perverse around sexes, genders, and sexualities
and around numerous important registers of international politics (like nationality,
civilization, and religious and secular authority), sometimes statecraft as mancraft is
(also) a queer activity that results in unusual sexualized orders of international
politics. We cannot account for these queer instances of statecraft simply by adding
the singular homosexualas either sovereign man or his foilto our analyses.
Rather, tracing how plural logics of the and/or function in global politicsthe queer
logics of statecraftis to appreciate how the normal and/or perverse plural
sometimes scripts sovereign figures, their adversaries, and the unusual orders these
mixed figures produce and are productive of. Queer logics of statecraft are evident in those
suggests.

moments in domestic and international relations when actors or orders rely upon a queerly conceptualized
Barthesian and/oran and that is at the same time an or in relation to sexes, genders, and sexualitiesto
perfomatively figure sovereign man, the sovereign state, or some combined version of the order/anarchy and

Analyzing international relations through a

lens of queer logics of statecraft directs us, following and then extending Ashleys arguments, to
categories that connect and break apart foundational binaries like
order/anarchy and normal/perverse, by understanding the stabilizing slash in
these binaries as multiplying and complicating connections, figures, and orders
rather than reducing and simplifying them. It leads us to ask how the plural as a
deliberate static (Barthes 1976, 5, 9) is introduced into these binaries to both establish
and confound their meanings and the meanings of men, states, and orders as
well as the meanings of sexes, genders, and sexualities which are foundational
to them. In a Butlerian vein, queer logics of statecraft require us to take seriously how the
plural is performatively enacted, enabling a plethora of national and international
figurations and logics that can be (queerly) inhabited (also see Weber 1998b). Following
Sedgwick, we can observe that queer logics of statecraft are attentive to how sexes,
genders, and sexualities that fail or refuse to signify monolithically are productive of
and are produced by unexpectedly normal and/or perverse sovereign men,
sovereign states, and sovereignly ordained and opposed orders and anarchies.
normal/perverse binaries as normal and/or perverse.

Queer logics of statecraft, then, do not just describe those moments when the performatively perverse creates the
appearance of the performatively normal. Nor do they describe only the opposite, when the performatively normal

queer
logics of statecraft describe those moments in domestic and international politics
when the logos/logoi as a subjectivity or the logos/logoi as a logic is plurally normal
and/or perverse in ways that confound the norm, normativity [antinormativity]
(Barthes 1976, 109; Wiegman and Wilson 2015) of individually or collectively singularly inscribed
notions of sovereign man, sovereign states, or sexualized orders of international
relations. This is not to say that queer logics of statecraft do not give rise to institutions, structures of
creates the appearance of the performatively perverse, although those can be among their effects. Rather,

understanding, and practical orientations (Berlant and Warner 1995, 548 n. 2) that make sovereign men,

sovereign states, and international orders appear to be singular, coherent, and privileged. In this respect,

they

can be akin to sexual organizing principles like heteronormativities and

homonormativities (Berlant and Warner 1995, 548 n. 2; Duggan 2003, 50). For, by confusing the
[singular] norm, normativity, [antinormativity] (Barthes 1976, 109; Wiegman and Wilson 2015),
queer logics of statecraft can produce new institutions, new structures of
understanding, and new practical orientations that are paradoxically
founded upon a disorienting and/or reorienting plural. This can make them
more alluring, more powerful, and more easily mobilized both by those who, for
example, wish to resist hegemonic relations of power and by those who wish to
sustain them (Weber 1999; 2002; Puar and Ra, 2002; Puar 2007). Unlike heteronormativities and
homonormativities, though, we cannot name in advance what these institutions,
structures of understanding, and practical (dis)/(re)orientations will be. We
cannot know if they will be politicizing or depoliticizing. To determine this, it is
necessary to both identify the precise plural each particular queer logic of statecraft
employs to figure some particular sovereign man, sovereign state, and
international order, always asking, For what constituency or constituencies does
this plural operate? The case of Neuwirth/Wurst is striking, as we will see, because it illustrates how
Europeans leaders debatedalbeit very brieflya plural logoi as a possible ground for contemporary Europe,
whether they recognized Neuwirth/Wurst as a plural logoi or not. In discussions about the new Europe, both sides
in this debate employed Neuwirth/Wurst to construct and authorize their Eurovisioned hierarchies of order versus
anarchy, as if they were true. In this way, Neuwirth/Wurst generated not only competing sexualized orders of
contemporary Europe but also practically (dis)/(re)oriented and (de)/(re)railed any idealized contemporary
European-wide vision of an already united Europe. It is not surprising that in their mobilizations of Neuwirth/Wurst,
European leaders attempted to claim him/her/them as either normal or perverse, for this is how traditional logics of
statecraft as mancraft operate. Because European leaders failed to consider Neuwirth/Wurst through the lens of
queer logics of statecraft, they generally failed to appreciate what plural(s) constituted him/her/them and how the
plural and/or logic he/she/they embodies is what made their attempts to claim or disownto normalize or to pervert
this normal and/or perverse figure both possible and impossible. Yet it is this very failure on the part of European
leaders to read Neuwirth/Wurst through the plural(s) that constitute(s) him/her/them that suggests an additional set
of research questions for international theory and practice, including the following: Can a paradigm of sovereign
man be effective without beingas Ashley claims the ideal type of sovereign man must beregarded as
originary, unproblematic, given for all time, and, hence, beyond criticism and independent of politics (Ashley 1989,
271)? What happens when a political community like a state or the EU considers grounding itself upon a
pluralized and/or logoi? Under what conditions might this be desirable or even necessary, and what might it

How might queer logics of statecraft affect the organization,

regulation, and conduct of international politics? The rest of this book puts both of
these queer IR theoretical and methodological approaches to work. It does this by
analyzing how the will to knowledge about the sexualities of the underdeveloped, the undevelopable, the
make possible or preclude?

unwanted im/migrant, the terrorist, the gay rights holder, the gay patriot, and the Eurovisioned queer drag
queen functions in and matters intensively to intimate, national, regional, and

international games of

power around sovereignty.

Its try or die for queer logics of statecraft the alt creates
resistance against the normatives present within IR and
Western thought
Weber 16 Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex
[Cynthia Weber, 2016, Chapter: Queer Intellectual Curiosity as International
Relations Method in Queer International Relations Sovereignty, Sexuality and the
Will to Knowledge, pgs 197-199, Oxford University Press] AMarb

Reconsidered through the lens of queer logics of statecrafta lens that contests
those exclusively binary expressions of difference that demand that all
subjectivities can be and can be known as singularly signifying subjectivities across
every potentially plural register they occupy or engagethe persistence of modern
man as sovereign man is put into doubt. This is for two reasons. First, queer logics of
statecraft direct us to an appreciation of those queer figures who cannot or will not
signify monolithically around sex, around gender and/or around sexuality. This is a point
queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick make (1993). More than this, though, queer logics of statecraft
enable us to appreciate how queerly plural figures might order, reorder, or disorder
national, regional, and international politics and the singular understanding of
sovereignty upon which these orders have depended at least since the Treaty of
Westphalia. This is the story Tom Neuwirth and/as Conchita Wurst tells in relation to contemporary Europe, as
recounted in chapter 6. Neuwirth/Wursts story is the same story many other figurations of or opposed to sovereign

the revolutionary state and citizen (Lind and

or the hegemonic state (Weber 1999). For none of these figures can be
captured or contained by an either/or logic of traditional statecraft as mancraft. This
is because their subjectivities are formed through and expressed by a pluralized logic
of the and/ora logic that understands these figures as both either one thing or
another or possibly another while it simultaneously understands them as one thing
and another and possibly another. As these queerly plural figurations of the homosexual of/in relation
man have been telling for a very long timebe they
Keating 2013)

to sovereign man come into focus, what also often comes into focus with them is the concerted effort required to
attempt to present not just these figurations but any figurations of sovereign man as if he were singular, as if he
preexisted attempts to constitute him as such, as if he had no history. This is the second way in which queer logics
of statecraft put the persistence of the singular modern man Foucault describes in doubt. For rather than
evidencing the existence much less persistence of this modern man, what they evidence is the endless reworkings
the desperate, constant refigurations of, in this case, the homosexual as/in relation to sovereign man that

the fragility of both modern man and modern sovereignty. These endless
reworkings of modern man as sovereign man expose the endless games of power
these refigurations require, hinting that these particular modern games of sovereign
statecraft as sovereign mancraft are unlikely to work forever. Put in Foucaults terms, what
comes into relief through queer logics of statecraft is how the attempted figuration of the
homosexual as singular sovereign man and the singular understanding of
sovereignty upon which it depends are in the process of disappearing (1971). By
neglecting to take queer logics of statecraft as mancraft into account,
opportunities are lost to better understand how a variety of political
games of power function in relation to the homosexual. On the one hand, because
the vast majority of IR scholarship insists that any incorporation of sexuality
into IR (if it is to be incorporated at all) must be (presumably) knowable
and always codable in either/or terms, consideration of how queer and/or
modalities of queerly pluralized and/or subjectivities and their effects on the
organization, regulation, and conduct of intimate, national, regional, and
international relations threaten to fall out of IR theory and practice. On the other hand,
underscore

consideration of how singular figurations of the homosexual in traditional either/or logics of statecraft as mancraft
are confronted and confused by and/or figurations of these same homosexuals threatens to fall out of

Puar and Rais accounts of the al-Qaeda

terrorist allow for multiple incarnations of this figure (as the monster, the terrorist, and the fag
transnational/global queer studies. For example, Puars and

who is also the dangerous Muslim or the dangerous Arab or the dangerous Sikh, for example; see Puar and Rai

Yet because Puar and Rai only read this figure through the either/or
logics of statecraft as mancraft that Western governments employed to incite,
2002; Puar 2007).

stabilize, and regiment this figure in their domestic and foreign policies, Puar and
Rai overlook how the al-Qaeda terrorist functions through queer logics of
statecraft, which employ and/or logics to confuse and confound Western
domestic and foreign policies (Weber 2002). Similarly, transnational/queer studies literatures that
read the formations and resistances of the gay rights holder through monolithic constructions of homonormativity
(Duggan 2003), homonationalism (Puar, 2007), or the human rights industrial complex (Puar 2013) tend to reify

Queer logics of statecraft, in contrast, are attentive to

the resistive possibilities within these normativities because of their
attention to how and/or logics function in sovereignty discourses, for
example, through Foucauldian notions of counterconduct as applied to human rights
either/or logics of power versus resistance.2

(see Odysseos 2016). All of this has the effect of limiting the opportunities for both (queer) IR and
(transnational/global) queer studies scholars to reconsider sovereignty itself. My argument is not that (queer) IR
scholars offer better explanations of international relations than do (transnational/global) queer studies scholars or
vice versa. My argument is thatread separately neither

scholarly tradition lives up to its

intellectual or political promise, especially in how they read sovereignty and
sexuality in international contexts. Yet read in combination, these overlapping bodies
of scholarship can and do further enrich understandings of how sovereign man as
sexualized sovereign man functions in existing and emerging sexualized
understandings of intimate, national, regional, and international relations that both
sustain and threaten to suspend traditional understandings of sovereignty. My focus on
sovereignty and sexuality, then, has not been intended to designate some new field of queer IR as a new
sovereign subject of study that knows who the homosexual in international relations really is or what sovereignty

My aim instead has been to contest the

political delusion of sovereignty (Cocks 2014) and its corresponding personal and
political delusions of sexuality that sustain and contain all these forms of
individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego [as a singular subjectivity or as
discrete scholarly communities] on which we build and from which we have tried to build and
to constitute knowledge (Foucault 1971) about sovereign man, about sexualized
man, and about sexualized sovereign man. In doing this, my aim is the same as Foucaults.
always was, always is, or always will be or should be.

Foucaults reflections on his own preoccupation with the end of manwith my embellishmentsexpress what I
mean: And so I dont say the things I say [about discourses of sovereignty, about the singular sexualized sovereign
man they strive to produce or about the all-too-often disconnected scholarly traditions of (queer) IR as opposed to
(transnational/global) queer studies] because they are what I think, but rather I say them . . . precisely to make sure

they are going to live

a life or die in such a way that I will not have to recognize myself in them. (1971)
they are no longer what I think. To be really certain that, from now on, outside of me,

Assemblages- Puar
The alternative is assemblage theory affective politics is the
only way to avoid control societys infiltration
Puar 7 Professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University [Jasbir K.,
2007, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Duke University
Press] AMarb
Identity is one effect of affect, a capture that proposes what one is by masking its
retrospective ordering and thus its ontogenetic dimension what one wasthrough the guise
of an illusory futurity: what one is and will continue to be. However, this is anything but a relay
between stasis and flux; position is but one derivative of systems in constant
motion, lined with erratic trajectories and unruly projectiles. If the ontogenetic
dimensions of affect render affect as prior to representationprior to race, class,
gender, sex, nation, even as these categories might be the most pertinent mapping
of or reference back to affect itselfhow might identity-as-retrospective-ordering
amplify rather than inhibit praxes of political organizing? If we transfer our energy,
our turbulence, our momentum from the defense of the integrity of identity and submit
instead to this affective ideation of identity, what kinds of political strategies, of
politics of the open end, might we unabashedly stumble upon? Rather than
rehashing the pros and cons of identity politics, can we think instead of
affective politics? Displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly,
audibly, legibly, or tangibly evidentthe seemingly queer body in a cultural
freezeframe of sortsassemblages allow us to attune to movements, intensities,
emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and
corporealities. Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology,
representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility,
ontology, affect, and information. Further, in the sway from disciplinary societies (where the panoptic
functioned primarily in terms of positions, fixed points, and identities) to control societies, the diagram of
control, Michael Hardt writes, is oriented toward mobility and anonymity. . . . The flexible
and mobile performances of contingent identities, and thus its assemblages or
institutions are elaborated primarily through repetition and the production of
simulacra. Assemblages are thus crucial conceptual tools that allow us to
acknowledge and comprehend power beyond disciplinary regulatory models, where
particles, and not parts, recombine, where forces, and not categories, clash.
Most important, given the heightened death machine aspect of nationalism in our
contemporary political terraina heightened sensorial and anatomical domination indispensable to
Mbembes necropoliticsassemblages work against narratives of U.S.
exceptionalism that secure empire, challenging the fixity of racial and sexual
taxonomies that inform practices of state surveillance and control and befuddling
the us versus them of the war on terror. (On a more cynical note, the recent work of Eyal
Weizman on the use of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, and Guy Debord by the Israeli Defense
Forces demonstrates that we cannot afford to ignore concepts such as war machines and machinic assemblages, as

while intersectionality
and its underpinningsan unrelenting epistemological will to truthpresupposes
identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely
anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever, assemblage, in its debt to
they are already heavily cultivated as instructive tactics in military strategy.) For

ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be
known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming beyond or without being.

We offer this debate as a queer convivial gather, a becoming

with, imagining an unpredictable becoming with rather than an
overdetermined effacement of queer alterity, its inability to
move or escape, which characterizes the status quo
Puar 10. Jasbir Puar, professor of womens and gender studies at Rutgers
University, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 19, No. 2, July
2009, pg. 168

Out of the numerous possibilities that assemblage theory offers, much of it has
already begun to transform queer theory, from Elizabeth Groszs crucial re-reading
of the relations between bodies and prosthetics (which complicates not only the
contours of bodies in relation to forms of bodily discharge, but also complicates the
relationships to objects, such as cell phones, cars, wheelchairs, and the distinctions
between them as capacity-enabling devices) (1994), to Donna Haraways cyborgs
(1991), to Deleuze and Guattaris BwO (Bodies without Organs organs, loosely
defined, rearranged against the presumed natural ordering of bodily capacity)
(1987). I want to close by foregrounding the analytic power of conviviality
that may further complicate how subjects are positioned , underscoring
instead more fluid relations between capacity and debility. Conviviality ,
unlike notions of resistance , oppositionality , subversion or transgression
(facets of queer exceptionalism that unwittingly dovetail with modern
narratives of progress in modernity), foregrounds categories such as
race , gender , and sexuality as events as encounters rather than as
entities or attributes of the subject. Surrendering certain notions of
revolution , identity politics , and social change the big utopian picture
that Massumi complicates in the opening epigraph of this essay conviviality
instead always entails an experimental step. Why the destabilization of
the subject of identity and a turn to affect matters is because affect as a
bodily matter makes identity politics both possible and yet impossible. In
its conventional usage, conviviality means relating to , occupied with , or fond
of feasting , drinking , and good company to be merry , festive , together
at a table , with companions and guests, and hence, to live with. As an
attribute and function of assembling, however, conviviality does not lead to a
politics of the universal or inclusive common , nor an ethics of
individuatedness , rather the futurity enabled through the open
materiality of bodies as a Place to Meet. We could usefully invoke Donna
Haraways notion of encounter value here, a becoming with
companionate (and I would also add, incompanionate) species, whereby
actors are the products of relating, not pre-formed before the encounter

(2008, 16). Conviviality is an ethical orientation that rewrites a Levinasian

taking up of the ontology of the Other by arguing that there is no absolute self
or other,15 rather bodies that come together and dissipate through
intensifications and vulnerabilities , insistently rendering bare the
instability of the divisions between capacity-endowed and debility-laden
bodies. These encounters are rarely comfortable mergers but rather entail
forms of eventness that could potentially unravel oneself but just as
quickly be recuperated through a restabilized self, so that the political
transformation is invited, as Arun Saldhana writes, through letting yourself
be destabilized by the radical alterity of the other , in seeing his or her
difference not as a threat but as a resource to question your own position
in the world (2007, 118). Conviviality is thus open to its own dissolution
and self-annihilation and less interested in a mandate to reproduce its
terms of creation or sustenance, recognizing that political critique must
be open to the possibility that it might disrupt and alter the conditions of
its own emergence such that it is no longer needed an openness to
something other than what we might have hoped for. This is my
alternative approach to Lee Edelmans No Future, then, one that is not
driven by rejecting the figure of the child as the overdetermined outcome of
reproductive futurism (2004),16 but rather complicates the very terms of
the regeneration of queer critique itself. Thus the challenge before us is
how to craft convivial political praxis that does not demand a continual
reinvestment in its form and content , its genesis or its outcome , the
literalism of its object nor the direction of its drive.

Vote neg even if the 1AC is true. Their claims are part of a will
to truth that fixes subjects in place and enables the logic of
the war on terror. Assemblages are a prior question because
they constitute the field of emergence for subjectivities.
Puar 7. Jasbir, professor of womens and gender studies at Rutgers University,
Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 214

Linked to this is what Massumi calls "ontogenetic difference" or

"ontogenetic priority," a concept that rescripts temporality exterior to the
sheer administrative units that are mobilized to capture the otherwise
unruly processes of a body :
To say that passage and indeterminancy "come first" or "are primary" is
more a statement of ontological priority than the assertion of a time
sequence . They have ontological privilege in the sense that they constitute

the field of emergence , while positionings are what emerge . The trick is to
express that priority in a way that respects the inseparability and
contemporaneousness of the disjunct dimensions: their ontogenetic
difference .
And later: " The

field of emergence is not pre-social . It is open-endedly social . ...

One of the things that the dimension of change is ontogenetically 'prior to'
is thus the very distinction between individual and the collective , as well as any

given model of their interaction. That interaction is precisely what takes form."' The given models of interaction
would be these bifurcated distinctions between the body and the social (its signification) such that the distinctions
disappear. Massumi's move from ontology (being, becoming) to ontogenesis is also relevant to how he discusses
affect and cognition and the processes of the body: " Feedback

and feed forward, or

recursivity, in addition to converting distance into intensity, folds the
dimensions of time into each other . The field of emergence of experience
has to be thought of as a space-time continuum, as an ontogenetic
dimension prior to the separating-out of space and time . Linear time, like
position- gridded space, would be emergent qualities of the event of the
world's self- relating . " 2 7
This ontogenetic dimension that is "prior" but not "pre" claims its
priorness not through temporality but through its ontological status as
that which produces fields of emergence; the prior and the emergence are
nevertheless "contemporaneous." "Ontological priority" is a temporality and a spatialization that

has yet to be imagined, a property more than a bounded- ness by space and time. The ontogenetic dimension that
articulates or occupies multiple temporalities of vectors and planes is also that which enables an emergent
bifurcation of time and space.

Identity is one of affect, a capture that proposes what one is by masking

its retrospective ordering and thus its ontogenetic dimension- what one
was- through the guise of an illusory futurity: what one is and will
continue to be. However, this is anything but a relay between stasis and
flux; position is but one derivative of systems in constant motion, lined
with erratic trajectories and unruly projectiles . If the ontogenetic
dimensions of affect render affect as prior to representation-prior to race,
class, gender, sex, nation, even as these categories might be the most
pertinent mapping of or reference back to affect itself-how might identityas-retrospective-ordering amplify rather than inhibit praxes of political
organizing? If we transfer our energy , our turbulence, our momentum from the
defense of the integrity of identity and submit instead to this affective ideation of
identity, what kinds of political strategies, of "politics of the open end,""
might we unabashedly stumble upon? Rather than rehashing the pros and
cons of identity politics, can we think instead of affective politics?
Displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly,
or tangibly evident-the seemingly queer body in a "cultural freeze-frame"
of sorts-assemblages allow us to attune to movements, intensities,
emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures as they inhabit events,

spatiality, and corporealities . Intersectionality privileges naming , visuality,

epistemology, representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling,
tactility, ontology, affect, and information. Further, in the sway from disciplinary
societies (where the panoptic "functioned primarily in terms of positions,
fixed points, and identities") to control societies, the diagram of control ,
Michael Hardt writes, is "oriented toward mobility and anonymity . . . . The flexible
and mobile performances of contingent identities, and thus its
assemblages or institutions are elaborated primarily through repetition
and the production of simulacra. "29 Assemblages are thus crucial
conceptual tools that allow us to acknowledge and comprehend power
beyond disciplinary regulatory models , where "particles, and not parts,
recombine, where forces, and not categories, clash . "30
Most important, given the heightened death machine aspect of nationalism in our contemporary political terrain-a
heightened sensorial and anatomical domination indispensable to Mbembe's necropolitics- assemblages

work against narratives of U.S. exceptionalism that secure empire,

challenging the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies that inform
practices of state surveillance and control and befuddling the "us versus
them" of the war on terror . (On a more cynical note, the recent work of Eyal Weizman on the use of
the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Guy Debord by the Israeli Defense Forces demonstrates that we
cannot afford to ignore concepts such as war machines and machinic assemblages, as they are already heavily

For while intersectionality and its

underpinnings- an unrelenting epistemological will to truth- presupposes
identity and thus disavows futurity, or , perhaps more accurately, prematurely
anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever, assemblage, in its debt to
ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet
to be known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming beyond or without
being. 32
cultivated as instructive tactics in military strategy.)

Assemblages- Race
An approach based on non-dialectical assemblage theory may
manifest as politically similar to the AFF, but this theoretical
move is necessary to disfigure the coherency of Man as such
acceptance of judicial definitions of the human that simply flip
the dialectic sacrifice the radical position for comprehension so
we affirm habeas viscus, a radically materialist understanding
of the flesh and its capacity for becoming and flux in the here
and now
Weheliye 14. Alexander G. Weheliye, professor of African American studies at
Northwestern University, Habeas Viscus, pg. 135
Because black cultures have frequently not had access to Mans language,
world, future, or humanity, black studies has developed a set of assemblages
through which to perceive and understand a world in which subjection is but
one path to humanity, neither its exception nor its idealized sole fea ture. Yet
black studies, if it is to remain critical and oppositional, cannot fall prey to
juridical humanity and its concomitant pitfalls, since this only affects change
in the domain of the map but not the territory. In order to do so, the
hieroglyphics of the flesh should not be conceptualized as just exceptional or
radically particular, since this habitually leads to the comparative tabulation
of different systems of oppression that then serve as the basis for defining
personhood as possession. As Frantz Fanon states: All forms of exploitation are
identical, since they apply to the same object: man.28 Accordingly, humans are
exploited as part of the Homo sapiens species for the benefit of other
humans, which at the same time yields a surplus version of the human: Man.
Man represents the western configuration of the human as synonymous with
the heteromasculine, white, propertied, and liberal subject that renders all
those who do not conform to these characteristics as exploitable nonhumans,
literal legal nobodies. If we are to affect significant systemic changes, then we
must locate at least some of the struggles for justice in the region of
humanity as a relational ontological totality (an object of knowledge) that
cannot be reduced to either the universal or particular. According to Wynter,
this process requires us to recognize the emancipation from the psychic dictates of
our present... genre of being human and therefore from the unbearable wrongness
of being, of desetre, which it imposes upon ... all non-white peoples, as an
imperative function of its enactment as such a mode of beingf] this emancipation
had been effected at the level of the map rather than at the level of the territory.29
The level of the map encompasses the nominal inclusion of nonwhite
subjects in the false universality of western humanity in the wake of radical
movements of the 1960s, while the territory Wynter invokes in this context, and
in all of her work, is the figure of Man as a racializing assemblage.

Wielding this very particular and historically malleable classification is not an

uncritical reiteration of the humanist episteme or an insistence on the
exceptional particularity of black humanity. Rather, Afro-diasporic cultures
provide singular, mutable, and contingent figurations of the human, and thus do
not represent mere bids for inclusion in or critiques of the shortcomings of western
liberal humanism. The problematic of humanity however, needs to be
highlighted as one of the prime objects of knowledge of black studies, since
not doing so will sustain the structures, discourses, and institutions that
detain black life and thought within the strictures of particularity so as to
facilitate the violent conflation of Man and the human. Otherwise, the general
theory of how humanity has been lived, conceptualized, shrieked, hungered
into being, and imagined by those subjects violently barred from this domain
and touched by the hieroglyphics of the flesh will sink back into the deafening
ocean of prelinguistic particularity. This, in turn, will also render apparent that
black studies, especially as it is imagined by thinkers such as Spillers and Wynter, is
engaged in engendering forms of the human vital to understanding not only
black cultures but past, present, and future humanities. As a demonic
island, black studies lifts the fog that shrouds the laws of comparison,
particularity, and exception to reveal an aquatic outlook far away from the
continent of man.30
The poetics and politics that I have been discussing under the heading of habeas
viscus or the flesh are concerned not with inclusion in reigning precincts of the
status quo but, in Cedric Robinsons apt phrasing, the continuing development
of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for
liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve [and I
would add also to reimagine] the collective being, the ontological totality.31
Though the laws of Man place the flesh outside the ferocious and ravenous
perimeters of the legal body, habeas viscus defies domestication both on the
basis of particularized personhood as a result of suffering, as in human rights
discourse, and on the grounds of the universalized version of western Man.
Rather, habeas viscus points to the terrain of humanity as a relational
assemblage exterior to the jurisdiction of law given that the law can bequeath
or rescind ownership of the body so that it becomes the property of proper
persons but does not possess the authority to nullify the politics and poetics of the
flesh found in the traditions of the oppressed. As a way of conceptualizing politics,
then, habeas viscus diverges from the discourses and institutions that yoke
the flesh to political violence in the modus of deviance. Instead, it translates
the hieroglyphics of the flesh into a potentiality in any and all things, an
originating leap in the imagining of future anterior freedoms and new
genres of humanity.
To envisage habeas viscus as a forceful assemblage of humanity entails le aving
behind the world of Man and some of its attendant humanist pieties. As
opposed to depositing the flesh outside politics, the normal, the human, and
so on, we need a better understanding of its varied workings in order to
disrobe the cloak of Man, which gives the human a long-overdue extreme

makeover; or, in the words of Sylvia Wynter, the struggle of our new millennium
will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our
present ethnoclass (i.e. western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man,
which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the
well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the
human species itself/ourselves.32 Claiming and dwelling in the monstrosity
of the flesh present some of the weapons in the guerrilla warfare to secure
the hill cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species, since these
liberate from captivity assemblages of life, thought, and politics from the
tradition of the oppressed and, as a result, disfigure the centrality of Man as the
sign for the human. As an assemblage of humanity, habeas viscus animates
the elsewheres of Man and emancipates the true potentiality that rests in
those subjects who live behind the veil of the permanent state of exception:
freedom; assemblages of freedom that sway to the temporality of new
syncopated beginnings for the human beyond the world and continent of
Man.

Sinophone Praxis
Reject the affirmative and embrace the Sinophone as a praxis
to disrupt the Eurocentric foundation of the aff
Heinrich 14 Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the
University of California, San Diego [Ari Larissa, 2014, A volatile alliance Queer
Sinophone synergies across literature, film, and Culture in Queer Sinophone
Cultures, Routledge] AMarb
the problem of Chinahow to define
it, how to define modern, what to make of the shifting sands of disciplinary
affiliation and access to archives, what to teach students Shih Shu-meis development of the
idea of the Sinophone has provided a much-needed critical solution. As a scholar with a
For fields that have been struggling famously for decades with

background in nineteenth-century medical and visual cultural history, I was initially attracted to the idea of the

it provided a flexible alternative to the clunky amalgam of

postcolonial theory and qualified transnationalism that had evolved to
accommodate shifting understandings about the meaning of China in late imperial
interactions with (Western) science and cultures. Shihs notion of the Sinophone could
accommodate a diversity of research materials regardless of geography; it exploded once and for all the
possibility of any binary model of China and the West while sidestepping the trap
of accidentally reifying these terms even as it seeks to undermine them. If attempts
to unseat this powerful dimorphism bear a resemblance to attempts to challenge
the insistent dimorphisms of sex and genderand if we allow that the idea of the
Sinophone, despite or even because of the questions it raises, has enabled works and concepts to
be placed productively in dialogue without restriction by category, discipline,
location, and conventionperhaps we could argue that Shihs project succeeds, at least in part, in
queering Chinese studies. As Andrea Bachner observes in this volume, Sinophone, not unlike
queer both contests identitarian formations and signifies as a contestation of
essentialism itself. Sinophone as a critical framework may not have set out specifically to
address questions of gender and sexuality, but as part of larger movements in postcoloniality , and
as something that has been essentially coeval with the emergence of queer studies, it certainly h as a critical
affinity for (or even debt to) these questions; Sinophone studies, lacking a queer
focus, is an inherently queer project. If the idea of the Sinophone has provided a workaround for longstanding challenges to defining China across the spectrum of fields related to Chinese studies, perhaps queer
studies can offer non-specialists (such as Chinese studies scholars) a means of
assimilating a complex theoretical vocabulary of gender and sexuality that might
otherwise remain inaccessible behind a firewall of disciplinary and area studies
divisions. A value of queer studies may be that by definition it is not, or does not have to be, provincial,
bound to discipline; rather it stands in opposition to the very notions of dualism, clear-cut
boundaries, and categorical purity (Bachner, this volume). However, just as gender and sexuality
Sinophone because

have yet to take on an authorial role within Sinophone studies, so too has it been difficult to home the Sinophone
within queer studies frameworks without reproducing the freeze and thaw of a China/West dimorphism and its

when a given academic project either

labels some form of queerness [as] distinctively Chinese, or [by contrast] identifies
some aspects of Chinese culture as distinctively queer yet not in any Western sense
of the word, [paradoxically it only] unveils the very constructive nature of queerness
and Chineseness by fixing [these terms to an] analytical presumption. Like the way
subsequent deconstruction. As Chiang writes in this volume,

Sinologists can (and often do) romanticize a preordained fact of Chineseness, queer scholars can (and often do)
easily re-essentialize the very object of their analysis, queerness. A solution, Chiang arguesand what is at the

creating a dynamic hybridizing theoretical

praxis that approach[es] anti-normative transnational practices and identities from
an angle that crystallizes Chineseness and queerness as cultural constructions that
are more mutually generative than different, as open processes that are more
historically co-produced than additive. The utopian potential of a queer Sinophone
cultural studies practice is to transcend familiar disciplinary boundaries in a way
that can nourish, and create, all sides. The structural affinity of the Sinophone for the
queerincluding of course the ways in which the two categories are mutually constitutive holds out the
hope of creating an alternative theoretical model that is more than the sum of its
parts, and that can expand to accommodate, and to interrogate more accurately,
the rhizomatic expansion of information and connections that characterizes our age
heart of this volumeis to work toward the possibility of

Failure
The alternative is to embrace queer failure reject the
standards of success that drive their knowledge cumulation
and embrace the impossibility to know as a prerequisite to
post-hegemonic queer worldmaking
Barkin and Sjoberg 15
(J. Samuel Barkin is a professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global
Governance at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Laura Sjoberg is a leading scholar of feminist
international relations and international security. Her research focuses on gender and just war theory,
womens violence in global politics, and feminist interpretations of the theory and practice of security
policy. The Failures of Constructivist Theory in IR Written for presentation at the 2015 Millennium
Conference.)

