Occupy as Method: The Queer (political and

epistemological) Potential of Occupy Wall Street

Laura Sjoberg
Christian Chessman
University of Florida
Draft for Presentation at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL. Please do
not cite without permission comments are welcome to
sjoberg@ufl.edu.

Disclaimer by Way of Introduction

To call the Occupy movement queer is both itself a politically
controversial statement and the basis for the argument in this paper. It
is well-known that queer issues were not singled out in the Occupy
movement, where no Pride flags or pink triangles could be seen
(Bolcher 2011). While some in the queer community suggested that
this was a positive sign of a broad and inclusive movement (e.g.
Zimmerman 2011), others reacted negatively, suggesting that OWS
spaces prioritized the wants, needs, values, and culture of
heterosexual white men first and characterized it as another example
of a straight-white-man approach to movement-building

(DisOccupy.com 2012). While some (e.g., Michael Warners [2012]

discussion of the death of queer theory) have recognized resonance
between Occupy Wall Street and queer theory, many more people have
characterized the occupy movement as forgetting and sometimes
resisting to include people who are the most oppressed in the
process (Meronek 2011). Judith Levine framed the Occupy movement
as downright unfriendly to women and queers:
But it turns out life wasnt so blissful for some residents of
the concrete Peaceable Kingdom. Men were dominating the
General Assembly. The lengthy and exhaustively debated
Declaration of the Occupation of New York city managed to
include only one grievance dealing with sex and gender:
They have perpetuated inequality in the workplace based
on age, the color of ones skin, sex, gender identity, and
sexual orientation. Childcare was infrequent, or so casual
as to be hazardous. Women and queers were being
harassed and assaulted under the blue-tarp cover of night.
Even Occupys main form of political action nonviolent
civil disobedience, which means, basically, submitting to
police brutality and spending countless hours in jail
favors young white men: They are sturdy, childless, and
unlikely to receive the harsh treatment their counterparts
of color would receive. (Levine 2012)

We were neither at Occupy Wall Street nor directly affiliated with the
Occupy movement we read, and write, it as outside observers
consumers of its politics, its significations, and its implications. We do
not make an attempt to explore, understand, disaggregate, or
streamline the many reasons many people participated/participate in
the Occupy movement, or the many different ways in which many
different Occupiers intervene in and engage with contemporary
political orders. This decision is partly strategic (the properties of the
Occupy movement that we are interested in do not rely on a neat or
coherent narrative of OWS) and partly substantive (as Sidney Tarrow
(2011) explains, asking its activists what they want, as some pundits
have demanded, is beside the point).1 Second, we do not speculate to
the success or failure of the Occupy movement either as a social
movement generally or in service of particular goals.2 Further, we want
to make it clear that we are not making the argument that OWS was
good for queer people or for queer rights, or even that it was not
complicit in making heterosexism and cissexism normalized even in
the radical community. While we have heard positive and negative
accounts of what happened to queer people in OWS, as well as positive
and negative accounts of the OWS record on queer issues, we are not
looking to sort those questions out. Instead, we see what Michael
Warner (2012) saw, resonance. Warner describes:
Almost 20 years later, the resonance with the Occupy Wall
Street movement is unmistakable. Like Occupy Wall Street,
2

queer theory worked by magnetizing attention, at the right

moment, to problems that existed before it, and which it
could not fix. Like OWS, it maintained a skeptical distance
from legitimate political processes in order to cast light on
their distortions. Like OWS, its moment in the spotlight was
only a strobelike illumination of a lingering state of affairs
(Warner 2012).
We see these resonances, and want to explore them. Therefore, rather
than examining occupy as queer politics, we are looking at occupying
space as queering, and therefore to the queer (epistemological and
political) potential of the practice of occupation as revealed by the
OWS movement. It is in that vein that we classify OWS as a queer(ing)
movement.
Reading Occupy
Judith Butler, in Precarious Life, made the argument that, in neoliberal
capitalist imperium,3 dissent is quelled, in part, through threatening
the speaking subject with uninhabitable identification, (2006, p.xix)
given that a dissenter must choose silence over being labeled
treasonous or communist or some other label that has an unbreakable
identification with evil in contemporary Western political performance.
This catch-22, Butler argues, limits not only what we can hear, what we
can see, and what we can mourn, but also how we live, which she
frames (in Levinas (2005 [1972]) terms) as the surplus of every
sociality over every solitude. Butler (2006) argues that it is the overinfusement and policing of meaning, which serves not only the
3

performative function of constituting human experience as such but

also the regulatory function of rendering uninhabitable political space
(deemed) unacceptable. The uninhabitability that Butler sees as
inscribing constant precarity onto body and lived experience initially
seems an unsolvable puzzle given the common assumption that the
uninhabitable cannot be inhabited. Until it was.
Re-imaginging Hannah Arendts (1998[1958]) concept of a
space of appearance, Butler (2011a) reacted to Occupy Wall Street
(OWS) as the (literal) inhabitation of the uninhabitable, characterizing
it as a performative social ontology of equality separable from other
revolutionary attempts by its very ability to embody the by-definitiondisembodied uninhabitable space of protest. In a speech in Venice,
Butler (2011a) talked about OWS as a (gendered) embodied social
ontology that at once presumes precarity and interrupts its numbing
hold. In this sense, as Nikki Sullivan (2003, v) describes queer theory,
OWS refuses to be disciplined and continues to struggle against the
straightjacketing effects of institutionalization, to resist closure and
remain in the process of ambiguous (un)becoming as protest.
Imagining an extension of Butlers initial, hopeful reaction to OWS, our
current project accounts for the biopolitical uncontrollability of the
movement as a transgression different in kind and scope from
traditional protest movements in a way that shows (epistemological
and political) promise for queer theorizing. Thinking of queerness as a
verb (a set of actions) (to queer), it is to quiz or ridicule, to spoil,
4

to put out of order, a deconstructive practice that is not undertaken

by an already constituted subject, and does not, in turn, furnish the
subject with a nameable identity (Sullivan 2003, 50-52).
Relying collected on discourse and dispositive data from Occupy
Movements in across the globe, we frame the occupy movement as
constituted by embodied indefiniteness, interrupting the assured
embodiment on which neoliberal imperium stabilizes its domination.
This performative counter-culture then not only clashes with the
substance of neoliberal imperium but also brings into question its
structure and modes of sustainability, presenting a biopolitical
challenge to its continued existence.
This framing of the Occupy movement, we argue, not only tells
us something about the politics and process of the movement, but
suggests that the contribution of OWS both to critical theorizing of
politics and to revolutionary political action is at least largely
methodological in the movements (intentional or unintentional)
transformation of embodied present from a tool of biopower control of
the sovereign to a tool of rejection of sovereignty, and with it, the
appropriation of an embodied space of appearance for radical,
empathetic, transformative politics previously structurally excluded by
the rules of habitation in Empire. This paper engages occupation as a
method of knowledge production and exchange, and explores
questions of creation, stability, transfer, and signification of
knowledge(s) through those lenses. It begins by using occupation as

