Queer IR K – CNDI 2019

1NC
The reduction of arms sales is rooted in antiqueer liberal order and militaristic
paradigm, legitimizing future arms sales under the guise of human rights
Stravriankakis 18 (Anna Stavrianakis, Anna Stavrianakis is a Lecturer in International
Relations at the University of Sussex. Her main research interests are NGOs and global civil
society; the arms trade and military globalisation; and critical approaches to the study of
international security, “Controlling weapons circulation in a postcolonial militarised world,”
Review of International Studies, doi:10.1017/S0260210518000190, 5/16/18, pg. 3-5 )

The ATT is in many ways the epitome of post-Cold War humanitarian arms control and the
broader human security agenda. The purpose of reducing human suffering, the inclusion of IHL
and human rights in the operative provisions of the treaty and of SALW in the scope of
weapons to be regulated, as well as the landmark inclusion of gender-based violence (GBV) as
an issue States Parties must take account of when approving weapons exports, all point to the
ways in which human security and humanitarian arms control attempt to protect individuals
in war and in situations of armed violence. Key features of the negotiating process – the role of
small and middle powers, and civil society; and the challenges posed to the sclerotic UN
negotiating machinery – resonate with the global governance elements of previous human
security-related weapons campaigns against landmines, cluster munitions, and SALW .6 Indeed,
Jennifer Erickson describes the process as a ‘marriage between traditional security and human security begun by the landmine
campaign’.7 Activists and scholars have attempted to elevate human rights and humanitarian concerns for the broad swath of the
world’s population above the political economy and security interests of states and arms-producing companies. Weapons-
specific initiatives such as the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty and 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions
had shown the impact that a humanitarian framing can have in relation to particular
technologies. The negotiation of the 2001 Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and
Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects showed the
challenge of applying human security principles to weapons with legitimate military and security
uses – a challenge that was to resurface during the ATT negotiations. Regulating the conventional arms trade as a whole cannot
take a purely disarmament or humanitarian frame, given its deeply entrenched legitimacy. This makes the ATT a human
security initiative rather than a primarily humanitarian arms control or disarmament one 8 –
while it has the reduction of human suffering as a named purpose, this sits alongside
‘international and regional peace, security and stability’ in Article 1 of the text . As Mary Martin and
Taylor Owen put it, ‘The idea of arms control is appealing to proponents of human security because
it sets out to control tools of violence, as well as seeking to curb the dominance of the state in
determining the forms of insecurity to which policy solutions must be found. ’9 Jody Williams,
founding coordinator of the ICBL, calls on governments and civil society to work together, including on initiatives like the ATT, ‘to
advance human security as a viable alternative to militarism and violence and war’.10 Sympathetic criticism of the ATT has been
aired from within the academic and scholarpractitioner community. Matthew Bolton and Katelyn E. James argue that the
treaty
represents a ‘melding’ of a ‘“maximalist” human security – civil society approach with concerns
of developing countries and the “minimalist” strategic and commercial interests of the major
arms exporters’.11 Christine Chinkin and Mary Kaldor argue that ‘the humanitarian achievements’ of post-Cold War weapons
control ‘need to be complemented by disarmament’. That is, as well as ‘bringing states’ human rights
obligations into the heart of weapons control’, human security requires ‘the reduction of
existing weapon stocks and prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of
further weapons’.12 Such a call echoes the demand of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF),
one of the civil society organisations active on the ATT, for disarmament as a longstanding, yet marginalised feminist concern.13
Others have been less sympathetically critical. For
Neil Cooper, initiatives like the ATT ‘do not represent a
novel post-Cold War development that symbolizes progress on an emancipatory human security
agenda’.14 Post-Cold War arms trade regulation has been based on a ‘discourse around
humanitarianism, human security and weapons precision’ that has served to legitimise high-tech
military technologies.15 Cooper and others emphasise the deep historical roots of the way humanitarian
impulses intersect with economic and security ones, including in late nineteenth-century
efforts to regulate the supply and circulation of weapons in the imperial peripheries that are
remarkably resonant with contemporary efforts.16 Historically minded scholars remind us that surplus and
obsolete weapons have long circulated in the peripheries of empire, and new weapons tested
there; and political authorities were licensing weapons exports as early as the sixteenth century
– in part to avoid blowback.17 Arms trade regulation, then, has a ‘historically contingent’ character, marked by the
ongoing importance of ‘power, interest, economy, security’.18 Militarism emerges as a core concern out of such critiques and
provides the jumping-off point for this analysis. Inparticular, there are long traditions of historical
sociological and feminist scholarship on militarism ,19 defined here as ‘the social and international relations of
the preparation for, and conduct of, organized political violence’.20 In relation to arms control, I have argued
elsewhere that the ATT has been mobilised by liberal democratic states primarily to legitimise
their arms transfer practices.21 And Cooper concludes that ‘campaigners need to return to a strategic contestation of
global militarism rather than searching for tactical campaign victories dependent on accommodation with the language and
economic and security paradigms of contemporary military humanism’.22 This is part of a political economy
critique of the way ‘the regulation of pariah weapons might alternatively be described as
“arms control from below within the logic of militarism from above”’, 23 in line with a wider
critique of human security as having been ‘institutionalised and co-opted to work in the
interests of global capitalism, militarism and neoliberal governance ’.24 Neil Cooper and David Mutimer,
surveying the history of and prospects for controlling the means of violence, argue that ‘ the longer term, indirect effect
should be to reduce militarism and promote cultures of peace’ or ‘at the very least, avoid
further embedding cultures of militarism ’.25 How, then, should we think about the impact of
the human security agenda on militarism, and vice versa; and what are the ramifications for
weapons control?

The impact is homonationalism – a form of sexual exceptionalism that expels

racial and sexual others from the American empire
Puar 07 (Jasbir K., PhD ethnic studies, Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke
University Press. 2007)

National recognition and inclusion, here signaled as the annexation of homosexual jargon, is contingent upon
the segregation and disqualification of racial and sexual others from the national imaginary. At
work in this dynamic is a form of sexual exceptionalism—the emergence of national homosexuality, what I term
‘‘homonationalism’’—that corresponds with the coming out of the exceptionalism of American empire.
Further, this brand of homosexuality operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness,
queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual
subjects. There is a commitment to the global dominant ascendancy of whiteness that is implicated
in the propagation of the United States as empire as well as the alliance between this propagation and this brand of homosexuality.
The fleeting sanctioning of a national homosexual subject is possible, not only through the proliferation of sexual-racial subjects who
invariably fall out of its narrow terms of acceptability, as others have argued, but more significantly, through the
simultaneous engendering and disavowal of populations of sexual-racial others who need not apply. In
what follows I explore these three imbricated manifestations—sexual exceptionalism, queer as regulatory, and the ascendancy of
whiteness—and their relations to the production of terrorist and citizen bodies. My goal is to present a dexterous portrait, signaling
attentiveness to how, why, and where these threads bump into each other and where they weave together, resisting a mechanistic
explanatory device that may cover all the bases. In the case of what I term ‘‘U.S. sexual exceptionalism,’’ a narrative claiming the
successful management of life in regard to a people, what is noteworthy is that an
exceptional form of national
heteronormativity is now joined by an exceptional form of national homonormativity , in other
words, homonationalism. Collectively, they continue or extend the project of U.S. nationalism and
imperial expansion endemic to the war on terror. The terms of degeneracy have shifted such that homosexuality
is no longer a priori excluded from nationalist formations. I unearth the forms of regulation im- homonationalism and biopolitics 3
plicit in notions of queer subjects that are transcendent, secular, or otherwise exemplary as resistant, and open up the question of
queer re/production and regeneration and its contribution to the project of the optimization of life. The ascendancy
of
whiteness is a description of biopolitics pro√ered by Rey Chow, who links the violence of liberal deployments of
diversity and multiculturalism to the ‘‘ valorization of life’’ alibi that then allows for rampant
exploitation of the very subjects included in discourses of diversity in the first instance . I elucidate
how these three approaches to the study of sexuality, taken together, suggest a trenchant rereading of biopolitics with regard to
queerness as well as the intractability of queerness from biopolitical arrangements of life and death

Deconstruction of hierarchies of masculinity and militarism are a prerequisite to

any affirmative action and reconceptualize international relations.
Independently the affirmative’s epistemology justifies the male/female divide
that provides the foundation for all other hierarchies
Wibben 18 (Annick Wibben, Professor of Politics and International Studies as well as the
director of the Peace and Justice Studies program. She contributes to the Politics, International
Studies, Gender & Sexualities Studies, Peace & Justice Studies and Legal Studies curricula. Before
joining the USF faculty, she worked as co-Investigator (with James Der Derian) of the
Information Technology, War and Peace Project infopeace.org at the Watson Institute for
International Studies at Brown University from 2001-2005, “Why we need to study (US)
militarism: A critical feminist lens,” Security & Dialogue, 2018, journals.sagepub.com/home/sdi,
2018, pg. 143)