The pride in success and embarrassment in failure depend on being able to identify
success and failure, which various disciplinary standards for the production of
knowledge purport to outline. Generally, there is an implication that research has failed
when it does not contribute to the cumulation of knowledge, and that a researcher
has failed when s/he is incapable of producing sustained contributions to
knowledge. In our reading of the impossibility of detecting the cumulation of
knowledge, though, that would make every piece of scholarship and every scholar a
failure. We think that is true. We just do not think that it is problematic, that failure
is always a problem, or that the idea and implications of failure have been fully
explored in epistemology in IR. It is, after all, failure that Baudrillard called for, in different words a
willingness to drop commitment to and passion for a certain end on the recognition
that both that end and its opposite are empty signifiers. Here, we are using the word
failure in two senses: in the traditional sense of failing to reach ones own ends,
and in the queer sense of failing to live up to expectations. When we say that we are talking
about failure in the queer sense, we mean the queer failure that Jack Halberstam talks about: failure as not
a stopping point on the way to success but a category levied by the winners
against the losers and a set of standards that ensure all future radical ventures
will be measured as cost-ineffective (Halberstam, 2011: 184). The label of research
failure (the foil to research success) is not a weakness to be overcome, but a
category constituted by the winners as a demonstration of the losers
being inferior. Failure as a category in IR scholarship serves to reinscribe
and renormalize standards of research success which remain unchanged,
unchangeable, regressive, and violent. The scholarship that makes
unconventional claims to knowledge cumulation (or no claim to knowledge cumulation) not
only fails but constitutes its researchers as failures which becomes recursive when we tend to
blame each other or ourselves for the failures of the social structure we inhabit, rather than critiquing the

it is the system
that privileges success that is the problem, and failing within it is an emancipatory
possibility which dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we
currently live (2011, 2). Rather than being by-definition normatively undesirable, in Halberstams view, failure
structures themselves (Halberstam, 2011: 35; citing Kipnes, 2004). In Halberstams view,

under certain circumstances, failing, losing,

forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more
creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world (2011, 2-3). This
is because: To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather than
searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure
involves acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the
hopelessly goofy (Halberstam 2011, 186-187). Declaring, and embracing, knowledge
cumulation failure (and thus, in traditional terms, research failure) allows us to escape the
punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development
(Halberstam 2011, 3). Here, the norms that discipline behavior and manage human
development are the fetishization of science, the fetishization of progress, and the
establishment and reification of boundaries of what ideas are relevant and what
ideas are irrelevant. In embracing failure, and escaping those punishing norms that are as violent in
their inclusion2 as they are in their exclusion queer studies offer us one method for imagining,
not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems
(2011, 89), Here, the alternative to the hegemonic system of claims of knowledge
cumulation is the queer not only as sexuality, but as lifestyle, as performance, and as foundation
for theorizing. If scholars find their affirmation in (hollow) confirmations of their claims to
knowledge cumulation, a queer politics of failure suggests a different direction. As
Halberstam recommends, rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in
all of our own inevitable fantastic failures (2011, 187). Reveling in fantastic failures, in terms of a
can be normatively desirable. S/he suggests that

queer critique of the fantasy of progressive knowledge cumulation, has two elements: enjoying research-as-failure,
and confronting the future given that embrace. Queer theory suggests guidelines for embracing failure: failing is
something queers do well not (only) in the self-deprecating sense of laughing at (our own) flaws, but in the more

queer failure
is a map of the path not taken to dismantle the logic of success and failure with
which we currently live (Weber, 2014). Failing to meet expectations and being fine
repudiates the salvation narrative that accompanies the right rules and norms
(Weber, 2014). The exposure and analysis of queer failure denaturalizes the coherence
of knowledge-production performances to show the vapidity inside, and argues that
the only way the performance of IR can truly be understood is liminal, transitional,
and vulnerable (Butler, 1990, 1993). With Halberstam, we suggest the replacement of allencompassing global theories with those subjugated knowledges which have
been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systemization (Halberstam,
fruitful sense of exposing the ridiculousness of norms by failing to live up to them. In this sense,

2011).

Haraways Figurations
Instead embrace figuration
Weber 16 Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex
[Cynthia Weber, 2016, Chapter: Queer Intellectual Curiosity as International
Relations Method in Queer International Relations Sovereignty, Sexuality and the
Will to Knowledge, pgs 29-33, Oxford University Press] AMarb
What exactly might we look for when we examine figurations of the homosexual?
Writing in a context very different from Foucaults,8 Donna Haraway discusses some specific techniques of
figuration that allow us to employ figuration as a critical conceptual device (Kuntsman
2009, 29; also see Castaeda 2002). Haraways conceptualization of figurationwhich is compatible with Foucaults
analysis and builds upon Butlers notion of performativitycan help us explore in more detail the figure of the

Figurations are distillations of shared meanings in forms or images. They

do not (mis)represent the world, for to do so implies the world as a signified
preexists them. Rather, figurations emerge out of discursive and material
semiotic assemblages that condense diffuse imaginaries about the world
into specific forms or images that bring specific worlds into being . This
makes figurations powerful signifiers that approximate but never properly represent
seemingly signified worlds, even though figurations are evoked as if they did
represent preexisting worlds. It is this latter move that reifies figurations and the
worlds they create, making both potentially flat, unproductive, stifling and
destructive (Grau 2004, 12; McNeil 2007). This is why we need techniques like Haraways to analyze precisely
how figurations are crafted and employed. Haraway describes figuration as the act of
employing semiotic tropes that combine knowledges, practices, and power to shape
how we map our worlds and understand actual things in those worlds (1997). Unpacking
Haraways description, we are left with four key elements through which figurations take
specific forms: tropes, temporalities, performativities, and worldings (1997, 11). Tropes
are material and semiotic references to actual things that express how we
understand them. Tropes are figures of speech that are not literal or self-identical
to what they describe (Haraway 1997, 11). Figures of speech enable us to express what
something or someone is like while (potentially) at the same time grasping that the
figuration is not identical to the figure of speech we have employed. This is what
makes figuration something that both makes representation appear to be possible
and interrupts representation in any literal sense. Haraway argues that language
necessitates deployment of figuration and its inability to achieve literal
representations. This is because all languagetextual, visual, artisticinvolves at least
some kind of displacement that can trouble identifications and certainties (Haraway
1997, 11) between a figure and an actual thing. Investigating figurations of the homosexual as an
homosexual.

alien species to the Victorians as opposed to the homosexual as the LGBT rights holder to the Obama
administration and as both an alien species andthe normal LGBT rights holder in the figure of Neuwirth/Wurst
allows analysis of what makes these figurations possible but also what keeps them from referring to specific
material bodies engaged in specific forms of sexual practices, specific forms of loving or specific forms of (singular)

Haraways second element of figuration is temporalities. Temporality

expresses a relationship to time. Haraway notes that figurations are historically rooted in
the semiotics of Western Christian realism, which is embedded with a progressive,
eschatological temporality. Western Christian figures embody this progressive temporality because
they hold the promise of salvation in the afterlife (Haraway 1997, 9). This medieval notion of
being.

developmental temporality remains a vital aspect of (some) contemporary figurations, even when figures take
secular forms (e.g., when science promises to deliver us from evil with a new technological innovation;Haraway
1997, 10). But

this developmental time may not be applied to every figuration in the

same way. For example, because the Victorian homosexual was figured not only through European scientific
discourses but also through discourses of race and colonialism (Stoler 1995), how the homosexual was related to
developmental temporalities depended very much on who it was (colonizer vs. savage) and where it was (Europe
vs. the colonies). It was in part thanks to how developmental temporalities were racialized (Stoler 1995) and
spatialized (Hoad 2000) that it was possible for the racially whitened, Western European homosexual to be put on
a course of progressive correction so he could live within Victorian society, while figurations of whole populations of
(queerly) racially darkened colonial subjects endlessly oscillated between the irredeemable nonprogressive
homosexual and the redeemable morally perfectible homosexual (Bhabha 1994, 118), both of whom must live

racialized and colonial legacies of the

homosexual live on, but in ways that appear to be completely different from those of their Victorian
predecessors. For example, Clintons LGBT rights holder is not cast as progressing; rather,
the LGBT is a temporally static figure articulated in universal moral terms. By
definition, this figure always was and always will be a human being like every other
human being. This is what empowers the LGBT to claim gay rights as human rights, as every human being
under Victorian imperial rule. Centuries later, these

has a claim to human rights. This does not mean that a developmental temporality is absent from Obama
administration discourse on the LGBT. Rather, developmental temporality is central to Obama administration
discourse, albeit differently than it was to the Victorians. This is because developmental temporality is not
implanted in the figure of the LGBT per se. Instead, it is located in relations between sovereign nation-states,
where the Obama administration uses a states progress toward the appreciation of gay rights as human rights as
the measure of development. This is evident in US policies toward Uganda and Russia, for example (Rao 2014b;
Wilkinson and Langlois 2014). Striving toward this specific kind of development is what it means to the Obama
administration to be on the right side of history (Clinton 2011; also see Rao 2012). As we will see in chapter 6, it is,
somewhat surprisingly, Tom Neuwirths Euro-pop bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst that most closely engages
with Western Christian realism and its progressive, eschatological temporality as described by Haraway. While
Neuwirth/Wursts declaration, Were unstoppable, aligns Neuwirth/Wurst with a modern progressive developmental
temporality, as a cisman styled with long flowing hair and a beard while wearing a gown and singing Rise like a
Phoenix, Neuwirth/Wurst has been read as a resurrected Christlike figure (Ring 2014). This has led some European
political and religious leaders to debate whether Neuwirth/Wurst is a developmental vision of salvation or sacrilege

These differences in how figurations of the homosexual relate

to temporalities underscore the importance of Haraways third element
performativities. Coined by Judith Butler to explain how sexes, genders, and sexualities
appear to be normal, natural, and true, the term performativity expresses how
repeated iterations of acts constitute the subjects who are said to be performing
them (Butler 1999, xv). Applying Nietzsches idea that there is no doer behind the deed and that the deed is
everything (1999, 33) to an analysis of sexes, genders, and sexualities, Butler argues that enactments of
gender make it appear as if sexwhich Butler understands as a social constructis
natural and normal, and as if particular sexed bodies map naturally onto particular
genders. It is through the everyday inhabiting of these various sexes, genders, and sexualities by everyday
people who enact them that the subjectivities of these doers of sexes, genders, and
sexualities appear to come into being. This does not mean thatonce enactedperformativities
for contemporary Europe.

freeze sexed, gendered, and sexualized subjectivities and the networks of power and pleasure that are productive

each enactment is itself particular, it holds the possibility of

reworking, rewiring, and resisting both frozen notions of sexes, genders, and
sexualities and their institutionalized organizations of power, including those that
participate in build[ing] the fantasy of state and nation (Butler 2004, 124; in IR, see Campbell
1992). Following Butler, Haraway argues that figurations are performative images that can be
inhabited (Haraway 1997, 11). In the case of the Victorian homosexual, the LGBT rights holder, and the Europop bearded drag queen, this means these figurationsthese figures of speechthrough
their repetition under specific conditions come to be understood as inhabitable
images of oneself (or, e.g., ones vision of Europe) or of others. The homosexual may
of them. Rather, because

choose to performatively inhabit these figurations, or this inhabiting might be

imposed upon the homosexual. For example, it is hard to imagine the Victorian homosexual willingly
embracing himself as perverse. It is even harder to imagine colonial subjects embracing their figuration by
Victorians as akin to the homosexual in their perversion while distinct from the homosexual because their
racialization and primitiveness designate them as incapable of progression or as slow to progress. In contrast, the
contemporary figuration of the homosexual as the LGBT may seem to be uncontroversially positive. Many
homosexuals welcome the opportunity to inhabit the image of the LGBT rights holder because of how it appears
to signify both normality and progress. At the same time, other contemporary homosexuals find the image of the

objections center on how the LGBT is produced by

and is productive of institutions, structures of understanding, and practical
orientations that value only what they describe as hetero/homonormative ways of
being homosexual (in marriage, the military, and consumption) and devalue what they describe as
queer ways of inhabiting ones sexuality (Duggan 2003), illustrating a tension
between IR conceptualizations of norms as uniformly beneficial (e.g.,Finnemore
and Sikkink 1998) and (antinormative) queer critiques of norms/normalization . As for
Neuwirth/Wurst, by both embracing and exceeding hetero/homonormativities, his/her
performative figuration complicates both the LGBT and a hetero/homonormative
versus (antinormative) queer dichotomy. These illustrations suggest figurations are never
stable. For every performance of a figuration depends upon innumerable particularities,
including historical circumstances, geopolitical context, spatial location,
social/psychic/affective/political dispositions, and perceived/attributed
traits (racial, religious, sexual, classed, gendered, [dis]abled) of individuals in
relation to the figurations they are presumed to inhabit, an individuals success,
failure or jamming of their assigned/assumed figuration as they performatively
enact it, and how these performativities are received and read by others. Because no
two performative enactments are ever identical (Butler 1999), every repetition and inhabitation
introduces some, even tiny, amount of difference. What this means for figurations of
the homosexual is they are never completely frozen, for they are always only
distilled forms or images that changeeven in small waysthrough their every
iteration and inhabitation. Therefore, institutional arrangements of
power/knowledge/pleasurebe they described as heteronormativities and/or
homonormativitiesare likewise less stable than they appear to be. All of these
aspects of performativityin combination with how tropes and temporalities are deployedcombine to
produce the final element of figurationworlding (in IR, see Agathangelou and Ling 2004). Worlding
map[s] universes of knowledge, practice, and power (Haraway 1997, 11). In the cases of the
LGBT rights holder too constraining. Their

Victorian homosexual, the Obama administrations LGBT rights holder and European debates over

the way they are performatively put into

practice, and the power relations running through them combine so differently in
each case that it is sometimes difficult to remember that we are speaking about the
same general figurethe homosexual. The sometimes extreme differences in how the figure of the
homosexual is worlded emphasizes another of Haraways points the maps produced by worlding
practices are as contestable as the figurations to which they give specific form (1997,
11). In Foucaults terms, this means neither understandings of the homosexual nor the
networks of power/knowledge/pleasure that produce this figure are ever frozen.
Rather, they are products of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their
pleasures [that define] new rules for the game of powers and pleasures (Foucault
1980, 48). These games are played not only in intimate relations but also in national,
regional, and international relations.
Neuwirth/Wurst, knowledge about these figurations,

Transgender China
Alt transgender china move away from western thoughts
think of it through an assemblage
Chiang 12 Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History, University of Warwick
[Howard, 2012, Chapter 1: Imagining Transgender China in Transgender China,
Palgrave Macmillan, DOI: 10.1057/9781137082503] AMarb
transgender studies came to be consolidated and widely recognized as an
independent area of academic inquiry. Of course, debates ensued among activists,
popular authors, academics, and other writers regarding what transgender precisely
means (and the more general question of who fits into what categories has deeper historical
ramifications in gay activism, feminism, and the civil rights movement ). But with an
expansive (even ambiguous), institutionalized, and collective notion of transgender,
these actors nonetheless shared a commitment to advancing the political and
epistemological interests of gender variant people. Moreover, as the twentieth century drew to
By the 1990s,

an end, it seemed rather usefuland perhaps helpfulto distinguish the range of community, political, and
intellectual work centered on trans folks from those centered on gays and lesbians. In the emerging field of
transgender studies, transgender-identified scholars took the lead in breaking the ground of research;22
contributors came from diverse disciplinary backgrounds with a heterogeneous set of theoretical, rhetorical, and
methodological positions; and, most importantly, fruitful conversations have been largely enriched by selfreflexive
insights on and a unique preference for novel interpretations of the meaning of embodiment, specifically, and the

The capacity to stand in

for an unspecified group of people is, indeed, one of the seductive things about
transgender in trying to describe a wide range of people, both historical and
contemporary, Western and non-Western.24 Despite Valentines promising remark, the
considerable measure of enthusiasm that fueled the making of transgender studies has been
confined mainly to North American and European academic circles. It logically follows that
possible boundaries of human experience more broadly.23 As Valentine puts it,

this area of scholarship is heavily oriented toward exploring Anglo-American society and culture. The only exception
is the still growing literature that uses anthropological data on gender diversity to elucidate the limitations of
Western-centric frameworks of gender dimorphism. But even here, the primary focus has been Native America and

Scholarly, activist, and creative work on transgender issues in

Northeast Asia remains relatively scarce. With a few notable exceptions, gay and lesbian
topics alongside the translation of Western queer theoretical textscontinue to dominate critical
studies of gender and sexuality in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China .26
Particularly missing from the field of queer studies is a sustained critical
engagement with Chinese transgender identity, practice, embodiment, history, and
culture. Recently, a number of Sinologists from different disciplines have begun to balance the analytical horizon
of transgender studies. A China-centered perspective makes it possible to expand the
scope of transgender scholarship in terms of historical nuance, culturalgeographical
coverage, and methodological refinement.27 It is in the spirit of providing this long overdue
Southeast Asia.25

perspective that the present volume brings together these Sinologists for the first time. Although each chapter can
be treated separately in its own right, they must also be taken together as a joint endeavor that explores the
possibility (and potential limitations) of excavating a field of scholarly inquiry that we might assign the label of
Chinese transgender studies. There is a consistent double bind in trying to consolidate a field under that name:
the prospect of such an ambitious project brings with it key intrinsic perils or conceptual problematic. In the

the conflation of many types

of gender variance into the single shorthand term transgender, particularly when
this collapse into a single genre of personhood crosses the boundaries that divide
the West from the rest of the world, holds both peril and promise. 28 Although Chinese
broadest sense, this merely echoes Susan Strykers earlier comment that

transgender studies promises to break new grounds and balance the existing insufficiencies in the broader
field of transgender studies, it faces a politics of knowledge not unlike the set of problems it
claims to exceed in the face of Western transgender studies. For instance, if the field of
transgender studies was institutionalized only in the 1990s and, even more crucially, in North America, how can
the category of transgender even with its widest possible definition, be applied to
Chinese cultural and historical contexts? It should be added here that even in Western studies
of transgenderism, scholars often traverse between treating the concept of gender
as an analytical, thematic, topical, theoretical, historical, and epistemological
category.29 So the interest of venturing into new terrains of analysis is inherently fraught with questions of
methodological assumption, categorical adequacy, and how they confound the fine line between research prospect
and disciplinary closure. Independently and interactively, each of the following chapters reveals some of these

One way to imagine Chinese transgender

studies is by adopting a focused definition of transgender to refer to practices of
embodiment that cross or transcend normative boundaries of gender. This approach
lends itself easily to identifying specific trans figures based on their selfrepresentation, bringing to light concrete historical and cultural examples in which
such identification occur, and stressing the importance of agency both in cultural
production and with respect to the historical actors themselves who self-identify as
trans. In Gendered Androgyny, for instance, Daniel Burton-Rose takes a huge chronological sweepover a
major pitfalls and the corollary intellectual promises.

period of nearly 25 hundred yearsin isolating concrete references to biological intersexuality as well as gender
identities not necessarily paralleled in the physical body that did not conform to the available dominant categories.
The examples that he uncovers in Buddhist, Daoist, and Classicist/Confucian sources serve as a pivotal reminder of
the surprising fluidity of the gender and sexual ideations as depicted in these canonical Chinese texts. Perhaps
there are scholars for whom some of these historical examples should be more appropriately absorbed into the
category of gay. Yet, this preference bears striking similarity to earlier competing efforts in Western LGBT studies

Burton-Rose
carefully pitches his study as an inoculation against superficial attempts to locate
an indigenous transgender discourse in Chinese culture, but only so as to enhance the
potency of transgender and allied social movements. In contrast, the chapter by Pui Kei
that only helped stabilize, rather than undermine, the field of transgender scholarship.30

Eleanor Cheung on Transgenders in Hong Kong offers a more contemporary perspective and marshals an even
more identification-based approach to chart the structural transformations of the sociohistorical context in which
trans individuals in Hong Kong have reoriented their subjectivityfrom shame to pride. Even though general
attitudes toward transgender people have become less negative and less hostile, many of Cheungs informants still
experience great emotional distress and trauma on a daily basis, much of which could be attributed to the
discriminations and prejudices that have survived from an earlier generation. The development of transgender
subjectivity in Hong Kong corresponds to the Model of Gender Identity Formation and Transformation, or the GIFT
model, which Cheung first delineates in her doctoral dissertation.31 Like Burton-Rose, Cheung not only relies on a
nominal notion of transgender to extend its analytical nuisance and possibility, but she also brings to light rare
voices of Chinese transgender subjects that constitute a goldmine of thick ethnography. In trying to imagine China
in a transgender frame, Sinologists have famous examples with which to work. The area of Chinese culture in which
cross-gender behavior has made the most prominent presence is none other than the theatrical arts. The beststudied example is perhaps the dan actors of traditional Peking opera. These actors start their professional training
at a relatively young age and are the only qualified actors to perform the female roles in traditional Peking opera.
Several scholars have explored in depth the historical transformation of their profession, social status, and popular
image in the twentieth century.32 In addition, although much has been speculated about the homoerotic subculture
embedded within the broader social network of these opera troupes, we must not lose sight of the gendered
implications of this male cross-dressing convention.33 After all, the dan roles were traditionally played by men
precisely because women were excluded from performing on the public stage. Considering the important role of the
theatrical arts in Chinese culture and history, the present volume sheds new light on some of its transgender
dimensions. Here, the purpose is to move beyond the well-known dan figure by highlighting other explicit examples
of cross-dressing in Chinese theatrical life. Chao-Jung Wus chapter, Performing Transgender Desire, does this by
bringing us to the other side of the Taiwan Strait. Wu provides a systematic ethnographic analysis of the Redtop
artists in Taiwan, a group of male cross-dressing artists who took the Taiwanese theatre culture by storm in the
1990s with their infamous fanchuan (cross-dressing) shows. Based on their public performances and personal
interviews, Wu argues that the Redtop artists provide a most telling example of the cultural performativity of
gender as theorized by Butler and others. The homosexual subculture that saturated the troupes quotidian rhythms

and structural underpinnings also troubles straightforward interpretations of the gender subversive acts as
conveyed by the actors themselves, especially since these behavioral patterns were highly imbued with misogynist
attitudes and hidden hierarchies of power relations defined around the normativity of gender orientation. Of course,
the

identitarian method of transgender studies discussed so far raises important

questions about the politics of representation, some of whose origins can be traced
to an earlier generation of debates in gay and lesbian studies. What forms of
practice or embodiment ultimately count and should get represented as
authentically transgender? Who get to be singled out as full-blown trans figures?
And whose voice has the authority to properly address or even resolve these
issues? In light of the above examples, we might add, how do we avoid holding up the dan actors of Peking
opera, the male impersonators of Yue opera, or the Redtop artists in Taiwan as role models or the ultimate
yardstick for calibrating the degree of transgenderness in other examples of potentially subversive Chinese figures,

As scholars, activists, and others

debate these questions in the United States and Europe, the reconfiguring of our
analytical prism with a focus on China would invariably complicate the politics of
queer representation and its underlying ideological and social agenda, as well as
the practical and political implications. A main objective of this volume is precisely
to make a critical intervention in unpacking these kinds of issues and debates. Any
conceivable answer to the above set of questions would be inherently problematic in one
way or another. Perhaps this squarely marks both the ugliness and flexibility of identity politics. Nevertheless,
this should not prevent us from thinking more creatively about different ways of
conducting Chinese transgender studies and how they might make broader impact
onChinese studies, transgender studies, and other cognate fields of scholarly
inquiry. An alternative approach to Chinese transgender studies is by building on case studies of gender
histories, embodiments, and cultural and artistic productions?34

ambiguity or androgyny, rather than concrete examples of gender transgression. This method considers
transgender practices not simply as the root of cultural identity, but also in terms of their relationship to broader
circuits of knowledge and power. A surprising example comes from the chapter by Zuyan Zhou, who delves into a
familiar genre of Chinese literature, namely, the scholar-beauty romances of the late Ming and early Qing periods.
But unlike previous studies, Zhou highlights an underappreciated androgynous motif lurking in the otherwise
renowned narrative of heteronormative romance between a caizi (talented scholar) and a jiaren (beauty). This
literary genre often construes its protagonists as embodying the attributes of both genders (perfect combination of
masculinity and femininity) to project a persistent ideal of androgyny. Contrary to the dominant interpretations of
this androgyny craze, which tend to trace its origins to the gender fluidity of the broader historical and cultural
context of the late Ming, Zhou explains the pervasive literary presentation of caizis and jiarens gender
transgression in relation to the contemporaneous development of the cult of qing (sentiment), noting that such
gender transgression instead originates from literati scholars recalcitrant impulses to assert their latent
masculinity as institutionalized yin subjects. Centering on the Beijing-based artist, Ma Liuming, Carlos Rojass study
carefully unravels the creative, social, and aesthetic expressions of Mas androgynous embodiment. Along with
Zhang Huan, Ma is a representative figure of a newly emerging group of Chinese performance artists whose work
continues to subvert hegemonic constructs of gender and sexual identity. Rojas takes Butlers understanding of the
iterative performativity of gender as a theoretical starting point and reflects more generally on the semiotics of
corporealityor the meanings and language of the bodybased on a series of texts in the realm of cultural
production, tracing the indigenous resources for Ma and Zhangs aesthetic creativity to the literary depictions of
male homoromance in the Chinese opera field. Central to his study are the following questions: How may subjects
use their bodies to challenge the representational regimes within which they are embedded? What is the role of
these semiotic systems in demarcating the systems own conceptual limits? In the examples found in Zhous and
Rojass chapters, ideas and norms of gender are unsettled on the level of artistic genresthrough manifestations of
gender liminalitythat are embedded within the form of art (literature or performance), rather than appropriations of

The most radical approach to developing

something that we might want to call Chinese transgender studies is perhaps by
leaving behind Western-derived meanings of gender altogetheror at least
problematizing them. This would make an important step in identifying and
understanding Chinese gender variance on its own unexpected terms. By making
a distinct departure from a trans/gender epistemology rooted in Western culture,
the completely opposite gender in public appearance.

we are also reconceptualizing our categories from a fundamentally global viewpoint.

Helen Leungs chapter, for instance, begins with a conventional analysis of trans figures in Chinese cinema, but it
ends with a radically suggestive interpretive strategy that restructures the very meaning of trans with respect to
Chinese body modification practices. In Transgenderism as a Heuristic Device, Alvin Wong focuses on the crosshistorical adaptations of a famous Chinese story, the Legend of the White Snake. By following how this story
transgendered across its adaptations in different cultural venues over time, Wong reveals the promise of these
transhistorical variants to produce unruly moments of transgender articulation. If Wongs heuristic suggestion is
based on historicitycrossing, Larissa Heinrichs chapter invites us to reconceptualize gender-crossing through the

This innovative rendition of transgender aesthetic

demands an inherently fluid definition of gender and demonstrates its concurrent
transformative possibility across literary and geocultural divides. Finally, Howard
Chiangs revisionist study of Chinese eunuchism offers a cautionary tale of the
tendency to universalize transgenderism as a category of experience. He exposes
the power, logic, and threshold of historical forces operating beyond the categorys
analytical parameters, especially in light of the modernist/nationalist bias of even
the most reliable sources on Chinese castration. Taken together, these studies reorient
the imagining of a transgender China by not assigning Western notions of gender
and transgender an epistemologically and ontologically privileged position. If cultural
framework of literary genre-crossing.

data from non-Western societies are useful for reflecting on Euro-American orderings of trans/gender, that certainly
should not be the sole purpose of this book. Contributors did not simply collect anthropological data about China
and report back to us what they found out there (although some of their work do engage with ethnography on the
level of disciplinary practice). Even the familiar debates on the North American berdache or otherthird
sex/gender people are oftentimes less about their experience, than about the theoretical preoccupations of
Western academic discourses and identity politics.35 Perhaps

one of the major strengths of doing

research on non-Western cultures, of which this anthology is an example, is the ability to
capture a grid of knowledge and experience that exceeds the categorizations of
gender, sexuality, and even transgender. Insofar as the very constitution of the field of transgender
studies as a field must remain a central question in the field, the findings of the present volume
should be viewed as having some central bearing on the definition and practice of
(trans)gender studies itself.36 Again, what matters less is how Western (trans)gender
theory or framework works in China, or whether or not it applies to a non-Western
context. Yet precisely because transgender studies is enabled and complicated by the indeterminacy of such key
concepts as gender, sexuality, and transgender, the studies that form this book point to different
possibilities of transforming the field vis--vis the very reorientations of these
concepts. And perhaps these potential transformations also have something to offer for
the rethinking of area studies. For example, one of the underexplored areas in Chinese
feminist studies and historiography that this book addresses concerns individuals who do not
conform toand practices that put pressure onhegemonic norms of gender. In the
emerging field of queer Asian studies, scholars are envisioning an ever more expansive
apparatus that could account for the myriad potentials and possibilities within crosscultural configurations of gender and sexuality as they play out in Asia and
elsewhere, in scholarly discourses, subcultural practices, grassroots movements, or
otherwise.37 Studies are leaving behind the homogenizing/ heterogenizing debate on global identity
categories,38 looking for new avenues of research that transcend traditional disciplinary
and methodological constraints,39 and, above all, addressing and building new
alliances across the globe to make post-Orientalist regimes of cross-cultural thinking
possible.40 If the animating force of transgender studies comes from a broad,
collective, and always mutating definition of transgender, the view from China only
makes the promise of transformation all the more meaningful to our imagination.

Kweer Theory
The alt is to embrace Kweer studies to understand how
racial binaries have historically excluded Asians, to revaluate
nationality, and to challenge the hegemonic whiteness of
queer
Sapinoso 2009
(Joyleen Valero (JV), PhD in Philosophy, University of Maryland, FROM
QUARE TO KWEER:TOWARDS A QUEER ASIAN AMERICAN CRITIQUE
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/9567/Sapinoso_umd_0
117E_10599.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y - KSA)
I am not
satisfied by how his earlier postulations of queer of color analysis boil down here only
to an African American cultural context. In no way do I mean to elide the importance and value of
Its not that I disagree with the argument Ferguson makes in the quotation above, but rather that

Fergusons work. Without a doubt, Johnson and Fergusons texts each compellingly undertakes an intersectional
approach that successfully engages an integrated analyses of sexuality in conjunction with race and racial
formation. The centrality of African American racial formations in these texts, however, must be taken into account.

Given the vastly different histories between African American and Asian American
racial formations, including, but not limited to the ways in which these racial groups
have historically been pitted against one another (for the betterment of privileged
whites), it is especially important that we consider how the specificities of African
American subjects and subjectivities and of Asian American subjects and subjectivities might
account for distinct queer of color critiques within a U.S. context. Rather, in moving toward a queer
Asian American critique I mean to build from the base Ferguson provides and consider, as the subtitle of Frank H.

In Yellow, Wu writes, If the color

line runs between whites and people of color, Asian Americans are on one side; if
the color line runs between blacks and everyone else, Asian Americans are on the
other side (18). What Wu points out here is that Asian Americans find themselves positioned
on either one side of the color line or the other according to how specific contexts
and situations are classified. In her book Feminism Without Borders Chandra Talpade Mohanty similarly
Wus book Yellow states, Race in America Beyond Black and White.

asserts, the color line differs depending on ones geographical location in the United States (134). More
specifically, Mohanty distinguishes between her experiences living on the East Coast versus San Diego, California.

Having lived on the East Coast for many years, my designation as brown,
Asian, South Asian, Third World, and immigrant has everything to do with
definitions of blackness (understood specifically as African Fergusons Aberrations in Black focuses on
She writes:

U.S. subjects and contexts, and is located specifically within African American Studies and American Studies.
Similarly, most of Black Queer Studies is focused on blackness in the U.S. Though Rinaldo Walcotts essay Outside
in Black Studies: Reading From a Queer Place in the Diaspora, offers us a glimpse of blackness that is not specific
to the U.S., for the most part these texts posit queer of color critique and black queer studies as tied to particular

Besides de-naturalizing a focus on blackness as I do here by

turned attention to queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities , another effective
U.S. formations of blackness.

way to build upon and expand queer of color critique and black queer studies would be to de-naturalize blackness
itself through investigating different formations of blackness, for example in transnational and diasporic contexts.

my own in so far as a diasporic approach disrupts

nationalist discourses, and allows for the re-evaluation of nationality and national
Such a project could actually be closely related to

belonging. 11 American). However, San Diego, with its histories of immigration and racial struggle, its shared

border with Mexico, its predominantly brown (Chicano and Asian-American) color line, and its virulent antiimmigrant culture unsettled my East Coast definitions of race and racialization. I could pass as Latin until I spoke
my Indian English, and then being South Asian became a question of (in)visibility and foreignness.

Being South

Asian here was synonymous with being alien, non-American. (134) Whereas Wus formulation is in
relationship to a black/white color line, Mohantys experiences speak to the more nuanced relationships among
communities of color, positing a brown/Asian color line. Still, however, its clear from both these examples that

inhabiting such a variable racial position uniquely situates queer Asian American
subjects and subjectivities within discourses of queer of color critique , and demands yet
another fundamentally different approach. Taking queer of color critiquea tool for taking into
account racialized sexualitiesto a level that directs attentions to nationality and
national belonging, my critical project moves beyond the black/white binary which currently
predominates in the field. In addition to addressing the limitations of discussing race in the U.S. in terms of a

to disrupt notions of
homosexuality as a specifically white American phenomenon, as well as notions of
Asians in America as perpetual foreigners. These two misconceptions have worked
in tandem to reify the unintelligibility and impossibility of queer Asian American subjects and
subjectivities by positing Asianness and queerness, as well as Asian heritages and American
identities as mutually 12 exclusive. The work by Asian American Studies scholars to point out the ways in
black/white binary, moving towards a queer Asian American critique also helps

which Asians in America, immigrant and native-born, have been made into a race of aliens (R. Lee xi), or how in
the last century and a half, the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally,
economically, and culturally (L. Lowe 4), along with the work by LGBT Studies scholars to demonstrate the racial
and ethnic diversity of LGBT people, has made definite progress in challenging these misconceptions, respectively.
It is through a queer Asian American critique that I integrate these analyses so as to consider the dynamics of

I advocate kweer
studies as a practice (re-)dedicated to speaking about the material existence of a fuller
range of bodies of various colors, and aimed at understanding the complexity of racial differences as
they intersect with sexual identities. By no means are Asian Americans the only ones to find
themselves disregarded by the black/white binary of race predominant in the U.S.;
the experiences of American Indians, Latin Americans, as well as the growing
population of mixed race people in the U.S. are also elided by the black/white
binary. Writing specifically about mixed race people and the black/white binary, Gigi OtalvaroHormillosa argues
that, colonial violence maintains itself by the creation of black/white paradigms of race
that render other cultures invisible or prone to locating themselves on either side of
this paradigm (337). Otalvaro-Hormillosas argument goes even further than Wus, pointing not only to the
limits of black/white paradigms of race, but also revealing how taking up the discourse of a
black/white binary maintains colonial violence. Otalvaro-Hormillosas focus on colonial violence is
nationality and national belonging at play within a U.S. context of queer identifications.