a lens to understand (disciplinary and political) knowledge production

strategy and knowledge consumption possibility, and continues by
exploring the implications for the knower/learner distinction in [queer]
IR theory/practice. In so doing, it makes the argument that the logic of
occupation can make a significant contribution to queer theorys
efforts to make strange, to frustrate, to counteract, to delegitimize, to
camp up heteronormative knowledges and institutions, and the
subjectivities and socialities that are (in)formed by them and (in)form
them (Sullivan 2003, vi). It concludes with some of the implications of
thinking about occupation as queer and queerness as occupying.
Occupy as (Queer) Embodied Indefiniteness
The Occupy movement/conversation/method/knowledge is to be
framed within its situation in what LHM Ling and Anna Agathangelou
(2009) refer to as the neoliberal imperium:
An overarching hegemonic project it encompasses
states, governments, classes, and sets of ideologies that
work in tandem to validate each other specifically, the
neoliberal imperium reflects and sustains a set of social
relations of power expressed through daily interactions and
the institutions that support them (e.g., global capitalism,
the neoliberal state and its market, the patriarchal family,
complicit knowledge construction in the academy, an
ontology of fear and property. (Agathangelou and Ling
2009, 2)

In Agathangelou and Lings explanation, the neoliberal imperium

draws on and legitimizes neocolonial strategies of power based on
race, gender, sexuality, and class to privilege the few at the expense of
the many, despite the continuous exploitation of the latter to sustain
the former (2009, 2). In this understanding, the stability of the current
social order not only relies on but consistently reproduces inequalities
among people, states, and nations. These inequalities draw lines
among livable and unlivable existences.
In this world, the system of needs is the product of the system of
production in a cycle of symbolic exchange (Baudrillard 1970). Reality
is a product, a simulacrum to be produced for and consumed by the
people in self-fulfilling cycle, a dialectical vision of history and
consciousness cycling and recycling at all levels where it is at once
approaching perfect operationality and approaching its own death
(Baudrillard 1976). In other words, the system of deprivation and
exclusion on which the neoliberal imperium functions works so tightly
as to make its political impacts seem natural and its evils invisible.
This system of deprivation and exclusion makes certain lives unlivable
and certain spaces uninhabitable. If a particular existence is defined as
impossibly other by the prevailing discourses and practices of
everyday life, then the people who live those existences are in essence
impossible. This impossibility means that the space other to the
neoliberal imperium (not objecting to it but outside of it) is discursively,
performatively, and physically uninhabitable. The perfect

operationality of the neoliberal imperium constitutes performative

erasure of any space potentially outside of it for not only speaking, but
for living/existing/acting/feeling. In Judith Butlers (2011a, 12)
explanation, the structural control of the neoliberal imperium on daily
life is strong, and, as a result, we are faced with the idea that some
populations are considered disposable. Butler explains:
This process usually induced and reproduced by
governmental and economic institutions that acclimatize
populations over time to insecurity and hopelessness (see
Isa-bell Lorey) is built into the institutions of temporary
labor, of decimated social services, and of the general
attrition of social democracy in favor of entrepreneurial
modalities supported by fierce ideologies of individual
responsibility and the obligation to maximaze ones own
market value as the ultimate aim in life. (Butler 2011a,
13).
This process, called precaritization, Butler argues, renders certain
space (particularly that in opposition to the perfect operationality of
the neoliberal imperium) uninhabitable multidimensionally in terms of
identities, actions, lives, and physical space. It makes certain living
spaces uninhabitable both literally and figuratively. This
precaritization separates people from livable life, where restoration and
rehabilitation are only possible by breaking with the neoliberal status
quo (Butler 2011a, p.13).
8

But such a break with the neoliberal status quo initially appears
impossible. This is because, in Hannah Arendts (1998[1958]) terms, a
space of appearance is at once necessary for the sort of democratic
political function that would be necessary to perform such a break with
the status quo and impossible within the perfection of the neoliberal
imperium. Arendt suggests that a polis is only a polis when there is
space where I appear to others as others appear to me (Arendt
1998[1958], 198). Such a space is not just the location of the polis, but
instead a [physical space that] comes into being wherever men are
together in the manner of speech and action (Arendt 1998[1958],
199). In this way, to have action to have life to have politics, the
only indispensible material factor in the generation of power is the
living together of people (Arendt 1998[1958], 201). The inhabitability
of uninhabitable space, then, is necessary for the creation of political
alternatives.
But the neoliberal imperium prevents the very creation of this
alternative space. Instead, it constitutes the operative abstraction of
living together the fictionalization and alienation of the operative
from the real systematically in such a way that the abstraction of the
practice of neoliberal capitalism becomes real (Baudrillard 1976). In
this way, it serves as a trap that cannot be escaped because there is
no way to escape it to have a real politics, there must be space; to
have space, there must be a possibility of a real politics; yet neither
exist within the neoliberal imperium, to which one cannot be other.
9

While voices of dissent sporadically arise, they are quickly interpolated

because the neoliberal imperium prefigures both itself and its
(internalized) other such that there is no genuine outside to use as a
deconstructive space.
One of the major projects of queer theorizing has been to find that
elusive and impossible outside. Judith Butler has described the term
queer as a site of collective contestation that is never fully owned,
but always only redeployed, twisted, and queered (Butler 2013). The
impossibility of queer deconstruction becomes a puzzle even in that
description it is at once inside and outside, but the two are
irreconcilable.
Enter Occupy Wall Street (OWS). We mean enter both in the
sense of intellectual intervention and in the sense of spatial
intervention in the perfect abstraction of the neoliberal imperium. In
this analysis, we are interested in the intersection between Occupy as
a movement/status/existence and the problem of uninhabitable space
in the neoliberal imperium. In order to understand this, some brief
exploration of the relationship between OWS and political space is
necessary.
OWS as a movement started (or at least got noticed) in the
physical occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, and quickly
spread to the physical occupation of a number of parks and other town
and city public spaces around the United States (and even around the
world). Greg Elmer and Andy Opel (2011, 8) suggests that OWS

