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The Intended and Unintended Queering of States+Nations
The Intended and Unintended Queering of States+Nations
The Intended and Unintended Queering of States+Nations
The appeal to the natural is one of the most powerful aspects of commonsense thinking, but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies
history.
(Weedon 1987:3)
To characterize something as natural both denies its history and erases its
politics. As a contribution to queering states/nations, I consider in this essay the
history hence politics of sex, sexuality, and states. Reading early state
formation the rise of civilization as constituting and normalizing binary
sex/gender difference and heteropatriarchal kinship relations, I argue that
making states is making sex. Making both involves multiple, interactive
transformations: in self/subject and collective identities, symbolic systems of
meaning, institutional arrangements, and regulatory, coercive, and juridical
forms of power. Once states are successfully made, to ensure intergenerational
continuity they monitor biological and social reproduction. This has historically
featured instituting a heteropatriarchal family/household as the basic socioeconomic unit, regulating womens biological reproduction, and policing sexual
activities more generally.
Increasingly formalized in the transition to modernity, patriarchal households
and the sex/gender binary feature in the context of European state-making, the
international system of states/nations it generated, and the (nationalist) colonizing practices it proliferated. These arrangements spurred heteronormative and
nationalist ideologies and subjective investments in both particular (birthright)
political-economic arrangements and (exclusionary) imagined communities of
states/nations. In short, the heterosexism/heteronormativity of modern states is
marked by hierarchical dichotomies constituting sex as malefemale biological
difference, gender as masculinefeminine subjectivities, and sexuality as
heterosexualhomosexual identifications.1
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previously valued dimensions of their identities and activities. To ensure a numerically adequate population, establish (inheritable) claims to property and membership, and promote in-group allegiance, states regulated sexual relations.
Typically, this involved restrictive expectations as well as legal codes disciplining
womens sexual activities and establishing a norm of (biologically reproductive)
heterosexuality (without presuming modernist understandings of homosexual
identity or proscriptions against homoerotic behaviours). That females faced
greater restrictions than males alludes to deepening sex/gender asymmetries.
In these processes, states abstracted and centralized authority in a political
(public) sphere that was thus distinguished from, while being dependent upon, a
household (private) sphere focused on subsistence and social reproduction. Men
especially those with inherited claims to property acquired status, authority,
and resources as patriarchal heads-of-households, and some gained additional
status through identification with military activities or religious or political authority. Women typically lost status, authority, and resource claims that they variously
enjoyed in kinship communities; in the transition to patriarchy they became
transmitters of property and in norms regarding adultery property of their
men. Relatively isolated in individual households, women became more dependent
upon fathers and husbands, losing access to the countervailing support of extended
kin networks. These altered arrangements amplified malefemale distinctions and
presumably cultivated gender-differentiated identities (subjectivities).
In the Western tradition (flowing from Greek city-states), centralization
involved normalizing foundational dichotomies (publicprivate, reasonaffect,
mindbody, culturenature, civilizedbarbarian, masculinefeminine) both materially (divisions of authority, power, labour, and resources) as well as conceptually
(justificatory ideologies, collective belief systems). Not least because statemaking involved the invention of writing, these systemic transformations were
codified, and that codification (in Western philosophy, political theory, classical
and religious texts) profoundly shaped subsequent theory/practice.
Early states are important then, for the patterns and institutions they stabilized:
sex/gender asymmetries (divisions of labour and status; women as property;
heteropatriarchal households), masculinism (male right to rule; patriarchal transmission of property and membership claims), and inequalities of status, resources,
and power (elite rule; public over private; productive or specialized over reproductive or menial labour; citizens over Others). Given the salience of inherited
claims to property and membership status, (womens) adultery was severely
punished, but non-reproductive sexual behaviours that did not threaten heteropatriarchal structures drew far less attention.
Modern European States/Nations and Heteronormative Politics
[T]o understand the forces that . . . make up the us and them comprising
the affinities and enmities of enduring inter-state inequality and systemically
violent conflict, then we must move . . . towards a deeper understanding of
the rules that hold together the state as a membership organisation.
(Stevens 2006:755)
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While patriarchal dominance and gendered ideology were contested and only
eventually took shape in early state formation, they were largely taken for granted
in European state-making processes and their colonizing practices. In the intervening centuries, patriarchal authority was routinized in monotheistic belief
systems and patriarchal kinship reproduced and extended (unequal) divisions of
authority, power, labour, and resources. The modern eras celebration of
rationalist/objectivist science did complicate how authority was legitimated, but
not how it was gendered masculine.