13 particularly useful in expanding queer of color critique to account for a wider range of racialized experiences.
Kweer My first memory of stumbling upon kweer is connected to seeing it in an on-line edition of the now defunct,
alternative Seattle newspaper, Tablet. 10 Specifically, it appeared in the article, Better Living Through Drag: A
Discussion With Bamboo Clan About Race, Gender, and Being Kweer, by writer, editor in chief, and Tablet coowner, De Kwok. In the specific context of his essays title, kweer

signified to me a distinct racially

Asian way of being queer.11 While kweer is not utilized in the body of the article itself, Kwoks use of it
in the (sub)title struck me as familiar (to both queer and quare), yet distinct (from both queer and quare),
and still now, many years later, continues to captivate my imagination.

Johnson cites quare as part of

his grandmothers thick, black, southern dialect, (2) and the quare studies he asserts follows a
similar racial lineage, focusing specifically on African American culture. His rhetorical strategy of
proposing a new term that is racially marked effectively challenges queer studies 10
For more information about Tablet see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_(newspaper) 11 Since that first sighting, I
have found kweer in a handful of other contexts, ranging from a book by Palmer Cox published in 1888 titled,
Queer People with Wings and Stings and Their Kweer Kapers that features a cast of talking animals to on-line
references from UrbanDictionary.com and Kweer.com, that simply use kweer as synonymous for queer. Another
on-line source is from a personal blog post where the author self-identifies as a proud kweer gringo kaffir, and

uses kweer as a whimsical spelling for queer...and perhaps a way of distancing myself from Queer Studies and
other Frankensteinian pastimes (Ex Cathedra). Two sources, however, that seemed to similarly posit kweer as a
specifically racialized term are: 1) on-line biographies of Julie Dulani, who introduce her as a desi gender-kweer
poet, filmmaker and activist, passionate about speaking the truth fiercely and unapologetically (SALAAM); and 2)
Vicki Crowleys essay Drag Kings Down Under: An Archive and Introspective of a Few Aussie Blokes which notes
that kweer is the preferred spelling of many Australian Indigenous peoples (306) and further cites Rea and Brook
Andrew, Blak Bebe(z) & Kweer Kat(z). 14 tendency towards white hegemony. At the same time, however, steeped in
southern blackness, quare has limiting tendencies of its own.

I invest in kweer as another way,

to challenge queer studies

different although not wholly unlike Johnsons conception of quare,

tendency towards white hegemony. One way in which to think about the relationship between kweer
and quare is that similar to quare, kweer visibly differs from queer, signaling to readers its (racial)
distinctiveness.12 Aside from their visual elements, kweer and quare can also be compared to queer
according to their pronunciation. In fact, Johnsons discussion of quare is specifically tied to his grandmothers
utterance, suggesting the significance of its oral transmission.13 In contrast, kweer and queer are homonyms,
aurally undistinguishable from one another.14 In fact, it has often been the case that when telling people the title of
this dissertation, they have mistakenly thought me to be saying from quare to queer instead of from quare to
kweer, and questioned why the turn away from quares focus on race to queers hegemonic whiteness.

I take

the risk of kweer being mistaken for queer in order to highlight kweers
difference from quare. Although both quare and kweer aim to challenge how
whiteness has become naturalized within queer studies, kweer also challenges the
naturalization of blackness as the sole focus of queer of 12 To some degree, the visual
characteristic that marks both quare and kweer as something else than queer could be seen as mirroring the
assumed visual differences often attributed to people of color. While it is not my intention to promote this reading of
either kweer or quare, I do mean to highlight how their difference from queer, as well as from one another is
signified visually. 13 And perhaps even suggesting the importance of oral traditions between generations in African
American history and culture. 14 In light of the stereotypical assumption of Asian Americans as foreign-language
speakers whose English speech is riddled by an Asian accent, I take pleasure that it could be seen as disrupting this

my decision to deploy a
similar rhetorical strategy as Johnson in order to propose kweer as a visually and
aurally marked racial term distinct from quare that can explore nuances of racialized
cultural rituals and lived experiences within a fuller range of various culturesparticularly, but not
limited only to, Asian Americans. Kweer Disruptions The importance of intersectional analysis
lays not only in acknowledging the fuller range of peoples material realities, but
also in the larger project of queer studies to challenge the stability of supposedly naturalized
categories of identity, especially sexuality. As Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star write in their
stereotype that kweer and queer are homonyms. 15 color critique; hence

book, Sorting Things Out, the more at home you are in a community of practice, the more you forget the strange
and contingent nature of its categories seen from the outside (293-295). This being at home and forgetting of
strangeness are what define being naturalized. Naturalization is an on going, and ever evolving process. For
example, queer has been deployed to disrupt assimilationist uses of gay and lesbian, and quare has been
deployed to disrupt and denaturalize (mis-)conceptions of the hegemonic whiteness of queer.

Kweer is another

aimed at examining our assumptions and taken-for-granted beliefs of who queers of color
to retain a certain level of strangeness that
ultimately allows for a more nuanced, and complex understanding of nationality and national
belonging at play within a U.S. context of queer identifications. The main reason I turn to a kweer strategy is to
purposefully denaturalize not only the assumption of the hegemonic whiteness of
queer, but also to disrupt the 16 ways in which blackness is being naturalized as the sole focus of queer of
strategy

are and what queer of color critique entails in order

color studies. Certainly, black queer studies is a crucial project, necessary, as E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G.
Henderson argue, for nam[ing] the specificity of the historical and cultural differences that shape the experiences
and expressions of queerness (7). In their Introduction: Queering Black Studies/Quaring Queer Studies,
Johnson and Henderson make clear the importance and significance of considering the specificity attached to the
marker black (7). Indeed, despite all the work that has been done on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender identities, that Johnson and Hendersons edited anthology, Black Queer Studies, published in 2005
can be said to be the first of its kind reveals the extent to which attention to specificities of blackness have largely
been marginalized. Still, given the differing histories and contexts of particular groups racial formations in the U.S.,
it is important to consider the specificity attached to racial, historical, and cultural markers aside from black. For

example, as Angelo Ancheta, Jacinta Ma, and Don Nakanishi argue in their introduction to AAPI Nexus Special Issue
on Civil Rights, Asian Americans are frequently absent from the largely black-white civil rights discourse, and if
they are considered, they are often relegated to secondary or tertiary roles. Major components of the Asian
American civil rights agenda are ignored altogether (v). In this instance, kweer studies helps to disrupt the
black/white binary and bring Asian Americans and Asian American issues into sharper and more central focus.
Furthermore, Ancheta, Ma, and Nakanishi point to the various populations included under the umbrella term Asian

not only do we have to consider the relationships between

Asian Americans and other 17 communities of color, but among different
populations within Asian American communities themselves. 15 This latter project of looking
American to make clear that

to specificities aside from black, which I term kweer studies, is not in competition with black queer studies, but

another avenue alongside black queer studies, in the service of the larger
realm of queer of color studies. Thus, despite black queer studies relatively recent emergence as a
visible and developing field of study, and its very attention to black racial differences, we must continue to
push towards recognizing other racial differences. My point here is that my concern is not for the
rather

specificity on black queers that texts such as Black Queer Studies and Aberrations in Black make central, but rather
that these texts specificity on blackness be highlighted and distinguished from wider investigations of queer people
of color, including, but not limited to black people. In this way, queer

people of color does not come

to stand only for black queers, and we maintain the potential to focus on a fuller
range of queer racial formations. As AnaLouise Keating writes in her essay Forging El Mundo Zurdo,
its not differences that divide us but rather our refusal to openly discuss the
differences among us (520). We must not only discuss our differences, but also recognize the complexity
of our differences. In her essay Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, Audre Lorde makes clear
that such complex recognition of our differences is the key to successfully challenging systematized oppression and
creating a better society for us 15 In fact, when considering the differences among Asian Americans in regards to
scholarly disciplines of study, Helen C. Toribio argues that there are elements in Filipino American studies that
make it distinct from both Chinese American and Japanese American studies and more similar to other areas of
ethnic studies, such as Native American studies and La Raza studies, (167) pointing not only to the potential of a
kweer studies to discuss differences among Asian Americans, but also to discuss ties between some Asian
Americans and other non-black communities of color (167). 18 all. I take Keatings and Lordes messages to heart as
I attempt to move towards a kweer studies which is indebted to, but distinct from much prior work in queer of color
critique that focuses on race in terms of African Americans and blackness, and so calls for even greater attention to
differences. Furthermore, a queer Asian American critique makes a significant contribution to Womens Studies
focus on intersectionality.

Feminist scholarship is not free from a problematic history of

centering on white, middle-class, Eurocentric and heterosexual women, although it is the
case that women of color, working-class women and lesbians critique of that kind of feminist scholarship has led to
foregrounding the study of the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality that is now at the heart of
Womens Studies. In her book, Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, Lynn Weber writes at length
about the benefits of intersectional analysis, citing such things as recognizing limiting views of others, achieving
good mental health, and realistically assessing our environment (11-14). Beyond contributing to the field of
Womens Studies by mere virtue of being an intersectional analysis, this dissertation also seeks to make a
contribution by

challenging Womens Studies approach to intersectionality . More specifically,

some kinds of intersectionality have been prioritized at the cost

my research illustrates that

of others. This critique is by no means unique. For example, in their book Scattered Hegemonies, Inderpal
Grewal and Caren Kaplan point out that race, class, and gender are fast becoming the holy trinity that every
feminist feels compelled to address even as this trinity delimits the range of discussion around womens lives.

What is often left out of these U.S.-focused 19 debates are other categories of identity and
affiliation that apply to non-U.S. cultures and situations (19). The intervention Grewal and
Kaplan attempt to make here is one specifically on behalf of transnational feminism, arguing for the need to pay
attention to women in a global context. Since the publishing of Scattered Hegemonies in 1994, there has certainly
been a significant increase in work transnational feminism, and Womens Studies in global contexts. My own
challenge to the field of Womens Studies is both similar to and different from Grewal and Kaplans. Like Grewal and

I find problematic the way in which the holy trinity of race, class, and gender
elides other dimensions especially sexuality, but also such things as disability,
nationality, and religion. However, whereas Grewal and Kaplan push for a non-U.S. focus, my project seeks
Kaplan,

to turn the focus back on the U.S., specifically to Asian Americans. Centering Asian Americans in my project
contributes to maintaining an intersectional analysis that not only looks to multiple dimensions of differencerace,

understands that each of those dimensions is itself

complex, rather than simply a matter of simplistic binaries (e.g., white/black,
heterosexual/homosexual, U.S. citizen/non-U.S. citizen, male/female,
masculine/feminine). Thus, in addition to broadening queer of color scholarships focus on African American
gender, sexuality, nationalitybut also

sexualities, another contribution a U.S. focus makes is to more closely address the changing racial climate in the
U.S. While Grewal and Kaplan are certainly justified in their push to focus on the ways in which transnational
feminism and women in a global context must be understood in their own light, and not merely by U.S. standards,

investigation of racial formations within the U.S., 20 specifically in regards for Asian Americans
remains important, too. In fact, in light of how both Womens Studies and LGBT Studies are becoming
increasingly focused on issues of international globalization, and more and more attention is bestowed on Asians in
Asian countries, the importance of unpacking the complexities of racialized sexualities within the U.S. takes on
especial significance. Despite the opposing foci between my approach and that of Grewal and Kaplans, the
contribution both make is the commitment to developing and practicing a complex intersectional analysis.

Tropicalism
Embracing Tropicalism is key to disrupt rigid masculine theory
and open up the field to queer theories, which better reveals
power relations.
Paul Amar, Associate Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of California Santa Barbara.
MIDDLE EAST MASCULINITY STUDIES DISCOURSES OF "MEN IN CRISIS," INDUSTRIES OF GENDER IN REVOLUTION,
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. Special Issues: Middle East Sexualities. ProQuest. Fall

2011. 36-70,129.

One of the avenues proposed for exiting from the impasse in masculinity studies is
a shift of methodologies away from questions of identity and political discourse
toward forms of inarticulate sociality, non-politicized intimacies, and non-verbal
practices. These new methodological avenues circumvent spoken or represented
identities as they are articulated in social movements, governance, or the public
sphere. These theorists have argued that highlighting naming practices that are less identitarian (e.g. developing
terminologies that flag less identitarian categories such as "men who have sex with men," "the downlow," or, of

these theorists aim to develop empirical, ethnographic

methods that get beyond the interview and the speech act, and so properly
appreciate the nonverbal, non-psychological quality of erotic and social sexuality.
course, "queer") is not enough. Instead

Inspired by the pioneering ethnographic work of Charles Hirschkind (2006, 21), who develops methodologies for
rendering "subterranean forms of... sensory aptitudes and practices inhabiting contemporary cultural-historical
formations," I provisionally label these masculinity-studies method "sensory empiricism" to highlight certain
commonalities in these scholars who do empirical fieldwork and often also work in activist or therapeutic
interventions and who develop new legibilities for sensory and erotic social performances and forms of contact
rather than maintain the frame of measuring and qualifying ethno-cultural or gender identities. In his recent work,

empirical social scientific and public health start anew

with an open apprehension of practices of public erotic sociality, which has
consistently been marginalized by political ethnography and socio-historical archival
work on sex talk and sex texts. Parker argues that methodologies that are open to the full
sensorium of practices (not merely of the sex act itself, but of eroticized sociality
and spatial circulation) may offer new ways to explore and catalogue the world of
the visual, the tactile, and the olfactory and thus break out of the semiotic
limitations of spoken and written utterances and their anchoring in the landscape of
hegemonized political subjectivities. Parker's work, which has often focused on public sexuality and
sexual health in Brazil, faced criticism in the past-that his notion of a non-identitarian world of sensory
interaction, where gay/straight and black/white identities blur, may reflect the
persistence of a Tropicalist worldview. Tropicalism, a colonial discourse that
overlaps with Orientalism in many ways, sees the sexuality of "tropical peoples"
(usually meaning Latin Americans and Caribbeans of color ) as more polymorphous
and less disciplined than those of the North. Tropical sensuality stands as either a threat to modern
Richard Parker (2009) proposes that

disciplinary subjectivity or as the much desired supplement that adds color, vitality, and flexibility to Western
modernity. Parker is aware of these critiques, but he, along with many Brazilian scholars of racialized sexuality and
public eroticism, such as Peter Fry (1986, 2000), Osmundo Pinho (2011), Rosana Heringer and Pinho (2011), and
Laura Moutinho (2004), insist that sensorial Tropicalist methods can transcend their colonial origins. Furthermore,
they emphasize that empirical

fieldwork on tactile, olfactory, physical, spatially specific

forms of contact that are not pre-segregated into social, racial, or identitarian
subjects may reveal alternative social formations of power as well as alterity that
public utterances, public records, and social movements may be missing or
obscuring. This agenda has been articulated by Bradley Epps (2005, 145 - 8) as an

"ethic of promiscuity," drawing upon, in particular, the epistemological innovation

embedded in the work of marginalized Brazilian sex ethnographer and urban
sociologist, Nstor Perlongher. These Brazilianists that I group together as sensory empiricists can be
seen as parallel to the vernacular methodology of Latino queer performers who, as described in the work of Jos

Tropicalism and
Orientalism are explicitly mined and spectacularized in ways that recover
and revalue underground forms of racial, class, and gendered collectivity
and that destabilize notions of embodiment, pleasure, and masculinity .
Muoz (1999), have developed processes of "disidentification" through which

Imagination
The alt solves we must embrace a politics of solidarity to
understand how racialized sexualities function within current
international institutions Imagining possible responses is the
only way to induce change
Sapinoso 2009
(Joyleen Valero (JV), PhD in Philosophy, University of Maryland, FROM
QUARE TO KWEER:TOWARDS A QUEER ASIAN AMERICAN CRITIQUE
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/9567/Sapinoso_umd_0
117E_10599.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y - KSA)
Imagination, a function of the soul, has the capacity to extend us beyond the
confines of our skin, situation, and condition so we can choose our responses . It
enables us to reimagine our lives, rewrite the self, and create guiding myths for our
times. (Anzalda Preface: (Un)Natural Bridge, (Un)Safe Spaces 5) In working towards the kind of imagination
Kweerly Forward

that Gloria Anzalda describes in the quotation above, I investigate the areas of kinging culture and U.S.

there have been failures in imagining queer Asian American subjects

and subjectivities is seen more clearly when we foreground the interplay of
racialized sexualities with national belonging within areas of kinging culture and U.S. immigration.
Although these failures exist, working with and through interdisciplinary
methodologies in these sites provides insight into how such imaginings can be , and
immigration. That

have been realized in the practices of actual queer Asian American subjects. 31 Whether in kinging culture or

asserting a presence and

challenging convention as strategies employed to claim nationality and national
belonging in these contexts that have failed to imagine and include queer Asian American subjects and
subjectivities. I juxtapose these two sites because doing so allows me to put cultural
production, political activism, and legislation into intimate conversation with one
another. My combination of investigation kinging culture and U.S. immigration issues encourages imaginative
discourses of U.S. immigration, my dissertation emphasizes a similar dynamic of

processes that foreground national belonging and highlights work that seeks to realize these imaginings, at both the
micro level of an individual kings performance, as well as the macro level of federal immigration legislation. In
highlighting these overlaps, my project seeks to make kinging culture more accountable to racialized sexualities in
national contexts, while also simultaneously making immigration legislation more accountable to individuals queer

in opening up the conversations of queer of color critique to a

broader range of racializations, focused on, but not limited to Asian Americans, I
hope to contribute to a better understanding of how we might pursue and achieve a
politics of solidarity (in opposition to a politics of unity) . A kweer approach allows me to be
sexualities. In addition,

attentive to queer Asian Americans lives as they live themto understand their lives within the very organizations,
institutions, and structures they are circumscribed by, while at the same time understanding that they cull out

it is important
to foreground the intersectionality of our various dimensions of identity, it is perhaps
of greater importance that we stress our 32 interconnectedness. In this way, we can
band together, strong in numbers and driven in shared purposes . More and more it
becomes clear that it is only through such a politics of solidarity that large social change
will occur, and social justice will be obtained .
spaces where hopes and dreams persist by creating new nations and worlds around them. While

Trans Rage
Through language, trans identity is expressed as rage. Trans
rage allows subversive action within the territorialized space
of gendered bodies by embodying the chaos that society forces
into order. These stories obscured by cis security open up a
space, not a place, for trans studies.
Stryker 94
(Susan Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, as well as Director of the
Institute for LGBT Studies; she also holds a courtesy appointment as Associate Professor in the Norton
School of Family and Consumer Sciences. She is the author of many articles and several books on
transgender and queer topics, most recently Transgender History (Seal Press 2008). She won a Lambda
Literary Award for the anthology The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006), and an Emmy
Award for the documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (Frameline/ITVS
2005). She currently teaches classes on LGBT history, and on embodiment and technology. Research
interests include transgender and queer studies, film and media, built environments, somatechnics,
and critical theory. My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing
Transgender Rage GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1994 Volume 1, Number 3: pp. 248-251
cVs)

A formal disjunction seems particularly appropriate at this moment because the

affect I seek to examine critically, what I've termed "transgender rage," emerges
from the interstices of discursive practices and at the collapse of generic categories. The rage
itself is generated by the subject's situation in a field governed by the unstable but
indissoluble relationship between language and materiality , a situation in which language
organizes and brings into signification matter that simultaneously eludes definitive
representation and demands its own perpetual rearticulation in symbolic terms. Within this
dynamic field the subject must constantly police the boundary constructed by its own
founding in order to maintain the fictions of "inside" and "outside" against a regime of
signification/materialization whose intrinsic instability produces the rupture of subjective boundaries as one of its

The affect of rage as I seek to define it is located at the margin of

subjectivity and the limit of signification. It originates in recognition of the fact that
the "outsideness" of a materiality that perpetually violates the foreclosure of
subjective space within a symbolic order is also necessarily "inside" the subject as
grounds for the materialization of its body and the formation of its bodily ego. This
primary rage becomes specifically transgender rage when the inability to foreclose
the subject occurs through a failure to satisfy norms of gendered embodiment.
Transgender rage is the subjective experience of being compelled to transgress what
Judith Butler has referred to as the highly gendered regulatory schemata that determine the
viability of bodies, of being compelled to enter a "domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation" that in
its unlivability encompasses and constitutes the realm of legitimate subjectivity (16). Transgender rage is a
queer fury, an emotional response to conditions in which it becomes imperative to
take up, for the sake of one's own continued survival as a subject, a set of practices that
precipitates one's exclusion from a naturalized order of existence that seeks to
maintain itself as the only possible basis for being a subject. However, by mobilizing
gendered identities and rendering them provisional, open to strategic development and occupation, this
rage enables the establishment of subjects in new modes, regulated by different
codes of intelligibility. Transgender rage furnishes a means for disidentification with
regular features.

compulsorily assigned subject positions. It makes the transition from one gendered
subject position to another possible by using the impossibility of complete
subjective foreclosure to organize an outside force as an inside drive , and vice versa.
Through the operation of rage, the stigma itself becomes the source of
transformative power. (10) I want to stop and theorize at this particular moment in the text because in the
lived moment of being thrown back from a state of abjection in the aftermath of my lover's daughter's birth, I
immediately began telling myself a story to explain my experience. I started theorizing, using all the conceptual
tools my education had put at my disposal. Other true stories of those events could undoubtedly be told, but upon
my return I knew for a fact what lit the fuse to my rage in the hospital delivery room. It was the non-consensuality

bodies are
rendered meaningful only through some culturally and historically specific mode of
grasping their physicality that transforms the flesh into a useful artifact. Gendering
is the initial step in this transformation, inseparable from the process of forming an
identity by means of which we're fitted to a system of exchange in a heterosexual
economy. Authority seizes upon specific material qualities of the flesh, particularly
the genitals, as outward indication of future reproductive potential, constructs this
flesh as a sign, and reads it to enculturate the body. Gender attribution is
compulsory; it codes and deploys our bodies in ways that materially affect us, yet
we choose neither our marks nor the meanings they carry. (11) This was the act accomplished
between the beginning and the end of that short sentence in the delivery room: "It's a girl." This was the
act that recalled all the anguish of my own struggles with gender. But this was also the act
that enjoined my complicity in the non-consensual gendering of another. A gendering violence is the
founding condition of human subjectivity; having a gender is the tribal tattoo that
makes one's personhood cognizable. I stood for a moment between the pains of two violations, the
of the baby's gendering. You see, I told myself, wiping snot off my face with a shirt sleeve,

mark of gender and the unlivability of its absence. Could I say which one was worse? Or could I only say which one I
felt could best be survived? How can finding one's self prostrate and powerless in the presence of the Law of the
Father not produce an unutterable rage? What difference does it make if the father in this instance was a pierced,

Phallogocentric
language, not its particular speaker, is the scalpel that defines our flesh. I defy that
Law in my refusal to abide by its original decree of my gender. Though I cannot
escape its power, I can move through its medium. Perhaps if I move furiously
enough, I can deform it in my passing to leave a trace of my rage. I can embrace it
with a vengeance to rename myself, declare my transsexuality, and gain access to
the means of my legible reinscription. Though I may not hold the stylus myself, I can
move beneath it for my own deep self-sustaining pleasures. To encounter the transsexual
body, to apprehend a transgendered consciousness articulating itself, is to risk a
revelation of the constructedness of the natural order. Confronting the implications
of this constructedness can summon up all the violation, loss, and separation
inflicted by the gendering process that sustains the illusion of naturalness. My
transsexual body literalizes this abstract violence. As the bearers of this disquieting news, we
transsexuals often suffer for the pain of others, but we do not willingly abide the
rage of others directed against us. And we do have something else to say, if you will
but listen to the monsters: the possibility of meaningful agency and action exists,
even within fields of domination that bring about the universal cultural rape of all
flesh. Be forewarned, however, that taking up this task will remake you in the process. By
tatooed, purple-haired punk fag anarchist who helped his dyke friend get pregnant?

speaking as a monster in my personal voice, by using the dark, watery images of Romanticism and lapsing
occasionally into its brooding cadences and grandiose postures, I employ the same literary techniques Mary Shelley

I assert my worth as a monster in

spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face, and redefine a life worth
used to elicit sympathy for her scientist's creation. Like that creature,

living. I have asked the Miltonic questions Shelley poses in the epigraph of her novel: "Did I request thee, Maker,
from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?" With one voice, her monster and

answer "no" without debasing ourselves, for we have done the hard work of
constituting ourselves on our own terms, against the natural order. Though we
forego the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves
instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth. (12) If this is
your path, as it is mine, let me offer whatever solace you may find in this monstrous benediction: May you
discover the enlivening power of darkness within yourself. May it nourish your rage.
May your rage inform your actions, and your actions transform you as you struggle
to transform your world.

Using rage to embody the monster creates potential for transforming

the relationship between language and the bodies that they describe
this accesses a radical break that allows world-making from outside
Weaver 13
(Harlan Weaver is a professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Davidson College, holding a Ph.D
from UC Santa Cruz. Monster Trans: Diffracting Affect, Reading Rage Accessed 27 January 2016
https://www.academia.edu/4561931/Monster_Trans_Diffracting_Affect_Reading_Rage cVs)
While many of Strykers readers may not have read Frankenstein, the cultural significance of his monster is not lost

Frankensteins monster is everywhere in worlds of new and changing bodies

and feelings. Just as Shelleys monster has inspired many cyborgs, Strykers essay
has made an indelible mark in transgender theories in the ways it takes up the
monsters rage as a means to elucidate a new form of doing and understanding
trans bodies. These feelings, and the nodes of diffraction they create monstrous
gender, language as a tool for resistance to abjection, queer kinship that leads to
transformation, monstrous fury that reconfigures language map onto us , her readers,
pushing us to feel in kind. These feelings also reveal how Strykers language, in encouraging us to
feel with her, intra-acts with us. The nature of theory is to engender a new
understanding of the way the world works , a new way to take in ones own experiences and make
sense of them. When reading theory, we are being asked to re-evaluate what we know,
to re-understand our worlds and to come to new understandings. Strykers theory,
borne of her monstrous rage and the diffraction patterns between her and Shelleys
monsters, ask us to re-understand our encounters with a gendered social world, for
she asks us to take up the anger and frustration these encounters produce and,
rather than turn them into a personalised sense of abjection, a face-less
monstrosity, use them to drive us into action. By pushing us to take up the bodily affects, the
somatechnics of bodily feelings, that diffract between her and Shelleys monsters , she interpellates us into
new and different understandings of language, materiality, and gender, so that we
might also be moved by fury and affect, so that we might also transform the
relationship between language and bodies, so that we might also feel
differently. Reading Strykers words, we are asked to transform. The transformations Stryker encourages in us
on them.

are transformations that move through the diffraction patterns between Shelleys writing and hers. These patterns
are central to fully understanding the potential for change and transformation this experience of somatechnical
reading entails, for the nodes of gender, kinship, and language produced by the emotions that move through both
push at us, readers/screens, to change. These points, where their wave-like emotions augment each other, pressing
and flooding, impart different and better understanding of the kinds of feelings and bodies made possible by the

these points reveal spaces where

Strykers writing fosters transformation, asking her readers to feel differently, and,
therefore, change their worlds. Finally, I want to point to another change that Strykers writing reveals:
interplay between Strykers and Shelleys writings. Further,

in asking us to feel differently, Stryker expands Frankensteins monsters disruption of the intersection of kin and

Stryker asks us to bring an

alternate sensibility to our understanding of the kinds of beings we are as well as
the kinds of beings we might become. What this move accomplishes depends on how much we are
kind. By pushing us, her readers, to emerge differently than we began,

willing and able to feel with and be open to the kind of encounter that Stryker and Shelley, and many others, seek.

this feeling differently might engender new connections,

ones that expand the monsters sense of kinship as kindness and Strykers queerly
transfigured self into odd kin-groupings and different non-families, kindred who are
joined together by kindness but who are also not grouped in Western,
heteronormative formations, in short, kin whose linkages help us reunderstand and re-configure our bodies and our worlds. In this very hopeful sense,
Yet it strikes me as quite likely that

this article maps yet another reach towards and through the reader, and so I ask you to consider this monstrous
benediction:

May you feel and move with the potential for difference.

By rejecting passivity, rage confronts the powers that work

against gender autonomy. We demand that identities
marginalized by the totality of normalcy be recognized in this
space.
Copenhaver 14
(Robert Copenhaver identified as a Queer person of faith, graduate of Idaho State University, whose
interests include queer theory, politics, and theology. He will be starting a masters in theological
studies at The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago next fall; Queer Rage; published 2/19/14;
http://coperoge.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/queer-rage/) GFD

I hate straight people who cant listen to queer anger without saying hey, all straight people arent like that. Im
straight too, you know, as if their egos dont get enough stroking or protection in this arrogant, heterosexist world.
Why must we take care of them, in the midst of our just anger brought on by their fed up society?! Why add the
reassurance of Of course, I dont mean you. You dont act that way. Let them figure out for themselves whether
they deserve to be included in our anger. But of course that would mean listening to our anger, which they almost
never do. They deflect it, by saying Im not like that or now look whos generalizing or Youll catch more flies
with honey or If you focus on the negative you just give out more power or youre not the only one in the
world whos suffering. They say Dont yell at me, Im on your side or I think youre overreacting or Boy, youre
bitter. - The Queer Nation Manifesto Last weeks post involved a quote from The Queer Nation referring to the

A good queer is one that

accepts the progress that others have made for us. According to straight people, and some
way in which straight people have taught us that good queers dont get angry.

queers who have accepted the straight position, we should be thankful for things like same-sex marriage and the

the acceptance of progress is a form of passivity that forgets the

importance of queers of the past who fought for our recognition while maintaining
the uniqueness of queer identities. We forget about the politics of groups like ACT UP
and the protests of Stonewall. These histories are ignored in favor of assimilationist
strategies that we are taught are good because of straightness . Rather, we need
to use our anger at straightness as the starting point for our politics. We need to
stop accepting liberal progress narratives that keep us passive and have forced us
to conform to what a good citizen should look like . Benjamin Shepard writes, Thus, play
repeal of DADT. However,

intermingled with a full range of emotionsfrom despair to pathos, from pleasure to terror. Charles King, a veteran
of ACT UP New Yorks Housing Committee, which evolved into Housing Works, of which he is now president,
explained that these combined feelings of joy and anger fueled the groups work: I actually think its a combination

The AIDS movement in the 1980s was fueled by this amazing combination of
taking grief and anger and turning it into this powerful energy for action. But in the
of the two. . . .

course of that,

developing this comradely love. Yes, the anger was the fuel. Its what brought us
together and taking that anger and not just sitting with it. . . not just letting grief turn into
despair. Bringing it into some sort of action was very cathartic, but also what was
cathartic in the process was all the loving that was taking place. Anger can be
transformative. Anger is a strategy that allows us to develop creative strategies for
resistance against heteronormative institutions and practices. I am tired, and we should all
be tired of both straight people along others in our own community telling us that we should be happy about all of

Our passivity and acceptance of it makes

us forget about the queer bashing that so many in our community face
everyday. Anti-queerness is still just as prevalent as ever, but under the guise of
tolerance we have covered up the physical and psychological violence that so many
queers face everyday. There are homeless queer youth everywhere. There are queer
people being assaulted in our streets. There are parents telling their children they
are going to get AIDS and die, that they are perverts and should die, and are
sending them to therapy to make them straight. Governments state and local are
complacent and strategically prevent us from having access to housing, jobs, and other
material resources. Instead of being fucking happy about same-sex marriage, we should be fucking mad .
We should be angry that we pretend that its getting better. IT IS NOT! Stop
pretending. Be angry. Utilize our rage to confront the ways in which anti-queerness
continue to perpetuate violence against queer bodies everywhere.
the progress that has been made. FUCK THAT PROGRESS.