10

occupation of public space changes the spaces in which protest is

allowed. Previously:
The spatial segregation of speakers according to the
content of their messages all too easily bifurcates voices
and perspectives into two sides, mirroring the dominant
red/blue political culture of the US. .Protests and
demonstrations become staged events, bland and neutered
substitutions of the passionate by literally separating the
demonstrators from the last object of their demonstration,
the protest zone becomes a way of controlling the content
of the debate without really acknowledging what is done.
(Elmer and Opel 2011, 8).
The allocation of protest space in the United States layers on the
neoliberal imperium to make the space of otherness to it uninhabitable
both as an alternative and as physical space.
OWS discursively interrupts the narrative of the unadulterated
good of the neoliberal imperium by critiquing the lifestyle and
dominance of the 1% (van Gelder 2011). While that interruption is
important, we argue that the OWS movement makes another, more
important, more fundamental, and more lasting intervention in the
status quo political dialogue. This second interruption the one that is
the focus of this paper is the making of uninhabitable space
inhabitable. Blogger Geoffrey Holsclaw describes this in terms of
Zizeks subjective destitution:

11

OWS seems to fit perfectly with Zizeks understanding of the

subjective destitution, the act of separating ones self from
symbolic support, the act of cutting ties to socially defined
roles and expectations, the act of dying to the symbolic
order, and therefore, in a sense, of dying oneself (Holsclaw
2011)
It is this act of separating oneself from symbolic support that Judith
Butler suggests is key to the Occupy Movement creating (in Arendts
terms) a space of appearance where previously such a space was not
possible. She explains that acting together opens up time and space
outside and against the temporality and established architecture of the
regime (Butler 2011b, 3). According to Butler, for politics to take
place the body must appear which necessitates, within the neoliberal
imperium, that there has to be a hegemonic struggle over what we
call the space of appearance (Butler 2011b, 3). Such a hegemonic
struggle could help to move from piecemeal forms of transgressive
resistance against the existing order toward creating the possibility of
another order altogether ensuring lasting change (Holsclaw 2011).
How such an intervention must be had, though, and how such a
hegemonic struggle must be won, is often left off the theoretical map
in evaluating the Occupy movement. Butler, however, does some
thinking about these questions, suggesting that it matters to
understanding what it means to Occupy that there is inhabitation of
physical space (be it Zuccotti Park or academic buildings in London,

12

Athens, or Berkeley) involved in occupying, where the symbolic

meaning of seizing these buildings is that these buildings belong to the
public (Butler 2011b). Seizing public buildings as occupation is, in
Butlers view, a path to a different social ontology based on the
presumption that there is a shared condition of precarity that situates
our political lives starts at occupation (Butler 2011b, 4). The result is
the ability to make what Butler characterizes as impossible demands:
If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the
impossible. If the right to shelter, food, and employment
are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible.
If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the
recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed,
then, yes, we demand the impossible (Butler 2011c).
The feasibility of achieving the content of these impossible
demands is beyond the scope of this analysis we are interested in the
very fact of their impossibility. The occupation performed by OWS
creates space for the making of impossible demands transgressive to
the politics of the ordinariness of the neoliberal imperium. In our view,
the true accomplishment of OWS is not to provide hope, shelter, food,
employment, and wealth redistribution, but to provide the possibility of
demanding those things in the face of the operative abstraction of the
neoliberal imperium the American Dream, hard work, and American
exceptionalism.
This operative abstraction hides its constitutive other the reality

13

of its impacts on people. The existence and honorary position of the

American Dream relies on the existence and marginalization of a
constitutive other who does not belong. For each person safe at
home in the neoliberal imperium, then, there are (insider,
constitutive) others from whom they must be protected, whether or
not an actual threat is posed. As such, queer theorizing has suggested
that inclusiveness itself has been weaponized to differentiate home
from other or away and excuse (discursive and material) violence
toward that other.
In this way, Puar (2006) argues that the inclusive expansion of the
neoliberal imperium to involve the queer other-within remains
exclusive and violent towards its constitutive other(s) even as it
appears gentler. That violence is (at least in part) the violent
reproduction of naturalized, bounded identities when identities are
liminal and messy when not policed. The bounded nature of both
inclusion and exclusion of inhabitable space excludes liminality,
messiness, and outside-ness. The violent reproduction of bounded
identities shows stability, hiding liminality; shows certainty, hiding
doubt, and shows stickiness, hiding mobility. Queer theorizing of the
liminality involved in unstable sex/gender identities shows that even
that which is presumed to be the most primordial (in sex identity) is
really liminality hiding under supposed definition. Translated to thinking
about inhabitability, this theorizing suggests that even the apparent
ultimate safety of inhabitable space hides liminality and uncertainty,
14

and perhaps danger under its supposed (empirical and normative)

clarity.
Such dangers have been previously recognized in queer
theorizing. Queer theorizing has questioned either the sovereignty of
the state or the naturalness of the concept of sovereignty. In Cynthia
Webers words, sovereignty performs as a referent for statehood
where the norm of state sovereignty heralds and reinforces (a false
sense of) stable identity and existence for states (Weber 1995, 1). It is
in this sense that Weber (1995, 123) suggests that the state is a sign
without a referent, given that the sovereignty that serves as the
basis for the states stability is self-referential, and therefore cannot be
the referent of the state (Weber 1995, 123). In this way, in
Baudrillards terms, truth appears as a simulacrum (a truth effect) but
not as a referent or signified (Weber 1995, 125). The truth effect of
the concept of sovereignty is to produce the appearance of the stability
of state/identity in IR without any underlying basis for it. In other words
theorists solve (however temporarily) the problem of state
sovereignty by proceeding as if the meaning of sovereignty were stable
because a solution to this problem seems to be a prerequisite for
getting on with the business of international relations, which leads to
the treating of sovereignty as an already-settled, uncontested
concept (Weber 1995, 2-3). This settles a sovereignty order despite
the possibility/(probability) of global politics lack of capacity to be
settled in such an orderly way. This is at least in part because states
15

and their sovereignty are constantly contested and unstable. A state of

unsettlement exists alongside the condition of impossibility of
unsettlement.
Any counterdiscourse that does not deal with both elements of
that paradox, then, never truly escapes it which is what encouraged
Butler to discuss the problem of the uninhabitable space of protest to
begin with. Queer theorizing has gone a long way towards dealing with
this problem. For example, Queer theory in geography has suggested
that spaces do not have pre-existing sexual identities (Oswin 2008,
90), and are not naturally authentically straight but rather actively
produced and (hetero)sexualized (Binnie 1997, 223). Such space is
portrayed as straight, organized, and clearly identifiable when in fact it
is often a location deeply scarred by myriad battles fought over the
social, political, and cultural meanings associated with (presumed)
sexual(ized) identity/ies (Nash 2006, 2). In order to successfully queer
such space, then, it is not enough to answer with a politics that does
not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions,
but upholds and sustains them (Duggan 2003, 50). Instead, queering
space produced as heteronormative requires operating beyond
powers and controls that enforce normativity with radical
(re)thinkings, (re)drawings, (re) conceptualizations, (re)mappings
(Browne 2006, 889, 888). Queering then constitutes a
reterritorialization of heterosexual space (Oswin 2008, 90).