Militaries and militarism have discursively and practically been dependent on deploying
gendered myths and images – and on a variety of persons inside and outside militaries who accept them and act them
out. It thus becomes imperative not only to simply assert a link between (hegemonic)
masculinity and war, but also to explore more deeply how ‘masculinity in the context of the
military operates as a kind of intersection of hierarchies, in which a dominant hierarchical
distinction between masculine and feminine sustains other hierarchies within and between
men and women in different categories of military life’ (Hutchings, 2008: 392). This can be observed
in descriptions of basic training, where masculinity is bolstered not just by denigrating femininity
and female anatomy, but also at the intersection with sexuality, when those who are perceived
to deviate from the heterosexual norm are disparaged .9 Melissa Herbert’s (1998) study of the ways in which US
servicewomen have to negotiate femininity and masculinity is revealing here: she notes that women who minimize their
femininity to become ‘one of the guys’ are just as likely as women who play up their
femininity to have both their gender identity and their sexuality questioned . Notably, when
traditional femininity is emphasized, this is less threatening to military hierarchies since these servicewomen do not make a claim to
authority on the basis of hegemonic masculinities. Importantly, while these intersecting hierarchies are fluid (as
we can see after the reversal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the policy that did not allow gay and
lesbian service members to serve openly in the US military, where the threat of being labeled
lesbian or gay is less costly), ‘the only absolutely fixed element in the concept [hegemonic
masculinity] is its signification of superior value in a formal dynamics of valorization’ (Hutchings,
2008: 394).10 The official opening of all military occupational specialties in the US military to women, especially in branches such as
the US Marine Corps that have vehemently resisted this move, consequently must also be interpreted as a direct attack on this
hegemonic value system. Indeed, reading the resistance of the US Marine Corps as a deeply gendered
response to a (perceived) attack on hegemonic masculinity and its attendant privileges allows
for a deeper understanding of the length to which its leadership went to defend the status quo,
for example by producing a flawed study (Walters, 2015). At the same time, we might also consider
evidence from other fully integrated militaries (e.g. Eichler, 2013), which indicates that the integration
of women into combat is unlikely to impact the US Marine Corps’ culture without further
intervention by the leadership. Hutchings’ claims about shared norms of manliness and warfighting are supported by
Aaron Belkin’s (2012) analysis of military masculinity in the US military. He describes military masculinity ‘as a set of
beliefs, practices and attributes that enable individuals – men and women – to claim authority
on the basis of affirmative relationships with the military or with military ideals’ (Belkin, 2012: 3).
Importantly, as Herbert attests also, while ‘military masculinity has been more available to men than to women for sustaining claims
to power … women have harnessed it as well’ (Belkin, 2012: 3) – albeit with varying success. In her discussion of post-traumatic
stress, Sandra Whitworth (2008: 110) points out that it
‘lays bare the fragile ground on which [white] military
masculinity is built’.11 Given that the experience of military masculinity is dependent on gender
as well as on race, however, Whitworth finds that ‘whereas white [male] soldiers discover
through their emotions that they have not lived up to the norms of the warrior brotherhood,
women and marginalized men discover they were never equal partners in the ‘brotherhood’ to
begin with’ (Whitworth, 2008: 110–111). In the case of the US military, this is a common theme in recent (auto)biographical
accounts of servicewomen who have been on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is more, since women from
underrepresented groups serve at higher rates than white women (in the US military), the
intersections of gender and race crucially compound the effects of post-traumatic stress and
deserve more attention. The question of how gendered (and raced!) myths and images shape militarism concerns not just
women who are serving in the military, of course. Feminist scholars have long been paying attention to women’s lives also outside
and alongside militaries (for the divide is more false than real in everyday life). They find: Militaries
rely on women, but
not all women experience militarization identically. Militaries have needed and continue to
need some women to provide commercialized sexual services to soldiers, other women to
commit themselves to marital fidelity in military families; simultaneously, they need other
women to find economic security and maybe even pride in working for defense contractors . At
times, governments even need some civilian women to act as feminist lobbyists promoting women’s rights to serve in the state’s
military. (Enloe, 2007: xii) Feminist insights into the broader, everyday experiences of militarism provide support for feminist
skepticism regarding the current move to further integrate women into the US military – and leads us back to the questions posed in
the introduction: Who benefits and how? What changes and what stays the same? What is clear is that feminist scholarship has
much to contribute to current debates. Commenting on the state of feminist research on militarism and security, Annica Kronsell
and Erika Svedberg (2012: 6) assert that ‘the
implications [of these feminist interventions] are extensive;
theories of war are flawed if they lack a gender dimension and every strategy to end war for
peace must include a change of gender relations’. It is hard not to agree given the deep
enmeshment of norms of gender and war.
 Structural Claim
Cisprivilege oversaturates the affirmative’s approach to security and
reproduces ontopolitical, anti-queer violence on the international stage
Shepherd and Sjoberg 12 (Laura J, Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor
of International Relations at Sydney University, and Laura, PhD USC and associate professor of
Political Science at the University of Florida, Trans- bodies in/of war(s): Cisprivilege and
contemporary security strategy, Feminist Review) AG

Taking cisprivilege seriously draws attention to the fact that even the most inclusive
interpretations of security exclude the ambiguous (Munoz, 1999: 2), the cross (McCloskey, 2000: xii; Roen,
2002), the invisible (Bettcher, 2007: 52), the disidentified (Heyes, 2003: 1096) and the 'in' (Shotwell and Sangray, 2009:
59). We argue here that this is neither incidental nor accidental, even if it is not a conscious practice of
exclusion, and that these exclusionary practices are forms of violence . Foucault suggested that '[a] relationship of
violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks, it destroys or it closes off all possibilities' (1983: 340).
Violence perverts, inverts or renders unintelligible certain ways of being in the world while
endorsing others; in this, violence is perhaps best conceptualised as a specific relation of power that is not necess- arily
repressive but productive. A conceptualisation of violence inspired by Foucault can allow for the
admission of 'the exclusionary presuppositions and foundations that shore up discursive practices insofar as those
foreclose the heterogeneity, gender, class or race of the subject' (Hanssen, 2000: 215) as acts of
violence that are simultaneously practices of power. On this view, violence is not reducible to
(physical) constraint or repression but rather encompasses regulative idea(l)s and performs
ordering functions in our collective cognitive frameworks. If we accept that representing transpeople
and queer bodies specifically as in- and hypervisible in war stories and security strategy is a form of
violence, and that this violence has its foundation in unexamined and often unconscious privilege enjoyed
by cispeople, then we can begin to understand how a nuanced and sophisticated gendered theory of
security needs to incorporate corporeality, including trans- corporeality. We can note parallels
between transphobic violence (policing and actively (re)producing the boundaries of gender)
and transnational violence (policing and actively (re)producing the boundaries of religions,
states, ethnicities and/or alliances. Laura Shepherd (2008: 78; see also Shepherd, 2010c) terms these processes 'the
violent reproduction of gender' and 'the violent reproduction of the international'). The borders of gender are policed
as a part of an active policing of the borders between states , the borders between states and non-states, and
the borders between the (safe) self-state and the (dangerous, terrorist) other. Narratives of the international fetishise
and Orientalise the exotic 'Other' (be it a colonial other, a trans- other or a terrorist other) to associate
Otherness with violence and inspire violence towards the Other. 'Non-violent' resisters of existing
(engendered) social orders are often addressed by the dominant (gendered) social order violently, much like
non-violent transpeople are often attacked for the very presentation of trans-ness in the face of a social
order that excludes their existence both de jure and de facto. We suggest that these are ontopolitical practices; as
Michael Dillon explains, 'all political interpretation is simultaneously ontopolitical because it cannot but disclose the ontology
sequestered within iť (1999: 112). The ontopolitical (representational) practices of
security have thus far been
founded on embedded cisprivilege. The ontology of security, even of gendered security theory, has
conventionally relied on gender/sex certainty and gender/sex hierarchy. If it is analytically and conceptually
productive to see transphobic violence as the violent reproduction of a stable sex/gender
system that 'naturally' privileges cisgender performances because such performances are associated with normality and safety
and trans- performances are associated with danger and discomfort, it then becomes
possible to ask questions
about the ways that trans-in(/hyper)visibiIity, cisprivilege and a regulative, exclusionary
ontopolitical social order are violently reproduced in inter/transnational relations. In tentative
conclusion, we suggest that this might be a creative and constructive way forward that resists the dominant
ontopolitical practices of security-as-matter and gender-as-binary , both of which bring into being a
disguised and disfigured (corpo)reality of genderqueer and trans- bodies in/of war.