A2: Perm
Homonationalism DA the perm is a thinly veiled attempt to
include queer theorizing in IR when in reality it recreates
Homonationalism
Nayak 14 PhD in Political Science at University of Minnesota and an Associate
Professor at Pace University [Meghana, December 2014, Thinking About Queer
International Relations Allies. International Studies Review, doi:
10.1111/misr.12188, Wiley] AMarb
What does it mean to be an ally to not only communities mobilizing for justice but
also to a field of study/scholars? I contend that this question is vital and pivotal as we try to grapple
with Queer International Relations (IR)/Global Queer Studies relationship with the IR discipline. In the context of

I see allies as those who may not regularly cite, rely

upon, study, teach, or participate in a particular field of studies but are interested
and invested in the development and endurance of that scholarship. But what is
done to and with Queer IR by allies? Are ally politics aiming to deconstruct,
dismantle, and radically transform the very systems of which they are beneficiaries?
Or are allies leaving power relationships intact because they are actually
uneasy with, dismissive of, or unclear about Queer IR theorizing? Scholars
academic institutions and practices,

working in queer studies, critical race studies, or on allegedly peripheral topics have increasingly questioned the
politics of their so-called allies, among students, faculty, administration, and the profession as a whole (Carver
2009; Ahmed 2012; Gutierrez y Muhs, Niemann, Gonzalez, and Harris 2012). Perhaps, for some, being an ally
means establishing queer-friendly credentials, so they might support the work of a scholar who does Queer IR or
devote a week of attention in their IR class to Global Queer Studies to illustrate the diversity of IR theories. Or,

But how
far are they willing to go in creating space for Queer IR to challenge how
IR is performed, or how marginalized scholars are treated as different,
anomalies, and incompetent? Anecdotal evidence reveals that scholars doing Queer IR, like other
they might enfold Queer IR insights within slightly safer research agendas, such as human rights.

marginalized academics, face troubling encounters on blogs and Facebook pages, in conferences, job search

These
interactions include thinly veiled homophobia or transphobia, scornful
dismissal of queer studies as not rigorous enough or not legitimate,
and attempts to make deviant and intolerable those doing Queer IR (Weber
2014b). But well meaning self-proclaimed allies in fields such as Feminist IR, Global Politics, or
Postcolonial IR may also participate in acts of exclusion and dismissal, even as these
very scholars may find their allies, including in queer studies, dont get it. In
interrogating resistance by not only those adamantly opposed to but also alleged/potential allies of Queer IR, I
have been contemplating Queer IRs promise (and threat) of revealing the instability
of IR as a discipline. I contend that it is not just in the mainstream-alternative
approaches debate but also in the acts of alleged solidarity and support that we see
how tenuously IR operates. My hope is that we do a better job in interrogating ally politics among and
committees, tenure and promotion committees, and reviews of journal articles and manuscripts.

between various communities of scholars. In my classes, I have unsurprisingly discovered that many of my

students hold a perception that there is a difference between international LGBTQ activism and Queer
IR theory. The latter, they claim, is elitist and inaccessible. Many queer or allied students see

themselves and their struggles as intimately connected with queerness, circumscribed as identity politics or the
implementation of rights for sexual minorities. When we discuss examples of gay rights movements or
trans-rights movements around the world, they respond favorably, understanding such attempts for social justice
within a human-rights framework of perpetrator/victim. But when I assign readings that I think of as Queer IR/

homonationalism (Puar 2005, 2007), postcolonial and global

antiracist engagement with queerness (Hawley 2001), and heteronormative and cisnormative ontologies underlying global politics and statecraft (Cohn 1987; Weber 1994a,b,
Global Studies, regarding

1998a,b, 1999, 2002, 2014a; Richter-Montpetit 2007; Agathangelou et al. 2008; Canaday 2011; Rao 2012; Sjoberg,

many (not all) students see the work, or at least parts of it, as divisive,
inaccessible, and even dangerous for the real struggles of queer communities.
is not uncommon that students may cling to a perceived praxis/theory divide. I see it when I
this forum),

It

teach feminist theory and try to push past discussions on sexual violence prevention or reproductive rights to also
include postcolonial or black feminist theory. I see it when I teach human rights and try to move the conversation
beyond successful international criminal legal cases to questioning the very premises of human rights discourses. A
significant number of students are indeed willing to sit with the discomfort of acting toward justice while

the
students who show resistance want to see IR as a field with terminology, jargon,
and skills to master so that they can do something in the real world to protect
people from persecution and harm. Anything else seems too negative, too
threatening to their relationship to the IR discipline , which to them holds the
promise of allowing them to understand global politics and to become career
professionals in changing the world. The same students who might excitedly read Feminist IR
simultaneously questioning and challenging what motivates and counts as action and justice. However,

scholarship or human rights work on sexual minorities, balk or seem taken aback when I mention Queer IR or Queer
Global Studies, thinking that this scholarship belongs in some strange, otherworldly theory universe. Yet, they
would call themselves allies, or part of the movement for LGBTQ rights.

Gridlock DA the perm stabilizes queerness in IRs colonial

household but queerness must scream its defiance
Nayak 14 PhD in Political Science at University of Minnesota and an Associate
Professor at Pace University [Meghana, December 2014, Thinking About Queer
International Relations Allies. International Studies Review, doi:
10.1111/misr.12188, Wiley] AMarb
After semester-long encouragement of students to recognize their precarious relationship with Queer IR, they start
to see as political rather than as mere preference their simultaneous disengagement with Queer IR and excitement
about international LGBTQ activism. What, indeed, my students trouble with Queer IR reveals is the presumption
that IR as a discipline holds the key to understanding the world (singular), out there. Thus, students start to
understand that to engage with theory is to challenge the problematic premise that a college education will equip

queer theorys critical

perspectives create space to ask how and why we name and identify with issues of
justice. Accordingly, being an ally is a complex political project, as what
might look like solidarity is actually tenuous, problematic, or incomplete
because of the kinds of power relationships we uncover through a critical, queer
theory lens. The students learn furthermore to unravel IR as an objective field of study and to see it as a
students with a set of tools and skills to identify and solve problems in the world. So,

discipline. And thus, the struggles they experience are instructive for articulating what professional academics

One of the most useful pedagogical tools at my disposal is

Agathangelou and Lings House of IR metaphor (2004; see also Nayak and Selbin 2010).
Agathangelou and Ling describe IR as a colonial household (2004:21), in which
exists a heteronormative family maintaining control and order, with bad children
living upstairs, perhaps punished for their naughty ways, servants living
might be experiencing as well.

downstairs providing labor, and barbarians and the like living outside. The family
includes father realism, mother liberalism, and the caretaking
daughters, neoliberalism, liberal feminism, and standpoint feminism. The
rebel sons (such as Marxism, postmodern IR, and pragmatic/liberal constructivism) and the fallen daughters
(postmodern feminism and queer studies) plan their devious disruptions of mother and fathers rule from upstairs.
Downstairs (in what I imagine are the servants quarters), area studies and comparative politics experts, Asian
capitalist countries, and peripheral and transitional economies provide the knowledge that confirms and

outside of the house are Orientalism, al-Qaeda,

postcolonial IR, and worldism. While it is beyond the scope of this article to examine and engage with
legitimizes the familys rule. Finally,

this house metaphor, I find it useful in the classroom, conversations with my peers, and my scholarship to consider

some subfields of IR can unsettle the entire household. The house itself is a
construction, an edifice that seems sturdy, unquestionable, hetero- and cisnormative, with clear boundaries (different floors and inside/outside) but is actually
on shaky ground. We see the shakiness when studying global politics. What we learn
from the other pieces in this forum and Queer IR studies is that states attempt to act queer-friendly
but do so without recognizing that the state itself is queer. By this I mean that the
state has no settled, natural gendered and sexualized identity (straight, cis-gender,
masculine) precisely because the state must constantly shift, anticipate, and revise
how its gender and sexuality appears. Just as, per Judith Butler, sex, sexuality, and gender are in a
that

traumatic deadlock [such that] every performative formation is nothing but an endeavor to patch up this trauma
(Zizek 1993:265; quoted in Weber 1998a:93), so is foreign-policymaking an attempt to deal with the trauma of

what
we see is states acting in simultaneously homophobic and
homopositive/homoprotectionist ways, because protection of and extension of
rights to LGBTQ communities is meant to be an indicator of being civilized, where
countries can move toward neoliberal modernity if they treat queers right (Lind, this
forum). When countries pinkwash or promote homonationalism, they act as straight
allies, to distinguish themselves from straight persecutors. With this understanding of IR
not being able to decide and settle the representation/recognition/identity of states (Weber 1998a:93). So,

(understood as political practices and decisions), as unsteady, frantically trying to normalize distinctions and
categories between us and them, good and bad, strong and weak, let us return to the question of being

IR, not just in terms of what political actors do, but also as a
discipline, is in a traumatic deadlock. When Weber (2014a,b, this forum) asks what Queer IR means
for the discipline, I am curious not only about the possibilities of erasure and
gentrification of Queer IR but about what Queer IR reveals about the IR disciplines
incoherence, instability, inability to be straight. If queer, as Sjoberg notes in this forum,
can complicate the idea of stable borders in the context of states and
territories, then so can queer complicate the idea of borders around and
within disciplines. By looking closer at queer studies within this household, we remember that some
an ally to a discipline.

feminist theories are allied because they intersect with queer theory, while other feminist theories might be more

queer theory troubles the binaries of sex/gender, straight/gay, male/

female, queer/not-queer, thus serving as a critical theory that reveals that power works by investing
in these rigid distinctions and categories. So, we can ask which theories (feminist and otherwise) are
skeptical allies or dismissive. Further,

wedded to or challenge these categorizations and thus what they miss or contribute to our understandings of the IR
topics we study. In addition, think of yearly declarations that IR is dead, confessions by IR scholars that they find
their homes elsewhere or struggle with antiquated theories, or attempts to constantly stretch, question, and

What is IR doing if not

patching up the trauma of not knowing its place or its boundaries, constantly
troubled by feminists, queers, undocumented migrants, stateless communities, indigenous politics (and the
list goes on)? Asking about Queer IRs allies is meant to prompt the realization that just as states act as
allies in order to cover up their queerness or to act as straight saviors, so too
challenge IR and those who speak in its name as policymakers or consultants.

may academics act as allies in ways that distract from the disciplines
queerness.

Legibility DA the aff places gendered subjects on the grid of

intelligibility through legal gatekeeping
Elliot 10 Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology and graduate faculty
member in the interdisciplinary program Cultural Analysis and Social Theory at
Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada [Patricia Elliot, 2010, Chapter 3: Desire and the
(Un)Becoming Other1 : The Question of Intelligibility in Debates in Transgender,
Queer, and Feminist Theory Contested Sites, Ashgate] AMarb
the dominant process by which intelligible gendered subjects
are distinguished from unintelligible subjects is based on securing the stable,
bounded, typically white, masculine, coherent self by projecting what is unstable,
ambiguously gendered, or incoherent onto non-normative others who are
considered unintelligible. For those who despair of transforming this process and the dichotomy it
As Shildrick demonstrates,

produces, an obvious solution is to embrace the incoherent and the illegible as an integral part of ones identity. In a

Halberstam (2006) criticized Butlers (2004) proposal to revamp the category

human to include those identities that are currently considered unintelligible. In
Halberstams view, this return to the human constitutes a heroic and liberal narrative
that is naive in its politics and that departs from Butlers previous, more radical critique of the idea that
becoming intelligible can be liberating. Halberstams view may be rooted in the fear that becoming
legible requires conformity to the normatively human, to a conformity demanded,
for example, by medical or legal gatekeepers at gender clinics. Becoming legible is
believed to require stabilization or fixing of identities which otherwise have
managed to escape the normalizing discourses of a gender order that regulates not
only gender identities but sexual, racial, ethnic, and class identities as well. Halberstam
worries, with some justification, that rendering trans a more coherent and legible category
risks undermining the capacity of transpersons to oppose the normative. She also fears
that making trans legible leads to the imposition of a monolithic concept of trans in
non-Western contexts where gender variance may have a completely different
set of meanings and functions than in the Western world .3 Instead of this legibility,
Halberstam claims we need to look at the unintelligible for inspiration. She is not alone.
recent lecture,

Following Halberstams lead, Noble (2006a) also finds inspiration in the unintelligible and in the cultural landscape
described as post-queer. Exemplifying the promise adhering to transpersons in general, and transmen in
particular, Noble (15) advocates the permanent incoherence they (and he) represent as key to resisting personal
and structural constraints of the sex/ gender system. While he explicitly hopes to avoid policing or prescribing or
hierarchizing kinds of political embodiment (99n1), his overall theory clearly privileges the most obvious
manifestations of incoherent bodies. These are found in drag kings, who embody new possibilities for resistance,
and queer femmes, whose rejection of queer and feminist representational practices and political ideas [makes
them] the queerest of the queer (74, 1023). Indeed, for Noble the promise of transgender, or at least Ftm
versions of it, is the refusal to move from one sexed position to another. Instead, t ransgender

is said to
involve a kind of grafting of new bodies onto old, where one materialization is
haunted by the other, as opposed to crossing or exiting (84).

The permutation is the scholars attempt to cling onto their

futile notions of success this lack of ambivalence toward IR
scholarship guts solvency and retrenches structural violence
Barkin and Sjoberg 15
(J. Samuel Barkin is a professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global
Governance at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Laura Sjoberg is a leading scholar of feminist
international relations and international security. Her research focuses on gender and just war theory,
womens violence in global politics, and feminist interpretations of the theory and practice of security
policy. The Failures of Constructivist Theory in IR Written for presentation at the 2015 Millennium
Conference. cVs)

not only do traditional standards of knowledge make invisible their own

impossibility, they make invisible their own violence. The raced, sexed, and classed
impacts of that masking and the recursive enactment of the standards despite (and
at the expense of the visibility) of those impacts continue. Baudrillard suggests a corrective to
In this way,

this break between signs (standards) and referents (the fantasy of the objective existence of good scholarship)

only ambivalence, as a rupture of value sustains a

challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign questions the
evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding) and of its exchange value
(the discourse of communication) (Baudrillard, 1981). This ambivalence, Baudrillard argues,
brings the political economy of the sign to a standstill; it dissolves the respective
definitions of symbol and referent (Baudrillard, 1981). Both endorsing assimilation and
assuming its possibility may be net violent (for discussions of the violences of inclusion, see
Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco, 2014; Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco, 2013). Moving of the
signification knowledge from any referent to which it was originally tied makes
method and research performances of scholarship. If research is a performance of
scholarship, standards for research serve to disguise the fantastic nature of
knowledge cumulation. While the ontological lack is not unique to democratic peace, the insistent
performance of normative and methodological good might be. In this performance, there is no space for
liminality, uncertainty, change, inadequacy, and failure in structural rather than
passing senses. Yet looking beyond the performative discourse of certainty, those are
exactly what one finds. This paradox, Baudrillard suggests, can only be cleared by ambivalence towards
(Baudrillard, 1973). He argues that

the research program and its truth statements. This is because condemnation or rejection of the research program
and its truth statements endorses its assumptions about truth, as well as some of its assumptions about what the
international arena is and how it works.

A2: State Necessary

Queerness produces better, practical institutions- not a total
rejection
Weber 15 Cynthia Weber is Professor of International Relations at the University
of Sussex, UK. International Studies Quarterly, Queer Intellectual Curiosity as
International Relations Method: Developing Queer International Relations
Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks, 9-3, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12212

This is not to say that queer logics of statecraft do not give rise to institutions,
structures of understanding, and practical orientations (Berlant and Warner 1995:548,
footnote 2) that make sovereign men, sovereign states, and international orders appear to be singular,
coherent, and privileged. In this respect, they can be akin to sexual organizing principles like heteronormativies and

by confusing the
[singular] norm, normativity [or antinormativity] (my brackets; Barthes 1976:109; Wiegman and Wilson,
2015:1-3), queer logics of statecraft can produce new institutions, new structures
of understanding, and new practical orientations that are paradoxically founded
upon a disorienting and/or reorienting plural. This can make them more alluring, more
powerful, and more easily mobilized by both those who, for example, wish to resist
hegemonic relations of power and those who wish to sustain them (Weber 1999, 2002; Puar and Rai
2002; Puar 2007). Unlike heteronormativities and homonormativities, though, we cannot name
in advance what these institutions, structures of understanding, and practical (dis)/
(re)orientations will be. We cannot know whether they will be politicizing or depoliticizing. To
determine this, it is necessary to identify both the precise plural(s) each particular
queer logic of statecraft employs to figure some particular sovereign man, sovereign state, or other
homonormativities (Berlant and Warner 1998:548; footnote 2; Duggan 2003:50). For,

sovereign community and international order, always asking, For what constituency or constituencies does this
plural operate?

A2: Queer Studies

Homonationalist
Queer studies are distinct from other studies in the LGBT
spectrum
Stryker 4 (Transgender Studies: Queer Theorys Evil Twin Published in GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Published in 2004, article by Susan Stryker
page 214)
Most disturbingly, transgender increasingly functions as the site in which to contain
all gender trouble, thereby helping secure both homosexuality and heterosexuality as
stable and normative categories of personhood. This has damaging, isolative political

correlaries. It is the same developmental logic that transformed an

antiassimilationist queer politics into a more palatable LGBT civil rights
movement, with T reduced to merely another (easily detached) genre of sexual
identity rather than perceived, like race or class, as something that cuts across
existing sexualities, revealing in often unexpected ways the means through which
all identities achieve their specificities. The field of transgender studies has taken shape
over the past decade in the shadow of queer theory. Sometimes it has claimed its place in
the queer family and offered an in-house critique, and sometimes it has angrily spurned its
lineage and set out to make a home of its own. Either way, transgender studies is

following its own trajectory and has the potential to address emerging problems in
the critical study of gender and sexuality, identity, embodiment, and desire in ways
that gay, lesbian, and queer studies have not always successfully managed . This
seems particularly true of the ways that transgender studies resonate with disability studies
and intersex studies, two other critical enterprises that investigate atypical forms of
embodiment and subjectivity that do not readily reduce to heteronormativity, yet that
largely fall outside the analytic framework of sexual identity that so dominates queer theory.

A2: IR Solves Queer Issues

We must rethink our western notions of what it means to be
queer queerness upon the backdrop of other inequalities and
wartime crimes is important to ask important questions about
how violence is legitimized through war
Mikdashi and Puar, 2016
(April, Maya, Mellon Postdoctoral Associate, Institute for Research on
Women (IRW) Scholar, in conjunction with the Womens and Gender
Studies Department, Ph.D. from Columbia University inAnthropology,
Author of "Sex, Secularism and Sectarianism: Practicing Citizenship in
Contemporary Lebanon," Co-Founder of Jadaliyya Ezine, Co-Director of
the documentary About Baghdad, Professor at Rutgers, Jasbir K,
Associate Professor of Womens & Gender Studies at Rutgers
University, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at
Berkeley, M.A. from the University of York, England, in Womens
Studies, Author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer
Times, Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization (GLQ: A Journal
of Lesbian and Gay Studies), co-edited Sexuality and Space ,
Interspecies Viral (Womens Studies Quaterly), Articles in Gender,
Place, and Culture, Radical History Review, Socialist Review, Feminist
Legal Studies, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography,Feminist
Studies, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Author for
The Guardian, Huffington Post, Art India,The Feminist Review, Bully
Bloggers, Jadaliyya, and Oh! Industry., Won the 2013-14 Society for
the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the Edward Said Chair
of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a
Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the
CUNY Graduate Center, a Ford Foundation grant for ethnographic
documentation work , the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay
Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award ,Advisory Board member of
USACBI. Director of the Graduate Program of the top-ranked Womens
and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University. Queer Theory
and Permanent War, Published by Duke University Press,
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/613189/pdf - KSA)

In such a context, what kinds of queer organizing, archives, theory, practices,

visibilities, institutions, knowledge production projects emerge? The precarity of
queer life is not exceptional in these sociopolitical spaces: it is additional precisely
because war, genocide, occupation, oppression, dictatorship, terrorism, and killings
are part of the everyday fabric of life for many people who live in the region. What
kind of queer emerges in the face of revolutionary overthrow of the Mubarak
regime, for example, or in the context of Lebanon, where one out of every three
residents in 2015 was a refugee fleeing war in a different part of the Middle East?
What animates the impulse to search for something to call or to theorize as queer?
What must the queer body do, or be, to be recognized as such, and by whom? Do
we want this recognition, and if so, how and for what purposes? How can we
generate theory out of these locations, and if doing so, are these bodies of theory
routed through area studies rather than recognized as queer theory? For example,
perhaps the term most used to describe injury against samesex relations is
homophobia. As a term, homophobia is an apt descriptor for discrimination against
queers in several urban areas of the contemporary Middle Eastand we have
written about its circulations between the United States and the contemporary
Middle East (Puar and Mikdashi 2012). However, homophobia is also a
homogenizing and flattening discourse. In Beirut, the naming homophobia
aggregates aggressions that might also be understood as gendered or racial or
economic. For example, the sign homophobia is the marker most used to describe
incidents where working-class or racialized migrant laborers engaging in male-male
sexual behaviors are attacked or brutalized. Perhaps this is not surprising given the
everydayness of violence (sexual, physical, psychological) directed against migrant
labor (including domestic labor) or refugees. With the description of homophobia,
the ordinariness of these assemblages of racial and classed violence are marked
and are routed through LGBTQ rights groups and organizations and discourses that
circulate transnationally. These organizations and discourses operate by
universalizing particular injuries. Transnational LGBTQ rights discourse, meanwhile,
is not only anchored in US-based queer histories and movements. It is also anchored
in, and anchors, white, cisgendered, masculinist, and 220 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF
LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES middle-class queer histories that are elevated through
the elision of race, sex, and class domination in the United States. Once emptied of
located and ongoing histories of domination, the global LGBTQ movement can
emerge as such. We are turning from the now obvious preoccupation with queer
organizations, activism, and the naming of queer bodies, optics that are largely
mobilized in queer theory as American studies as evidence of queer vitalism or
sexuality studies. We note, rather, that an urgent issue for those who work in and
from the perspective of transnational Middle East studies (those of us whose
archives are located there) is: How can queer theory emerge and converse with the
mass corporeal losses and debilities of war? Does queer theory (still) require a
sexual or gendered body or a sexual or gendered injuryparticularly if part of the
project of homonationalism is to produce and stabilize transnational, imperial, and
settler colonial forms of sexual and gendered injury? Perhaps, thinking from a
location where war and colonization are quotidian contexts of life, we should rethink
what sexual injury is, and the economic, political, and military work that
designations of sexual or gendered injury and violence does in the first place.

How do these designations affect which deaths or injuries are internationally

nameable and mournable and which deaths are merely collateral damage in the
contemporary Middle East? What gendered and racial archives are being invoked
with every deployment of those now ubiquitous words, collateral damage?

A2: Queer Theory is

Unintelligible
Unintelligibility is necessary
Norton No Date
Education: Florida Southern College, BA 1967; Florida State University, MA, PhD 1972. Doctoral dissertation on homosexual themes in English Renaissance
literature, published as The Homosexual Literary Tradition (1972). Career: Instructor, Florida State University, 1970-72. Member of the Gay Liberation
Front, Florida, 1971-72, campaigned against Florida's sodomy statute. Edited The Homosexual Imagination, a special issue of College English, the first allgay issue of an academic journal, 1974; introduction "The Homophobic Imagination" reproduced on Norton's website. Emigrated from Florida to London in
1973. Research Editor for the fortnightly news journal Gay News, London, 1974-78. Wrote articles on gay history and literature for Gay Sunshine, The
Advocate, Gay News, etc. during the 1970s, and for Gay Times later. Published academic articles in Renascence, American Imago, Yearbook of
Comparative and General Literature, the London Journal, etc. Was the Foreign Rights Manager for Western Publishing Company (Golden Books), 1979-90.
Freelance publishing consultant 1991-94; freelance writer and editor since 1995. Author of books on gay history and on the Gothic Novel, including the
highly acclaimed Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700-1830 (1992), My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries (ed.)
(1997), The Myth of the Modern Homosexual (1997), a critique of social constructionism; a biography of the Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe (1999); an
anthology of Gothic Literature (2000); and several facsimile collections of eighteenth-century British erotica for Pickering and Chatto, Sex Doctors and Sex
Crimes (2002) and Sodomites, Mollies, Sapphists and Tommies (2004). He is a contributor of entries to Who's Who in Gay & Lesbian History (Routledge,
2001) and a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He maintains an extensive website on Gay History and Literature, with large
subsections on Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook and on the "father of gay history" John Addington Symonds, as well as a nongay site on Early Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Reports: A Sourcebook. In December 2005 he formed a civil partnership with his partner of nearly thirty

(Rictor Norton, AGAINST QUEER THEORY,

http://rictornorton.co.uk, http://rictornorton.co.uk/theoroea.htm)ED
years. He spoke at the launch of Britain's LGBT History Month February 2006.

AGAINST QUEER THEORY Jargon and Obscurantism The apparent

unintelligibility of queer theory is often apologized for as being just another example
of the difficult concepts and language necessarily employed by high-level abstract
thought. For example, one member of the QSTUDIES LIST wrote: "There is a
tendency among theorists of all stripes to get lost in the meta-discussion. Levying
this criticsm specifically at Queer theorists is misdirected." Another contributor
wrote: "You don't have to be anti-theory, though, to be critical of theory that is
unnecessarily opaque and jargonistic." Another wrote: "The suggestion was made
that work be done to "translate" queer theory, bringing it out of academese, and I
applaud that effort because it will help some queer kid out there make sense of
hir/his/her situation." And another wrote: "If [Daniel Harris, who perpetrated a hoax
on the List] wanted to critique "queer theory" for using complicated terms in order
to confuse, he might have constructed a more insightful article around exploring the
issues that were to arise in attempting to translate queer theory into a more
accessible vocabulary." I sympathize with any plea for greater clarity, but I wonder
if abstraction per se accurately characterizes the nature of queer-theoretical
discourse. It seems to me that there is a marked difference between the analytic
tradition of traditional philosophy and the "theoretic" stance of postmodern queer
discourse. High-level books on philosophy, economics, and sociology often are
indeed rarefied, and do often use jargon. But they also take great care to define
their terms as precisely as possible. Many of the specialist terms that they use
e.g. instantiation or explanandum can usually be found in a decent dictionary,
and usually are used in the way precisely defined in the dictionary. Strictly speaking,
philosophical discourse tends to be difficult rather than unintelligible. Such is often
not the case with queer theory discourse. Postmodern queer theory discourse is full
of terms that mean nearly the opposite of what they ordinarily mean (for example
"genealogical" in Foucault's non-genealogical sense; or "the imaginary" in Lacan's

non-imaginary sense), and very frequently the specialized use of such seemingly
ordinary words is left undefined, or the source being used is not mentioned. The
problem of jargon is especially difficult in queer theory not because we have never
heard of the words before, but because many of the words are common but the way
they are used is exceedingly strange. Queer theory discourse regularly destabilizes
grammar, for example by using verbs and adjectives as nouns, and nouns as verbs.
A common example is the phrase "blacks are othered by whites." This technique is
often combined with typographical trickery and odd spelling. For example, a
discussion about construing the mother as Other results in the word "(m)othered". It
is not surprising that this kind of praxis has been criticized as virtuosic performance
rather than careful analysis. I sometimes wonder if the repertoire of fancy footwork
that seems to comprise queer theory really has any intellectual content. Is it
genuine theory or is it just praxis without theory? Elizabeth Meese in an article
titled "Theorizing Lesbian : Writing A Love Letter" (from her book (Sem)erotics:
Theorizing Lesbian Writing) writes like this: "Why is it that the lesbian seems like a
shadow a shadow with/in woman, with/in writing? ... A shadow of who I am that
attests to my being there, I am never with/out this lesbian. And we are always
turning, this way and that, in one place and another. ... What could be the auto-biograph-y of this figure, of this writing "lesbian"? The word, the letter L, and the
lesbian of this auto-biography, this auto-graph? I like the letter L which contains its
own shadow, makes and is made up of shadow, so that I cannot de-cipher the thing
from its reflection. ... How then to begin to say what lesbian : writing is, to write its
story, to speak of the letter of the letter?" How indeed? What is the difference
between the words "auto-bio-graph-y" and "auto-biography"? How do they differ
from the word "autobiography"? Does Meese use the hyphens because she doesn't
think we are intelligent enough to understand the etymology of the word? If so, why
does she hyphenate the word differently, apparently in the same context? Is there
any possible way in which we could conceive that the word "de-cipher" might have
a different meaning from the word "decipher"? Does the letter L have a shadow? If
so, does it have more of a shadow than the letter S? Does it matter? Does a
Sapphist have less of a shadow than a Lesbian? Does the compound noun "lesbian :
writing" have a particular meaning because the colon is separated by spaces
between its elements? If it does, why doesn't Meese tell us? If you don't stop
reading after the first few paragraphs of this sort of thing (it's not a hoax though
it certainly looks like one), you will eventually come to the kernel about lesbians
being semantically subjugated by the phallo-logo-centric system, a theory
supported by quotations from Derrida, Lacan, Luce Irigary and Monique Wittig: the
usual sort of thing that is simultaneously premise and conclusion of queer theory
discourse. This example from Meese is an extreme example of such discourse, but
it is by no means uniquely odd. It is part of a general trend in queer theory to
attribute to mere typography a meaning and a power that it really does not
possess. Meese goes on, in a passage especially relevant for understanding the
nature of queer "theorizing": "Lesbian theorizing is always at once theoretical and
"pre"-theoretical: the writer behaves as though she knows what the lesbian is, what
theorizing lesbianism entails, despite what Mary Daly and Jane Caputi term its
"wildness," what is "not accounted for by any known theories". The "pre"-theoretical
of lesbian theorizing is and is not a "pre"- on its way to becoming something in

itself, is and is not a stage of anticipation before the letter a "pre"-, waiting to be
"post"-. The lesbian writer presents her subject as (the) One in the absence of
others." What kind of pre-post-pubertal writing is this? If we use this as an example,
then I think we can realize that there is no way that this could be rewritten in a less
rarefied or more intelligible and accessible manner: if it were "translated", it would
simply cease to be queer theory. There is simply no way you could sit down with
Meese and say, "Let me help you edit this so that it is clearer." There is no way she
would allow anyone to untangle her knot. The point I want to emphasize is that
reasonable claims for clarity can only apply to conventional analysis and queer
"theorizing" is in a different category altogether. Queer theory is not so much an
analysis as an attitude. Whenever someone says they are going to "retheorize"
something, you know there's trouble ahead. To "theorize" means basically "to make
things less clear." What many apologists for queer theorizing fail to appreciate is
that the obscurity of queer theory is not the result of a lack of writing skill, but a
deliberate strategy to (A) overcome the opponent by befuddling him or her, (B) to
signify one's in-group status and solidarity, and (C) to undermine a faith in linguistic
"meaning" that is said to be a feature of traditional patriarchy. The term
"obscurantist" seems apt: queer theories are not only obscure, but deliberately
obscure. To appeal for accessibility and clarity misses the point: the queer theorist
quite deliberately chooses complexity rather than clarity in his or her discourse, in
the mistaken belief that clarity perpetuates reductionism/essentialism/idealism. We
should bear in mind that we are not talking about the age-old problem of academic
jargon, but about the specific recent emergence of the French-American school of
deconstruction/structuralism/social constructionism. Queer theorists belong to the
school of discourse theory (Derrida, Foucault et al.). Unlike great thinkers of the past
(and present), members of this school not only employ neologisms but regularly
refrain from defining them. Given the choice between any two words, the queer
theorist will always choose the word that is not in the dictionary. The highest praise
a queer theorist can wish for is that their discourse illustrates "verbal pyrotechnics",
for neologisms and nonce-words are the name of this game (I almost called it
"ludic"). The fundamental principle of queer theory is "to theorize" rather than to
communicate knowledge. Their aim is not to uncover truths and realities and all that
essentialist/empiricist rubbish ("knowledge n'exist pas"), but to deconstruct
discourse by turning every query about substantive issues into a query about
strategic issues. Queer theory is an exercise in ideology rather than communication;
many practitioners will admit that it is a strategy in the class struggle for
hegemony: the aim is not analysis per se but analysis as a tool for social change.
Queer theorists and cultural theorists now dominate the once-conservative
academic departments, and they are not likely to respond to requests that they
write more intelligibly for non-academic non-queer-theorist-colleagues. Queer
theory will lose its power if it lapses into boring old "Gay and Lesbian Studies" and
dull empiricism that deals merely with facts. I am not altogether sure that queer
theorists realize that self-imitation has become self-parody, and that more and more
people have a sneaking suspicion that all the brilliance with which the emperor's
clothes are described will not blind us to his nakedness.

A2: State Solves

There can be no improvement in the lives of queers without an
explicit queering of politics- oppression becomes more
subversive, not less deadly.
Copland, 2016
(May 16, Simon, Journalist for the Guardian, Attacks Against Queer
People Have a long History. Its time we changed our Defence,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/17/attacksagainst-queer-people-have-a-long-history-its-time-we-changed-ourdefence - KSA)
Looking back at this time last year, when it came to gay politics, it would have been easy to be complacent .

Ireland and the US supreme court were both about to vote yes on marriage equalit y
and in Australia it looked inevitable that we would do the same too. Other issues were finally entering the debate,
whether it was trans* rights, or recognition for other non-traditional relationship styles.
The march for progress was unstoppable. What difference a year can make. Held on 17 May every year, the
International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (#Idahot) is an opportunity to reflect on where queer
people have come in our fight for liberation, and to strengthen our resolve to continue on .

And well need

strength to fight what has been a largely unexpected swing against queer
communities in the past year. Momentum on marriage equality in Australia has
stalled, with hostility on the issue intensifying in recent months. Rightwing forces
have also opened up new fronts. The attacks on Safe Schools for example, felt like they came out of
nowhere, but were swift and effective. This pattern can be seen globally. In the US, conservatives have
passed religious freedom bills in a number of states, and last year the city of Houston rejected
an ordinance that would have added protections to queer people in housing and
employment. This year, North Carolina passed a bathroom bill, mandating that
people use the bathroom that matches their gender assigned at birth . These attacks have
surprised many in the queer communities. This Idahot it is worth reflecting on why this has happened, and what we

While these
attacks may look shocking, they follow a pattern that has been occurring for
hundreds of years. Go back to the 1890s for example, and you can see a similar explosion of sexual desire as
to what has happened recently. The gay nineties were known for decadent art such as that from Aubrey
can do about it. To do so, it is important to understand the historical context of these shifts.