16

But this figurative reterritorialization, Butler argues, can never be

complete, given that the space that it occupies remains constitutive
other to the inhabitable space of the neoliberal imperium. This is where
we think that pairing the act of occupation in the Occupy movement
and queer theorizing about disturbance and reterritorialization might
actually reach the uninhabitable space of other to, rather than
constitutive other to, the neoliberal imperium.
This is because the act of occupation in the Occupy movement
provides a counterdiscourse not only because of its opposition to the
neoliberal imperium (which has been opposed before) but because of
the methods of its opposition. The neoliberal imperium has been
opposed before not only by protesters, but by many people across the
spectrum of American experiences. Some have critiqued it while
others (starving, freezing, and dying) have been living proof of its
failures. Still, opposition to the neoliberal imperium has largely been
coopted as its constitutive other (and therefore inside), and its failures
have been made invisible by its perfect operationality. That
operationality had not previously been disturbed either by critique of
or carnage resulting from current political practice.
We argue that this is one of the key differences between OWS and
other political movements that OWS disturbs the operationality of the
neoliberal imperium. It disturbs both its narrative basis and its practice
by embodied occupation. That embodied occupation performs a
physical intervention (and therefore a symbolic intervention) in the

17

stark line between the inhabitable space within (and as constitutive

other to) the neoliberal imperium and the uninhabitable space outside
of it. This is because OWS occupies three uninhabitable spaces
simultaneously: the space of protest, the space of outside of the
neoliberal imperium, and the space of the liminal and uncertain after
the dominance of the neoliberal imperium.
OWS literally occupies the space of protest, by refusing defined and
licensed places to protest the existing political order protesting the
(demanded) orderliness of protest that would keep it within the
neoliberal imperium. The physical presence of the Occupy movement
in a space where it is/was physically not allowed to be actually
occupies the space of objection to the ordering of bodies demanded
by the neoliberal imperium, disrupting the embodied order of
contemporary politics. The resultant disruption of the neoliberal
imperium is as important as the method by which that disruption
occurs. As we have outlined above, disruptions of the imperium that
lack spaces of appearance are only able to resist from within the
coordinates that the imperium has prefigured, and therefore lack
emancipatory potential. This potential is hamstrung in part when the
disruption of oppressive biopolitical formations are co-opted; instead of
eliminating the old oppressive formation, it simply adapts to
accommodate the tactic and forms a new, similarly oppressive
formation. Occupying the space of protest, then, creates a space for

18

emancipatory potential that was previously unavailable under the

operative abstraction of the neoliberal imperium.
Both by disturbing the order of (physical and political) protest
space and by doing so to reject the principles and results of the
neoliberal imperium, OWS also occupies the uninhabitable space of
other to the neoliberal imperium. Rather than restricting itself to the
acceptable protest methods and spaces that would contain it as the
(internal) constitutive other to the neoliberal imperium, OWS positions
itself outside of the acceptability of both protest to and failure within
the neoliberal imperium. It does so by pointing out the ways in which
the neoliberal imperium is not only unable to keep its promises
(Agathangelou and Ling 2009) but has, despite its operative
abstractions, failed to contain the bodies of its protestors and failures.
The physical presence of bodies in Zuccotti Park (and elsewhere
around the country and the world) is an embodied and symbolic
counternarrative to the neoliberal imperium, only possible by the
inhabitation of uninhabitable space. As Zizek said at Zuccotti Park, we
are not destroying anything, we are only witnessing how the system is
destroying itself (Zizek 2011).
In this sense, the materiality of the form of witness is key: the
witness is an embodied, physical presence that manifests inside but
must be outside of the neoliberal imperium. In this space of
appearance, this physical manifestation of bodies in the face of the

19

neoliberal imperiums closure of the space for such manifestation

creates an outside the neoliberal imperium in a way that disrupts the
dominance of the neoliberal narrative, and suggests the ability to
question the perfection of its operationality (and therefore its feasibility
at all).
This leads to the third way that OWS inhabits uninhabitable space
by being in the space of the liminal and uncertain after the neoliberal
imperium. One of the central properties of the neoliberal imperium,
according to Agathangelou and Ling, is the certainty with which its
parts are defined and its results are ordered stably as European,
Christian, white, capitalist, heterosexual, and patriarchal. OWS, as, in
Tarrows (2011) terms, a different type of movement, occupies the
neoliberal imperium with something that is ambiguous (and perhaps
even queer) on issues of race, class, national origin, sex, sexuality, and
economics. Rather than constructing a defined opposite or a clear
political space, the practice of OWS suggests that the alternative to the
ordered, inescapable, perfectly operational neoliberal imperium is the
liminal, the messy, and the unordered outside on principal but
refusing to rebuild or reconstruct an (equally oppressive) alternative
order. Instead, it blurs the categorical boundaries between inside and
outside, capitalist and non-capitalist, and produces liminality as a
counterculture to the straightjacket of liberal capitalism. This produces
and performs uncertainty both of the occupier and the occupied,

20

and rejects the assumption that clarity can be (re)produced by labeling

a person as within a previously defined set of characteristics. As
Christine Sylvester once noted, liminality suggests borderlands that
defy fixed homeplaces in feminist epistemology, places of mobility
around policed boundaries, places where ones bag disappears and
reappears before moving on (Sylvester 2002, 255). Occupy blurs the
lines between homed and homeless both in practice (where the
homed re-homed with the homeless for solidarity), effectively
questioning and deconstructing the (apparently stable) neoliberal
imperium, provide 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 stability of the neoliberal imperium is desirable, but ultimately
violent. It is desirable because settled-ness is (in Baudrillards terms)
seductive (regardless of, and perhaps especially in the absence of,
capacity to be settled). It is ultimately violent because those who are
unsettable but settled anyway into a binary into which they do not fit
are settled and limited into something they are not by force of
conformity, a violence that repeats itself constantly in the daily lived
experience of (inappropriate) settlement. It is in the unsettling of that
violent settlement where OWS finds its residence in the uninhabitable
space of the liminal after the neoliberal imperium.
In this way, the strategy of occupation meets the logic of queer
theorizings desire to deterritorialize and reterritorialize. We argue that