Homonationalism shapes modernity – it overdetermines IR, propelling

liberalism forward through queer human rights discourse that marginalizes the
sexualized Other
Puar 07 (Jasbir K., PhD ethnic studies, Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke
University Press. 2007)
My intention in Terrorist Assemblages was not only to demonstrate simply a relationality of the instrumentalization of queer bodies by the U.S. state,
or only the embracing of nationalist, and often xenophobic and imperialist interests of the United States by queer communities.
Homonationalism fundamentally highlights a critique of how lesbian and gay liberal rights
discourses produce narratives of progress and modernity that continue to accord some
populations access to cultural and legal forms of citizenship at the expense of the partial and full expulsion from those
rights of other populations. Simply stated, homonationalism is the concomitant rise in the legal, consumer, and

representative recognition of lgbtq subjects and the curtailing of welfare provisions, immigrant
rights, and the expansion of state power to surveil, detain, and deport. This process relies on the shoring up of the respectability
of homonationalism in trump times 229 homosexual subjects in relation to the performative reiteration of the pathologized perverse (homo- and
hetero-) sexuality of racial others, in specific, Muslim others upon whom Orientalist and neo-Orientalist projections are cast. However, in Terrorist
Assemblages I looked not only at the proliferation of queerness as a white Christian secular norm, but also at the proliferation of homonationalism in
South Asian queer communities in the United States, where forms of Hindu secularism and Indian nationalism often converge.
Homonationalism, therefore, is not a synonym for gay racism, a critique of the racial exclusions and whiteness of
mainstream lgbt communities, or another way to mark how gay and lesbian identities became available to

conservative political imaginaries. The concept of homonationalism has been adapted and redeployed
to suit different needs, different strategies, different politics. It has created synergy across and through
various political movements and struggles and has generated capacious theoretical paradigms
as well as important debates about the fraught relationships between academia and activists, theory and praxis.4 The text and its
conceptual apparatus have moved across different disciplinary and geopolitical terrains, crossing the activist-academic species divide many times over
and resonating with organizing underway in Northern Europe, the Middle East, India, and the United States. A robust debate about homonationalism is
happening in France, where funnily enough the book has been, in some circles, denounced for its queer intersectional thrust. Some interlocutors have
interrogated the relation of homonationalism to Israeli pinkwashing. Others take up the theorization of intersectionality and assemblage, noting,
correctly, that I do not properly honor the history or precarity of black feminist theories in relation to the institutional centrality of white male
canonicity. This is an error and an elision that I attempt to redress in a later article. As someone who has been drawing on the formative work of black
feminists and also insisting on and producing intersectional scholarship for two decades now, my interest in rethinking intersectionality was never
about a fidelity to assemblage theory, rather a commitment to what Mel Chen calls “feral methodologies.” I myself do
not think of
homonationalism as an identity, a position, or an accusation —it is not another marker meant to cleave a “good”
(progressive / transgressive / politically Left) queer from a “bad” (sold-out / conservative / politically bankrupt) queer. I feel it is especially unhelpful as
an accusation, as if some of us are magically exempt from homonationalism (by virtue, most often, through claiming the position of “queer” as one of
the political avant-garde or as politically pure, transcendent, or inherently immune to critique) and others of us are intrinsically predisposed to it. The
accusation 230 postscript of homonationalism works to disavow our own inevitable and complex
complicities with “queer” and with “nation.”5 As an analytic (rather than a descriptor, stance, or position) it most
forcefully attends to apprehending the consequences of the successes of lgbt liberal rights
movements, deployed to understand and historicize how and why a nation’s status as “gay-friendly” has become desirable in the first place. Like
modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and resignified, but not exactly opted out of: we are all

produced as subjects through it, even if we are against it. It is not something that one is either inside of / included or
against / outside of—rather, it
is a structuring force of neoliberal subject formation. As Maya Mikdashi helpfully
expounds, “Homonationalism is not the end goal of a conspiratorial ‘gay international,’ rather, it is only one aspect of the

reworking of the world according to neoliberal logics that maintains not only the balance of
power between states, but also within them.”6 The call-and-response process that continues to rely on opposing a
“mainstream/global queer” against a “queer of color / non-Western queer” often fails to interrogate the complex social field within which “ queer”

is being produced as a privileged signifier across these boundaries, with effects within multiple
national, regional, and local areas. While Joseph Massad’s work is not inaccurate about the history of sexuality and the travels of
the Master Sign of “sexuality” through colonial administrative institutions, his rendering of the “gay international,” privileging the figure of the native
subaltern sexual subject untainted by these transnational circuits, reifies the distinctions between the West and the rest that he insists should be
undermined and challenged Homonationalism is thus a structuring facet of modernity (rather than an
aberration or “liberalism gone bad”) and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by
nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality. This historical moment can
be called homonational to the extent that one must engage homonationalism in the first place as the condition of possibility for national and
transnational politics. And herein lies the ugliness of homonationalism, its bifocal capacity in one instance to attach and entrench bodies even more
deeply to the disciplinary force of sexuality through its offerings (hear Foucault, reminding us it is not freedom of sexuality we want but freedom from
sexuality) and yet still enact a convincing yet brutal liberalism against Others in the very name of this attachment. Trump will do no less than what is
already suspected: yank like a yo-yo, threatening the withdrawal of protection in one moment, lauding these very protections to vilify other countries,
religions, and races in another. The homonationalism in trump times 231 assemblage of homonationalism provides Trump, and nation-

states in general, an impressive arsenal of tools: a structure of modernity (connected to another enduring structure of
modernity, the nation-state); a convergence of geopolitical and historical forces; neoliberal interests in

capitalist accumulation through “multicultural difference ” both cultural and material (queer as consumer emerges in
line with other niche markets, most notably ethnic ones); biopolitical state practices of population control; and

affective investments in discourses of freedom, liberation, and rights (most notably invested in gay and lesbian
and sexual human rights discourses but also as an affective assemblage, in that it is a reading of attachments; attachment to the

nationstate arises as legitimate claim or right). Rearticulated as a field of power rather than an activity or property of any one nation-

state, organization, or individual, homonationalism is only useful in how it offers a way to track historical

shifts in the terms of modernity, even as it has become mobilized within the very shifts it was produced to name. What this also
means, I am proposing, is that we are all subjects produced through, not despite or against, homonationalism. And this leaves us with complex
questions about agency and accountability, which are no longer discrete or located in singular human bodies or concrete entities, but rather dispersed
across numerous entities. So the question becomes, for me, not so much who can or cannot be called
homonationalist, or which organizing projects are or are not homonationalist, but rather how the structural
expectations for homonationalism—expectations that are becoming hegemonic—are negotiated by groups who
may well want to resist such interpellation but need to articulate that resistance through the same logics of

homonationalism. How is homonationalism working or being strategically manipulated differently in different national/geopolitical contexts,
and are there homonationalisms that become productively intrinsic to national liberation projects rather than national imperialist/expansionist
projects?7 Homonationalism thus names a historical shift in the production of nationstates from the insistence on heteronormativity to the increasing
inclusion of homonormativity. The process of homonationalist inclusions-exclusions coheres not through 9/11 as a solitary temporal moment.
September 11 sometimes seems to function as an originary trigger, fostering a dangerous historical reification (what is sometimes cynically referred to
in the U.S. as the “9/11 industry.”). Looking back now, through the moment of 9/11, my interest in Terrorist Assemblages has been in the forty-year
span of the era of post–civil rights that, through the politics of liberal
inclusion, continued to produce the Sexual Other
as white and the Racial Other as straight . Certainly 232 postscript September 11 revealed and drew to the surface forms of
Islamophobia that, as Edward Said had argued, were already tremors in the “era of decolonization.”8 In the case of the United States, we can point to
the work of Nayan Shah, Eithne Luibheid, and Siobhan Somerville, who all elaborate on this binary production from earlier periods, highlighting the
forms of racial disaggregation at work in immigration legislation, the criminalization of sexual activity, and border patrolling.
 Framework
The affirmative reifies violent worldmaking through their war that sanitize US
interventionism– reject their gendered logics of domination
Hutchings 08 (Kimberly, leading IR scholar and PhD International Relations, 6/10/08,
Rethinking the Man Question, Cognitive Short Cuts, pp.40-41) AG