Beardsley and the scandalous plays of Oscar Wilde. The era also saw the birth of the suffragette movement. But

just as the exuberance of the decade hit its stride, so did the conservative backlash.
Wilde was sentenced to hard labour, while the suffragettes faced the full wrath of the
police. This pattern is common. A similar sexual revolution occurred in the swinging 1920s and 30s.
This was a time when gay rights became even more prominent with sexologists such as the German Magnus
Hirschfeld actively campaigning for the rights of gay and trans* people . Again, the
backlash was swift. Hirshfelds centre was burnt down by the Nazis, while in the Anglosphere these new
sexual ideas were crushed in the post-war boom, as our society focused on the ideal
of traditional marriage. The sexual exuberance of the 1960s and 70s came with a
similar backlash, particular as the HIV/Aids crisis hit in the 80s. Instead of dealing with HIV/Aids

as a medical issue, governments around the world used it as an opportunity to

scaremonger about queer people, raising fears of the spread of the gay cancer . In
each of these moments, the sexual exuberance of the time made change look
inevitable. Progress to true liberation and equality was on an unstoppable march, so
it seemed. Yet in each moment, rightwing forces responded in kind . They have been
extremely successful in doing so. Of course times today are different, primarily in that we are a much moresocially

but we can still see similar themes today from the rightwing attacks of
the past. Our history is potted with conservatives trying to paint queers as
dangerous, both to the family unit and broader capitalist society. Responses to the HIV/Aids
liberal society,

crisis for example painted gay men as dangerous disease spreaders making queers a threat to the entire
community. That is exactly whats happened in the past year. While most people in our community reject the
premise that gays and lesbians are out to destroy the family (primarily because we gays and lesbians have given up
on doing so), these attacks are still trying to paint LGBTI people as dangerous to the rest of
society. This time however the focus is on two groups: kids and trans* people. Instead of destroying the family, we

sexualising children (ie Safe Schools) and providing a threat to the ideals of
gender and in turn peoples safety (ie trans people in public toilets). Of course these attacks are
not new, but they have become the focus of a new attempt to make LGBTI people a
dangerous group that should be rejected. It is in understanding this history that we can see the
are now

weakness of some of the responses of the LGBTI community. While protests against the attacks on Safe Schools
were great, we have engaged in this debate through narrow and conservative frames. Responses were framed
around the concept of safety, speaking in depth about the threat of deaths of queer kids. While obviously

no one was willing to open the debate on the need to teach kids
about sexuality and sexual desire. The LGBTI communitys response bought into the frame of the
debate. Weve once again tried to convince people that were not challenging any of
the tenets of modern society, and instead that we just want to live our lives. This
becomes a problem when we actually do want to challenge social institutions. It becomes
an issue when we do talk about the need to teach kids about sexuality, or to
challenge the dominance of the gender binary . Here is the threat of these attacks from
important, it is notable that

conservatives. While they may seem weak now, if they can frame us as dangerous in this way they could have real

They probably wont kick us out of society, or even marriage, but they may
be able to stop further progress for queer people. The fact that weve seen legislation
and regulation that has taken us backwards for the first time in over a decade is a good symbol of
this regression. This is the challenge. Instead of being defensive , it is time we change the frame of
the debate. We need to overthrow the very idea that teaching kids about sexuality,
or that changing how we deal with gender, are bad things . We need to accept that we are
dangerous to parts of society, but to embrace that fact, and make the argument as to why it is necessary. The
attacks queer people face today have a long history . For centuries, conservatives have
been extremely successful in painting queer people as a threat to our society . This
year, and this International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, it is up to us to change that frame. Only
through destroying the very premise of that argument will we be able to break the
cycle of repression.
success.

Current political strategies fail in relation to the Queer

community
Thiel 14 (LGBT Politics, Queer Theory, and International Relations http://www.eir.info/2014/10/31/lgbt-politics-queer-theory-and-international-relations/ 10/31/14)
Markus Thiel is assistant professor in the Department of Politics and International

Relations at Florida International University, Miami & research associate at MiamiFIUs EU Center of Excellence. He has published several articles in the Journal of
European Integration, International Studies Encyclopedia, Perspectives on European
Politics & Society, and others.
In reference to the practice of LGBT politics, the emergence of numerous Western-organized NGOs, but also locally
hybridized LGBT movements with the significant publicity they generate be it positive or negative pluralizes
transnational politics to a previously unknown degree, and chips away at the centrality of the state in regulating
and protecting its citizens. In the same vein, the inclusion of LGBT individuals not as abject minorities, but as
human rights carriers with inherent dignity and individual rights of expression, may transform the relationship

But queer theory, which contests many extant

does
not always align comfortably with the predominant political strategies advanced in
transnational LGBT rights advocacy. The latter are viewed as conforming,
heteronormative, stereotyping, and even (homo)nationalistic in their particular
value-laden Western overtones. While queer tactics subvert assimilationist
heteronormative policies, LGBT advocacy is aimed at inclusion within existing forms
of representation, rather than the appreciation of difference, and thus often appears
de-queered for political purposes: the anti-assimilationist character of queer activism and its
between a minoritized citizenry and governmental authority.

socio-political institutions such as mainstream liberalism, neoliberal capitalism, or regulatory citizenship,

breaking down of pre-existing categories would present a perhaps insurmountable challenge to human rights
discourse, which requires stable categories and, given opposition to anything perceived as a claim for special
rights, an emphasis on the similarities between people regardless of their sexuality and the normality of LGBT

Tensions between assimilationist-inclusive and transgressive

queer approaches in the international policy domain should, however, not be suppressed,
as they reflect a pluralist social reality and signify the need to rethink simplistic IR
epistemologies and analytical approaches. Political tensions in the real world should prompt the
queer IR theorist to question established conceptions of governance. To illustrate, in my own work I use the EUs
justification of sexual non-discrimination on neoliberal market policies to highlight
the ambiguous positioning of the EU when advocating limited equality provisions in its
complex multi-level governance system (Thiel, in Picq & Thiel 2015). I argue that the dominance of
neoliberalism as the EUs raison detre limits the rights attainment of LGBT individuals
because it restricts alternative critical views contending that rights are accorded only
partially in the absence of universal social justice and broader human and social
rights. It also problematizes the implicit cooptation of NGOs by the EU when
accepting funds and cooperating with a supranational system that is at least partially
people (Sheill 2009, 56).

responsible for the retrenchment of national welfare policies and this is based on supposed technocratic policies

Such commodification of rights in itself is

problematic, yet cannot be politicized in a system in which socio-economic policy is
protected by its supposed non-political regulatory nature reminiscent of Foucaults
power-knowledge linkage. The feminist contribution to IR highlights uneven gendered power relations, but
that are shielded from political accountability.

a critical IPE that merges concerns with structural injustice with the thoughtful critique of Queer Theorys view on
state-economy relations and civil society adds profound insights. And this is not only in the application of critical
theory, but also of queer theoretical tenets such as taking seriously the distinct positionality of actors, the inherent
normative content of supposed technocratic politics, and the ambiguous outcomes of political action. Possible
Futures for LGBT Perspectives and Queer IR Scholarship The recent increase in IR scholarship infused with queer
thinking evidences that more rigorous interrogations of the impact of LGBT issues in international politics have
begun to be successfully answered. Reflecting on the possible futures of LGBT advocacy and queer research, there
are various critical aspects to consider: the progress of such strategic politics is mainly limited to the West, and
evokes domestic hetero- and homonormative and international (homo)colonialist contentions. This becomes

when powerful transnational NGOs, such as the International Lesbian Gay

or international organizations such as the UN, the
World Bank, and the EU, advocate reforms in countries while not realizing that their
particularly apparent

Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA)

explicit LGBT support accentuates the politicization of those minorities. LGBT

politics and queer IR research can inspire and parallel each other as long as sexual
advocacy politics does not fall prey to overly assimilationist or patronizing politics. If
predominantly gay and lesbian rights such as marriage and adoption equality are aimed for, while
transgender individuals are still lacking healthcare access or protection from hate-crimes,
can one speak of true equality? And if the normalization of sexualities into consuming, depoliticized
constituencies leads to a weakening of alternative, critical models of socio-political coexistence and appreciation of
difference, what effects does this have on LGBT emancipation?

Aff Answers

Queer IR Fails
Queer IR fails Queer ethics and epistemology is incompatible
with theories of international relations and realism
Jezzi 15 (Nathaniel, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom, specialist in
philosophy, peer-reviewed by scholars, Constructivism in Metaethics, Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, non-profit organization, March 19, 2015,
http://www.iep.utm.edu/con-ethi/)
realism cannot accommodate our broader metaphysical and
epistemological commitments. Here the concern is generally that realism about value, or
morality, or reasons is incompatible with philosophical naturalism . Very roughly, this is the
The first supposed failing is that

ontological thesis that the only kinds of facts and properties that exist are natural onesthat is, those facts and
properties that (could) figure as the objects of investigation of our best scientific practices. The alleged problem is

ethical facts and properties could only satisfy condition (3) if naturalism were
false. There are two (related) versions of this argument in the literature. For example, according to one
popular version of the objection made famous by J.L. Mackie (1977), ethical facts and
properties exhibit certain necessary connections with our motivational capacities.
This view is sometimes referred to as motivational internalism. If these motivational
connections are understood naturalistically (for example, as connections between ethical
judgments and an agents desires or dispositions to choose), it is hard to see how ethical facts and
properties could enjoy the independence described in condition (3). They would have to be
that

stance-independent by nature yet necessarily connected with certain motivational stances. The worry is that this

in the words of Mackie, that ethical facts and properties were utterly
different from anything else in the universe (1977: 38). The conclusion here is that
realism commits one to a kind of metaphysical queerness. Mackies allegation of
metaphysical queerness gives rise to a related concern about epistemological
queerness. If ethical facts and properties are metaphysically different from anything
else in the universe, why should we think that we could discover them in the same
way we come to know natural facts and properties ( that is, via observation and empirical
would suggest,

theorizing)? Here the particular worry is that we could only come to know them via some mysterious faculty of

Hence a queer metaphysics would require a queer epistemology. While

Mackie was the first to present these objections, there are also more recent versions
of this kind of naturalistic argumentones that respond to Mackies worries about
queerness with a constructivist solution. For example, Street (2006) claims that realism is
incompatible with our best evolutionary account of how we came to make the
ethical judgments we do. According to this argument, if realism were true we would
have no good explanation of how our ethical judgments have succeeded in
matching (or tracking) stance-independent ethical truths; rather, the truth of these judgments would
have to be entirely a matter of unlikely coincidence. Constructivism, by contrast, is supposed to avoid
these problems. By grounding ethical truths in features of intentional states,
constructivists claim that their view makes use of only naturalistic materials, ones
that can be accounted for by empirical psychology. These are features that may be
appealed to in order to explain the apparent connection between ethical judgments
and motivation. They might also help the constructivist avoid Streets skeptical scenario. This is because the
constructivist will argue that there is no serious gap between ethical judgment and
truth that the skeptic may exploit. Of course, these types of naturalistic concern alone
intuition.

do little to distinguish the constructivist challenge from others, such as the

challenge error-theorists and expressivists mount against realism. In fact, it would appear
as if every major challenge to realism incorporates some version of this worry. But this is not the only motivation to
which constructivists appeal. This first type of concern is usually coupled with a second type.

Incorporating Queer theory into consideration, organization,

and conduct of international relations confuse figurations of
statecraft and threatens to push Queer theory out of
transnational thought
Weber 16 (Cynthia, Professor of International Relations at Sussex University, coDirector of the media company Pato Productions, films that critically engage with
identity, citizenship, and human rights practices, Graduate Program in International
Affairs and the Observatory for Latin America at the New School University,
published several internationally recognized books on topics ranging from US
foreign policy and international relations to theory and film, including Simulating
Sovereignty, Cambridge University Press, Queer International Relations, Oxford
University Press, January 25, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=TiHuCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=queer+
%22international+relations
%22+intersectionality&ots=a6qioU01He&sig=aCoU53h1_cMvGkS1yN2S8wqsuVQ#
v=onepage&q=queer&f=false)
through the lens of queer logics of statecrafta lens that contests those
exclusively binary expressions of 'difference' that demand that all subjectivities can
be and can be known as singularly signifying subjectivities across every potentially
plural register they occupy or engage the persistence of 'modern man' as
'sovereign man' is put into doubt . This is for two reasons. First, queer logics of statecraft
direct us to an appre- ciation of those queer figures who cannot or will not signify
monolithically around sex, around gender and/or around sexuality . This is a point queer
theorists like Eve Sedgwick make (1993). More than this, though, queer logics of statecraft enable us
to appreciate how queerly plural figures might order, reorder, or disorder national,
regional, and international politics and the singular understanding of sovereignty
Reconsidered

upon which these orders have depended at least since the Treaty of Westphalia. This is the story Tom Neuwirth
and/as Conchita Wurst tells in relation to contemporary 'Europe', as recounted in chapter 6. Neuwirth/Wurst's story
is the same story many other figurations of or opposed to 'sovereign man' have been telling for a very long time

For
none of these figures can be captured or contained by an either/or logic of
traditional statecraft as mancraft. This is because their subjectivities are formed
through and expressed by a pluralized logic of the and/or a logic that understands
these figures as both either one thing or another or possibly another while it
simultaneously understands them as one thing and another and possibly another.
As these queerly plural figurations of the 'homosexual' of/in relation to 'sovereign
man' come into focus, what also often comes into focus with them is the concerted
effort required to attempt to present not just these figurations but any figurations of
'sovereign man' as if he were singular, as if he preexisted attempts to constitute
him as such, as if he had no history. This is the second way in which queer logics of
be they 'the revolutionary state and citizen' (Lind and Keating 2013) or 'the hegemonic state' (Weber 1999).

statecraft put the persistence of the 'singular modern man' Foucault describes in
doubt. For rather than evidencing the existence much less persistence of this
'modern man', what they evidence is the endless reworkingsthe desperate,
constant refigurations of, in this case, the 'homosexual' as/in relation to 'sovereign
man' that underscore the fragility of both 'modern man' and 'modern sovereignty' .
These endless reworkings of 'modern man' as 'sovereign man' expose the endless
games of power these refigurations require, hinting that these particular modern
games of sovereign statecraft as sovereign mancraft are unlikely to work forever.
Put in Foucault's terms, what comes into relief through queer logics of statecraft is
how the attempted figuration of the 'homosexual' as singular 'sovereign man' and
the singular understanding of sovereignty upon which it depends are 'in the process
of disappearing' (1971). By neglecting to take queer logics of statecraft as mancraft into account,
opportunities are lost to better understand how a variety of political games of power function in relation to the

the vast majority of IR scholarship insists that any

incorporation of sexuality into IR (if it is to be incorporated at all) must be (presumably)
knowable and always codable in either/or terms, consideration of how queer and/or
modalities of queerly pluralized and/or subjectivities and their effects on the
organization, regulation, and conduct of intimate, national, regional, and
international relations threaten to fall out of IR theory and practice. On the other hand,
consideration of how singular figurations of the 'homosexual' in traditional either/or logics of
statecraft as mancraft are confronted and confused by and/or figurations of these
same 'homosexuals' threatens to fall out of transnational/global queer same
'homosexuals' threatens to fall out of transnational/global queer studies . For example,
'homosexual'. On the one hand, because

Puar's and Puar and Rai's accounts of the 'al-Qaeda terrorist' allow for multiple incarnations of this figure (as the
monster, the terrorist, and the fag who is also the dangerous Muslim or the dangerous Arab or the dangerous Sikh,
for example; see Puar and Rai 2002; Puar 2007). Yet because Puar and Rai only read this figure through the either/
or logics Of statecraft as mancraft that Western governments employed to incite, stabilize, and regiment this figure
in their domestic and foreign policies, Puar and Rai overlook how the 'al-Qaeda terrorist' functions through queer
logics of statecraft, which employ and/or logics to con- fuse and confound Western domestic and foreign policies
(Weber 2002).

Queer Theory Fails

Queer Theory Fails recreates patriarchal categories or
relevance
Beresford, Law Prof @ Lancaster University, 14 (Sarah, The Age of Consent and the
Ending of Queer Theory, Laws (3) pg. 759779)

The debate surrounding whether or not the age of consent should be lowered resurfaced again in late 2013. Much of the debate focused expressly, or impliedly, on
the age of which men and boys have sexual intercourse (whether gay or straight).
The parameters of the age of consent debate illustrate that the issues were raised
and discussed in a manner that on the face of it, discusses the sexual experiences
of all individuals irrespective of sex or gender. However, I suggest that the consent
debate privileges the sexual experiences of boys, and underplays or ignores the
sexual experiences of girls. Denying or minimizing the experiences of some subjects
whilst privileging the experiences of others, is reflective of what Queer Theory has
become rather than what it originally intended to be. In this context, then, the
debate is a Queer one because the emphasis has focused upon the effects on
teenage boys, at the expense of the impact on teenage girls. This article uses the
age of consent debate to illustrate how the scope of Queer Theory has shrunk from
its gloriously wide and wonderfully promising beginnings to a rather narrow and
restrictive understanding now. I am not seeking to argue the suitability (or
otherwise) of Queer Theory as an analytical lens with which to consider consent to
sex per se, rather, I seek to illustrate how the debate on consent is illustrative of
some of the drawbacks and dis-functionalities of Queer Theory. Queer Theory no
longer does what it says on the tin, and had tried and failed to successfully destabilize dominant patriarchal normative discourse and power structures. I suggest
that this is because that which underpins Queer Theory is the post-structuralist idea
that there is no subject, only discourse, and that it is discourse which gives
meaning to identity categories. Consequently, if there is no subject, there can be
no discrimination or differential treatment experienced by the subject. However, I
argue in this article that the subject does exist and that the denial of the subject is a
denial of subjectively lived experience. Whist I happily endorse the idea that
discourse plays a significant role in creating and giving meaning to categories,
Queer Theory and post-structuralism unintentionally re-create patriarchally defined
categories of legal relevance. If there is to be a more inclusive and genuinely queer
debate, such a debate needs to be more explicit in acknowledging the lived
experience of girls and thus more inclusive and reflective of these experiences.
Lowering the age of consent is likely to lead to even greater pressure on girls to be
sexually active before they are ready, exposing them to experiences and
consequences before they are sufficiently emotionally and physically mature.

Queer Theory reinforces hegemonic masculinity

Beresford, Law Prof @ Lancaster University, 14 (Sarah, The Age of Consent and the
Ending of Queer Theory, Laws (3) pg. 759779)

When Queer Theory denies the subject, it also consequently denies the existence of
what I argue are much needed categories of legal relevance; that of girls and

woman. I thus now turn to an additional problem with Queer Theory; the denial of
the subject. As outlined above, part of the attractiveness of Queer Theory and of
post-structuralism is that it can act as a liberating methodological tool to resist a
dominant hegemony of identity. However, this approach leads to the denial of not
only the subject, and thus the continued subjection, oppression and the denial of
subjectively lived experience. It can also be seen as a violence to women as a
class of persons, thus, reinforcing hegemonic masculinity ([49], p. 173). In other
words, the subject does not exist; the I and the self of lived experience are thus
dismissed. Queer Theory suggests that identity is the product of discourse not the
source of action [50]. My concerns with the shortcomings of Queer Theory in this
respect are not isolated. Various authors have suggested that Queer Theory ignores
the social and institutional conditions within which lesbians (and gay men) live [51];
that it renders it impossible to talk in terms of a lesbian subject [52].

Queer theory fails it erases the identities of the individual

pieces of the LGBT spectrum and sabotages its own movement
Smith 3 (Title: Queer Theory and Communication From Disciplining Queers to
Queering the Discipline(s) | Article: Queer Theory, Gay Movements, and Political
Communication By Ralph R. Smith PHD | Published in 2003, UMICH didnt give an
exact date | Ralph is a professor of communication at Southwest Missouri State
University and teaches courses about LGBT politics)
Because of its recent academic high profile, queer theory has been subjected to extensive criticism. Included in

queer theorists, in their radical nominalism, ignore the material world of

actual persons //. Reflections 347 and relationships, preferring instead to focus on grammatical and semantic
analysis of texts and on conditions of reception-consumption, thereby drawing attention away from
economic inequity and actual relations of exploitation . Critics charge, moreover, that, despite
or because of its historicism, queer theory transforms changes in fashion into major
shifts in epistemology, thereby obscuring continuity in human experience across
time and cultures, thus denying gay men and lesbians the benefit of a history and a
universality arguably well grounded in reality . Further, by ignoring politics for other aspects of
these criticisms is that

culture, queer theorists may elevate cross-dressing heavy metal performances, for example, to the same

Queer theory is also criticized for avoiding the reality

of core identities by transforming them into mere subjectivities, thereby departing
from human experience and intuition . Presentation of queer theory, so another indictment runs, is
importance as Supreme Court decisions.

incestuous in citation, dogmatic in thought, and impenetrable in style and vocabulary. Canonical texts of queer
studies by Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Butler, and Sedgwick are repetitively redescribed with increasing obscurity not
required for works already remarkably obscure. Major lacunae in thought are papered over by repetitive assertion of
formulary phrases advanced as dogma. Incredibly convoluted sentences are often studded with recondite words,

queer theory has produced

a series of adverse effects on gay politics, redirecting attention from the materiality
of actual social conditions to language, from the disruption of bodies through
violence to the disruption of homophobic performance. The claim is made that
interest is drawn away from perennial questions in gay politics which truly matter,
e.g., assimilation vs. minority group, insider politics vs. confrontation, and
contention over issue selection, to questions which have only rarely been asked . More
specifically, queer theory erases gay identity, thereby weakening social justice and civil
rights movements, creating a sense of futility about achieving amelioration of
neologisms, and familiar words used unfamiliarly. In the view of some critics,

conditions for sexual minorities and strengthening the sense of division already
endemic among gay advocates. In the view of some critics, queer theory enhances
misunderstanding between the ivory tower and the street, between academics, who should be
among the spokespersons for gay interests, and gay activists and their
constituencies. Queer theory is also faulted for failing to recognize that politics is a
part of culture, even popular culture, just as much as performance art and sit-coms.
Finally, by its emphasis on individualism and on the creation of self through
consumption practices, queer theory drains the pool of those who might become
committed to achieving a common good.

Queer Liberation Now/ State Solves

The Squo is structurally improving the Law is redeemable,
and grassroots movements coupled with policies are key to
effect change
Sapinoso 2009
(Joyleen Valero (JV), PhD in Philosophy, University of Maryland, FROM
QUARE TO KWEER:TOWARDS A QUEER ASIAN AMERICAN CRITIQUE
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/9567/Sapinoso_umd_0
117E_10599.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y - KSA)
the issuing of marriage licenses to
lesbian and gay couples in San Francisco , the push for a Federal Marriage Amendment seeking to
define marriage as strictly between a man and a woman, and the 2004 U.S. presidential election,
queer citizenship was pushed to the foreground in the U.S. in 2004. In particular, the U.S.
Supreme Courts ruling in Lawrence v. Texas in June 2003 that anti-sodomy laws
were unconstitutional seemed to herald a new era of queer citizenship through its
decriminalization of laws intended to outlaw gay (male) sex58. Dominant within this new era
was an increased hopefulness and belief that queer people in the U.S. were finally
on the verge of overcoming the second-class citizenship they had been relegated to because
In the wake of legalized same-sex marriages in Massachusetts,

of their sexuality. That is, queer people have been and are denied certain rights based specifically on their lack of
adherence to the heterosexual norm. Thus, rather than enjoy the range of rights extended to full citizens, the
marginalization queer people face within the U.S. polity reflects their status as second-class citizens. In the wake of
U.S. anti-sodomy laws being invalidated nationwide, it was anticipated that all other forms of systematic and
institutional discrimination against queer people were near an end, too, and that queer peoples full citizenship was

The anticipation of the end of homophobia and heterosexism was

concomitant with a re-vitalization and increased visibility of LGBTQ grassroots
activism organized around lesbian and gay civil rights, especially around the right to marry. This focus on
marriage has continued in the last five years , and according to the 58 Legal definitions of sodomy
close at hand.

vary and often encompass sex acts between a man and a woman, as well as between two men; typically, however,
sodomy laws were enforced only against mens same-sex sexual behavior. 92 National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce
and the National Conference of State Legislatures has resulted in

a handful of gains: same-sex

couples have the right to marry in six59 states [Massachusetts (2004), Connecticut (2008), Iowa
(2009), Vermont (2009), Maine (2009), and New Hampshire (2009)]; civil unions granting state-level spousal rights
to same-sex couples are allowed in New Jersey (2006); domestic partnerships that give unmarried couples some
state-level spousal rights are available in California (2005), Oregon (2007), Hawaii (1997), Washington (2008), and
the District of Columbia (2008); and Rhode Island (2007) and New York (2008) recognize same-sex marriages
performed in other states. While securing same-sex marriage rights is by far not the only gay civil right being
sought out, it does remain the case that it is often depicted as among the most prevalent struggles, if not the most
prevalent one, throughout numerous gay mainstream rights groups and movements.

A2: Trans Range

Trans rage can never claim a secure means of resistance
because of the inability to stabilize gendered positions in
linguistic structure operation through speaking in hearing is
inevitably gendered and the alt fails
Stryker 16 Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies
The Transgender Studies Reader; Susan Stryker, Edited by Stephen Whittle; 2006;
p.247-248 [OCR]; mbc
CRITICISM
In answer to the question he poses in the title of his recent essay, "What is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein)," peter Brooks
suggests that, whatever else a monster might be, it "may also be that which eludes gender definition" (219), Brooks reads Mary
Shelleys story of an overreaching scientist and hrs troublesome creation as an early dissent from the nineteenth-century realist
literary tradition, which had not yet attained dominance as a narrative form. He understands Frankenstein to unfold textually
through a narrative Strategy generated by tension a Visual y oriented epistemology, on the one hand, and another approach to

Knowing by seeing and

knowing by speaking/hearing are gendered, respectively, as masculine and feminine
in the critical framework within which Brooks operates. Considered in this context, Shelley's text is
knowing the truth of bodies that privileges verbal linguistically, on the Other (199200).

informed byand critiques from a point of viewthe contemporary reordering of knowledge brought about by the increasingly

The monster problematizes gender partly through

its failure as a viable subject in the visual field; though referred to as "he," it thus
offers a feminine, and potentially feminist, resistance to definition by a phallicized
scopophilia. The monster accomplishes this resistance by mastering language in order to claim a position as a speaking
subject and enact verbally the very subjectivity denied it in the specular realm. Transsexual monstrosity, along
with its affect, transgender rage, can never claim quite so secure a means of
resistance because of inability of language to represent the transgendered
movement over time between stably gendered positions in a linguistic structure. Our
situation effectively reverses the one encountered by Frankenstein's monster. Unlike the monster, we often
successfully cite the culture's visual norms of gendered embodiment. "Ibis citation
becomes a subversive resistance when, through a provisional use of language, we
verbally declare the unnaturalness of our claim to the subject positions we
nevertheless occupy (6) The prospect of a monster with a life and will of its own is a principal source of horror for
compelling truth claims of Enlightenment science.

Frankenstein. The scientist has taken up his project with a specific goal in mindnothing less than the intent to subject nature
completely to his power. He finds a means to accomplish his desires through modern science, whose devotees, it seems to him,
"have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even
mock the invisible world with its shadows.... More, far more, will I achieve," thought Frankenstein. "I will pioneer a new way, explore
unknown powers, and unfold the world the deepest mysteries of creation" (Shelley 47). The fruit of his efforts is not, however, What
Frankenstein anticipated. The rapture he expected to experience at the awakening of his Creature turned immediately to dread. "I
saw the dull yellow eyes of the creature open. I lis jaws opened, and he muttered some inarliculalc sounds, while a grin wrinkled his
cheeks. Ile might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped" (Shelley 56,
57). The monster escapes, too, and parts company with its maker for a number of years. In the interim, it learns something of its
situation in the world, and rather than bless its creator, the monster curses him. The very success of Mary Shelley's scientist in his
self-appointed task thus paradoxically proves its futility: rather than demonstrate Frankenstein's power over materiality, the newly
enlivened body of the creature attests to its maker's failure to attain the mastery he sought, Frankenstein cannot control the mind
and feelings of the monster he makes. It exceeds and refutes his purposes.

My own experience as a
transsexual parallels the monster's in this regard. The consciousness shaped by the
transsexual body is no more the Creation of the science that refigures its flesh than
the monster's mind is the creation of Frankenstein. The agenda that produced
hormonal and surgical sex reassignment techniques is no less pretentious, and no

more noble, than Frankenstein's. I lerolc doctors still endeavor to triumph over nature. The scientific discourse that produced
Sex reassignment techniques is inseparable from the pursuit of immortality through the perfection of the body, the fantasy of total

Its genealogy
emerges from a metaphysical quest older than modern science, and its cultural
politics are aligned with a deeply conservative attempt to stabilize gendered
identity in service of the naturalized heterosexual order. None of this, however,
precludes medically constructed transsexual bodies from being viable sites of
subjectivity. Nor does it guarantee the compliance of subjects thus embodied with the agenda that resulted in a transsexual
mastery through the transcendence of an absolute limit, and the hubristic desire to create life itself. (7)

means of embodiment. As we rise up from the operating tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals are something more, and something
Other, than the creatures our makers intended us to be, although medical techniques for sex reassignment are capable of crafting
bodies that satisfy the visual and morphological criteria that generate naturalness as their effect, engaging With those very

Transsexual
embodiment, like the embodiment of the monster, places its subject in an antagonistic, queer
relationship to a Nature in Which it must nevertheless Frankenstein's monster
articulates its unnatural situation within the natural world with far more
sophistication in Shelley novel than might be expected by those familiar only with the version played by Boris Karl oflin
techniques a subjective experience that belies the naturalistic effect biomedical technology can achieve.

James Whale* classic films from the 1930s. Film critic Vito Russo suggests that Whale's interpretation of the monster was influenced
by the fact that the director was a closeted gay man at the time he made his Frankenstein films. The pathos he imparted to his
monster derived from the cxpcricncc of his own hidden sexual Identity. (8) Monstrous and unnatural In the eyes of the world, but
seeking only the love of his own kind and the acceptance of human society, Whale's creature externalizes and renders visible the
nightmarish loneliness and alienation that the closet can breed. But this is not the monster who speaks to me so potently of my own
situation as an openly transsexual being. I emulate instead Mary Shelley literary monster, who is quick-witted, agile, strong, and
eloquent.