21

this realization has substantive impacts about for the politics and
theorizing of sovereignty, practical impacts for methodology in the
study of sovereignty/security/IR, and prescriptive value for oppositional
politics.
Occupy, Territory, and Sovereignty
The impact of the inhabiting of these three uninhabitable spaces is
complex and multidimensional. While we draw from a number of the
implications, we focus on one: the transformation of embodiment from
a tool bipower of control of the sovereign to a tool of rejection of
sovereignty. In the bipower order of the neoliberal imperium,
individuals rely on the government for social goods which are used to
indoctrinate or interpellate them and produce them as proper subjects
of the sovereign. This biopower is aimed at disciplining populations into
self-policing, to follow the will of the sovereign as a self-enforced edict.
The sovereign's exercise of power functions by naturalization through
institutions and environments that acclimatize individuals to behaving
in a certain way; specifically in a way which is subordinate to the will of
the sovereign.
The self-policing function is/was key to the perfect operability of the
neoliberal imperium, given that bodies (across levels of precarity) were
ordered into particular and specified places within its modalities of
power. Biopower was/is a tool of the sovereign to maintain and enforce
sovereignty and therefore the existing political order. The physical act
of occupying, however, suggests a possibility of finding an outside to
the rule of biopower. Rather than being (self)-policed, occupying bodies
22

are being un-police-able. Those who occupy are using bodies as a

tool of the rejection of the sovereign and the (unjust) political order it
implies/supports/reifies/makes possible. As outlined above, the
disruption of the neoliberal imperium happens when an individual uses
their body to performatively constitute otherwise unspeakable spaces
and manifest unspeakable identities. Unique to this tactic is the
inability to accumulate power, because power derives from the
physical space taken by each individual's body and the concomitant
performance that body enacts. Each body's performative effect is
equal, because the effect derives not from some characteristic of the
body, but from its existence and occupation of space. Whether or not,
then, Occupy is a counterculture or protest movement on its own
merits, an Occupying body moves from a tool of the neoliberal
imperiums biopower to a tool of transgression against it. This could be
useful literally (as a tool of expanding critique of the neoliberal
imperium) and as translated to other areas of protest, critique, and
unsettling, as discussed below.
Occupy as [Queer] Method for the Study of
Sovereignty/Security/IR
In this section, we are interested in the ways in which the
Occupy movement has altered both the method of and the situation
of protest in order to provide insight into the methodology of
protest/political scholarship in IR, particularly in queer scholarship, but
also more broadly. What implication does the now-inhabitability of

23

uninhabitable space have for how we do research critiquing exclusion?

We believe that these questions linking the theory and performance of
OWS and IR methods have been neglected in the field, and are looking
to pursue them.
While a group called OccupyIRTheory has explored some of
these questions in blog posts, meetings, and writings in journals of the
field,4 much of that work has focused on directly relating to the
Occupy movement in the terms spelled out on the blog what we
expect from the Occupy movement and what the Occupy
movement can expect from us as IR theorists. Some exceptions,
though, exist, and are worth mentioning before/during our discussion
of what we derive from OWS as method for IR theorizing. The first
thoughts are Patrick Thaddeus Jacksons, in Three Thoughts about
What #occupyirtheory Might Mean. Jackson (2012, 107) suggests
that to occupy in the #ows sense means something like assembling
constitutively, and thus calling attention to the contingency of
whatever is being occupied. Jackson explains that the OWS
commitment to economic justice demands that IR theory be
evaluated according to the effect it has on peoples lives, and perhaps
especially according to the values it enshrines and advances (Jackson
2012, 108). Aida Hozic (2012, 149) adds to this the suggestion that
the very attempt at doing apolitical IR scholarship is rendered
ineffective by considering the concerns of the Occupy movement,
such that if there is a message in the #occupy movement for IR and
24

IPE scholars in the United States, it is the warning that the last two
decades of academic political abstinence are no longer sustainable.
There is no way around it. Citing Alex Barder and Daniel Levines
(2012) suggestion that IR has been co-opted by liberal triumphalism
of the post-Cold War era and therefore failed to raise its voce loudly
and clearly, Hozic suggests that one of the take-aways from the
Occupy movement is the need to revive a politics of critique in IR.
We take these lessons as important for the politics of IR theory
understanding contingency in global politics, judging theory based on
its impact on people, and restoring a critical politics to IR theory. Our
interest is in building on those lessons to understand the potential
contributions of the political practices of OWS for the politics and
research methods of the field of IR. For those purposes, building on the
discussion of the relationship between OWS and the neoliberal
imperium above, we derive some characteristics of what it means to
occupy. Occupying is physically inhabiting that which is occupied, as
an embodied disruption of the social order which makes that
inhabitation impossible. Occupying is inhabiting uninhabitable space
space of protest, space of otherness, and space of liminality. Occupying
is turning a body from a tool for the policing of sovereignty and the
maintenance of the centrality of power to a tool for resistance of
sovereignty and the disruption of the category of power. Occupying is
residing in but remaining outside of the possible in political space,

25

exposing flaws in the operability of an otherwise perfectly operable

imperium.
So what would it look like to occupy the imperium of IR
theorizing? It is perhaps first important to understand how and why
one would think of IR theorizing as an imperium to begin with. Though
there are many ways to approach understanding IR theorizing as an
imperium, we approach it through feminist lenses. We argue that
(American, mainstream) IR can be understood as an imperium that by
its constitution excludes feminist work.
This IR is a world that polices its boundaries, whatever they are.
Each debate excludes its other as much as it constructs a conflict
between its in-crowd. But since by definition everyone is in the
debate, even its detractors are constitutive others. There is no
outside the debates inside IR that is IRs uninhabitable space.
This tension is present, for example, in feminist debates about
engaging with IR (Tickner 1997). Feminist IR discusses the awkward
silences and miscommunications in relating with IR, yet cannot ever
be completely outside of the awkward other it relates to (in) (Tickner
1997, 612). The function of the part-inclusion (e.g., Keohanes [1989,
245] endorsement of feminist standpoint theory, or Hallidays [1988,
426] endorsement of feminist insights) is the inability to fully connect
(e.g., Tickners [1997] frustration), the development of unrealistic
expectations of full integration (e.g., Whitworths [1989] declaration
that the next phase of IR would be critical and feminist), and the