By definition, European state-making replicated earlier processes: centralization of resources and authority, organization of military capacity, and ideological
consolidation under elite control. But state-making in the modern era was shaped
by both the legacy of earlier states and the emergence of new techniques, modalities, and operations of power. Whether described as the penetrating infrastructural
power of states (Giddens 1987; Mann 1984) or new mechanisms of disciplinary
power and biopolitics (Foucault 1980), the key insight is a shift from more to less
direct operations of power and new understandings of government.
Modern states required far more knowledge about their subjects. Hence, their
interest in and cultivation of the social and human life sciences (to provide
expertise) and development of bio-political strategies (censuses, statistics,
programmes to enhance the health, education, etc. of expanding populations) all
in support of producing civilized subjects who will govern and care for themselves and exercise their citizenship responsibly (Rose 1996:45). In complex and
varying ways, the emerging art of government (re)configured categories and
relations of sex/gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race.5 But while there are many
critiques of sexism, of heteronormativity, and of nationalism, how these overlap
and interact has only recently become a focus of inquiry (e.g. Morgensen 2010;
Puar 2007). I turn then to briefly consider how pervasively nationalism presumes
and tends to reproduce sexist and heteronormative assumptions and practices.6
First, nationalist policies involve regulating under what conditions, when, how
many, and whose children women will bear. The forms taken are historically
specific shaped by socio-religious norms, technological developments, economic pressures, and political priorities. But states often seek to increase or
replenish their numbers, and in the context of pronatalist policies, nonreproductive sexual activities are deemed threatening to national interests. States
may restrict access to contraception, criminalize abortion, reward childbearing,
demonize homosexuality, and/or represent the primary purpose of family life as
sexual reproduction. In general, potentially reproductive women will be encouraged (pressured?) to bear children for the nation while non-reproductive sexual
activities will be discouraged (punished?) for undermining national objectives.
Second, states have an interest in whether children are appropriately socialized, and therefore in the constitution of families/households as primary sites of
social reproduction. In particular, states sustain sexist and heteronormative principles through legislation regarding marriage, child adoption and custody, and
transmission of property and citizenship claims. Exclusively heteropatriarchal
family life ensures that heterosexual coupling and gendered divisions of labour/
power/authority are the only apparent options, which reproduces sexist and heter61
shared, in theory all men (compared to women) can identify with the cultural
valorization of men and (hegemonic) masculinity and mens favoured access to
public sphere activities, authority, and power. And in practice, militarization as a
male-dominated activity encourages men to bond politically and militarily as they
play out the us vs. them script of protecting their own women and violating the
enemys men/women. In effect, modern states cultivate male homosocial politics
celebrating masculinitys cultural valorization and (abstract) male bonding across
(actual) differences while decisively proscribing homosexual practices.8
Indeed, in modern states and in most countries today homosexuals (and
women) were excluded from military service. Recent challenges to this exclusion expose how deeply heterosexist premises underpin hegemonic masculinity.
As a site of celebrated (because non-sexual) homosocial bonding, the military
affords men a relatively unique opportunity to experience intimacy and interdependence, especially with men, in ways that heterosexist identities and divisions of labour otherwise constrain. Cohn (1998:145) argues that for many, the
military is effectively a guarantee of heterosexual masculinity, affording a rare
situation where
men are allowed to experience erotic, sexual, and emotional impulses that
they would otherwise have to censor . . . for fear of being seen . . . as
homosexual and therefore not real men. They are not only escaping a
negative imputations of homosexuality but gaining a positive, the ability
to be with other men in ways that transcend the limitations on male relationships that most men live under in civilian life.
Finally, the heterosexist state/nation denies homosexual bonding to both men and
women. But whereas men are expected to bond politically (homosocially) with
other men of the state/nation, the dichotomy of public and private spheres denies
womens homosocial bonding as well. Rather, as an effect of heteropatriarchal
households and inheritance rules, women are linked to the state through their
fathers/husbands and are expected to bond only through and with their men.9
Women then are not merely symbols or victims within nationalist struggles. They
are also agents: supporting their men/nation, participating in militarization, and
increasingly, taking up arms. To be effective, however, in hyper-masculinized
arenas, women are pressured to appear and reinforce heteronormative/masculinist
strategies, including the cultural devalorization and physical destruction of
Others.
The Queering of States/Nations
Heterosexuality is at once necessary to the states ability to constitute and
imagine itself, while simultaneously marking a site of its own instability.
(Alexander 1997:65, citing Hart 1994:8)
I have argued that the hierarchical binaries of embodied male-female sex difference and cultural masculine-feminine gender differentiation were constitutive of
early state-making, and taken for granted in modern (nationalist) state-making and
its colonizing projects. Gradually, most people/nations have been incorporated
63
Notes
1
65
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