Static Identities Good

Openness to flux and constant becoming destroys the
foundations for political institutions necessary to sustain
radical democratic life---some universal, fixed guarantees of
equality are crucial to politics
Joseph Schwartz 8, Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Future
of Democratic Equality, 56-61
Butler, Brown, and Connolly reject the essentialism of narrow identity politics as
an inverted ressentiment of the Enlightenment desire for a universal,
homogenized identity. They judge identity politics to be a politics of wounding,
resentment, and victimization that only can yield bad-faith moralization Wendy
Brown takes to task identity politics for essentializing conceptions of group
identity. For example, she critiques the work of Catherine MacKinnon as epitomizing
identity political theory, accusing MacKinnon of denying women agency by
depicting them purely as victims.38 Brown also remains wary of the patriarchal,
conformist nature of traditional left conceptions of solidarity and citizenship.
Browns implicit concept of radical democratic citizenship rests upon the recognition
that political identity is continually in flux and is socially constituted through
agonal political struggle. Brown celebrates an Arendtian conception of a polity in
which both shared and particular identities are continually open to reconstruction. In
this left Nietzschean view of an everypersons will to power, there can be no
cultural certainties or political givens, as such givens would repress difference and
fluidity.39 But, if the human condition is a world of permanent flux, then we must
postulate a human capability of living with constant insecurity, for in this world
there can be no stable political institutions or political identities.40 An ability to
calculate the probabilities of political actions or public policies would disappear in
this world of infinite liminality. By assuming that the pre-eminent democratic value
is that of leaving all issues as permanently open to question, post-structuralist
democratic theory eschews the theoretical and political struggle over what
established institutions and consensual values are needed to underpin a
democratic society.
Post-structuralist analysis has contributed to a healthy suspicion of narrow and
essentializing identity politics. But a self-identified feminist, African- American, or
lesbian activist is likely to value the shared historical narratives that partly
constitute such group identities. Of course, if one is a democrat and a pluralist, one
would reject the oppressive homogenization and potentially authoritarian aspects of
ethnic or racial chauvinism and of essentializing types of identity politics. The
democratic political home should be open, fluid, and self-reflective; but if
participation is to be open to all, then such a society also needs to reproduce a
shared democratic culture and the institutional guarantee of democratic rights. That
is, contrary to post-structuralist analysis, not all issues can be open to agonal
struggle in a democratic society. The traditional radical democratic critique of

democratic capitalism remains valid; the equal worth of the individual is devalued
by rampant social inequality within and between groups. Thus, a radical democrat,
whether post-structuralist or not, must not only be committed to institutional
protections of political and civil rights, but also to social rightsthe equal access to
the basic goods of citizenship (education, health care, housing, child care). Of
course, the precise nature and extent of these rights will be politically contested
and constructed. But a democratic society cannot leave as totally open the
minimal institutional basis of democracy a democratic society cannot be agnostic
as to the value of freedom of speech, association, and universal suffrage.
Social movements fighting for an expansion of civil, political, and social rights,
rarely, if ever, rest their arguments on appeals to epistemological truths whether
foundational or anti-foundational. To remain democratic, their policy goals
cannot be so specific that they preclude political argument about both their worth
and how best to institutionalize them. If social movements in a 58 democratic
society deemed that every policy defeat meant a betrayal of basic democratic
principles, there would be no give-and-take or winners and losers within democratic
politics. But if a government were to abolish freedom of speech and competitive
elections, or deny a social group basic rights, it would be reasonable for an observer
to judge that democratic principles had been violated. Democratic political
movements and coalitions struggle to construct shared meanings about those
political, civil, and social rights that should be guaranteed to all citizensand they
often work to expand the types of persons to be recognized as citizens (such as
excluded immigrants). Such arguments are inevitably grounded in normative
arguments that go beyond merely asserting the import of flux,
difference, and anti-essentialism. The civil rights movement did not demand
equal rights for all solely as an agonal assertion of the will of the excluded; they
desired to gain for persons of color an established set of civil and political rights that
had been granted to some citizens and denied to others. The movement correctly
assumed that the exclusion of citizens from full political and civil rights violated the
basic norms of a democratic society. Thus, postmodern epistemological
commitments to flux and openness cannot in-and-of-themselves sustain the
fixed moral positions needed to sustain a radical democracy.
Post-structuralist theorists openly proclaim their hostility to all philosophical metanarratives. They reject comprehensive conceptions of how society operates and
the type of society that would best instantiate human freedom. But poststructuralists go beyond rejecting meta-narratives; they insist that only an antifoundational epistemology can ground a politics of emancipation. For Butler,
Brown, and Connolly, not only do meta-discourses invariably fail in their efforts to
ground moral positions in a theory of human nature or human reason. They also
assert that an agonal politics of democratic we formation can alone sustain
democratic society. This agonal politics, they claim, can only be sustained by a
recognition of the inconstant signification of discourse and the ineluctable flux of
personal and group identity.41 Rejecting the authoritarian, celebration of the
ubermensch by Nietzsche, they offer a post-Nietzschean, amoral conception of
democracy as an open-ended project of defining a self and community that is

constantly open to the desires of others. These theorists constantly reiterate the
definitiveness (dare we say foundational truth) of this grounding of democracy,
despite the historical reality that social movements often contest
dominant narratives in the name of a stable alternative narrative of a
democratic and pluralist community.
One might well contend that the post-structuralist political stance is guilty of a new
meta-narrative of bad faith, that of anti-foundationalism. According to this antifoundational politics, a true democrat must reject any and all a priori truths
allegedly grounded upon the nature of human reason or human nature. A
committed democrat may well be skeptical of such neo-Kantian or neo-Hegelian
conceptions of freedom; but, many committed democrats justify their moral
commitments using these philosophical methods. A democrat might also reject (or
accept) the arguments of a Jurgen Habermas or Hans Georg Gadamer that the
structure of human linguistic communication contains within it the potential for a
society based on reasoned argument rather than manipulation and domination. But
there are numerous other philosophically pragmatic ways to justify democracy,
even utilitarian ones. Political democrats may well disagree about the best
philosophical defense of democracy. But, invariably, practicing democrats will
defend the belief (however philosophically proved or justified) that democratic
regimes best fulfill the moral commitment to the equal worth of persons and to the
equal potential of human beings to freely develop and pursue their life plans.
To contend that only an anti-foundationalist, anti-realist epistemology can sustain
democracy is to argue precisely for a foundational metaphysical grounding for the
democratic project. It is to contend that ones epistemology determines ones
politics. Hence, Brown and Butler both spoke at a spring 1998 academic conference
at the University of California at Santa Cruz where some attributed reactionary
and left cultural conservatism to belief in reactionary foundationalist
humanism.42 Post-structuralism cannot escape its own essentialist
conception of identity. For example, Butler contends in Feminist Contentions that
democratic feminists must embrace the post-structuralist nondefinability of
woman as best suited to open democratic constitution of what it is to be a
woman.43 But this is itself a closed position and runs counter to the practices of
many democratic feminist activists who have tried to develop a pluralist, yet
collective identity around the shared experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal
society (of course, realizing that working-class women and women of color
experience patriarchy in some ways that are distinct from the patriarchy
experienced by middle-class white women).
One query that post-structuralist theorists might ask themselves: has there ever
existed a mass social movement that defined its primary ethical values
as being those of instability and flux? Certainly many sexual politics activists
are cognizant of the fluid nature of sexuality and sexual and gender identity. But
only a small (disproportionately university educated) segment of the womens and
gay and lesbian movement would subscribe to (or even be aware of) the core
principles of post-structuralist anti-essentialist epistemology. Nor would they be
agnostic as to whether the state should protect their rights to express their

sexuality. Post-structuralist theorists cannot avoid justificatory arguments for why

some identities should be considered open and democratic and others exclusionary
and anti-democratic. That is, how could post-structuralist political theorists argue
that Nazi or Klan ethics are antithetical to a democratic societyand that a
democratic society can rightfully ban certain forms of agonal (e.g. harassing
forms of behavior against minorities) struggle on the part of such anti-democratic
groups.

The alts focus on becoming forever suspends political

engagement in favor of self-therapy---accepting some axioms
of commonality are necessary to achieve emancipation
Chamsy Ojeili 3, Senior Lecturer School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria
University of Wellington, Post-modernism, the Return to Ethics, and the Crisis of
Socialist Values, www.democracynature.org/vol8/ojeili_ethics.htm#_edn9
Notably, anarchists have often been charged with this failing by Marxian thinkers.[157] Anarchism does include those suspicious of the demands of
association, those who fear the tyranny of the majority and who emphasise instead the uniqueness and liberty of the individual. Here, the freedom of the
creative individual, unhindered by the limitations of sociality, is essential. This second strand shows clearly the influence of liberal ideas. It is also, in its
bohemian and nihilistic incarnation, a child to the malevolent trio of De Sade, Stirner, Nietzsche, that is, those who reject coercive community mores and
who recoil from herdish, conformist pressures. The free individual must create his or her own guiding set of values, exploring the hitherto untapped and
perhaps darker aspects of him or herself through an art which chaffs against the standards of beauty and taste of the ordinary mortal. Given that freedom
cannot endure limitations and that all idols have been driven from the world and the mind, for these revolutionaries, all is permitted.[158] This emphasis
on individual sovereignty is clear in Godwin and Stirner,[159] but also in Goldmans suspicion of collective life, in her elevation of the role of heroic
individuals in history, and in the work of situationist Raoul Vaneigem.[160] This accent within non-orthodox socialism has been much criticised. For
instance, Murray Bookchin has contrasted social with lifestyle anarchism, rejecting the elevation the self-rule of the individual in the latter to the

consider, here, the consequences, in the case of Emma Goldman, of the

substitution of collective revolutionary change for boheme and for an intellectualist
contempt for the masses. Goldman turned more and more to purely self-expressive
activity and increasingly appealed to intellectuals and middle class audiences, who felt amused and flattered by her individualism and exotic
iconoclasm.[162] This egoistic and personalistic turn ignores the essential social
anarchist aspiration to freedom, the commitment to an end to domination in
society, the comprehension of the social premises of the individualist urge itself, and the necessity of moving beyond a purely negative conception
of liberty to a thicker, positive conception of freedom.[163] Perhaps, as Bookchin has rather trenchantly asserted, the recent
individualist and neo-situationist concern with subjectivity , expression, and desire is all
too much like middle class narcissism and the self-centred therapeutics of
New Age culture. Perhaps also, as Barrot has said, the kind of revolutionary life advocated by Vaneigem cannot be lived.[164] Further,
highest goal of anarchist thinking.[161] One might

total freedom for any one individual necessarily means diminished freedom for others. As La Banquise argue, Repression and sublimation prevent people

The whole
thrust of libertarian politics is towards a collective project that reconstructs those
freedom-limiting structures of economy, power, and ideology .[166] It seems unlikely that such
from sliding into a refusal of otherness.[165] For socialists, freedom must be an ineradicably social as well as an individual matter.

ambitions could be achieved by those motivated solely by a Sadean ambition to seek satisfaction of their own improperly understood desires. On this

accenting autonomy as a property of the collective and of each

individual within society, and rejecting the opposition between community and
humanity, between the inner man [sic] and the public man [sic].[167] Castoriadis ridiculed abstract
individualism: We are not individuals, freely floating above society and history, who are
capable of deciding sovereignly and in the absolute about what we shall do, about how we shall do it, and about the
question, Castoriadis is again useful

meaning our doing will have once it is done Above all, qua individuals, we choose neither the questions to which we will have to respond nor the terms

Rejecting the contemporary

tendency to posit others as limitations on our freedom , Castoriadis argued that others were in
fact premises of liberty, possibilities of action , and sources of facilitation.[169]
Freedom is the most vital object of politics, and this freedom always a process and
never an achieved state is equated with the effective, humanly feasible, lucid and
reflective positing of the rules of individual and collective activity .[170] An autonomous society
in which they will be posed, nor, especially, the ultimate meaning of our response, once given.[168]

 one without alienation explicitly and democratically creates and recreates the institutions of its own world, formulating and
reformulating its own rules, rather than simply accepting them as given from above and outside. The resulting institutions,
Castoriadis hoped, would facilitate high levels of responsibility and activity among all people in respect of all questions about society.[171]
Castoriadis notion of social transformation holds to the goals of integrated human communities, the unification of peoples lives and culture, and the

committed to the free deployment of the

persons creative forces. Just as Castoriadis enthused over the capacity of human collectivities for immense works of creativity and
collective domination of people over their own lives.[172] He was also

responsibility,[173] so he insisted on the radical creativity of the individual and the importance of individual freedom. Congruent with the notion of social
autonomy, Castoriadis posited the autonomous individual as, most essentially, one who legislates for and thus regulates him or herself.[174] Turning to
psychoanalysis, he designated this autonomy as the emergence of a more balanced and productive relationship between the ego and the unconscious. For

these goals were not guaranteed by anything outside of the

collective activity of people towards such goals , and he insisted that individual
autonomy could only arise under heavily instituted conditions through
the instauration of a regime that is genuinely democratic .[175] Such an
outcome could not be solved in theory but only by a re-awakening of
politics. Only in the clash of opinions dependent on a restructured social
formation not determined in advance by naturalistic or religious postulates, could a true ethics
emerge.[176] This, I believe, is the highpoint of libertarian thinking about ethics and politics. Conclusion I have argued that socialist
Castoriadis,

orthodoxy has been eclipsed as a programme for the good life. On the one hand, it devolves into a project of
pragmatic expediency bereft of a political and ethical dimension, where statist administration submerges both
individual freedom and democratic decision-making. On the other hand, as social democracy the orthodox tradition
coalesces into a variety of more or less straightforward liberalism. Liberalism tends to overstate the conception of
humans as choosers, under-theorising and under-valuing the necessity of political community and the social
dimension of individuality and the necessity of a positive conception of freedom. The communitarian critique,
however, too readily diminishes the freedoms of the individual, subordinating people entirely to the horizons of
community life and reducing politics to something like a general will. Possessed of both liberal and
communitarian features, post-modernism has been skeptical about the idea of a unitary human essence. It has
jettisoned the notion of humans as unencumbered choosers, and it has underscored the constructedness of all our
values. In so doing,

post-modernism signals a renewed interest in ethics, in questions of

responsibility, evaluation, and difference, within contemporary social thinking. Post-modernism offers a
valuable critique of the tendency of socialist orthodoxy to bury the socialist insight as to the sociality and historicity

Nevertheless, advancing as it does on orthodox socialism, post-modernisms radical

constructivism and its horror at the disasters of confident and unreflective modernity can issue in an
ironic hesitancy, indicated in particular by an uncritical emphasis on pluralism and
incommensurability that threatens to forever suspend evaluation .[177] One
signal of this is the cautious and depoliticised obsession with Otherness and the
subject as victim of the return to ethics .[178] Further, post-modernism all too often
withdraws from universals and emancipation towards particularist either
individualist or community-based answers to questions of justice and the content of the valuable
life. In contrast, those seeking a radical, inclusive democracy must remain
engaged and universalist in orientation. A number of libertarians have not hesitated in
committing themselves, most importantly, to the emancipation of humanity without exception.[179] In
fact, politics and ethics seem unthinkable without such universalistic
aspirations. Post-modernists themselves have often had to submit to this truth,
smuggling into their analyses universally-binding ethico-political principles and
attempting to theorise the potential linkages between progressive political
struggles. However, such linkages do not amount to a coherent anti-systemic
movement that addresses the power of state and capital. In contrast, the
universalist commitments of the ethics of emancipation held to by many libertarians
accents both freedom and equality, and the establishment of a true political
community, against the dominations and distortions of state and capital. Against the
contemporary obsession with ethics, which is so often sloganistic, depoliticised,
defensive, privatised, and trivial, we should, with Castoriadis, accent politics as primary and as
of values.

the condition of proper ethical engagement . I have argued that, in line with Castoriadis strictures,
such a political community and the aspiration to truly ethical and political deliberation, can only be attained when
socialists free themselves from belief in the possibility of extra social guarantees other than the free play of
passions and needs,[180] and from the expectation of an end to tensions and dilemmas around questions of social
ordering. On these terms, libertarian goals are not contra liberal strictures the negation of aspirations for
freedom and democracy but are rather a collective pressing of these aspirations to the very far limits of popular
sovereignty. It is for this reason that the stubborn durability of these goals may, against all expectations, be an
auspicious sign for libertarian utopianism.

Institutional Analysis Good

The alt fails---deriding all attempts at action as freezing
becoming no way to deal with difficult political choices---we
also control terminal uniqueness because they cant convince
others to abandon liberal subjectivity
Joseph Schwartz 8, Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Future
of Democratic Equality, 56-62
A politics of radical democratic pluralism cannot be securely grounded by a wholehearted epistemological critique of enlightenment rationality. For implicit to any
radical democratic project is a belief in the equal moral worth of persons; to
embrace such a position renders one at least a critical defender of enlightenment
values of equality and justice, even if one rejects enlightenment metaphysics and
believes that such values are often embraced by non-Western cultures. Of course,
democratic norms are developed by political practice and 60 struggle
rather than by abstract philosophical argument. But this is a sociological and
historical reality rather than a trumping philosophical proof. Liberal democratic
publics rarely ground their politics in coherent ontologies and epistemologies; and
even among trained philosophers there is no necessary connection between ones
metaphysics and ones politics. There have, are, and will be Kantian conservatives
(Nozick), liberals (Rawls), and radicals (Joshua Cohen; Susan Okin); teleologists, left,
center, and right (Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre, or Leo Strauss); antiuniversalist feminists (Judith Butler, Wendy Brown) and quasi-universalist,
Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser).
Post-structuralists try to read off from an epistemology or ontology a politics; such
attempts simply replace enlightenment meta-narratives with postmodern (allegedly
anti) meta-narratives. Such efforts represent an idealist version of the materialist
effortwhich post-structuralists explicitly condemnto read social consciousness
off of the structural position of the agent. A democratic political theory must offer
both a theory of social structure and of the social agents capable of building such a
society. In exchanging the gods of Weber and Marx for Nietzsche and Heidegger (or
their epigones Foucault and Derrida), poststructuralist theory has abandoned the
institutional analysis of social theory for the idealism of abstract philosophy.
Connolly, Brown, and Butler reject explicit moral deliberation as a bad faith
Nietzschean attempt at ressentiment. Instead, they celebrate the amoral, yet
ethical strivings of a Machiavellian or Gramscian realist war of position.44 Sheldon
Wolin, however, has written convincingly of how Machiavelli can be read as an
ethical realist, a theorist of moral utilitarianism.45 Even a Machiavellian or
Gramscian political realist must depend upon moral argument to justify the social
utility of hard political choices. That is, if one reads both as ethical utilitarians who
believe that, at times, one must dirty ones hands in order to act ethically in
politics, then they embrace a utilitarian, just war theory of ethical choice.
According to this consequentialist moral logic, bad means are only justifiable if
they are the only, unavoidable way to achieve a greater ethical goodand if the use

of such bad means are absolutely minimized. Such hard political choices
yield social policies and political outcomes that fix identities as well as
transform them.
Not only in regard to epistemological questions has post-structuralist theory created
a new political metaphysics which misconstrues the nature of democratic political
practice; the post-structuralist analysis of the death of man and the death of the
subject also radically preclude meaningful political agency. As with Michel
Foucault, Butler conceives of subjects as produced by powerknowledge
discourses. In Butlers view, the modernist concept of an autonomous subject is a
fictive construct; and the very act of adhering to a belief in autonomous human
choice is to engage in exclusion and differentiations, perhaps a repression, that is
subsequently concealed, covered over, by the effect of autonomy.46 That is, the
power of discourse, of language and the unconscious, produces subjects. If those
subjects conceive of themselves as having the capacity for conscious choice, they
are guilty of repressing the manner in which their own subjectivity is itself
produced by discursive 61 exclusion: if we agree that politics and a power exist
already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made
possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into
its construction.47 Susan Bickford pithily summarizes the post-structuralist
rejection of the modernist subject: power is not wielded by autonomous subjects;
rather through power, subjectivity is crafted.48 Bickford grants that poststructuralism provides some insight into how group and individual identity is
culturally constructed. But Bickford goes on to contend that after poststructuralism exposes the lie of the natural (that there are no natural human
identities), socially constructed modern individuals still wish to act in consort
with others and to use human communication to influence others: people
generally understand themselves as culturally constituted and capable of
agency.49
For if there is no doer behind the deed, but only performative acts that
constitute the subject, how can the theorist (or activist) assign agency or moral
responsibility to actors who are constituted by discursive practices. (Discursive
practices engaged in by whom, the observer may ask?) Butler insists that not only
is the subject socially constituted by power/knowledge discourses, but so too is
the ontologically reflexive self of the enlightenment. Now if this claim is simply
that all social critics are socially-situated, then this view of agency is no more
radical a claim than that made by Michael Walzer in his conception of the social
critic (or agent). Walzer argues that even the most radical dissident must rely upon
the critical resources embedded within his own culture (often in the almost-hidden
interstices of that culture). Effective critical agency cannot depend on some
abstract universal, external logic.50 Asserting that critical capacities are themselves
socially constructed provides the reader with no means by which to judge whether
forms of resistance are democratic and which are not. That is, no matter how hard
one tries to substitute an aesthetic, ironic, amoral ethical sensibility for
morality, the social critic and political activist cannot escape engaging in moral
argument and justification with fellow citizens.

Butler astutely notes that resistance often mirrors the very powerknowledge
discourses it rejectsresisting hegemonic norms without offering alternative
conceptions of a common political life. But Butler seems to affirm the possibility (by
whom?) of effective rejection of such norming by performative resignification.
But the resignification of performative discursive constructions provides no
criteria by which to judge whether a given resignification is emancipatory or
repressive.51 And just who (if not a relatively coherent, choosing human subject) is
performing the resignification. Furthermore, if all forms of identity and social
meaning are predicated upon exclusion, then the democratic theorist needs to
distinguish among those identities which exclude in a democratic way and those
which exclude in an anti-humanist, racist, and sexist manner. Some social
identities are democratic and pluralist, such as those created by voluntary
affiliations. But other identities, such as structural, involuntary class differences
and racial and sexual hierarchies, must be transformed, even eliminated, if
democracy is to be furthered. And how we behaveor performcan subvert (or
reinforce) such undemocratic social structures. But if these social structures are
immutably inscribed by62 performative practices, then there can be no
democratic resistance. In her call for an ironic politics of performative resistance,
Butler seems to imply that human beings have the capacity to choose which
performative practices to engage inand from which to abstain. If this is the
case, then a modernist conception of agency and moral responsibility has covertly
snuck its way back into Butlers political strategy.52

Ethical projects of self-creation must be tethered from the

outset to advocacy for institutional change---the aff lapses into
new-age individualistic therapy that demolishes collective
political action
Ella Myers 13, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at the
University of Utah, 2013, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World,
p. 44-45
Connolly is inconsistent in this regard, for he also positions Foucauldian self- artistry as
an essential preliminary to, and even the necessary condition of, change at the
macropolitical level.104 That is, although Connolly claims that micropolitics and
political movements work in tandem, each producing effects on the other,105 he sometimes
privileges action by the self on itself as a starting point and necessary prelude to
macropolitical change. This approach not only avoids the question of the genesis of
such reflexive action and its possible harmful effects but also indicates that
collective efforts to alter social conditions actually await proper techniques of the
self . For example, in a rich discussion of criminal punishment in the United States, Connolly contends that
today the micropolitics of desire in the domain of criminal violence has become a
condition for a macropolitics that reconfigures existing relations between class,
race, crime and punishment.106 Here and elsewhere in Connollys writing the sequencing
renders these activities primary and secondary rather than mutually inspiring and
Unfortunately,

reinforcing.107 It is a mistake to grant chronological primacy to ethical selfintervention , however. How, after all, is such intervention, credited with producing
salient effects at the macropolitical level , going to get off the ground , so to speak, or
assuredly move in the direction of democratic engagement (rather than withdrawal ,
for example) if it is not tethered, from the beginning, to public claims that direct

attention to a specific problem, defined as publicly significant and

changeable? How and why would an individual take up reflexive work on the desire
to punish if she were not already attuned , at least partially, to problems afflicting current
criminal punishment practices? And that attunement is fostered, crucially, by the

macropolitical efforts of democratic actors who define a public matter of concern and elicit the
attention of other citizens.108

For reflexive self- care to be democratically significant , it

must be inspired by and continually connected to larger political

mobilizations . Connolly sometimes acknowledges that the arts of the self he
celebrates are not themselves the starting point of collaborative action but instead
exist in a dynamic, reciprocal relation with cooperative and antagonistic efforts to
shape collective arrangements. Yet the selfs relation with itself is also treated as a
privileged site , the very source of democratic spirit and action. This tendency to prioritize the
selfs reflexive relationship over other modes of relation defines the therapeutic
ethics that ultimately emerges out of Foucaults and, to a lesser degree, Connollys work. This ethics not
only elides differences between caring for oneself and caring for conditions but also
celebrates the former as primary or, as Foucault says, ontologically prior . An ethics
centered on the selfs engagement with itself may have value, but it is not an ethics fit

for democracy .

A2: Disidentification
Disidentification fails to transgress appearance in favor of
individual subjectivity and closes discussions of identity
Mayo 99 Director of the LGBTQ Center at West Virginia University and a
Professor in Women's and Gender Studies
Education Feminism: Classic and Contemporary Readings; 2013; [Cited: Gender
Disidentification The Perils of the Post-Gender Condition, 1999] Cris Mayo, Edited by
Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon, Lynda Stone, and Katharine M. Sprecher; p.246-248; mbc
These are questions that have been taken up less optimistically by feminist poststructuralist theorists who also wonder how we

MacKinnon and
Houston see the intransigence of gender as a force organizing social relations, while
poststructuralists see the limitations of identity as a political starting point. Critiques
of identity have pointed to shortcomings in the degree of agency possible in a
subject position too closely connected to its own subjugation. The degree to which one can avoid
problematically reinstall normative subjectivity even as we attempt progressive feminist politics.

this aspect of subjectivity is debatable, however. Some theorists have contended that the subject can only be wrestled out of its
constraining aspects by active transgression of identity acts, boundaries, and expectations. Judith Butler, for instance, claims that
only by subverting the expected codes and actions of identity can subjects highlight and begin to disengage the normalizing aspects
of subjectivity. 8 Indeed, because subjectivity is constructed through repetitions that inevitably fail, subjectivity inevitably swerves

The question remains: To what degree is this something

new any less bound up in the problematics of identity? Importantly, agency lies in the
ability to understand the context and codes of identity, as well as to productively
refuse them. Wendy Brown contends that identity groups that seek their freedom on
the basis of an identity that has been normalized by power tie their struggle closely
back into the very institutions that constrain their activity in the first place. 9 My
contention that disidentification fails to transgress is based on the appearance it
gives of tying students back into an individualist subjectivity, wherein they are
responsible for their actions, as if constraining social forces and reigning
conceptions of subjectivity were not even present. And yet I think these students start from within
an understanding of social forces. That is, their refusal of identity occurs in the context of
understanding how identity has been central in the constitution of subjectivity. In this
from its original position to something new.

sense then, they are attempting to transgress from within an understanding of culture, but they do so by attempting to remove
themselves from its force. Neither Butler nor Brown, of course, argues that we can get outside of this normalizing power, but both
essentially argue that there are better and worse ways to live under normalizing power. The better way, if one can push the
normative content, is to understand the codes of power, not to do without them or move outside of ideology to where the air is
fresher and the milk cheaper, but to work and rework the codes of power more responsibly and more relationally. Brown does argue
against identity politics in a way that is similar to the way students distance themselves from gender, though they are binding
themselves to liberal individuality, not gender. She contends that identity politics is bound in a resentment that encourages its

Because so much of identity

politics binds its political claims to its sense of injury, its advocates cannot embrace
power without losing the ground of their critique. In other words, a politics based on
resentment is a politics grounded in injury, trapped by its own project and unable to
find a way out of its original problem. This means that identity politics, or any politics based
on injury, derives its power from its pain. Even in the midst of agitating to have that pain relieved it cannot
advocates to demand recognition and protection because of their weakness.

explicitly embrace power without losing its reason for being. As a result, Brown argues, identity politics cannot move beyond its
current situation to a fuller sense of futurity that would be reflected in political projects that attempt to fight for a world rather

While I disagree that identity politics is as bounded as

Brown claims, her argument and student disidentifications do push feminism and
than conduct process on the existing one. 10

critical pedagogy to watch for the problems of emphasizing dangers without

pointing to possibilities for change. Here I think a stronger sense of relationality in
identity is necessary to make the personal political. The personal is not
intrinsically political, and perhaps the supposition that it is intrinsically political is a case of a persistently bad
misreading, but the personal becomes political as relations are formed over questions of
identity. These articulations of identity are in play through politics, which gives rise to the original meaning of the personal is
political as it is used in feminist politics, consciousness raising, and organizing. Brown, I think, mistakes the political purpose of
identity politics and argues that identity politics concentration on the question Who am I? should rather be shifted to What do I
want for us? It is my contention, however, that these two questions are not easily separated. Public assertions of identity, as well as
educational discussions of identity, can be an invitation to mutual consideration of political projects that attempt to name both injury

The problem with disidentification is that it

potentially shuts down the conversation on identity by simply refusing to engage
the category of gender, as if history and social forces are so easily kept at bay. Before I
engage in worry over this, I do want to point out the positive potential in transgressing categories
that have become too constraining, through acts of reinterpreting identity that I do
not take to be disidentification. The distinction I want to make between the two is that transgressing does
understand the situated meaning of the categories of identity and does not insist that they disappear. Indeed, transgressing
requires an understanding of the persistence of the categories that are transgressed
and presumes that one needs an audience and that ones audience will understand
the transgression. In other words, transgression plays within codes that are understood to
be social and historical. Disidentification, in contrast, is a refusal of history. The
history of feminism is replete with conflict over whose definition of gender will rule
the day, conflicts most often raised when white, middle-class gender displays itself
as unmodified gender. Indeed students argue that what adults see as sexual harassment, they see as playful sexuality,
and identity as issues for deliberation and contestation.

that real adults mistakenly equate sex play among younger people as necessarily dangerous precisely because the people
involved are so young. 11 This may also be a moment when African-American female students attempt to deflect teacher criticism
of the behavior of young African-American men in class, insisting on their own ability to handle themselves with young men. 12
Thus, these young women are saying that the version of gender offered by some educators is weaker than the version of gender
they live. In addition, well in keeping with much criticism of white feminism from women of color, the version of female victimization
that appears to be offered in anti-sexual harassment education lacks a sense of cross-gender relationality and thus a lack of racial
solidarity. These tactics of insisting on a fuller understanding of the interplay of age and responsibility, race and gender, are each
useful additions to an understanding of the swirl of identity relations in any interaction. Indeed, these stances toward identity do
much to heighten a sense of agency and responsibility in interaction.

Disidentification reifies sexual violence

Mayo 99 Director of the LGBTQ Center at West Virginia University and a
Professor in Women's and Gender Studies
Education Feminism: Classic and Contemporary Readings; 2013; [Cited: Gender
Disidentification The Perils of the Post-Gender Condition, 1999] Cris Mayo, Edited by
Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon, Lynda Stone, and Katharine M. Sprecher; p.249-250; mbc
My argument is that the refusal of the salience of gender in the lives of all students, then, is mistaken. The specifics of what is

Students
who contend that they are transgressing expected boundaries of gender behavior
by refusing gender are thus missing the play of power that encourages them to view
themselves as unmarked, liberal subjects. These tactics of disidentification are
themselves tied to normalizing power; that is, these disidentificatory practices fail
to engender agency. I am thinking here particularly of the response of young women
in high school who acknowledge that they have been the targets of unwanted
sexual attention given on the basis of a perception of their gender, but who
disidentify themselves with the targets of sexual harassment. That is, they equate victimhood
entailed in the category of gender do need to be widened and discussed, but the category itself has not disappeared.

with femaleness and claim for themselves an identity outside of that circuit. The problems with this form of disidentification are at

First, by acknowledging that harassment has taken place, but removing

themselves conceptually from it in an attempt to transgress the limits of gender in
their lives, the women who adopt this stance of disidentification neglect to attend to
the consequences it has on their social, emotional, and educational outcomes. To a
least twofold.

certain degree, then, they deny the gendered aspects of their selves that opened them to sexual harassment and are thus unable to
address the harassment as a condition of their gender. The potential here is that rather than seeing sexual harassment within a
social context, they tend to blame the negative impact of sexual harassment on their own personal shortcomings. As Pauline Bart
and Patricia OBrien have noted, in the context of sexual assault, the ability of women to understand themselves as victims of a
gender-related crime, rather than individually culpable for what happened to them, helps them to fight back during the assault and

Thus an understanding of ones gender

identity, in this instance, helps one to gain a sense of agency at the time of an
attack and to retain ones sense of agency afterward. The young women in high school who
helps them through the recovery process after the assault. 14

disidentify do so to avoid having to conceive of themselves as open to harassment or assault. They evince a high degree of
confidence in their status as a person deserving respect, rather than a woman living in a context of potential danger. In order to
avoid being a gendered victim, then, they become individualized and isolated victims, worthy of blame for their own victimhood,

The second
problem of this disidentification is that it prevents women from connecting with
other young women with similar experiences. These young women also tend to lack
compassion toward other young women who experience sexual harassment, dating
violence, or sexual assault, because to express support means that they too identify
with the gender of the person so injured. In addition, many are inclined to blame the victim of sexual
rather than situated in a context where, the experience of harassment and violence is increasingly prevalent.

harassment rather than see sexual harassment in its social context. 15 This means that young women note that some young women
may be the victims of gender-related harassment, but characterize this experience as the personal failure of those victims, thereby
reinforcing their own imagined distance from a quality that would open them to harassment and reinforce their distance from people

neither victim nor non-victim has a way to connect with

the other that can enhance her perception of their potential interchangeability, and
this leaves them without a basis for solidarity. Disidentification with their gender
leaves them with little way to approach a world that sees them as gendered,
despite their own reluctance to accept gendered identities. What each of these problems with
who might well need their support. Thus

disidentification underscores is that young women do understand what gender is, they do not form their identity outside of gender
but rather against it. But rather than undertaking a critical stance toward gender relations, and thus opening discussions of what
gender could and should mean, they sidestep the identification and locate themselves as individuals outside of social forces.

The

productive refusal of identity, rather than subverting codes of power, reinstalls

these girls back into a genderless, ahistorical individuality. Since peer support is
crucial to many young adults in crisis, and peer education can be a helpful route in
addressing potentially sensitive topics, it is therefore important to reconnect these
young women to one another. It is also crucially important that young men be
connected to the project of eliminating sexual harassment and assault , not only because
they are likely to be the perpetrators, but also because they are likely to be victims as well. Despite their relatively better outcomes
when sexually harassed, young men still need to be considered in discussions (indeed, they too deal with sexual harassment as
something that necessarily disidentifies them with masculinity, since to be a victim is to fail to be a man). The point here is to move
an individualistic response to harassment into the realm of a political and social critique. This means that antiharassment education
needs to move beyond an individualistic model of explanation to an historicized and politicized interrogation of the various forms of
violence in contemporary social interactions.