26

inability to escape the discipline or these dysfunctional relationships

entirely (e.g., Zalewskis [2007] lament). This trap of being neverinside and never-outside is mismatched with feminist scholars claim
that the nature of their work was discipline-transformative (e.g.,
Tickner 1998, 209; Zalewski 2003, 291). As a result, theres an
underlying tension in feminist IR work, where it cannot exist in the
space allocated to it, but it cannot escape that space either its
protest is corralled into inhabitable space when it be functional if and
only if it finds a way to inhabit uninhabitable space. In other words (like
much critical theorizing with a political protest against the business as
usual ontologically, epistemologically, and/or methodologically), the
paradox of feminist theory as critical theory is that the imperium of the
discipline traps, orders, and tames its critique.
Some feminist theorists (e.g., Zalewski 2003) have suggested
that the answer to this paradox is in seeing feminist theorizing as
fundamentally undecidable an approach embraced by queer theorists
in a number of different contexts. At the same time, as Zalewski
suggests and queer theorists confirm it is that interruption,
instability, and undecidability that renders the uninhabitable space
that those approaches could inhabit so dangerous, and incentivizes
IRs taming behavior. Seeing IR as this sort of imperium vis a vis critical
theorizing brings up the question of what it would look like to occupy
IR. What would it look like to physically inhabit the discipline of IR? To
be an embodied disruption of the social order which makes inhabitation
27

impossible? To occupy a space of protest? A space of otherness? A

space of liminality? What would it look to reside in but remain outside
of the possible political space of IR? To use embodied power to resist
the orthoroxy and operationality of IR?
Certainly, the question of the relationship between critical IR and
mainstream IR has been explored in the discipline in a number of ways
(e.g., Sjoberg 2009). But the question of the materiality of occupation,
we argue, might be a good way to think about critical interventions in
IR. Several ways of thinking about this might bear fruit. The first is the
physical inhabitation of the discipline of IR. This is more complicated
than it first appears, given that the discipline of IR is a political
economy, where if one is able to be sustainably present, it is because
one is in some sense included by/with the discipline as a paid member
of a faculty, allowing one the time and resources to both eat and write.
At the same time, the intersection of that political economy of being a
faculty member and the political economy of knowledge production is
not zero-sum, where tokenist inclusion in the political economy of
being a faculty member can actually signify the creation of a
constitutive other in the political economy of knowledge production.
It is when it reaches this point that we argue that critical IR might
usefully benefit from thinking about and acting on occupying the
discipline of IR, and wield queer theorizing as a tool to analyze the
productivity of such a move. So far, such a strategy has not (explicitly
or implicitly) been a part of how critical theorists have dealt with IR,

28

outside of a few individual acts of civil disobedience. While some look

to stand outside of IR (Brown 1988) or actively reconstruct IR without
reference to the mainstream of the discipline (Squires and Weldes
2007), still others engage the discipline (Tickner 1992). These
strategies, though, might be enhanced by applying some of the unique
methods of occupation when we think about how to interact with the
discipline. For critical IR, physically inhabiting the discipline of IR might
be accomplished by going to the spaces that IR feels safe in its
exclusion of its critiques conference spaces, panel spaces, journal
spaces, book spaces, university spaces and occupying them
reading, writing, talking, interrupting. It might be accomplished by
establishing a physical presence places where critical are usually not
welcome infiltrating social space to infiltrate intellectual space,
coming uninvited, asking feminist questions of non-feminist work, and
the like. In IR, such occupation seems to accord with queer theorists
desire to to quiz or ridicule, to spoil, to put out of order, performing a
deconstructive practice that is not undertaken by an already
constituted subject, and does not, in turn, furnish the subject with a
nameable identity (Sullivan 2003, 50-52).
In this way, an embodied disruption of the social order may be
that sort of physical presence in unwelcome spaces or disruption of
existing physical space whether by speaking, attire, physical location,
or engagement in/with/at the international relations imperium. It might
be something as simple as wearing marriage equality or this is what
29

a feminist looks like tshirts in the place of business suits at

conferences, or something as complicated as a large-scale [insertcritical-group-here] presence intervening in a conference panel that
ignores or suppresses critique. Embodied disruptions can be in physical
presence itself or in the ways in which physical presences react to,
narrative, involve, or implicate a particular critique of the way that IR
works.
Occupying a space of protest, in Occupy movement terms, is to
refuse to keep protest confined to the allowed spaces (in feminisms
case, for example, feminist journals, feminist theory and gender
studies panels, allocated chapter space in textbooks and syllabi) and
instead to engage in interventionary protests in uninhabitable spaces.
Spaces of protest can be as straightforward as alternative textbooks
(e.g., Shepherd 2009) and as sideways as presenting a paper different
than that announced in an impermissible space for critical research.
Occupying a space of otherness requires transcending the confined
space of IRs constitutive other (inclusiveness that allows and produces
exclusiveness), to act simultaneously physically present in but
conceptually outside of, against, and contrary to the orthodoxy and
perfect operationality of IR.
Occupying a space of liminality for [queer] critical IR might mean
embracing both intellectual instability (there is not one critical position
but many) and disciplinary instability (critical IR is not homed in IR). In
this context, liminality means embracing uncertainty and change, in

30

the world, in the discipline, and in the research of the discipline. It is

not marginality or mainstream, engagement or ignoring, occupying or
complicity it is both sides of each of those dichotomies at once. The
occupation of liminal space is embracing the by nature unstable
identity and practice of [always already queer] critical IR.
Would an occupied IR look any different than a non-occupied IR?
Perhaps, perhaps not. Would the intellectual relationship between
critical IR and mainstream IR look different for the occupation? Almost
certainly. Would such an occupation be a substantive queering of the
discipline? We argue yes. For our purposes now, it is the intellectual
relationship that we are interested in the idea that a [queer] critical
occupation of IR makes IRs uninhabitable space inhabitable
fundamentally changing the borders/boundaries of the discipline and
their functioning, in ways similar to the (intellectual) impacts of making
the uninhabitable space of the other to the neoliberal imperium
inhabitable fundamentally rippled the tenability of the neoliberal
imperium. This is all the more true given the Occupy understanding
of knowledge(/its political relations and interactions) as inherently nonhierarchical, coincident with the critical IR interest in critically
reevaluating/deconstructing hierarchies in IR knowledges.
Occupying Research
All of that said, limiting the methodology of occupation to
understanding disciplinary politics seems both unnecessarily limiting,
especially given that it would follow the political implications that the