In their influential texts, Mearsheimer, Hardt and Negri aim to do two things through their arguments: first, they aim
to paint a big picture of what international politics is like, how it works, and what is likely to
happen to it; and second, they aim to establish the credentials of their particular mode of analysis in
relation to other possibilities. I have suggested in both cases that drawing on a logic of masculinity helps
accomplish these aims. It is likely that these theorists would argue that the use of masculine language and logic is a matter
of rhetorical decoration and does not affect the validity of their substantive inductive or deductive arguments. On this account,
these theorists could make the same arguments either without rhetorical decoration altogether or by using another set of rhetorical
tropes to make the same case. I would argue, however, that the logic of masculinity provides a powerful
incentive against raising questions about the substantive assumptions and inductive and deductive moves
made in the arguments of theorists such as Mearsheimer, Hardt and Negri. The framing of contemporary
international politics in terms of masculinity logic locks our social scientific imagination into a
very familiar world in which we already understand how things ontologically work in terms of
value hierarchies. But it also provides a massively efficient short cut for the cognitive tasks of
categorization and analysis and for the evaluative tasks of judgement with which Mearsheimer, Hardt and Negri are concerned.
Of course, it is the case that the formal characteristics of the logic of masculinity are intertwined with
other conceptual schemes grounded in binary oppositions. We have, for instance, seen how the
distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ operates to help sustain the logic of contrast and
contradiction essential to Mearsheimer, Hardt and Negri’s arguments. Nevertheless, we have also seen, at least in the context
of these particular theories of world politics, the logic of masculinity providing a particularly stable reference point
for rendering the cognitive operations of contrast and contradiction intelligible, regardless of referential meanings
assigned to practising or theorizing international politics.17 Cognitive short cuts 41 Feminist scholars have long pointed
out that the logic of masculinity, as a mechanism for framing our understanding of international
politics, renders the thinking of the feminine and the feminized impossible other than in terms of lack or
absence. Quite rightly, much feminist analysis has been devoted to tracing the practical effects of this logic for the ways in which
international politics is practised and understood and as a precursor to challenging masculine hegemony in its many different forms.
As this chapter has demonstrated, however, the
resilience of masculinity as a mode of making sense of
world politics reflects the amount of analytic and normative work that it accomplishes . Therefore, it
raises the question of what kind of politics and theory would be possible without the work
accomplished by gendered logics. This also suggests that disentangling the operations of thought from
the operations of gender is a profoundly difficult task.
Links
 Political Economy
The aff is part and parcel of Western anti-intimate political discourse –
grounding “Third World” problems in materiality while erasing the anti-queer
undercurrents that drive violence
Buskharan 04 (Suparna, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Agnes Scott College, Made
in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national projects, November 2004, pp. 113-
115)///AG

- Note: “Khush” is a term many South Asian queers use to refer to themselves
Tolerance is tinged with an urge to define khush women or desi dykes as the economically privileged “Western” impersonator.
Western or westernized in this discourse operates as a sign that inconsistently draws from the
following: the decadent, superfluous, English-speaking, sell out, traitor, passive/active mimic,
privileged, not “oppressed,” individualistic, anti-structural/social and with capital. Real issues,
many khush women have been told, in a Third World nation are about economics and politics:
poverty, the environment, development, caste violence, religious fundamentalism, structural
adjustment, literacy, and population control—all of which supposedly do not exist within a
postcolonial political economy of sex and obligatory hetero- sexuality. Feminist work has
pointed to the disproportionate feminization of poverty. This uneveness is also directly
configured by an economy of compulsory heterosexuality, simultaneously constitutive of women’s experiences
of caste, religion, and region, which gains sur- plus value off of the service economy of women’s erotic and non- erotic labor. The
heteronormative economy deeply structures intimate lives and the avoidance in political
analysis of the intimate leads schol- ars to reduce “sexuality” to individual choice . I believe anti-
intimate political analysis has deep roots in the following: first, an arrogant distancing tendency among certain
scholars to represent and give voice to “the masses” and an unwillingness to examine one’s per- sonal privilege; second, a nativist
and orientalist suspicion of individ- uality in India; third, a tendency to understand subjects through one axis of identity (and thus a
The first
limited analysis of subjectivity and subject positions); and, four, the deployment of a bi-polar victimology framework.
point, mentioned above, refers to a particular academic- activist middle-class guilt that seeks only to
represent and speak solely for “the underdog.” The representing subject either assumes a self-
sacrificing “activist” role or seeks to be unmarked. The potential of being an ally or building
alliances is subsumed under an authoritative, objective, “down with the masses,” self-sacrificing
mode. Second, the suspicion of anything “personal” has much to do with the quick dismissal of individuality
as solipsistic atomic individualism. For example, claims such as, “Indian culture is not known for individualism or
individuals.” Individuals and individualism is conflated, and individualism is seen as a western phenomenon ,
which in turn deals with personal concerns such as sexuality. This automatically precludes an
analysis of (hetero) sexuality as a normative institution that differentially benefits actors
economically, culturally, or politically. Third, actors are primarily understood through only one axis of iden-
tity. For example, being a rural farmer may still benefit the subject as father, husband, or son
through male and heterosexual privilege and concurrently through economic class or caste.
Accusations of middle-class-ness are stretched to meaningless-ness in order to silence projects
that seek to understand subjects as constituted by multiple axes of privilege and subordination. And,
finally, by the bipolar framework of victimology , I mean an extension of the third point. In this framework, actors
are understood solely as victims or perpetrators, as subalterns or dominators, and never in a
complex nexus. Complex subjectivities produce contradic- tory, ambiguous, and imperfect
politics. Complex agents struggle in ways that accommodate and protest systems of
subordination. It is from this contradictory, ambiguous, and imperfect position that I begin to address this question as well as
my own not so innocent interest in media accounts of lesbian pacts.

The aff re-legitimizes the state through anitqueer militarism that renders
populations disposable and justifies interventions
Agathangelou 17 (Anna M. Agathangelou, Professor Agathangelou teaches in the areas of
international relations and women and politics. Some of her areas of expertise are time and
temporality in global politics, the body, time and ecology, international feminist political
economy and feminist/postcolonial and decolonial thought. She is the co-director of Global
Change Institute, Cyprus and was a visiting fellow in the Program of Science, Technology and
Society at John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard (2014-2015). She is currently
involved on two multinational SSHRC partnership research projects focusing on sexual violence
and human security, global governance, and biotechnology. She has researched ethnic conflict
in Cyprus, as well as reconstruction in post-conflict societies with a focus on sexual violence,
displaced peoples and the missing, 6/20/2019, York University, “From the Colonial to Feminist
IR: Feminist IR Studies, the Wider FSS/GPE Research Agenda, and the Questions of Value,
Valuation, Security, and Violence,” doi:10.1017/S1743923X17000484, pg. 740-43. November
2017)