Disidentification recreates violence and fails to change

hegemonic institutions
Shahani 12 Assistant professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender,
and Race Studies at Washington State University [Nishant Shahani, 2012, Queer
Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return, Google Books] AMarb

the politics of disidentification as a form of political

performance whereby marginalized queers of color navigate the mainstream, not
necessarily through an antagomstic politics of subversion but through a more
ambiguous mode of critique. In other words, disidentification does not merely function as
counter-identificatory practice; neither does it simply make peace with dominant power. Munoz's
In Disidenlifications, Munoz describes

example of the cultural performances of drag queen Vaginal Creme Davis illustrates the mode through which queer

Davis's drag is not predicated on passing as a

womanit is what Munoz calls "terrorist drag"67 in that her performances assume a
more threatening stance towards cultural anxieties around race, gender,
sex, and nationality. In one of her performances, Davis assumes the role of a white
supremacist militiaman, who she finds '"really hot,' "Clarence" so hot that she herself has had a race and
gender reassionment and is now Clarence. "68 The appearance of a black queen in whiteface paint
reverses the racist logic of blackface performance, but also perversely inhabits and embraces
the very site of oppression in order to recycle its interpellation with a difference.
For Munoz, Davis' disidentificatory drag does not simply counter the toxicity of racist
blackface, but performs, and even eroticizes abjection by inhabiting the site
of persecution. Disidentification thus troubles the binary between identification and counteridentification, since it does not simply acquiesce to the interpellative power of dominant
discourse. At the same time, disidentification does not describe the process through
which 'bad subjects" simply oppose hegemonic power. Munoz thus remarks: ' 'Bad sub- jects'
subcultures perform a politics of dlsidentification.

resist and attempt to reject the images and identificatory sites offered by dominant ideology and proceed to rebel,

Disidentification neither opts to

assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it. "69 Similarly, the
to 'counteridentify' and turn against this symbolic system ...

retrospective logic that subtends queer retrosexualities does not quite perform a "turning against' the 1950s as
primal scene. Rather than the oppositional logic that informs the turn "against" dominant ideology, queer
retrosexualities mobilize a turn- ing "back" which exploits the disidentificatory potential in the retrospective

Cedes the Political

The alternative cedes the political
McCluskey 8 (Martha McCluskey 8, Professor of Law and William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar @ SUNY
Buffalo Law, How Queer Theory Makes Neoliberalism Sexy, Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2008-15)

Queer theory's anti-moralism works together with its anti-statism to advance not
simply "politics," but a specific vision of good "politics" seemingly defined in opposition to
progressive law and morality. This anti-statist focus distinguishes queer theory from other critical legal
theories that bring questions of power to bear on moral ideals of justice. Kendall Thomas (2002), for example,
articulates a critical political model

that sees justice as a problem of "power, antagonism, and

interest," (p. 86) involving questions of how to constitute and support individuals as citizens with interests and
actions that count as alternative visions of the public. Thomas contrasts this political model of justice with a moral
justice aimed at discovering principles of fairness or institutional processes based in rational consensus and on
personal feelings of respect and dignity. Rather than evaluating the moral costs and benefits of a particular policy
by analyzing its impact in terms of harm or pleasure, Thomas suggests that a political vision of justice would focus
on analyzing how policies produce and enhance the collective power of particular "publics" and "counterpublics"

From this political perspective of justice, neoliberal economic ideology is

distinctly moral, even though it appears to be anti-moralist and to reduce moral principles to competition
between self-interested power. Free-market economics rejects a political vision of justice , in
this sense, in part because of its expressed anti-statism : it turns contested normative
questions of public power into objective rational calculations of private individual
sensibilities. Queer theory's similar tendency to romanticize power as the
pursuit of individualistic pleasure free from public control risks
disengaging from and disdaining the collective efforts to build and
advance normative visions of the state that arguably define effective
politics. Brown and Halley (2002), for instance, cite the Montgomery bus boycott as a classic
example of the left's problematic march into legalistic and moralistic identity politics. In
(pp. 915).

contrast, Thomas (2002) analyzes the Montgomery bus boycott as a positive example of a political effort to
constitute a black civic public, even though the boycott campaign relied on moral language to advance its cause,

By glorifying
rather than deconstructing the neoliberal dichotomy between public and private,
between individual interest and group identity, and between demands for power
and demands for protection, queer theory's anti-statism and anti-moralism plays
into a right-wing double bind. In the current conservative political context, the
left appears weak both because its efforts to use state power get constructed as
excessively moralistic (the feminist thought police, or the naively paternalistic welfare state) and also
because its efforts to resist state power get constructed as excessively relativist
(promoting elitism and materialism instead of family values and community wellbeing). The right, on the other hand, has it both ways, asserting its moralism as inherent
private authority transcending human subjectivity (as efficient market forces, the
sacred family, or divine will) and defending its cultivation of self-interested power as
the ideally virtuous state and market (bringing freedom, democracy, equality to the world by
exercising economic and military authoritarianism). From Egalitarian Politics to Renewed Conservative
Identity Queer theory's anti-statism and anti-moralism risks not only reinforcing rightwing ideology, but also infusing that ideology with energy from renewed
identity politics. Susan Fraiman (2003) analyzes how queer theory (along with other prominent
developments in left academics and culture) tends to construct left resistance as a radical
individualism modeled on the male "teen rebel, defined above all by his strenuous alienation from
because it also emphasized and challenged normative ideas of citizenship (p. 100, note 14).

this left vision relies on "a posture of flamboyant

unconventionality [that] coexists with highly conventional views of gender
[and] is, indeed, articulated through them" (p. xiii). Fraiman links recent left
contempt for feminism to a romantic vision of "coolness ... epitomized by the modem
adolescent boy in his anxious, self-conscious and theatricalized will to separate from the
mother" who is by definition uncoolcontrolling, moralistic, sentimental and not
sexy. (p. xii). Even though queer theory distinguishes itself from feminism by
repudiating dualistic ideas of gender, its anti-foundationalism covertly promotes
an essentialist "binary that puts femininity, reproduction, and normativity
on the one hand, and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the
other" (p. 147). This binary permeates queer theory's condemnation of "governance
feminism." (Brown and Halley, 2002; Wiegman, 2004) a vague category mobilizing images of
the frumpy, overbearing, unexciting, unfunny, and not-so-smart "schoolmarm" (Halley, 2002) whose
authority will naturally be undermined when real "men" appear on the scene.
the maternal" (p. xii). Fraiman observes that

Suggesting the importance of gender conventions to the term's power, similar phrases do not seem to have gained
comparable academic currency as a way to deride the complex regulatory impact of other specific uses of state
authority -for instance postmodernists do not seem to widely denounce "governance anti-racism," "governance
socialism," "governance populism," "governance environmentalism" or "governance masculinism" (though Brown

Queer
attraction to an adolescent masculinist idea of the "cool' dovetails smoothly with
the identity politics of the right. Right-wing politics and culture similarly condemn
progressive and feminist policies with the term "nanny state" (McCluskey, 2000; 2005a). The
"nanny state" epithet enlists femaleness or femininity as shorthand to make some government authority feel
and Halley do criticize progressive law reform more generally with the term "governance legalism" (p. 11)).

bad to those comfortable with or excited by a masculinist moral order, it adds to this sentimental power by coding
the maternal authority to be resisted as a "nanny" (rather than simply a "mommy"), enlisting identities of class, age

"nanny
state" slur tells us that a rougher and tougher neoliberal state, market, and family
will bring the grown-up pleasures, freedom, and power that are the mark and
privilege of ideal manhood. The "nanny state" is not an isolated example of the use of gender
identity to disparage progressive or even centrist policies that are not explicitly
identified as feminist or gender-related. For example, "girlie-man" gained currency in the 2004
and perhaps race and nationalityto enhance uncritical suspicions of disorder and illegitimacy. The

presidential election to disparage opposition to George W. Bush's right-wing economic and national security policies
(Grossman and McClain, 2004), and and in 2008 critics of presidential candidate Barack Obama similarly linked him

These terms open a window into

the connections between economic libertarianism and moral fundamentalism.
to disparaging images of femininity (Campanile 2008; Faludi 2008).

Libertarianism's anti-statism and anti-moralism requires sharp distinctions between public and private, morality and
power, individual freedom and social coercion. The problem, if we assume these distinctions are not self-evident
facts, is that libertarianism must refer covertly to some external value system to draw its lines.

Identity

conventions have long helped to do this work , albeit in complex and sometimes contradictory
ways. Power appears weak, deceptive, illegitimate, manipulative, controlling, undisciplined, oppressive, exceptional,
or naive if it is feminized; but strong, self-satisfying, public-serving, protective, orderly, rational, and a normal

Conventional political theory and culture

identifies legitimate authority with an idea of a masculine power aimed at policing
supposedly weaker or subordinate others. A state that publicly depends on and promotes such
power enhances rather than usurps private freedom and security in citizenship, market,
and family, according to the traditional theory of the patriarchal household as model
for the state (see Dubber, 2005). Queer theory updates this pre-modern political ideology
into smart postmodernism and transgressive politics by re-casting its idealized
masculine power in the image of a youthful and sexy disdain for feminized
concerns about social, bodily, or material limits and support . In her challenge to
exercise of individual freedom if it is masculinized.

this queer romanticization of "coolness," Fraiman (2003) instead urges a feminism that will "question a masculinity
overinvested in youth, fearful of the mutable flesh, and on the run from intimacy ... [to] claim, in its place, the
jouissance of a body that is aging, pulpy, no longer intact... a subject who is tender-hearted ... who is neither too
hard nor too fluid for attachment; who does the banal, scarcely narratable, but helpful things that moms' do" (p.
158). Feminist legal theory concerned with economic politics adds to this alternative vision an ideal that advances
and rewards the pleasure, power, and public value of the things done by some of those moms' nannies (McCluskey,
2005a)or by the many others engaged in the work (both paid and unpaid) that sustains and enhances others'
pleasure and power in and out of the home (McCluskey, 2003a; Young, 2001). One means toward that end would be
to make the domestic work (and its play and pleasure) conventionally treated as both banal or spiritual (see
Roberts, 1997b) deserving of a greater share of state and market material rewards and resources on a more
egalitarian basis, as Fineman's (2004) vision would do.

Queer Theory undermines action which papers over underlying

issues
Penney 14 (James, professor of cultural theory @ Trent University, After Queer Theory: The limits of sexual
politics, p. 13-16)
This curious ambivalence becomes even more pronounced as Morland and Willox's own analysis of the bombing
shows that the target of homophobic violence isn't really even a community in the sense in which they use the

The authors' laudable insistence on foregrounding the unsettling social

impact of the very notion of queer sex suggests that anti-gay violence
results from a fantasy of an 'other' jouissance, which both fascinates and
repels. From the psychoanalytic perspective, the gay pub, or even the 'gay
community', is a material or social stand-in for a properly psychical object
- that is to say, the traumatic object of enjoyment that the ego attempts to
jettison from consciousness with the associated forces of repression and
idealisation. It doesn't require an investment in psychoanalysis to think that by detonating the bomb, the
perpetrator seeks unknowingly to cleanse himself of his own unconscious 'queer' sexual fantasies. Indeed, queer
universalism can be put in this instance to a different use, more
subversive than its mobilisation in queer theory itself . Queer inheres most
essentially in the subject who seeks to destroy it, through acts of
homophobic violence or pseudo-therapeutic processes of
heterosexualisation, for instance. Queer becomes truly universal precisely at
the moment when it's targeted for elimination as a perverse , impure, communitydestroying anomaly. Paradoxically, the universal reach of queer is only underscored by
its motivation of the very 'acting out' that seeks to eradicate it. In this light, it's
term.

hardly coincidental that the homophobic bomber was also a neo-Nazi racist. Racism, too, targets an object that
can't be equated with persons or communities. Rather, racism is set in motion by fantasy perceptions of ethnicised
and racialised enjoyments; constructions of 'other' satisfactions associated with incomprehensible languages,
spiced or differently spiced foods, traditional collective customs and rituals, and the like. Or, more precisely put,
such fantasies are projections onto the Other of the subject's own disavowed enjoyments, which can be
conveniently rejected by the ego as foreign and obscene. Marxism surely adds to this line of analysis the insight

The
general theoretical point to be made in this context for antihomophobic
work is that a notion of a gay community, or even of the queer person,
isn't required to denounce, as of course one must, symptomatic acts of
homophobic violence. Indeed, the fact that a bomb going off in a queer establishment will almost
that such fantasy perceptions are often directed across the traumatic psychosocial dividing line of class.

always impact heterosexual persons as well betrays the disjunction between the true cause or object of

The
anti-identitarian logic of queer theory, the logic it so routinely fails to
follow to its proper conclusion, should ultimately imply that the queer
person, with his or her distinguishing marks of lesbian, gay or transsexual
jouissance, exists only in the homophobe's head. Never, however, does queer theory
homophobic violence- a psychical object of fantasy - and the actual, 'real-life' persons whom it affects.

entertain the corollary that both the idea of a 'gay/ queer community', and the 'compulsory heterosexuality' that
forms its negative ground, might in fact exacerbate, rather than attenuate, homophobic passion. In the final
analysis, however, the most basic and egregious problem with the Morland and Willox essay lies in its

As for much of queer theory, politics for these

authors signifies only the ambivalent struggle with notions of community
and identity, as well as the proclamation of their immanent, but
nonetheless provisional, subversion. As we've considered, the authors reproach Blair's speech
misidentification of the political.

for whitewashing the obscene realities of gay sex with politically correct talk of a multiplicity oflifestyles. At the next

they're embracing an idea of politics as lifestyle, and then

inventing a provisional notion of community to give it form . Like so much of queer
theory, their discourse never extends beyond the innocuous horizon of
lifestyle politics, with its implicit or unconscious call to the Other for
recognition, for sanction, for integration with dominant social norms . This call
moment, however,

persists beneath what appears, and is consciously intended, as its opposite. After all, it's not at all clear why it
would be so important for queer politics that Tony Blair openly disclose what lesbians, for example, do in bed, either
on the occasion of the commemoration of an act of homophobic violence or, for that matter, at any other time.

this brand of queer pseudo-politics can be linked to an

anxiety arising out of the impossibility of speaking sexual experience, of
transcribing the real of sex into the order of the signifier . For Lacan, sex
signals the disjunction between jouissance- that is, the ecstatic experience of the bodyand what can be articulated logically in language, in speech, and therefore consciously
known. That this disjunction is indifferent to what is understood as sexual
orientation -although not to sexual difference, but that's another story- is but a further
indication that sexual identity can't form the basis for political
subjectivation, that is for a truth procedure in Alain Badiou's sense of the phrase. Because both
queers and non-queers alike experience it 'in the defiles of the signifier' ,4
as Lacan put it, sexuality can't be directly politicised . But this statement isn't tantamount to
claiming .that sex is entirely severed from politics. Rather, sex is what haunts the expression of
all political judgment. It's the excess that estranges political articulation
from itself; the surplus showing that political judgments always contain
latent sexual significance. And from the perspective of Marxism, queer politics fails
because the difference upon which it rests (queer vs 'heteronormative') carries no
necessary relation to class antagonism, to the mode of production in its
determination of the relations of capital. Non-heterosexuals are widely distributed across the
range of material privilege. In fact, what's so politically disconcerting about queer is
the largely academic and upper-middle-class origin of so much of the
discourse, not to mention its serious lack of geopolitical mobility and
awareness. To be sure, there is no doubt that in the liberal and 'post-oedipal'
global North, there are concrete material advantages to be gained from
engaging in the queer lifestyle of which Morland and Willox speak. The queer is not
only unburdened by conventional family obligations or the monogamous
relationship.
Psychoanalytically,

Realism Solves
Realism solves- it is a continually developing theory that can
be nuanced to accommodate queerness- queer IR is an
elaboration, not a reason to reject.
Bagnoli 13 (Carla, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Constructivism in
Ethics, https://books.google.com/books?
id=e2dxh1tG6TQC&pg=PA157&lpg=PA157&dq=constructivism+queerness&source
=bl&ots=4QGKVgyW9H&sig=D8FfxHCNDLNuEdkrP7_AahQpQs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjc2prs2ezNAhXMpR4KHYHiAVcQ6A
EITDAI#v=onepage&q=queerness&f=false)
The argument is grounded on the assumption that practical knowledge commits to
realism about value, which is identified with rational intuitionism. On this realist
view, practical knowledge is knowledge of certain facts and properties of reality by
which one is compelled to act. The question is how to put this knowledge into
practice. "The ability to apply knowledge in action presupposes the capacity for
action, which is exactly what we are trying to understand. There are two separate
strands of Korsgaard's criticism, both of which spring from a concern for the
practicality of ethics, but they are driven by different conceptions of practicality. The
first criticism is that cognitions cannot be practical because they are cognitions of a
piece of reality. Elbe term "practical" here stands for "compelling." "The complaint
against realism is that it does not explain how knowledge motivates its possessor:
"For think how that account would have to work. agent would have to recognize it,
as some sort of eternal normative verity, that it is good to take the means to his
ends. How is this verity supposed to motivate him?" (Korsgaard 2003: 110;
Korsgaard 1996b: 16, 3840). This criticism resonates with the canonical noncognitivist critique of objectivism that prevails in the meta-ethics of the 1970s. J. L.
Mackie argues that the cost of defending objectivity in ethics is high: the realist
must posit a special ontology and a special moral faculty in order to do so. This
objection is moved against both G. E. Moore's intuitionist and Kant's rationalist
defenses of objectivity. These theories attempt to vindicate both the practicality and
objectivity of moral judgments, which are features of ordinary morality. Mackie
takes for granted that practicality amounts to motivational compellingness. "This
interpretation of the practicality requirement has the advantage that it grants an
intrinsic relation between judgment and action. Queerness results from combining
the (non-cognitivist) claim that moral judgments are intrinsically motivating and the
(realist) claim that they represent properties that are parr of the Fabric of reality
(Mackie 1977: 3840, 2122, 24). To retain the claim about the compellingness of
moral judgment and avoid queerness, non-cognitivists such as Mackie give up the
claim that there are moral properties to be known. For sure, both Moore and Kant
were concerned with the relation between objective rational judgment and action,
but it is questionable that Mackie's understanding of the practicality of ethical ents
can be plausibly attributed to either of them. Korsgaard shares Mackie's view that
moral judgments are practical insofar as they are action-guiding. They guide the
agent's action insofar as they are intrinsically motivating. Her argument against the
model of applied knowledge works on the assumption that the practicality of moral
judgments consists in their motivating force.' However, this strand of the argument

should not be taken in isolation, because it is complemented by a second set of

considerations.

Relating Queer theory to international relations inevitably

results in normative judgements accepting a realist
coherence theory allows us to accept a world of independent
thought
Lenman & Shemmer 12 (James, Oxford University reading Philosophy, Politics and
Economics, St Andrews University studying for an M.Phil. and then a PhD in Moral
Philosophy, Constructivism in Practical Philosophy, August 12, 2012,
https://books.google.com/books?
id=9x8WJldbzloC&pg=PA227&lpg=PA227&dq=constructivism+queerness&source=
bl&ots=YLbojx6GtQ&sig=qgWCGGUkRsLlLjCuLo2zkgHAjfA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ah
UKEwjc2prs2ezNAhXMpR4KHYHiAVcQ6AEITjAJ#v=snippet&q=to%20put%20this
%20in%20another%20way&f=false)
No. Judgments in a particular domain d permit of an error theoretic analysis if and only if judgments in domain are

far from
succumbing to an error theory, acceptlng a coherence theory of truth for normative
judgments is a novel method by which to avoid an error theory. Arguments for error
theories generally start by offering a semantics of judgments of the domain in
question. In this case, normative judgments refer to "normons." Next, error theories offer a
metaphysical claim: "normons" do not exist.2S But the inference from the claim that no such
metaphysically queer properties exist to an error theory that is, that all normative judgments
are falsegoes through only if we accept that normative judgments are judged true or false
on the basis of their beming the "right relation to metaphysically queer properties.
truth-apt, and all judgments in domain d are false. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere,24

But normative judgments, on this view, are not judged as true or false in this way. Rather, they are judged true or

judgements that ascribe

them needn't be false if we judge the truth or falsity of the judgments in question
on the basis of their coherence . Question 4: Isn't this a realist semantics? And if so, doesn't this mean
that a coherence theory of truthby your own admissionis inappropriate? A ' 'normonic" semantics of
normative judgments is paradigmatically realista semantics that refers to
judgment-independent normative properties. If so, it would seem that accepting a
coherence theory of truth for normative judgmentsand their realist propositional
contentis explicitly accepting something I have so far deemed inappropriate: the
combination of realism with a coherence theory of truth. This analysis, is mistaken. A
coherence theory of truth is inappropriate for a domain d if and only if we believe
that facts about domain are facts about a "world independent of our thoughts , ' ' to
false on the basis of their coherence. Hence even if such normons don't exist,

borrow Kirkham's phrase. To put this in another way, realism and the coherence theory are an inappropriate mix

Just because We accept a realist semantics

of normative judgments doesn't mean we have to commit to evaluating normative
judgments according to a semantic theory of truth. Rather, because constructivists
do not believe that facts about normativity are facts about a ' 'world independent of
our thoughts," they are licensed to choose a coherence theory, and evaluate
normative Judgments differently. The semantic analysis of normative judgments,
then, says nothing about whether the truth of such judgments is itself semantic. That
given realism's metaphysics, not realism's semantics.

Insofar as constructivism
retains a realist semantics while rejecting a normative "world independent of our
thoughts," the constructivist is licensed to accept a coherence theory of truth for
that domain. Constructivism needn't be committed to a circular semantics . But a
IS settled by further, metaphysical, questions about the nonnative domain.

serious problem looms. Consider the nature of coherence. Surely any plausible account of coherence is going to be
put in terms of the entailment relations between judgments, i.e. whether judgments are inconsistent with others,
whether they can be Inferred from a set of Other normative judgements, etc. But entailment relations are
understood in terms Of truth: for p and q to be inconsistent means that p and q cannot be true together. That p
entails q means that p cannot be true and q false, and so forth. Hence it would appear that coherence is defined in
terms of truth. But because truth, at least for normative judgments, is defined in terms of coherence, any account

constructivism relies on a
sensible understanding Of What it means for two judgments to "cohere" or
"withstand scrutiny" or bear whatever favored relation to each other . But if truth is
of coherence will be viciously circular-2 This is a serious problem. After all,

defined in terms of this favored relation, and if this favored relation is defined in terms of truth, we seem to be led

We seem unable to say With any certainty

whether two judgments will bear this favored relation, because we don't have any
informative account of what this favored relation is. Accepting alethic pluralism,
however, allows us to avoid a circular analysis of coherence. Whether the members Of any
to the problem Of indeterminacy by a back road:

given set of judgments bear any particular relation to each other is nor a question that is properly evaluated in the

nonnormative domains make use of a noncoherence truth predicate, the coherence of

any particular belief set is evaluated given a non-coherence account of truth. Let
me put this point in a slightly different way. Assume that non-normative truthbearers are susceptible to a semantic truth predicate. Because a judgment of the
form "system of belief S is coherent" is not a normative judgment, this judgment is
evaluated by means of a semantic truth predicate; this judgment is true just in case
its meaning bears the right relation to extra-linguistic reality. But if that is correct, the
normative domain: the coherence of a belief set is a purely non-normative question. However, because

coherence of S is determined by the various entailment relations between its constitutive judgments, i.e. whether
they can be true together, whether they set up "standards of correctness" that others survive, etc. But because the

Of course, if we accept
constructivism, all nonnative judgments, as evaluated by a semantic truth
predicate, will come out false (assuming a "surface" or "metaphysically queer"
semantics). But this does not mean they cannot be evaluated for their various entailment relations given a noncoherence truth predicate. Hence the definition of "coherence" is not viciously circular. Truth, for normative
judgments, is understood in terms Of coherence, which is thereby understood in
terms of the ability of particular judgments to be true together assuming a noncoherence, or semantic, truth predicate.27 By Way Of a conclusion to this section Of
the chapter, let me sum up my positive proposal and its rationale. The problems of
circularity and indeterminacy are foisted upon constructivism so long as
constructivism accepts a traditional, semantic, theory of truth, Hence to avoid them,
constructivist views must reject a traditional, semantic truth predicate in favor of an
alternative. My proposal: accept a metaphysically robust "surface" semantics of
normative judgments, together with a coherence theory of truth for nonnative
judgments. This account captures the heart of a constructivist view. After all, a
coherence theory of truth for normative judgments guarantees both Apt and
Relational. For the coherence theory, normative judgments are true if and only if they are
coherent with an agent's other normative judgments, where "coherence" is defined
according to the favored relation as specified by a particular constructivist view.
Thus a coherence theory of truth can capture the essential element of
domain in question is non-normative, the applicable truth predicate is semantic.

constructivism: that the truth of a normative judgment is set by its bearing of a favored relation (coherence)
to other normative judgments.

State Key- Queer IR

Mobilization of Queer theory in IR requires engagement with
the political
Weber 16 (Cynthia, Professor of International Relations at Sussex University, coDirector of the media company Pato Productions, films that critically engage with
identity, citizenship, and human rights practices, Graduate Program in International
Affairs and the Observatory for Latin America at the New School University,
published several internationally recognized books on topics ranging from US
foreign policy and international relations to theory and film, including Simulating
Sovereignty, Cambridge University Press, Queer International Relations, Oxford
University Press, January 25, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=TiHuCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=queer+
%22international+relations
%22+intersectionality&ots=a6qioU01He&sig=aCoU53h1_cMvGkS1yN2S8wqsuVQ#
v=onepage&q=queer&f=false)
usage of queer has a specific content, even if that content's
that analytical content does not
extend to all things nonnormative (as it does for some queer theorists). Rather, it extends
specifically to how queer is deployed in relation to normative and/ or perverse
understandings of sex, of gender, and of sexuality in ways that make two refusals.
The first refusal is to reduce 'queer' to only that which is antinormative (Wiegman and
Wilson 2015; also see Weber 1999). As I use it, queer is, for example, a never-quite-achieved
or coherent concept, subjectivity, field of political practice, or sexualized ordering of the inti- mate,
the national, and/or the international that combines normativities and perversions in
ways that confuse and confound what is said to be normative and/or antinormative
by eschewing or embracing while at the same time and place eschewing and
embracing normativities and perversions (as the case of the 'Eurovisioned drag queen'
Neuwirth/Wurst illus- trates in detail in chapter 6). The second refusal is to disconnect queer from
any consideration of sexes, genders, and sexualities and from those bodies that
refuse/fail to signify monolithically in these terms, because this move enables a
foreclosure on these types of analyses. This is why I am most comfortable with Eve Sedgwick's
understanding Of queer as 'the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances
and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of
any one's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify
monolithically' (1993, 8). For in this definition of queer, sexes, genders, and sexualities and their complex
attachments matter. Insisting upon linking queer to sexes, genders, and sexualities rather
than to a broader understanding Of queer as encompassing all things Sovereignty,
Sexuality. and the Will to Knowledge nonnormative allows me to do two further
things. The first is to distinguish queer from a more generalized (especially Foucauldian)
type of poststructuralism. The second is to insist that how queer and things
associated with queer are mobilized must themselves be the subject of political (and
feminist) analysis. Both of these points are illustrated in a story about an IR theorist's
evocation of the term queer. That story begins with this declaration: 'My work IS
queer'. This is what a white, heterosexual, cismale, poststructuralist IR professor
declared at a public lecture about his Foucauldian-informed project. His lecture
included no analysis of the function of nonmonolithic expres- sions of sexes,
genders, or sexualities. Quite the contrary, not once did he even mention any of these terms. Instead, as
This means that, analytically, my own

function is to keep open spaces for critical queer thinking and practice. For me,

he laid out his project, it had nothing to do with sexes, genders, or sexualities, even though there were multiple
opportunities to analyze their normative and/or perverse func- tions in the context of his project. Sitting in the
audience that day next to another self-identified queer person and queer studies scholar, I remember how we both
squirmed with discomfort. I remember our conversation afterward, in which we both discussed how profoundly

this specific enactment

of queer was not queer in any sense we understood it. It felt to us like an
appropriation of the term queer and of the thinking space that comes with it by this
'mythi- cally normative' professor (Lorde 1984, 116)29 in order to augment his own
individual power and to further his appeal to his audience of admirers. It made me admire
disturbed we were by this professor's declaration. For what we both felt was that

him less. For his mobilization of queerwhich, had it been mobilized differently, could have created a range Of
possibilities for scholarship and practice with respect to nonmonolithic sexes, genders, and sexualitiesclosed
down any consideration of sexes, genders, and sexualities in the very name of queer. This story illustrates why I
disagree with Sedgwick's suggestion that 'what it takesall it takesto make the description "queer" a true one is
the impulsion to use it in the first person' (Sedgwick 1993, 9). TO me, this particular claim by Sedgwick expresses a
naivet about power relations. QUEER INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS For not everyone uses queer in the first person in

mobilization of the term queer matters.

And this is why I insist on linking queer to analyses of nonmonolithic expressions of
sexes, genders, and sexualities. My move with respect to queer is akin Cynthia
Enloe's move with respect to feminism . As Enloe puts it, I think you can't claim to
describe your analysis as feminist if you have no interest in women's ideas and
experiences and lives, and if you have no interest in the workings of both
masculinities and femininities. You have to have curiosity about the workings of
both to be feminist. You also have to be interested in the way that power works in
gender and in women's lives. You have to add an explicit exploration of power if
you're not just going to do gender analysis, but (a more useful) feminist analysis.
(Enloe 2013)30 Let me borrow Enloe@ terms to explain how I use the term queer . I cannot claim to be
doing queer work if I have no genuine interest in those who refuse/fail to signify
monolithically in terms of sexes, genders, and sexualities. I cannot claim to be doing
queer work if I neglect to analyze how power circulates in and through sexes,
genders, and sexualities to attempt to normalize and/or pervert them. I cannot
claim to be doing queer work if my evocation of the term queer closes down
possibilities for critical thinking and practice in relation to nonmonolithic sexes,
genders, and sexualities. I cannot claim to be doing queer work if I do not analyze
how any evocation of the term queer is itself always made through a particular
expression of power on behalf of some kind of intimate, national, and/or
international politics. If I or other IR scholars were to call our work queer without
doing these things, this could be just as harmful to some presumed field called
'queer IR' as would declarations that dismiss queer IR research altogether. For this
kind of enthusiastic embrace of queer and queer IR squeezes the con- tent of
nonmonolithic sexes, genders, and sexualities right out of considerations of queer
and queer IR. And that has the effect of closing down Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to Knowledge
innumerable spaces of critical thinking and practice, whether that is our intention or not. Queer and queer
IR, then, are not equivalent to poststructuralism or poststructuralist IR. While they
have similar origins and overlap- ping political concerns, there can be and often are
important differences between them, both in terms of their content and in terms of
their political deployments and effects. This is not to say that a white, heterosexual,
cismale (or cisfemale), poststructuralist (or other) IR scholar cannot be a queer IR
scholar or cannot be an advocate on behalf of queer IR scholars and scholarship .
Many are (see Nayak 2014). Rather, it means that those deploying the term queer ought to
ask themselves: On whose behalf am I deploying this term, and what are the
practical political effects of my deployment? Also, how, in particular, does my deployment
of queer affect those who refuse/fail to signify monolithically in relation to sexes,
genders, and sexualities? One final point. There is nothing inherently feminist about
the same way, to empower the same 'truth'. This is why the

queer or queer IR. Queer and queer IR's relevance for the discipline of IR and even its existence in the
discipline of IR have been challenged by some feminist scholars and some feminist IR scholars.31 Additionally,
queer and queer IR can be and have been mobilized for nonfeminist purposes. Like many queer theorists and IR
theorists, my political commitment is to a queer IR that is also a feminist IR, or is at least compatible with a feminist
IR. What follows here is offered in that spirit.

State Key- Queer Theory

Queer theory must engage the question of the political
Kirsch 2k
(Max, Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory and Social
Change, p. 97-98)
Queerness as a deviant form of heterosexuality results in oppression.
When this fact is not confronted, it can lead to maladaptive responses
that include the markings of internalized homophobia : depression, psychosis, resignation, and
apathy. These are very much reactions to the ways in which we view ourselves, which in turn are, at least in part, due to the ways in which we are

Those enduring this form

of violence cannot , even in the academy, simply decide to disengage. We
cannot simply refuse to acknowledge these facts of social life in our
present society, and hope that our circumstances will change . Although the lack of
constantly told to view ourselves. Here, the production of consciousness takes a very concrete form.

definition is what has inspired the use of "queer," it cannot, as Butler herself asserts, "overcome its constituent history of injury" (1993b: 223). Be that as
it may, "queer," as put forward by Queer theorists, has no inherent historical or social context. We continually return to the following question: to whom
does it belong and what does it represent? These advocates of "queer" do not acknowledge that queer is produced by social relations, and therefore

Queer theory , particularly as it is expressed in Butler's writings on

performativity, dichotomizes the political as personal and the political as social
action into a binary that positions political action in impossible terms. The
nature of the "political" is never clearly discussed, and remains a chasm (cf.
Kaufman and Martin, 1994). However appealing the notion of positioning the self
through a reinterpretation of the "I" may be, it is misguided as political action : it cannot
generate the collective energy and organization necessary to challenge
existing structures of power. As Michael Aglietta observes, "There is no magical road
where the most abstract concepts magically command the movement of
society" (1979: 43). The question of polities, then, brings us back to where we began: what is the nature of the political and how do we address it?
contains the attributes of existing social relations. As I have shown,

Is it beneficial to maintain alliances with established political parties? Can we adopt the dominant values of our culture and still hope to change the
dynamics of those values? How do we form alliances with other oppressed groups? Is there a structural economic basis for such an alliance, or should we
look elsewhere? Perhaps most importantly: is it possible, given the tremendous resources represented by the dominant and coercive ideology of our
present social relations, to maintain the energy necessary to develop and continue modes of resistance that counter it? In the last question, as I will show,
lies an answer to the issue of alliances and structural identification. But first, we need to refocus the discussion.