31

idea of Occupying IR has research process implications as well. This

section, then, addresses what it would mean to use Occupy as a
research method for IR, particularly in correspondence with the
critiques and perscriptions associated with queer theory.
There has been a significant amount of work (especially recently)
on critical IR methods the breadth and depth of that research could
be a paper itself. For now, we are going to use Ann Tickners
description: a deep concern with which research questions get asked
and why; a preoccupation with questions of reflexivity and the
subjectivity of the researcher; and the commitment to knowledge as
emancipation (2005, 4). This sort of scholarship is at once research
and politics; considering up front what it means to know and how we
construct knowledge. This view clashes heavily with the positivist bent
of business as usual political science, suggesting that the positivist
notion of objectivity is no more than the subjective knowledge of
privileged voices disguised as neutral (Harding 1998; Keller 1985;
Goetz 1991). The problem with this is not the privilege of those voices,
but the incomplete and unrepresentative experience (Scheman 1993,
211-2; Harding 1998).
In IR research, then, like in the neoliberal imperium, the
experiences of the few are taken as representative of the experiences
of the many - yet this unrepresentativeness hides behind culturally
assumed objectivity, where the privileged are licensed to think for

32

everyone so long as they do so objectively. As such, critical IR

research goals and the Occupy methodology might have common
interests and goals in terms of the politics of knowledge production and
knowledge consumption. We particularly find two ways where we think
the (queer view of) the method of Occupation might dovetail with the
work of critical IR, which we briefly sketch here.
The first idea is that researchers occupy the uninhabitable space of
liminality, particularly, the liminality of our research subjects.
Recently, scholars have been thinking about what it means for the
researchers body to be at risk and experience trauma in the research
process, particularly in field research.5 We argue that this could be
pushed further, towards thinking of occupation of/experience of
liminal/uninhabitable space inhabited by IRs traditional research
subjects as itself a research method, where sense and emotion are
the product and producer of research experiences. Living the liminality
that we often ignore even when we write about the situation is a
research experience a way to reside in but outside of the dominant
narrative of history/politics, a way to transgress the boundaries
between research subject/object and researcher, and a way to
understand the fundamental interdependence of the occupier and the
occupied in research terms. The combined uncertainty of the observer
(what is that?) and uncertainty in the consumption of the observed
(how is that experienced?) of living liminality potentially provides the

33

ability to inhabit the uninhabitable space of researcher-positioned-asresearched, breaking down the researcher/subject divide and providing
space for the use of embodied occupation to break down IRs
(disciplinary and research) sovereignties. This could be leveraged in
support of feminisms interests in critical political knowledge
production, anti-hierarchical transgression, and the creation of space
for both research and political practice outside of the IR/neoliberal
imperium(s).
The second contribution we argue that Occupy as method could
make to critical IR research is in understanding research more
generally as being stable in its liminality rather than anchored by a
static certainty about ontology, epistemology, method, or field politics.
One way to think about this might be thinking about IR as art, as
Christine Sylvester suggests:
Surrounded by enchanted positivism, which promises
progress in knowledge yes, this is the way! only a
long learning curve has brought us to the point of Xraying and carbon-dating the facts presented as
timeless tendencies, as objective IR. If we do not
journey along the learning curve, we end up trying to
draw without looking, observing, and reckoning with
life. (Sylvester 2002, 273)

34

Sylvester is arguing that seeing the world in a way that is linear,

rational, and exclusively scientific neglects a number of concerns which
are normatively important, which find their substance in the political,
the personal, and the critical. At the same time, anchoring research in
liminality contradicts the disciplines anchoring in a positivist social
science based on approximating certainty. As researchers, liminalityas-research-goal is another uninhabitable space in IR one which
might be physically inhabited as an embodied disruption of positivist
social science one which might be a space of otherness and a space
of protest all at once both providing new intellectual turf for IR and
disrupting its operationaliity.
Occupying Research to Occupy/Queer IR
We are interested in a number of ways that both research practice and
the political landscape of the field might change as a result of the
introduction of the methodological principles for performing research
and navigating the field that we glean from the ideas and practices of
the Occupy movement. In our view, one of the most useful questions
such an interpretation can ask is how the space of the need to
do/think things differently becomes/became less
inhabitable/uninhabitable space in the discipline of IR/the practice of
governance, and how to inhabit that uninhabitable space,
methodologically for IR theory and practically for the world of
governance? We think of it in terms the perfect operationality (in
Baudrillards terms) of a simulacrum of what IR is (or, in your terms
35

how to govern) where the system and its normalized opposition form
a tight narrative of completeness that makes otherness to it
impossible. That narrative completeness relies on bodies being where
they are supposed to be (in Foucauldian terms about biopower being
an enforcer of sovereignty), and re-placement of bodies (occupation)
interrupts the narrative completeness of the imperium by
demonstrating the inhabitability of uninhabitable space.
We think an occupy approach to IR method and IR politics might
serve a function of disrupting the narrative completeness of IR-asdiscipline and IR-research-practice that could have two transformative
effects. The first is to render inhabitable the uninhabitable space of
critical theorizing residing in IR though outside its compliant
following/compliant protest model. The second is to disrupt/disconnect
the neat lines between research subject and research object by
residing in the liminal space of the research subject as research. We
think that these two performances of occupation are both substantively
significant for the field on their own, and acts of the sort of disruption
that queer theorizing looks to cause. Using OWS methodology as a
model for queer/critical IR politics and methodology might further that
cause; seeing the OWS movement as queer politics might clarify and
sharpen both its critique and its methodology. Of course, both ideas
will require significant further development, and
questions/comments/rebukes are welcome.

36

Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. States of Exception Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Agathangelou, Anna and LHM Ling. 2009. Transforming World Politics:
From Empire to
Multiple Worlds. New York and London: Routledge.
Arendt, Hannah. 1998 [1958]. The Human Condition (2nd Edition).
Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Barder, Alexander and Daniel Levine. 2012. The World is Too Much
with Us:
Reification and the Depoliticizing of Via Media Constructivist IR
Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 40(3):585-604.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1976. LEchange Symbolque et la Mort. Paris: Editions
Gallimard.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1970. Le Societe de Consummation Paris: Editons
Denoel.
Binnie, J. 1997. Coming Out of Georgraphy: Towards a Queer
Epistemology?
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15(2): 223-237.
Bolgerm Julie. 2011. Were Here, Were Queer, We are the 99%, The
Advocate 05
October 2011, accessed 14 August 2013 at
http://www.adovate.com/news/daily-news/2011/10/06/were-herewere-queer-we-are-99?page=full.
Browne, Kath. 2006. Challenging Queer Geographies, Antipode
38(4):885-93.
Brown, Sarah. 1988. Feminism, International Theory, and International
Relations of
Gender Inequality. Millennium: Journal of International Studies
17(3): 461-475.
Butler, Judith. 2011a. For and Against Precarity, Tidal 1: 11-14.
Butler, Judith. 2011b. Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,
OccupyLA
Reader, v.1-3: 2-15.
Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence London:
Verso.
Butler, J. 2004. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge.
Currah, P. and T. Mulqueen. 2011. Securitizing Gender: Identity,
Biometrics, and
Transgender Bodies at the Airport. Social Research 78(2): 557582.