At the forefront of IR theory, criticalfeminists in FGPE and FSS challenge dominant notions of what the
“international” (that is, a way of bringing into view the world as a single, unified entity, articulated in space and developing
over a shared and linear notion of time) is and ought to be, how and what institutions emerge, and with
whom as their imagined public. This work has stretched our grammars/logics of gendered
accumulation regimes and genealogies of violence. In problematizing such knowledge systems
and their re/production, IR feminists have provided us with insights into how to understand the
co-constitution of international relations and the international order (Enloe 2004; Peterson 2003; Rai and
Waylen 2013; Steans 2013; Tickner 1992). And yet, the gendered and racialized separations and specializations of the state’s
institutions and the market in world politics inform the formation of the different feminist schools of thought and their
conversations/tensions/nonconversations. Here,
property, possession, and military/police might are the
co-constitutive primary values of our global order and the constitutive material of the legal
regimes that guide these relations, including the possible insistence on the
segregation/specializations of FGPE and FSS. Insisting to focus on questions separately from the ways grammars
and categories becomes part of certain knowledge/power economies and regimes, preventing us from questioning the
unacknowledged and complicit agreements in the re/production of feminisms and their analytic bounded
separations/prioritizations. Why
is it that some reading modalities demand we zoom in to narrower
categories of violence such as “genderinfused violence,” “threatened violence in any economic
transformation,” work (i.e., not idleness), interstate conflict (True 2015), instead of racialized violence?
Why is it that others zoom in on the notion of a linear stream of progress instead of the multiple
actors’ practices that generate the possibility of meaning and value of existence otherwise ? One
wonders whether and when such work sanitizes the existing and emerging multiple scalar violences entangled with the fabric of our
assembled imperialist order. Insisting
on this division prevents us from asking—and beyond the
epistemological differences/tensions that have emerged over time— about the shared
frameworks, values, fragilities, and desires toward notions of re/production, labor-power, value,
and in/security that have been preserved across this segregation/specialization . Global politics
are never just “economic” or “security” issues. In our times and globally, when
race/sexuality/gender/nation are being coproduced as a response and challenge to dominant
forms of value in the form of coercive interventions of militarization and police powers, we
are forced to confront the way IR feminisms in their different iterations ask questions (see, for
example, Black Lives Matter; also Rai and Waylen 2013), albeit narrowly punctuated as exploitation and noncompensation, conflict
and war. Whatare the stakes in rereading from the vantage point of slavery/settler colonialisms
the process of primitive accumulation, as a moment of genesis, which, “like a concave mirror,
returns the image of the capitalist mode of production in its totality, by illuminating . . . certain
fundamental but hidden characteristics of the functioning of ‘normality’ ”? (Mezzadra 2008, 134) (what is
normal within certain boundaries of knowledge production; what kinds of value and in/security do such knowledge production
accord to the slave/the colonized?). What can such a reading concretize as theoretical possibilities with regard to the temporality of
world capitalism, the production of labor power as a commodity, and the possibilities for rethinking of the state/security question?
What does such a focus allow for the possibility of IR feminist interventions, and in relation to
conceptions of a truly global nonviolent world in theory and practice? Next, I point to how a
compositional FSS/FGPE approach with slavery/colonization at the center interrupts normative
knowledge/production regimes, including what/when is an issue a problematic. Our times
feature conversations on environmental degradation (Agathangelou 2016; Burke, Fishel, and
Mitchell 2016; Mitchell 2016), highlighting how an emergent politic is characterized by the
coproduction of morbidity and surplus value . Although advances in biotechnology, from
genetically modified organisms to gene editing, from geo-engineering to reducing carbon
emissions, “have given us tools to tinker with life itself ” (Jasanoff 2016), these inventions (and their
corresponding degradations) are unevenly distributed. Environmental experiments and
extermination policies of state bodies, genetic laboratories, military, police agencies, and
corporations under the political and economic support and racist social oppression by the
upper classes and international corporate elite profitably designate and select flesh, bodies,
races, gender, nations, marginalized populations and multiple ecologies as nature for access
and generation of value/ surplus value. Race, flesh, gender, nations, etc., are constituted as the technologies
of hierarchically dividing humanity from nonhumans and the international order by sieving
through those who deserve to live and which bodies to turn into the sites of violence with
impunity (Agathangelou 2016; Wilderson 2003). FGPE and FSS can grapple with how such production and
sorting through of value/valuations and nonvalue/devaluations of biological reproduction
work to generate a certain power privilege and security through and within the corporations,
the state, the international organizations for some and not others . FGPE and FSS may ask questions about
whether capitalism promotes economic extractions as racism. Do idle people, for example, challenge the legitimacy of corporations
that presume that their only possibility is work and extraction of value? How so? For instance, a major category such as work is
problematized by antislavery feminists as they argue that claims to a fair and equal production do not stand. The
system
depends on the co-constitution of the “slave,” her work and being and extraction for its
possibility. What notions of violence are imagined and embodied in the market’s and state’s
authority practices toward the ordering and zoning of peoples in the private and public realms ?
We might ask questions about how the colonial and racist archives’ “accumulated erasures, projections, fabulations and
misnamings” (Sharpe 2016, 12) and methods force people into positions that run against what they live everyday, what and how
they know. FGPE and FSS can grapple with the propositional assumptions they share about
subjects, species, value, security, land, violence, and freedom: how are certain notions of the
“human” tethered to value extraction? And others to value theft? Or how does the agricultural industry
come to value (and simultaneously ignore those less than humans’ inhabitants who do not possess legal rights) the
indigenous populated lands as sparse and mainly for logging and converting to farmland or for
sale to realtors worldwide? What form of violence do these enclosures and mostly liberal moral assumptions about
territory, land, work coproduce? What form of deaths, privileges and in/security do they make possible?
States, militaries, and corporations depend on our feminist disciplinary inquiry in the making of
the international order. The familiar and abstract notions that the state is responsible for its citizens’ security and that the
market should produce fair and democratic work for all become useful propositions toward the management and governmentality
of peoples. Some humans and workers have value; their lands, institutions, and property ought to
be secured and protected. Others are selected for access or left to death (and when they work cannot
be true workers); they do not register as humans, so violence can happen to them and their
ecologies with impunity (i.e., they are seen as empty anyway). A feminist compositional reading, of and
by FSS and FGPE, with an attention to race/colonial/neo-colonial apparatus, interrupts
normative notions about security and economy, and allow us to consider how we go about
producing dominant notions about the zoning of ecologies and people (i.e., those who work and are
deserving citizens; those who are idle/ criminals/lazy), their management, imprisonment, and decimation. This global materiality
could be problematized from the viewpoint of those whose value is extracted daily and whose existence and ecologies are being
policed, criminalized, and killed.
 Statecraft
Arms control programs are a product of hegemonic masculinity – the
assumption of irrational, violent states in the Middle East props up America as
the “Just Warrior” who saves the day, reproducing gendered violence while
sanitizing the conscience of the Western Man
Wright 09 (Susan, PhD in history of science and research scientist in the Institute for Research
on Women and Gender in the University of Michigan, Routledge Critical Studies, Gender and
International Security Feminist Perspectives, 10/16/2009, Feminist Theory and Arms Control,
http://booksdescr.org/ads.php?md5=9D1A07F25F38BBDACB498C1C26A71EAC)///AG

Bull and Schelling justify the use of “power over” states that are treated as adversaries , or potential
adversaries, in several ways. First, violence in the state system, and therefore the need to defend
against it, are taken as given. As Bull wrote: It is true that strategists take the fact of military force as their starting point
… The capacity for organized violence between states is inherent in the nature of man and the environment.
The most that can be expected from a total disarmament agreement is that it might make armaments and armed forces fewer and
more primitive.75 This claim of the inevitability of violence and the consequent need for military
protection have been extensively analyzed by feminist theorists. If violence is inevitable, then
someone or something is required to defend against it . Jean 206 Susan Wright Elshtain, Laura Sjoberg, and other
feminist theorists have demonstrated the pervasive tradition of western political thought that
claims that the inevitability of violence calls for the services of a Just Warrior (representing
variously the state military apparatus or the soldier) who is “engaged in the regrettable but
sometimes necessary task of collective violence in order to prevent some greater wrong” to the
Beautiful Soul, representing variously patria or the homeland or innocent civilians .76 Bull’s political
philosophy falls completely within this tradition. A second feature that legitimates a state’s exercise of “power over” another
is the focus in both strategy and arms control on ends rather than means. Schelling and Bull are
silent about the nature of the means used to exercise power over other states. The horrific
effects of nuclear, chemical, biological, or of war in any form receive no attention except to dismiss those
who focus on them. The ends, on the other hand—the security and survival of the state— are all
important. As Bull commented: There is a sense in which strategic thinking does and should leave
morality out of the account … if what is being said is that strategic judgments should be coloured by moral considerations
or that strategic inquiry should be restricted by moral taboos, this is something that the strategist is bound to reject.77 This moral
silence is related to a further major feature of Bull and Schelling’s work: the “psychic numbing”
concerning the weapons assumed to guarantee the state’s security. As Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk argue, human
beings develop powerful psychic walls to protect them from contemplating the effects of
extreme violence.78 “Psychic numbing” is a defense mechanism that represses, denies and excludes contemplation of
massive death and destruction. In their analysis of nuclear strategy and arms control, Bull and Schelling enlist
this psychological mechanism by focusing on reassuring ends rather than on the weapons
providing the means to get there. As Lifton, Falk and Carol Cohn have described in detail, the nuclear strategists’ focus
on ends is powerfully reinforced by their “domestication” of the weaponry through the use of
abstract, familial, religious, or sexual language—radically different metaphors that have a
single function: distracting the user and the listener from the reality of the subject matter .79 Bull
used this type of legitimation in his Foreign Office report through an exclusive focus on the strategic features of chemical and
biological weapons and complete silence on their effects. A
third feature of Bull and Schelling’s view of arms
control is the distancing of states from each other, with the primary relationship being an
adversarial one. Schelling might have argued that his model of strategy in International Relations was politically neutral, that
he was concerned only with achieving strategic balance. Bull, on the other hand, explicitly identified with “strategists’
greater sense of the moral stature of American and Western political objectives for which war
and the risk of war must be undertaken.” A fourth feature that justifies the Bull–Schelling approach to
arms control is the claim that the approach is rational and undistorted by emotion. The
rational/emotional dualism figures powerfully in The Control of the Arms Race. In the chapter on
nuclear disarmament, for example, Bull wrote that the idea that measures for nuclear disarmament should be
pressed as far as possible and that the more the better, “stems from a Luddite approach to the
problem of security.”81 Thus, Bull dismissed the British campaign for nuclear disarmament led by people like Bertrand
Russell (no mean logician) and the historian E.P. Thompson (no mean analyst of history). Using nuclear weapons as
deterrents, Bull was implying, was rational; destroying them was an irrational, “Luddite” act.
Again, this position draws on Bull’s firm belief that “the physical capacity for organized violence is
inherent in human society” and thus “the idea of absolute security from war emerging from [disarmament] is an
illusion.”82