The alt gets stuck in calcified opposition to state power---they

should lose if they cant identify how becoming/flux is
translated into political praxis
Noys 8 [Benjamin, Reader in English at the University of Chichester, Through a
Glass Darkly: Alain Badious critique of anarchism]

Alongside this critique, we can also see other signs of the rejection of the tendency of the movement to
mirror the power that it opposes. Recent discussions in the journal Voices of Resistance from Occupied London,
subtitled the Quarterly Anarchist Journal of Theory and Action from the British Capital after Empire, raise the

remains locked into shadowing

the summits of those in power. The article For a Summit Against Everything by the Comrades

question of the limits of the counter-summit precisely because it

from Everywhere asks the question: Sure we need to meet and our counter-summits are an excellent opportunity
for doing so. But why follow them around in their summits, why give them the tactical advantage of selecting where

Arguing for a new form of countersummit, autonomously organised, they note: Rather than waiting for
them to decide where and when to meet, no longer running behind them,
well jump on the drivers seat and decide this for ourselves . (2007: 44) This

and when our battles are to take place? (2007: 44).

suggests a strategic recognition of not only the successes of the anti-globalisation movement (which Badiou does
not recognise), but also its failures or limitations. The limitation of the counter-summit is being answered with the
proposal that a new independent and autonomous form of summit take place. Whether or not this is successful the
suggestion implies the recognition of the problem that Badiou had earlier identified: whether anti-

capitalist politics finds itself mirrored in its own self-definition as a

movement of opposition (anti-). One of the strategic questions posed to
anarchism, or anarchist practice, will be its negotiation of this different
form of autonomous power, especially in distinguishing itself from more
usual leftist or radical forms of organisation or counter-power. The
second point to consider is Badious claim that anarchism takes up a position of perpetual
opposition without really believing or acting in such a way as to change
the existing situation . The journal cum-newspaper Turbulence (2007), developed for reflection within
the movement of movements, titled its first issue What would it mean to win? Thus it posed to the
movement the question Badiou suggested that libertarian or anarchist thought has
tended to evade. What is interesting is that some of the articles in the issue do reflect a sense of crisis or
failure in the movement that links to the problem of organisation, or the development of struggles. Ben Trott
posits the need for directional demands, which aim to produce a point
around which a potential movement could consolidate (2007: 15). Similarly the
group The Free Association argue that what is required are problematics, shared
problems that involve acting and moving (2007: 26). The Argentinean group Colectivo
Situaciones argues for the need to develop a non-state institution of that which is collective (2007: 25). While it
would obviously be foolish to take this as representative of the movement, even less as particularly anarchist, it is

the problem of winning seems to lead on to the fundamental

criticism Badiou poses: how would anarchists go about achieving there
desired egalitarian collective social forms? To win is, of course, not only
a matter of proposing alternative social forms, but also of the means by
which these might be achieved . Of course this problem arises in part because Marxist or leftist
critics often cannot identify what anarchist practice does as having real
effects because it does not conform to their idea of what politics is or
should be. Anarchist thought and practice has always been concerned with
the critique of politics, as the separation of one realm of human activity from all others and a
separation which helps create an expert political class and professional politicians or militants. That said, as
the movement of movements starts to look beyond the limits of the
counter-summit it does begin to encounter the problem of strategy and
practice outside of the mass protest or temporary autonomous zone .
a sign that

Although not coming from an anarchist position, but rather from the tradition of post-autonomist thinking, Sandro
Mezzadra and Gigi Roggero raise the problem of organisation directly in their article in Turbulence. They point to

the difficulty that the movement of movements has had intervening into
the relations of production and that there is a danger of simply repeating
statements concerning the exhaustion of the party form and the
promotion of the new form of the network. Taking the case of EuroMayDay they point out

that although it posed problems, especially concerning migration, and transmitted explosive

images it
did not did not manage to generate common forms of organisation and
praxis (2007: 8). This raises the question of the relation of movements to institutions not only in terms of
existing institutions but also in terms of the creation of new institutions (Mezzadra and Roggero 2007: 9). In
particular they consider the case of what they call laboratory Latin America: the multiplicity of movements and
institutions emerging in a range of countries, especially Venezuela. That complex situation offers potential answers
to the questions of how we might form a space in common, and how can one employ the relations of power without
taking power? (2007: 9).3 We should note that the wider left does not speak with a unified voice on these
matters; nor has it promoted any successful solutions even in terms of its own models of revolution or reform. At

the struggle is to find a way between what seems like a sterile

opposition: between changing the world without taking power (as suggested
by John Holloway) and taking power to change the world (a more traditional left position).
Anarchist sympathy rest with the first option. But if anarchists are to
answer the type of criticism posed by Badiou and acknowledge the limits
currently being experienced by the movement of movements, the
implication appears to be the need for a new strategic thinking that can
engage with and against power to make a new world.
the moment

Queer rejection of the state absent a commitment to actual

political change results in nothing
Eric Kerl 10, Contemporary anarchism, http://isreview.org/issue/72/contemporaryanarchism
anarchism had established itself as a provocative, radical
opposition to the hegemony of pop culture and the suburban conservatism of Reagan and
Thatchers worldview. At the same time, anarchist ideas were reduced to a tiny cultural milieu, stripped of
By the end of the decade,

virtually all class politics. In this context, anarchism emphasized the politics of the personal; veganism,

The failure of
anarchism to convincingly offer a coherent strategy for fighting
oppression meant that many turned to variants of identity politics . Rather than a
unified movement, this resulted in an increasingly disjointed residue of identitybased anarchisms; green anarchism, anarcha-feminism, anarchist people of color,
queer anarchism, etc. Just as the new global justice movement was chalking up
some early victories, anarchist organizations were disappearing. A new global strugglea
interpersonal relations, and lifestyle choices, rather than revolutionary class politics.

new anarchism? In 1994, the Zapatista uprising marked the beginning of a worldwide fight against the excesses of
global capitalism. The growth of neoliberalism and global resistance had a profound effect on anarchism
internationally. In the United States, where the few workplace fightbacks were largely isolated and beaten, the 1999
Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization offered a militant, dynamic way of fighting and immediately
became a touchstone for a revived anarchist movement. In this new context, the central discussion within
anarchism was no longer about the nature of oppression. Instead, protest tactics became the immediate focushow
This new emphasis on
street tactics marked a significant turn from debates on the roots of oppression . In
fact, much of the global justice movement fostered an atmosphere hostile to
political debate. Under the guise of building consensus, minority perspectives were systematically buried.
While much of the movement was preoccupied with a diversity of tactics,
little room was left to discuss the very real diversity of politics and ideas that
existed in the movement. The new movement did arrive, first in the pentecostal appearance of the

to recreate the success of Seattle during other meetings of world capitalist elites.

Zapatistas in 1994, then in 1999 and after at Seattle, Quebec, Genoa, and Cancn, explains Staughton Lynd in
Wobblies and Zapatistas. Moreover, mirabile dictu, it arrived not exactly with a theory, but at least with a
rhetoric: the vocabulary of anarchism. Far be it from me...to tell these splendid and heroic young people that they

those who
protest in the streets today may turn out to be sprinters rather than longdistance runners.9I will just say that I am worried that in the absence of theory, many of those who
protest in the streets today may turn out to be sprinters rather than longdistance runners. 9 This evolving emphasis on practice over theoryand in some
cases the elevation of tactics to the level of principleexposes two problems for
contemporary anarchism. First, the anarchist method was transformed into its raison
dtre. The tactic itself became the goal. Second, this represented a retreat
from any goals-based, long-term strategy. As a result, anarchism was chiefly expressed in
need more and better theory. I will just say that I am worried that in the absence of theory, many of

the concept of prefigurative politics, where anarchisms method sought to prefigure an anarchist ideal of social
In this scenario, the classic anarchist goal of destroying the state receded into
the background. Instead, as Lynd describes the approach, the anarchist project should be to nurture a

relations.

horizontal network of self-governing institutions down below, to which whoever holds state power will learn they
have to be obedient and accountable.10 Prefigurative politics, of course, have always been part of the anarchist
creed. No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the means used to further it be identical in

What is different about

the new anarchism is that it ignores rather than challenges state power;
instead of the means prefiguring the ends, the means have become the ends.
spirit and tendency with the purposes to be achieved, wrote Emma Goldman.11

State Key- Heteronormativity

No State Link the state can be used to address
heteronormativity.
Chambers and Carver 8 Samuel A. Chambers is Senior Lecturer in Politics
at Swansea University, and Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the
University of Bristol, UK, 2008 (Part III: The Politics of Heteronormativity, Judith
Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics, Published by Routledge Press, ISBN: 0203-93744-9, pg. 156-157
Finally, heteronormativity can also be subverted at the level of public policy. The
trend in recent years, particularly in the US, has been to make heteronormativity
more explicit by writing it into the law, where it previously was not mentioned
(and for potentially subversive countertrends, see Carver 2007). The Federal
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the dozens of state DOMAs all serve to codify
the presumption of heteronormativity by announcing it plainly. In one sense, this is
a dramatic setback in the struggle for equal civil rights for lesbian and gay citizens
a fact that should not be downplayed. Nevertheless, in the politics of norms the
very effort required to defend heteronormativity outwardly suggests a certain
weakening of the norm. And legislators across the US have made it clear that
they see themselves as responding to an imminent threat. This threat is certainly
not, as those legislators would have it, against the 'sacred institution of marriage',
but it may well be a threat to heteronormativity, to the easy presumption of
heterosexuality. Perhaps the legalisation of gay marriage will prove subversive on
this front, if and when it happens. Perhaps it will not (Warner 1999). However, and in
any event, from within the theory of subversion that we have articulated here, the
most subversive move of all would come, on the level of national public policy,
in simply eliminating state-sactioned marriage altogether.

State Key- Trans Rights

We need a policy based advocacy that targets policy makers to
combat transphobia
Tannehill 15
(Brynn Tannehill, Board member of the Trans United Fund, The Trans Movement
Needs a New, Science Based Strategy, March 11 th, 2015,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brynn-tannehill/the-trans-movementneeds_b_8468062.html, JAS)
Convincing large numbers of people driven by fear and religious beliefs simply will
not happen. And 99 times out of 100, these arent the people who matter. The people
who matter are policy-makers who have the ability to change the regulations which
make life difficult for transgender people on a day to day basis . Bureaucrats,
administrators, judges, HR benefits, directors, school superintendents, police chiefs: these are the kinds of people
who need to be courted, convinced, and motivated to action. Time and time again over the past seven years we

seen gains for transgender people have come from convincing individuals in
positions of authority to make simple policy based changes. Passports, Medicare coverage of
have

transgender health, drivers license gender marker changes without surgery, inclusion of gender identity
protections and health care in the private sector: all of these were accomplished with smart and surgical
approaches. Similarly, when we win in court, it is because we have made better arguments in front of someone

Judges are not supposed to be swayed by emotion,

fear, or religious beliefs. Their job is to interpret the law, and the law is often
decided based on scientific evidence . We make progress when the courts and policy makers agree
who is supposed to be a neutral arbiter.

with the scientific evidence that holds gender identity is innate (it seems to be, with over 100 studies in support), it
is immutable (theres no credible evidence suggesting gender identity can be changed), and that medical care for

For the most

part, the people making these decisions start knowing very little about transgender
issues, and arent personally invested in the material. Just as importantly, theres
very little blow back when someone issues a nuanced piece of case law, or a policy
change is announced in a state insurance regulatory bulletin. In short, the individuals here
transgender people meets both the legal and medical definitions of medically necessary.

are able to do the right thing, without fear. These are the people we as a movement should be targeting. Trying to

convince the general public is an (expensive) fools errand. This is why LGB people
won the marriage fight: not because they won at the ballot box or in the
legislatures, but because they had better evidence on their side from the scientific
and legal community: including sociologists, psychologists, and doctors. The oppositions
attempt to counter science with bad science failed miserably. When the Regnerus study had its day in court, the

anti-gay study was, entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious

consideration. Despite the lessons of winning marriage in the courts, state and
national organizations seem hell-bent on doing expensive and futile campaigns to
shift opinions that cannot be shifted right now . The three million dollars in Houston could have
judge determined the

been used to fund studies that would counter right wing talking points about transgender people, and continue to

money could have been used

to hire a transgender policy experts and advocates dedicated to working
transgender issues full time in half the states in the US. There is also plenty of
evidence that this strategy works. The National Center for Transgender Equality has been working and
build the consensus of people who are experts in the field. Alternately that

insider, science and policy based strategy inside the Beltway for over a decade. A staggering number of the

improvements in federal policy under the Obama administration are attributable to

their work, and the strategy they employ. On a micro scale this tactic works as well.

Ohio is one of the most legally hostile states to transgender people. However, it has one of the most progressive
policies for changing drivers license gender marker as a result of wonkish advocates like Julie Van Dyne pursuing a

four ways to change the

legal framework that transgender people live under: legislation, ballots, case law,
and policy changes. The sooner we stop wasting our time tilting at legislative and
ballot windmills, the better. Doing the latter requires building the strongest scientific
consensus possible.
policy based strategy with in the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. There are

Perm
The perm allows for queer sensibility through more
incorporation of queerness in IR
Amoureux 15 Scholar postdoctoral fellow at Wake Forest University; received
his PhD from Brown University in Political Science [Jack, 2015, Queer Ethics of
World Politics, Academia.edu] AMarb
I am unavoidably reading queer
theory as an IR scholar steeped in a literature that, for the most part, has not
accepted and has even been actively hostile to a queer IR (Weber 2014b). Nevertheless,
an intersection of queer and dominant IR is potentially fruitful , but it is not
a matter of mixing and stirring since the queer has been relevant to IR and
world politics all along, in its dominant narratives of discipline as they extend
through the halls of power, products of media and culture, and the offices, conference rooms and
journals of the field of International Relations (Weber 2013; 2014a, 2014b; Wilcox 2015). In other
words, I am interrogating IR from a body of literature that has become known as queer theory but this
effort should not be read as a neglect of the ways in which a growing contingent of
IR scholars have read world politics through a queer lens to make up a rich variety
of critical and innovative approaches, including many that have an interdisciplinary foundation.
In summarizing some of these themes, controversies and tensions,

Nevertheless, when it comes to the work known as queer studies found and published across a wide spectrum of

IR is far behind, and this despite queer disciplinary tropes found

especially in practices of security. Only the writings of Judith Butler (especially: 1990, 2004, 2005) are
widely integrated into critical IR scholarship. While I seek to contribute to a more queer IR I also seek to
add to the scholarship of queer studies by developing a queer sensibility that is
relevant to international and global politics, as well as a form of reflexive agency.
scholarly fields,

Perm do both using subjectivity strategically solves best

Egginton 12 [William, Andrew W Mellon Professor in the Humanities at John
Hopkins University, "Affective Disorder", Volume 40, Number 4, Winter,
muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v040/40.4.egginton.html]

a great appeal of Deleuzian affect theory has been its promise of a

kind of short circuit between experience and bodies that bypasses
subjectivity and its attendant limitations63 the ego, ethnocentrism, gender bias, the list goes ontouching
As we have seen,

on an implicit ethical dividend, insofar as subjective capture seems counterproductive to real engagement with
otherness in almost any form. But as we've also seen, the same [End Page 36] early modern attempts to ground
ethics in experience that so influenced Deleuze reveal in striking detail how the limits of subjectivity cleave to the

not only does it seem impossible to link the

transmission of affect to an ethical project without the mediation of
subjectivity, subjectivity and its inherent auto-alienation may well be
intrinsic to affective experience . At its best, the turn to affect has reminded
theorists of communication in all its forms, from the political to the psychological to the
problem of ethics at its very core. In fact,

literary, that when humans communicate they do so through their bodies , and
that the affective dimension of this embodied communication often exceeds the grasp and dominion of cognitive

But as often occurs with intellectual trends, the enthusiasts of

affect have at times overstated their case , asserting a promise for their
theoretical endeavors that not only exceeds their possibilities, but also
undermines the very real pertinence of neurological studies of affect to
vital questions in philosophy , psychology, and the study of literature, art, and culture. It
behooves us , in the end, not to consider affect as an opponent to subjectivity,
but instead to understand how deeply related the two are . "I feel, therefore I
processes.

am,"64 wrote the Cuban novelist and theorist Alejo Carpentier in the context of his El recurso del mtodo (Recourse
of Method), a novel whose rationale from the title onward is a parody and response to Cartesian thought; to which
one can only note how even this most basic expression of the primordial kinship between feeling and being seems
sutured, at its core, to that solitary vowel that marks the subject's feeling minimal exclusion from the surrounding
world. [End Page 37]

Perm is a queering of the aff- reject binarism in favor of and/or.

Weber 15 Cynthia Weber is Professor of International Relations at the University
of Sussex, UK. International Studies Quarterly, Queer Intellectual Curiosity as
International Relations Method: Developing Queer International Relations
Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks, 9-3, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12212

The either/or

operates according to a binary logic, forcing a choice of either one

term or another term to comprehend the true meaning of a text, a discipline, a person, an act.
For example, in the binary terms of the either/or, a person is either a boy or
a girl. In contrast, the and/or exceeds this binary logic because it appreciates how the
meaning of something or someone cannot necessarily be contained within an
either/or choice. This is because sometimes (maybe even always) understanding
someone or something is not as simple as fixing on a singular meaningeither
one meaning or another. Instead, understanding can require us to appreciate how a person or
a thing is constituted by and simultaneously embodies multiple, seemingly
contradictory meanings that may confuse and confound a simple either/or
dichotomy. It is this plurality that the and/or expresses. According to the logic of the
and/or, a subject is both one thing and another (plural, perverse) while simultaneously one
thing or another (singular, normal). For example, a person might be both a boy and a girl while
simultaneously being either a boy or a girl. This might be because a person is read
as either a boy or a girl while also being read as in between sexes (intersexed), in between
sexes and genders (a castrato), or combining sexes, genders, and sexualities in ways that do
not correspond to one side of the boy/girl dichotomy or the other (a person who identifies as a
girl in terms of their sex, as a boy in terms of their gender, and as a girlboy or boygirl in terms of their
sexuality). In these examples, a person can be and while simultaneously being or because the
terms boy and girl are not reducible to traditional dichotomous codes of sex, gender, or sexuality either
individually or in combination, even though traditional either/or readings attempt to make them so. While
Barthes rule of the and/or is derived from his description of the castrato's body that he reads as combining two
sexes and two genders (1974), the plural that constitutes a subjectivity can also be more than one thing and/or
another. For a subjectivity can be one thing and another and another, etc. as well as one thing
or another or another, etc. in relation to sexes, genders, and sexualities, as there are multiple sexes, genders, and
sexualities individually and in combination (Fausto-Sterling 1993). This suggests both the limitations of deploying
Barthesian plural logics as if they expressed a singular rule of the and/or and the expansive possibilities of plural
logics that pluralize the rule of the and/or itself. This discussion makes two significant points. First,

the singular

choice we are forced to make by an either/or logic (for example, boy or girl) excludes the
plural logics of the and/or. Plural logics of the and/or contest binary logics, understanding the
presumed singularity and coherence of its available choices (either boys or girls, either normal or perverse),
their resulting subjectivities (only boys and girls), and their presumed ordering principles (either
hetero/homonormative or disruptively/disorderingly queer) as the social, cultural, and political effects of attempts to

it is only by appreciating how

the (pluralized) and/or constitutes dichotomy-defying subjectivities that we can grasp their
meanings. Second, when the (pluralized) and/or supplements the either/or, meanings are mapped differently.
constitute them as if they were singular, coherent, and whole. Therefore,

For in the (pluralized) and/or, meanings are no longer (exclusively) regulated by the slash that divides the
either/or. Instead, meanings are (also) irregulated by this slash and by additional slashes that connect terms in
multiple ways that defy either/or interpretations. Importantly, Barthes does not argue that either/or logics are
unimportant. He suggests it is both the either/or and the (pluralized) and/or that constitute meanings. Yet he
stresses texts should not be reduced to an either/or logic, so we can appreciate what plural constitutes a text, a
character, a plot, an order (Barthes 1974:5; emphasis in original). [ R]eleasing the double [multiple]

meaning on principle, the logic of the (pluralized) and/or corrupts the purity of
communications; it is a deliberate static, painstakingly elaborated, introduced into the fictive
dialogue between author and reader, in short, a countercommunication (1974:9; my brackets). The
(pluralized) and/or, then, is a plural logic that the either/or can neither comprehend nor
contain. It is how the (pluralized) and/or introduces a kind of systematic, non-decidable
plurality into discourse as that which confuses meaning, the norm, normativity
[and, I would add, antinormativities] (Barthes 1976:109, my brackets; on antinormativities see Wiegman and

around the normality and/or perversion of sexes , genders, and sexualities

rather than just accumulating differences (as intersectionality suggests; Crewshaw 1991) that
makes it a queer logic (Weber 1999:xiii; also see Weber 2014). For a (pluralized) Barthesian and/or
Wilson 2015:13)

accords with Sedgwick's definition of queer as theexcesses of meaning when the constituent elements of
anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically (1993:8) as
exclusively and or as exclusively or. Identifying these often illusive figurations, the now queer Barthesian and/or
suggests how we should investigate queer figures. Barthes instruction is thisread (queer) figures not only through
the either/or but also through the (pluralized) and/or. While Barthes offered this instruction in the context of

queer rule of the (pluralized) and/or applies equally to foreign

policy texts and contexts. For sovereign man as a plural logoi in a logocentric procedure can
figure foreign policy and (dis)-order international politics.11 For example, consider the case of the
reading literature (1974), his

2014 Eurovision Song Contest winner Tom Neuwirth and/as Conchita Wurst.

Perm- Trans Specific

Perm do both it allows for trans studies to be empowered in
politically productive ways
Stryker 12 Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Womens
Studies and the Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of
Arizona earned her PhD in US History at UC Berkeley [Susan, 2012, Chapter 11:
De/Colonizing Transgender Studies of China in Transgender China by Howard
Chiang, 10.1057/9781137082503] AMarb
What kinds of questions and practices, then, can transgender studies offer that
advance an anticolonial, de/colonial, or (post) colonial agenda, and that resist the
subsumption of non-Western configurations of personhood into Western-dominant
frameworks? At the very least, it would involve careful attention to the movement of
transgender phenomena, knowledge, and practices across regions, nations, and rural-urban
spaces, and it would acknowledge that the relationship between highly mobile medicalized categories such as
transsexual, and culturally specific terms that travel shorter distances is not a monolithic one in which the purity of
an ethnic practice is polluted and diminished by the introduction of a standardized modern import: in any site, the

Such a
transgender studies would also concern itself with how various forms of personhood
in locations around the world imagine their own relationship to those things
that transgender can be made to evoke, such as modernity, metropolitanism,
Eurocentrism, whiteness, or globalization. It would explore the adaptive reuse of the
category itselfwhether transgender is experienced as a form of colonization, as
an avenue for alliancebuilding or resource development, as a means of
resistance to local pressures or transnationalizing forces, as an empowering new
frame of reference, as an erasure of cultural specificity, as a countermodernity, as
an alternative to tradition, or as a mode of survival and translation for traditional
cultural forms that are unintelligible within the conceptual double binary of
man/woman and homo/hetero associated with the modern West. Transgender studies
should also acknowledge that transgender sometimes functions as a rubric for bringing
together, in mutually supportive and politically productive ways ,
marginalized individuals and communities of people in many parts of the world who
experience oppression because of their variance from socially privileged
expressions of manhood or womanhood. Furthermore, when academic researchers in the
uptake of an imported term makes it as local and as indigenous as it is foreign and invasive.

Anglophone global north and west investigate communities, identities, practices, institutions, and statuses
elsewhere that look transgendered to contemporary Eurocentric observers, the work of the transgender studies
field necessarily involves an ethicocritical assessment of whether or how the phenomena toward which the
researcher is oriented and invested in either can or cannot, or should or should not be apprehended through the
optics of transgender studies. It involves attending to the implications of either including or excluding such

it calls for reflexive selfconsciousness on the part

of researchers as to why they themselves desire to include or exclude various
phenomena from being considered transgendered, why they might seek to name it
as something else, and what their own stakes are in seeking particular
identifications or disidentifications with the phenomena they study. In addition, what holds
phenomena from consideration. Moreover,

true for research across cultural boundaries today holds equally true for historical and speculative research across

we should be very careful not to impose presentist categories of

sex and gender on the unruly strangeness of the past or the unfathomable future
yet to come. Finally, the field of transgender studies should not imagine that
the boundaries of time:

knowledge flows in one direction onlyextracted from the bodies of the

subaltern, the underclass, the colored, the colonized, the uneducated, the
unsophisticated, the deviant, and the improperly socializedfor the benefit of a
privileged elite for whom that knowledge becomes an instrument or technique for
the profitable management of difference. Ideally, the field of transgender studies is a
site where a critical gaze can be turned back by Others toward the scene of
normativitys engenderment, and where those othered within Eurocentric modernity
can produce counterknowledge for projects of their own. Transgender China
takes important steps in that direction.

Homogenization DA
Queer theory homogenizes difference and oppression
Johnson 1 (E. Patrick, Assistant professor of performance studies at Northwestern University, Quare
Studies, or (Almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from My Grandmother, Text and Performance
Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, January)

Because much of queer theory critically interrogates notions of selfhood,

agency, and experience, it is often unable to accommodate the issues
faced by gays and lesbians of color who come from raced communities.
Gloria Anzaldu a explicitly addresses this limitation when she warns that queer is used as a false unifying
umbrella which all queers of all races, ethnicities and classes are shored under (250). While acknowledging that
at times we need this umbrella to solidify our ranks against outsiders, Anzaldu a nevertheless urges that even
when we seek shelter under it [queer], we must not forget that it homogenizes, erases our differences (250).
Quare, on the other hand, not only speaks across identities, it articulates identities as well. Quare offers a way
to critique stable notions of identity and, at the same time, to locate racialized and class knowledges. My project is
one of recapitulation and recuperation. I want to maintain the inclusivity and playful spirit of queer that animates
much of queer theory, but I also want to jettison its homogenizing tendencies. As a disciplinary expansion, then, I
wish to quare queer such that ways of knowing are viewed both as discursively mediated and as historically

reconceptualization foregrounds the ways in

which lesbians, bisexuals, gays, and transgendered people of color come
to sexual and racial knowledge. Moreover, quare studies acknowledges the
different standpoints found among lesbian, bisexual, gay, and
transgendered people of colordifferences that are also conditioned by
class and gender.3 Quare studies is a theory of and for gays and lesbians of color. Thus, I acknowledge
situated and materially conditioned. This

that in my attempt to advance quare studies, I run the risk of advancing another version of identity politics. Despite
this,

I find it necessary to traverse this political mine field in order to

illuminate the ways in which some strands of queer theory fail to
incorporate racialized sexuality. The theory that I advance is a theory in the flesh (Moraga and
Anzaldu a 23). Theories in the flesh emphasize the diversity within and among gays,
bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people of color while simultaneously accounting for
how racism and classism affect how we experience and theorize the world .
Theories in the flesh also conjoin theory and practice through an embodied politics of resistance . This
politics of resistance is manifest in vernacular traditions such as
performance, folklore, literature, and verbal art.

Queer Theory Fails cant break down patriarchy

Beresford, Law Prof @ Lancaster University, 14 (Sarah, The Age of Consent and the
Ending of Queer Theory, Laws (3) pg. 759779)

What, therefore, links the debate surrounding the age of consent and Queer Theory?
I suggest that whilst on the face it, the age of consent debate is inclusive of all
identities, it is instead, inherently privileging of patriarchy. Queer identity and Queer
Theory have rested on the assumption that lesbians and gay men are all in this
together, that there is a common cause to fight. Queer Theory as an approach,
fails to fully recognize how patriarchy functions because it fails to acknowledge the
lived experiences of women (whether lesbian or heterosexual). As pointed out by
Parnaby, one of the major demands of Outrage! (a British pressure group, formed in
1990 to campaign for lesbian and gay rights), for example, was to campaign for a
change in the age of consent laws. Given that there was no age of consent

restriction at all for lesbians until the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000, this
was an issue which did not affect lesbians, yet Queer tried to convince women to
join a movement based almost solely on a gay male agenda ([25], p. 96). Thus,
illustrating that the campaign ran by Outrage! whilst purporting to be inclusive, was
far from inclusive, illustrating as it does the patriarchy presumed in the debate. In
this context, the mention of, and use of Queer Theory is not being presented as a
useful analysis in and of itself, but rather as an illustration of how consent
debates are in and of themselves, limitingly queer. At this juncture, it may be
useful to mention the tension(s) between the liberal legal subject at the heart of the
consent issue and some of the insights that could be potentially offered by Queer
Theory. I do not of course wish to see norms of equality imposed upon the subject
which will merely result in conformity to heterosexual and patriarchal identities. I
am aware in this regard of liberal subjectivity underpinning the consent to sex
debate and of course, tensions between so called liberal understandings of
consent/autonomy. As I explore later in more detail, whilst I dispute the liberal
notion of a sovereign singular physical body defined by heterosexuality and
patriarchy, I accept that the physical body inhabited by the concept of women has
to exist in order to argue the relevance of subjectively lived experience. Whilst
Queer Theory (as originally conceived) has the potentiality to contribute some
interesting viewpoints that might alter perspectives on the debate, the current
application of Queer Theory is ill equipped to do either, given that Queer Theory
perspectives are incapable of acknowledging heteropatriarchal norms. I now turn to
examine in slightly more detail, some of the origins of the term.

Alt Fails- Generic

The alt inevitably falls prey to Homonationalism and the same
Eurocentric ontological categories it criticizes
Stryker 12 Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Womens
Studies and the Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of
Arizona earned her PhD in US History at UC Berkeley [Susan, 2012, Chapter 11:
De/Colonizing Transgender Studies of China in Transgender China by Howard
Chiang, 10.1057/9781137082503] AMarb
Valentines work can be read as hostile to the project of a transgender studies, to
the extent that such a project is imagined only as a conceptual export of the global
west and north that is being spread to the global south and east, or that begins only
in elite academic settings from which it trickles down to a street that finds it
irrelevant. Valentine argues that the category transgender itself is often imagined as a
superior modern form that advances itself at the expense of old-fashioned,
premodern, traditional, or local non-Western understandings of sex, sexuality,
embodiment, gender, and identity. This is a progress narrative in which transgender, through a
reverse discourse, positions itself as even more modern than the increasingly shopworn
categories of gay and lesbian, with their rigid, fixed, outmoded concepts of man
and woman, and their complicities in homonationalist and consumerist forms
of citizenship. Particularly within the discipline of anthropology, Valentine contends, transgender
increasingly supplies the conceptual scaffolding that organizes and interprets crosscultural variations in embodied personhood; but in doing so, he suggests, it
extends the trope of modernization and inappropriately deploys
Eurocentric ontological categories. One implication of this conceptual move is that the
academic institutionalization of transgender studies which advances a goal of
transgender social legitimization through the development of an expertise
structured by the foundational preconditions of transgenders intelligibility
risks deploying a kind of Cartesian grid on the world of human diversity and
mapping it in ways that relentlessly orient it, in indubitably imperialist fashion,
toward Anglophone and Eurocentric standards and measurements. In directing
our attention to those ways in which transgender activism and advocacy themselves can become
complicit with the globalizing logic of neoliberalism, with the concomitant risk of
transgender studies scholarship becoming the (un)witting ideological accomplice of
this (un)stated politics, Valentine offers an important caution against nave
liberationist and progressivist transgender discourses, and usefully points out their
racial, class, nationalist, and linguistic biases. When transgender is understood to include all
gender variant practices and identities rather than being understood as an analytical stance vis--vis the refigurable

transgender studies does indeed risk erasing

violent colonial histories of knowledge-production about embodied difference. After all,
cataloguing divergences from modern Eurocentric understandings of sex, gender,
sexuality, embodiment, and identity in different cultures or classes, assigning
meaning and moral weight to such abnormalities, and exploiting or fetishizing
that difference according to the developmental logic of colonialism and capitalism,
have all been central features of Euro-American societies for over 500 years.
interrelationality of sex, gender, and identity,

Understanding the dissemination of transgender as a category that originated among white people within

Eurocentric modernity thus necessarily involves an engagement with the political conditions under which that term
was produced and within and through which it now circulates.

The alt ignores everday violence

Amoureux 15 Scholar postdoctoral fellow at Wake Forest University; received
his PhD from Brown University in Political Science [Jack, 2015, Queer Ethics of
World Politics, Academia.edu] AMarb
What does queer theory have to offer thinking about ethics in IR? Queer theorists
have sharply criticized the political and economic structures of neoliberalism. There is
little to no concern with democracy in this literature because democratic processes still leave out queers. Perhaps,
more accurately, they accept only those who can be rendered part of a normalized populationthose who evince
same-sex desires that take shape as monogamous families in which economic, social and political norms and
activities are oriented toward the future and the protection of children. In light of this criticism, most forcefully
made by Lee Edelman, it is not difficult to see the attractiveness of an ethic of no future, a stance that could be

it may be
difficult to accept an ethics of anti-politicsas the negation of meaningas
desirable for world politics or IR scholarship. As even sympathetic critics of Edleman have pointed
out, Edelmans politics appears all too sterile and ignorant of everyday lived
experiences and struggles. These critics have cited not only the concerns of nonnormative queers such as the polyamorous but also those often pushed to the
margins of neoliberal economies such as transgender persons of color. What do we
make of the political tactics they engage to extract real improvements in state
practices such as policing and state welfare benefits such as health care? Similarly,
transnational critiques and struggles aim to secure changes in the policies,
practices and decisions of states, international organizations, and NGOs. Furthermore,
attractive to IR scholars who have engaged poststructural and psychoanalytic analyses. Yet,

what would an embrace of the death drive look like for IR? Would it be passivity in the face of great power politics
or global neoliberalism? To be sure, there is something potentially powerful about rejecting a neoliberal politics of
reproductive futurity, in which the entire world must be ordered and put into motion to contribute to a global

It is to
point out the impossibility altogether of arriving at a well-ordered global polity.
When virtuous intentions lay claim to violent interventions, and norms and
rules define knowledge, queer negativity could be leveraged on behalf of spaces
and times that assert perverse desires and attend to the trauma of lives that have
been deemed undesirable and backward. This is a politics of refusal that, at its best, is its own form
political economy of consumption at the expense of steep inequality and environmental degradation.

of agency. It is an active embrace, following Edelman, of no meaning, no stability, and no responsibility. The
provocations of Edelman, and Love, might contribute to an IR literature that has offered critiques of neoliberalism
and has explored trauma and scarring (e.g., Edkins 2002; Steele 2013).