37

DeLuca, Kevin, Sean Lawson and Ye Sun. 2012. Occupy Wall Street on
the Public
Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a
Protest Movement, Communication, Culture, and Critique 5(4):
483-509.
DisOccupy. 2012 For People Who Have Considered Occupation But
Found It Is Not
Enuf. April 24, 2012, Disoccupy.wordpress.com, accessed 14
August 2013.
Duggan, L 2003. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural
Politics, and the Attack
on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Elmer, Greg and Andy Opel. 2008. Preempting Dissent: The Politics of
an Inevitable
Future New York: Arbeiter Ring Publishing.
Foucault, Michel. 2003[1976]. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at
the College de
France, 1975-1976. London: MacMillan.
Foucault, Michel. 2009[1977]. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the College de
France 1977-1978. London: MacMillan.
Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. Bananas, beaches, and bases: making feminist
sense of
international politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
van Gelder, Sarah. 2011. This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street
and the 99%
Movement New York: Berrett-Koehler.
Gitlin, Todd. 2012. Occupy Nation: The Roots , the Spirit, and the
Promises of Occupy
Wall Street. New York: HarperCollins.
hooks, Bell. 1990. Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical
Openness, from Yearings:
Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics.
Goetz, Anne M. 1991. Feminism and the claim to know:
contradictions in feminist
approaches to Women in Development. In Gender and
International Relations, edited by Rebecca Grant and Kathleen
Newland. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press.
Halliday, Fred. 1988. Hidden from International Relations: Women and
the International
Arena. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17(3):419428.
Holsclaw, Geoffrey. 2011. Occupy Wall St. Zizeks Act or Badious
Event? On The

38

Church and Postmodern Culture, accessed 15 November 2012 at

http://theotherjournal.com/churchandpomo/2011/11/21/occupywall-st-zizeks-act-or-badious-event/
Hozic, Aida. 2012. Return to the Real, Journal of Critical Globalsation
Studies 5: 14952.
Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. 2012. Three Thoughts about What
#occupyirtheory Might
Mean, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies 5: 107-109.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1985. Reflection on gender and science. New
Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Keohane, Robert O. 1998. Beyond Dichotomy: Conversations Between
International
Relations and Feminist Theory. International Studies Quarterly
42: 193-198.
Keohane, Robert. 1989. International Relations Theory: Contributions of
a Feminist
Standpoint. Millennium: Journal of International Studies
18(2):245-253.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 2005 [1972]. Humanism of the Other. Tran. Nidra
Poller. UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press.
Levine, Judith. 2012. Occupys Woman Problem. Seven Days 25 April
2012, accessed
14 August 2013 at http://www.7dvt.com/20102occupys-womanproblem.
Meronek, Toshio. 2011. How To Make Occupy Wall Street More TransInclusive, The
Bilerico Project, 1 November 2011, accessed 14 August 2013 at
http://www.bilerico.com/2011/11/sylvia_riveral_project_teachin_at_occupy_wall.php.
Nash, C. J. Torontos Gay Village (1969-1982): Plotting the Politics of
Gay Identity, The
Canadian Geographer 50(1): 1-16.
Oswin, N. 2008. Critical Geographies and Uses of Sexuality:
Deconstructing Queer
Space, Progress in Human Geography 32(1): 89-108.
Peterson, V. S. 2013. The Intended and Unintended Queering of
States/Nations,
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 13(1): 57-68.
Puar, J. 2006. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.
Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Roberts, Alasdair. 2012. Why the Occupy Movement Failed. Public
Administrative
39

Review 72(5): 754-62.

Scheman, Naomi. 1993. Engenderings: constructions of knowledge,
authority, and
privilege. New York and London: Routledge.
Shepherd, Laura, ed. 2009. Gender Matters in Global Politics. London:
Routledge.
Shepherd, L. J. and L. Sjoberg. 2012. Trans- Bodies in/of War(s):
Cisprivilege and
Contemporary Security Strategy, Feminist Review 101: 5-23.
Sjoberg , L. 2012. Toward Trans-gendering International Relations?
International
Political Sociology 6(4): 337-354.
Sjoberg, Laura. 2009. Introduction to Security Studies: Feminist
Contributions, Security
Studies 18(2):184-214.
Squires, Judith and Jutta Weldes. 2007. Beyond
Being Marginal:
Gender and
International Relations in Britain. British Journal of Politics and
International Relations 9:185-203.
Steans, Jill. 2003. Engaging from the margins: feminist encounters with
the mainstream
of International Relations. British Journal of Politics and
International Relations 5(3):428-454.
Sylvester, Christine. 2002. Feminist international relations: an
unfinished journey.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tarrow, Sidney. 2011. Why Occupy Wall Street is Not the Tea Party of
the Left, Foreign
Affairs 10 October 2011, accessed
athttp://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/98544.
Tickner, J. Ann. 1998. Continuing the Conversation. International
Studies Quarterly
42:205-210.
Tickner, J. Ann. 1997. You Just Dont Understand: Troubled
Engagements Between
Feminists and IR Theorists. International Studies Quarterly 41,
611-632.
Tickner, J. Ann. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on
Achieving International Security. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Warner, Michael. 2012. Queer and Then? The Chronicle of Higher
Education 1 January
2012, accessed 14 August 2013 at
http://chronicle.com/article/QueerThen=/130161.

40

Weber, C. 1995. Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and

Symbolic Exchange.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zalewski, Marysia. 2003. Womens Troubles Again in IR. International
Studies Review
5:291-294.
Zimmerman, Lila. 2011. Occupy Wall Street: A Protest that Does Not
Discriminate. Go
Magazine 9 November 2011, accessed 14 August 2013 at
http://www.gomag.com/article/lila_zimmerman/,
Zizek, Slavoj. 2011. Speech at Occupy Wall Street. In OccupyLA, p.5254.
Zizek, S. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.

41

1 Tarrows (2011) argument is that Occupy Wall Street is a movement of a completely

new type, where policy platforms are not the point of this new kind of movement.
Instead, this is a we are here sort of movement, in Tarrows terms, which has an
uncertain future.
2 For a perspective on OWS successes, see Todd Gitlin (2012), who characterizes the
movement as pioneering, intellectual, symbolic, and effective. For a perspective on OWS
failures, see Roberts (2012), who suggests that the attempt to work through existing
political institutions might be counterproductive.
3 Anna Agathangelou and LHM Lings (2009) words
4 http://occupyirtheory.info
5 See the forum on Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher in the December 2011
issue of International Studies Review edited by Christine Sylvester.