The affirmative’s attempt to securitize themselves within the debate space

legitimizes militarism’s encroachment into everyday life and justifies its
continuation
Wibben 18 (Annick Wibben, rofessor of Politics and International Studies as well as the
director of the Peace and Justice Studies program. She contributes to the Politics, International
Studies, Gender & Sexualities Studies, Peace & Justice Studies and Legal Studies curricula. Before
joining the USF faculty, she worked as co-Investigator (with James Der Derian) of the
Information Technology, War and Peace Project infopeace.org at the Watson Institute for
International Studies at Brown University from 2001-2005, “Why we need to study (US)
militarism: A critical feminist lens,” Security & Dialogue, 2018, journals.sagepub.com/home/sdi,
2018, pg. 141)
One of the ways in which feminist scholars have studied the impact of security policies to produce findings about everyday
(in)securities is by paying close attention to how militarism finds its expression in society. Indeed, even
before the field of
security studies existed, feminist activists and scholars resisted war and militarism, all the while
studying militarism’s varied effects. A major contribution comes from the work that illuminates processes of
militarization and shows that these are not neat and teleological. Instead, they involve multilayered and messy
transformations that take place over time and in different sites at the same time (Enloe, 2007).
Tracing them can reveal the pervasiveness and (global) spread of militarism. Further, anyone can be
militarized – that is ‘adopt militaristic values (e.g. a belief in hierarchy, obedience and the use of force) as one’s own, to see military
solutions as particularly effective, to see the world as a dangerous place best approached with militaristic attitudes’ (Enloe, 2007: 4).
Indeed, most people seduced by and subject to militarist logics are not in the military; for
example, less than 1% of the US population currently serves in the military, but much of the
population accepts the profound militarization of US society that extends to toys, fashion, and
other consumer goods, as well as sporting events, school funding, urban planning, taxation,
and more.8 ‘The language, ideas, and relationships associated with militarism operate in the seemingly mundane, apolitical,
everyday’, notes Maryam Khalid (2015: 637) – they are normalized . Hence for feminists, engaging militarism
cannot simply mean the study of militaries or militarism as an ideology, but must include the
study of society as a whole – including also resistance to militarism. Here, ‘the standpoint of women
engaged in anti-war activities generates a profound and solid knowledge that war is intimately
connected to the gender system via a continuum of violence’ (Kronsell and Svedberg, 2012: 2). Paying
attention to instances and processes of militarization allows feminist scholars to pay attention both to militarist ideology and to the
impact of policies and actions informed by it. In this context, whether
feminists are studying those serving in the
military, military and political institutions, broader economies of violence, or resistance to
militarism, their work also tends to ‘problematize and transcend the civil–military divide by
understanding militarism as embedded within society’ (Stavrianakis and Selby, 2013: 13–14). These scholars find
that the ‘civil–military divide shifts, reforms and reasserts itself in some spaces and not others’ (Basham, cited in Baker et al., 2016:
147). ‘What is really interesting’, notes Victoria Basham, ‘is the power relations that are facilitated
when the civil–military divide is invoked or when it becomes blurred and how’ (cited in Baker et al.,
2016: 147; see also Lutz, 2001). Employing a sociological understanding of militarism, which includes the
examination of mutually constitutive relations between militarism and other forces shaping
societies, feminist scholars dig deeper and reveal how militarism is reliant on gender hierarchies
that also shape everyday lives. More broadly, this approach reveals the manifold linkages of patriarchal society and
aggressive (or hegemonic) masculinities with violence and militarism. One such linkage, also relevant to studying the
integration of women into the (US) military, is that of shared gender norms: ‘The standards that govern the
being and conduct of men overlap with the standards that govern the being and conduct of
war makers, from foot soldiers to weapons experts to generals and political leaders’ (Hutchings,
2008: 390). Reading three exemplary scholarly texts on the changing role of warfare, Kimberly Hutchings finds that ‘ even
though gender is not the primary concern of any of these thinkers, their arguments can be read
as a renegotiation of the meaning of hegemonic masculinity in relation to war ’ (Hutchings, 2008: 390).
Each author’s description of the changing landscape of warfare relies on a contrast with an older form of war and norms of
masculinity embedded in it. This is most obvious in the case of Chris Coker, whose account of a shift toward posthuman war
emphasizes the loss of existing social meanings of war based on notions of heroism and sacrifice. Yet these notions are profoundly
gendered, as described so eloquently in Jean B. Elshtain’s (1987) analysis of the tropes of the ‘just warrior’ and the ‘beautiful soul’.
Indeed, whenever ‘we talk about women and the use of force, then, we are digging at the roots
of simultaneously what makes women feminine and men masculine’ (Carroll and Hall, 1993: 20,
emphasis in original). However, these meanings have never been static but constantly evolve , thus
making it all the more important to pay attention to the changing nature of (gendered) militarism.

State policy naturalizes heteropatriarchy- it relegates femininity to the private

sphere, regulates sexual activity in the name of a healthy state, and invokes
gendered metaphors of security that naturalize women as objects to be both
manipulated and protected
Spike Peterson in 2013 (Prof of IR @ University of Arizona, The Intended and Unintended
Queering of States/Nations, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 13, No. 1, 2013)

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 era’s
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 heter- onormative expectations. Worldwide, male parenting and care-giving take many forms, but
‘homosexual’ families/households are rare and nowhere are men expected to parent and care for dependents to the same extent
and in the same way that women are. Hence, some men who want to parent are denied this option, and most men who have the
option do not engage it fully. Of course this leaves women over-burdened, but it has other important effects. Men’s
systemic
exclusion from primary parenting and care-giving surely affects their subjectivities and worldviews – for
instance, by constraining their emotional experience and circumscribing forms of bonding available
to them. Finally, heteropatriarchal marriage and citizenship rules exclude non-heterosexuals from a variety of benefits, rights, and
privileges, not least with respect to immigration options. Third, the symbolic coding of the nation carries gender
as well as sexuality. The metaphors of nation-as-woman and woman-as-nation suggest how women – as bodies and
cultural repositories – become the battleground of group struggles. Nation-as-woman expresses a spatial, embodied
femaleness: the land’s fecundity must be protected against invasion and violation . It is also a
temporal metaphor: the rape of the body/nation not only violates frontiers but disrupts – by
planting alien seed or destroying reproductive viability – the maintenance of the community through time . Rape
has been practiced in countless wars and has become a metaphor of national humiliation . But
consider two assumptions in place before rape can ‘makes sense’ as a nationalist strategy: that
men are willing (eager?) to violate women/the feminine in this way, and that the ‘target’ is a
(heterosexually) fertile woman/body. Imagining the ‘beloved country’ as a female child , a lesbian, a
prostitute, or a post-menopausal wise woman generates quite different pictures and suggests quite different
understandings of community. Woman-as-nation marks the boundaries of (insider) group identity, and as symbols of
cultural authenticity women face a variety of pressures to conform to idealized models of behaviour. This suggests the political
significance often attached to women’s outward attire and/or public behaviour, as women – but
not men – are held ‘responsible for the transmission of culture’ and at the same time presumed
‘those most vulnerable to [heterosexual] abuse, violation or seduction by “other” men’ (Pettman 1992:5–6). This
heterosexist ideology features powerfully in nationalist projects – exemplified when European
colonizers used notions of bourgeois ‘respectability’ (read: heteronormative, well-bred) to legitimate their
domination of ‘Others’ (whose sexual practices were deemed ‘backward’), and when any state power justifies
foreign interventions as ‘rescue/civilizing missions’, ostensibly to ‘save’ women from oppression by their ‘own’
men.7 Fourth, these points suggest the historical – and continuing – fusion of nationalism, militarism, and
(heterosexist) masculinism (e.g. Puar 2007). Recall that state-making in Europe was spurred primarily by
military objectives: political conditions propelled centralizing processes of accumulation to pay for men and equipment to
fight ongoing wars, and one effect of state centralization was political-economic imperialist expansion
that required a reliable supply of males willing to secure (as soldiers) and administer (as civil/public servants) local and colonial
governments. Male bonding within and allegiance to the ‘fraternal’ state/nation became crucial.And while masculinist privilege is
not homogeneously shared, in theory all men (compared to women) can identify with the cultural valorization of men and
(hegemonic) masculinity and men’s 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 enemy’s men/women. In effect, modern states cultivate male homosocial politics – celebrating
masculinity’s 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 women’s 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’.
 Homonationalism
Stopping arms sales to a country for its anti-queer practices is homonationalist
sexual exceptionalism – a practice which exploits the image of the idealized
queer to justify the forceful expansion of Western liberalism and disregards
western anti-queer structures
Kapur 17 Ratna Kapur, Ratna Kapur is a law professor and former Director of the Centre for
Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi, India, “The (Im)possibility of Queering International
Human

Rights Law”, Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks, Chapter 7,
2017, /MegLak

One of the earliest moments to alert us to this de-radicalisation emerged when a cache of
thousands of disturbing photos taken by US army persons in Abu Ghraib prison during the then
US led invasion of Iraq, hit the headline news in late 2003. Jasbir Puar analysed the responses to
these photos, revealing how they were almost exclusively presented through a sexual lens,
where Iraqi prisoners were being intentionally humiliated through sexualised practices that
were assumed to be repulsive, emasculating and shameful to Muslims. Occluded in such a
reading were the racial, cultural, and gendered dimensions of the torture. These erasures
reinforced the liberal media’s homophobic practice of caricaturing Muslims, here through
traumatic images of pure abjection that violently satirise Muslim sexuality/subjectivity as
primitive and grotesque. The brutally racist and sexist dimensions that fell out of this avidly
consumed cache of photographs remained largely unquestioned by queer scholars and
advocates, thereby leaving in place the Western supposition that repressed sexuality is a
defining characteristic of the West’s most prominent, adversarial, cultural ‘other’ — namely,
‘the Muslim’. Queer operated to shore up US ‘sexual exceptionalism’ that is used to indoctrinate
the sexual subject into a belief in liberal superiority. Egregious acts such as torture were turned
into a ‘positive register of the valorisation of (American) life’ that continues to mark it as
progressive and inclusive. What emerged was the collusion of homosexuality and American
nationalism generated through the rhetoric of patriotic inclusion as well as homonationalism
pursued by gays and queers.16 In other words ‘queer’ came to be deployed in ways that were
complicit with dominant formations of sexuality as ‘homonormativity’. Sexual exceptionalism
continues to operate in ways that include some queer subjects, that is, those who conform or
assimilate — the ‘good homosexuals’ — while it simultaneously casts out non-compliant sexual,
gender and racial others. ‘Queer’ comes to be aligned with a set of (white) secular norms which
reinforce the racist representations of Islam and Muslims as homophobic and culturally
backward, where practices such as gay marriage serve as a marker for the distinction between a
racialised, primitive, Muslim population and upright, proper, homosexual citizens. It thus serves
not as a signifier of sexual identity or sexual subversion, but merely as a defused inscription of
socio-political difference within a larger modality of hierarchical regulation and governance of
gender, sexuality and gender identity. Similarly, the meeting by the Security Council to discuss
LGBT rights in light of the IS attacks on gays in Syria and Iraq did not necessarily advance the
rights of those on whose behalf such closed meetings were held. It did however provide further
justification for the deployment of deadly weaponry in an already confused and lethal
militaristic map that has produced untold civilian casualties and traumas in the Middle East. A
focus on human security has come to increasingly appropriate progressive agendas, as has been
similarly evident in the women’s human rights sphere, specifically in the context of sexual
violence against women, anti-trafficking and gender, peace and security.17 To all intents and
purposes the meeting was more about the propaganda war rather than about advancing the
rights of LGBT persons, within Syria or globally. Exhibiting the already endless list of atrocities
committed by IS serves as one of the continuing justifications for the bombardment of an
already devastated landscape and population, and a non-UN sanctioned military intervention
where no one is held accountable for the lives lost and harms done. Such meetings are not
coupled with a change in strategy to defeat ISIS that may save more LGBT lives; indeed the
military strategy remains unaffected and completely disconnected from these discussions.
Further, as discussed in the context of the Abu Ghraib photos, it may be that such a response
exacerbates the image of Muslims as misogynist, sexist, homophobic and culturally backward.
And it also poses a dilemma for the Middle Eastern/Arab queers who seek to oppose oppression
within their communities without serving the militaristic justifications and brutalities inflicted by
the sponsors of the US led military bombardments of Syria and elsewhere.A further related
consideration that puts the radical credentials of queer into question is the often one-
dimensional paternalistic reasoning that if legal recognition of homosexuality and/or same-sex
marriage is permissible in the US or Canada or France, it is because these societies are just
inherently better, more civilised and mature than, say, Uganda or the Caribbean or other
‘underdeveloped’ parts of the world, including India. Such reasoning deflects attention for
example, from the way in which Christian evangelicals from the US have been implicated in
partly producing an anti-gay agenda not only in Uganda, but also in other African countries such
as South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.18 It is not Islamic orthodoxy but
Christian evangelicalism from the US that is driving a homophobic agenda, easily received within
a context where conservative sexual and gender norms, constituted partly by the legacies of the
colonial past, continue to resonate in the postcolonial present. Economic sanctions or the
withdrawal of aid by countries whose citizens are implicated in producing or reinforcing
homophobia in the very places being punitively targeted by such measures, requires that both
the injury and the restorative/rehabilitative interventions be rigorously problematised. And
finally, a position that continues to associate human rights and freedom with the West, while
certain African, Islamic and non-Western societies and their leaders are cast as retrogressive and
barbaric, does not implicate the ways in which homophobia continues to flourish in Western
liberal democracies. Abhorrence of homosexuality and the homosexual continues to exist as an
ideological position across these hemispheric divides. For example, while 2015 saw the striking
down of discriminatory bans on same-sex marriage in the US, and more legal protections based
on sexual orientation and gender identity have been enacted at the municipal level, the
American right wing continues to support anti-gay legislation within the US as well as in other
parts of the world, including in Uganda and Russia. Similarly, shortly before the move to legalise
same sex marriages in France in May 2013, Paris witnessed some of the largest protests seen
since the 1960s, vast rallies by those opposed to the move to legalise same-sex marriage;
opposition which has been sustained and continuous.19
Advocacy for queer inclusion in militarist spaces is a form of homonationalism
that undergrids IR theory
Crane-Seeber ’16 (Jesse Paul, PhD in political science at the University of the District of
Columbia, “Sexy warriors: the politics and pleasures of submission to the state,” Critical Military
Studies) /ly
Michel Foucault’s work is pivotal to several projects in contemporary security and military studies, from post-structural discourse
analysis methodology (Buzan and Hansen 2009, 212–20) to recent debates about biopolitics as a useful framework for neoliberal
warfare and security (Salter 2006; Kiersey 2009; Evans 2010). While it is beyond this essay’s scope to address the shortcomings of
using Foucauldian categories like governmentality and biopolitics without ‘technologies of the self’ (Edkins 1999, 41–2), I want to
advocate including ‘pleasure’ explicitly in the Foucauldian power/ knowledge analytical framework. Foucault’s (2001)
discussions of sexuality have been less popular in International Relations than his recently published
lectures on biopower and security. Too few have taken up the challenge of grappling with pleasures and desires that
circulate in human relationships, even those constituted by cruelty and domination. As Foucault explained, What makes
power hold good, what makes it accepted is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force
that says no, but that it traverses and produces things , it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces
discourse. (1980, 119, emphasis mine) This insight, broadly compatible with Marxist and Gramscian analyses of hegemony, means
we must analyse how power relations are productive and enjoyable, not merely oppressive . In
queer political theory, the experiences and struggles of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender
(LGBT), and other sexual and gender non-conformists are taken as analytically central. This may be
intuitive when studying the politics of LGBT movements and their legal and rhetorical strategies for achieving social change. But
just as feminism has created critical spaces for interrogating gender that go beyond the ‘where
are the women’ question (Zalewski and Parpart 1998), queer theory generates insights into fields of power
relations beyond the immediate lives of queer people (Weber 2015). Instead of imagining queer activism as
‘healing’ 8 homophobic society, Foucault described the potential for queer communities to invent new
social relations: what we said at one time, ‘Let’s try to re-introduce homosexuality into the general norm of social relations’,
let’s say the reverse – ‘No! Let’s escape as much as possible from the type of relations that society proposes for us and try to create
in the empty space where we are new relational possibilities’. (1997, 160) In several ways, this resonates today. The politics of queer
marriage, the militarization of gay and lesbian bodies in the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ debates , and queer
media presence, have brought acceptance of monogamous queer couples, creating the possibility of a
‘homonationalist’ politics of inclusion and exclusion (Puar 2007). Creating acceptable spaces for
queer absorption into modern western capitalist societies minimizes the potentially destabilizing
and radical cultural contributions of sexual minorities . If heterosexist cis-gendered social norms do not have
room for the complexities of queer lives, relationships, and desires, the creation of new spaces and ways of living at the margins
becomes essential. Indeed, Foucault hypothesized that: [gay]
culture in the large sense, [is] a culture that
invents ways of relating, types of existence, types of values, types of exchanges between individuals which
are really new and are neither the same as, nor superimposed on, existing cultural forms. If that’s
possible, then gay culture will be not only a choice of homosexuals for homosexuals – it would create relations
that are, at certain points, transferable to heterosexuals. (1997, 159–60) In rejecting traditional and legal
patriarchal institutions, the queer community can explore new modes of relating. One area where
‘straight’ culture is adopting practices once confined to queer ghettos is kink. In a 1984 interview, Foucault argued that S/M9 had
potentially revolutionary implications for relationships, identities, and people’s experience of pleasure.10 He said, I don’t think that
this movement of sexual practices has anything to do with the disclosure or the uncovering of S/M tendencies deep within our
subconscious, and so on. [… Rather] it’s the creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously.
(Foucault, Gallagher, and Wilson 1984, 28) After arguing that BDSM play was a way of desexualizing pleasure, creating new kinds of
friendships, Foucault was asked what it might teach us about the power. He replied: One can say that S/M is the eroticization of
power, the eroticization of strategic relations. What strikes me with regard to S/M is how it differs from social power. Wh at
characterizes power is the fact that it is a strategic relation that has been stabilized through
institutions. […] On this point, the S/M game is very interesting because it is a strategic relation but it is always fluid. Of course,
there are roles, but everybody knows very well that these roles can be reversed. (Foucault, Gallagher, and Wilson 1984, 29)
 Hegemony - soldiers
The affirmative reproduces dangerous militarized masculinities that obscure the
antiqueer violence inherent to hegemony - Reject the romanticism of hard
power and “boots on the ground”
Speck 13 (Andreas, genderqueer social activist, War Resisters’ International, Queer and
Gender Critiques of Military Recruitment and Militarisation) ///AG

Despite all the military's equality talk, and its inclusion of women and queer people, it remains essentially a
masculine institution. Far from embracing diversity, it continues to promote itself as a man's world.
However, militarised masculinities, and the military’s exploitation of equality talk in order to reach
out to women and other sexual minorities, can be countered. The challenge is to acknowledge
and condemn the discrimination of women, queer people and other minorities in the reality of
the military, without falling into the trap of advocating a reform of the military rather than its
elimination. It is important to go back to the roots of queer liberation, which wasn't about equality within
a patriarchal and militarist system, but a radical and fundamental change of our societies .
Something got lost with the mainstreaming of gender and queer, and with equality talk; we need to reclaim that something. Our
queer struggle is a struggle against all forms of power structures that press us into norms and
binaries, of which the military is a major offender.

Reject the affirmatives insistence on hegemony and militarism – it reproduces

antiqueer logics and entrenches international relations with heteronormative
war fantasies
Wool 14 (Zoe H, PhD anthropology, 8/24/14, Critical Military Studies, Critical military studies,
queer theory, and the possibilities of critique – the case of suicide and family caregiving in the
US military) AG

Though the sociality of the US Army breeds all kinds of intimacies (see MacLeish 2013), when “Family”
(very often written with a capital F) is evoked in military programs or official materials, the referent is the
domestic unit comprising soldier, spouse, and usually children . One reason for this is that soldiers are, as a
population, more married than civilians of the same age. But this fact is neither mere coincidence nor evidence of some soldierly
essence. It
is a fact cultivated through structures of entitlements and benefits that have sought to make the
military a more “family-friendly” place, part of a concerted strategy to recruit and retain soldiers
after the end of the draft in 1973. Today, the military considers the families of soldiers part of its
“total force” (Chu, Hall, and Jones 2007), acknowledging that without them, and with the intensity of multiple
deployments that has characterized the last decade and a half, they would be unable to meet their own
institutional readiness needs. This specific form of family is further honed by the logistics of military
life, which can mean frequent moves with a nuclear family away from broader networks of kin. Together
with a whole slew of heteronormative forces, the picture of “ Army Family” that emerges is
multiply reinforced and decidedly nuclear, with the conjugal couple squarely at the centre . And
more than an aspect of demographics, this picture literally represents Army Family in countless images accompanying websites and
promotional material about military life and resources for families. The
military is an institution that amplifies,
projects, and is deeply invested in exemplary forms of normativity – especially those addressed
to embodiments of gender. No surprise, then, that the normative force of the conjugal couple at the
centre of this picture of the Army Family does not belong to the Army alone . Queer theory has done much to illuminate
how this form – and the logics of personhood, proper and improper intimacy, and generational
time that subtend it – structures public and political life in the contemporary US (Berlant 2000; Berlant and
Warner 1998), aligning the good life, or perhaps even life worth living at all, with heteronormative forms of
reproduction and sociality (Edelman 2004; Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 2013). Elizabeth Povinelli has elaborated
how the conjugal couple in particular, rather than the group (a competing social form in active duty army life;
Povinelli 2006, 181), is a key form through which proper personhood is seen to emerge in liberal
fantasies (Povinelli 2006, 175–236). This remains true in the Army, where the conjugal couple both supports and threatens the
other forms of institutional intimacy out of which soldiers’ socialities are made (MacLeish 2013, Chapter 4), as well as in the afterwar
for soldiers and veterans whose lives are forever marked by war but who are nonetheless supposed to be edging further away from
those institutional intimacies of the Army and toward other sustaining civilian ones (Wool, forthcoming, Chapter 5). There is a long
history of concern for soldiers’ sexual lives and hope that, especially after war, they might settle into normative patterns of husband
and fatherhood (Linker 2011). Given the ways that post-war rehabilitation has always been a gendered
project, and the inextricability of gendered personhood and the configuring of sexual intimacies, this should hardly be surprising.
But in the post-9/11 context, this family form has become more vital to fantasies of veteran
futures than in American wars of the past. What seems new in the contemporary moment is the explicit centrality of such hope
and concern to rehabilitative projects (broadly defined; Wool 2014), and, of special interest to the problematic I’m sketching here,
the hinging of normative family forms to fears about suicide through the mechanisms of support and care.

Troops within the military face misogynistic and sexual violence by not fulfilling
the dominant roles by being “masculine enough”
Crane-Seeber ’16 (Jesse Paul, PhD in political science at the University of the District of
Columbia, “Sexy warriors: the politics and pleasures of submission to the state,” Critical Military
Studies) /ly

Studies of militarized identities have helped prompt a recent focus on embodiment (Neumann 2014),
including this special issue. In that vein, Wilcox’s (2014, 2015) work to theorize embodiment in war from a
Butlerian perspective has brought attention to surveillance practices that make some bodies
visible, grievable, or killable. At a more experiential level, Dyvik’s (2016) study of Norwegian soldiers’ memoirs, as well as
Sylvester’s (2013) and McSorley’s (2013) analysis of war as an affective, physical process, demonstrate that
there is much to be learned about how people experience war . In this article, my focus is not on war,
per se, but rather the complicated psycho-sexual dynamics of soldiers’ relationships to their own
militarized bodies. Feminist scholars have long noted and interrogated the politics of militarized prostitution, war rape, and
sexual harassment within the armed forces (Alison 2007; Higate 2007; Lilly 2007). Misogynistic and sexual violence fit
with popular culture’s quasi-naturalized ‘man as predator’ narrative (McCaughey 2008). Numerous authors
have persuasively established links between militarization, hyper-masculine identities, and sexual assault (McClintock 1995; Enloe
2000, ch. 4; Goldstein 2001, ch. 6; Franklin 2004; RichterMontpetit 2007; Owens 2010; Zurbriggen 2010; Kirby 2012; Richter-
Montpetit 2014). This is an essential area of research to understand linkages between war and sexuality. Still, I
want to trouble
the militarized male as an object of desire, as more than a subject imposing violence . In this sense,
Belkin’s (2012) work on the complexity of male-male sexual encounters within the US military provides inspiration. He
demonstrates how the instability of categories of sexual identity yields an almost constant
search for a secure masculinity, with fascinating implications for sex within the military. While
few would dispute that dominance and submission are involved in all hierarchical social
relations, I follow Michel Foucault (1984) in arguing that communities that eroticize these roles have
broadly applicable insights into the productivity of power . Rather than see the sexualization of
warriors as an imposition, a hegemonically dictated push from above, I am interested in identifying the
modes of desire and pleasure that link militarization and eroticism in unique ways, following what
Cynthia Weber called a ‘queer intellectual curiosity ’ (2015).
 Hegemony – general
The affirmative’s commitment to unilateral US action entrenches itself in
masculine rhetoric and leads to more aggressive policies that restart conflicts
Emond 18 (Rachel Emond, Rachel Emond is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Center
for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. She works on issues related to nuclear policy with a
special emphasis on the history and future of women in the field. As her first major introduction
to nuclear policy, Rachel completed an undergraduate thesis, titled “American Foreign Policy
has a Masculinity Problem,” on the gendered discourse surrounding the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action with Iran, “American foreign policy has a masculinity problem: a discourse
analysis of the Iran deal,” University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, August 2018, pg. 39)///PSC

One of the most common themes in the language used by the opposition was that of
dependence. Explicitly and implicitly, those opposed to the Iran Deal claimed that it was dependent on
Iran, dependent on compliance, and dependent on military backup . The supporters of the Iran deal also
reinforced the deal as a multilateral operation, which has interesting connotations in and of itself. The idea of dependence
alone brings with it ideas of weakness, naïveté, and inability . There are separate meanings between the Iran
Deal being dependent on Iran and being dependent on Iran’s compliance. At the very least, there are separate connotations. In an
article written for the Washington Post, journalist Dennis Ross (Appendix A, Item 24) said that the success of the Iran Deal “depends
heavily on Iranians allowing access to inspect sites.” The
identification of another state becoming dominant
over the United States is incredibly detrimental to the image of a foreign policy solution
among policymakers. This specification of the Iran Deal being dependent on not just something outside of the written
agreement itself, but on another foreign entity, i.e. Iran, in particular signifies a complete lack of control owned by the United States.
As discussed previously, the United States places an incredible amount of effort into being the most
dominant, and therefore the most masculine, state in any foreign relationship. Dominance
evokes other descriptive words such as assertive, effective, powerful, and, above all, complete
control of the situation; all things that are the opposite of dependence. Dominance is a key aspect of
idealized masculinity as it directly includes being aggressive and risk-taking, and striving for
power and success (Pacholok 2009). Dependence on compliance, though it essentially has the same meaning when taken out
of context, has a slightly different undertone. Senator Rand Paul said that the deal is “dependent on
compliance,” suggesting that the deal is only legitimate if it works. In order to see how this implication
relates to the ideas of masculinity and femininity we will have to dig a little deeper. Recall earlier in this paper when I discussed the
relationship between femininity and femaleness. Though femininity and femaleness are not directly
correlated, the language of femininity is often assumed to apply to women, and, vice versa, the
characteristics and experiences of women are assumed to be distinctly feminine. Particularly in the
field of foreign policy, women, if allowed a chance, are then expected to prove themselves. They are only accepted as
viable players once they prove that their policies work . Men, on the other hand, are assumed to be
innately good at navigating the realm of international relations . When Senator Rand Paul stated that the Iran
Deal was “dependent on compliance,” he was implying that the deal would have to prove its worth, that time would tell whether or
not the agreement was viable—in the same way a woman would have to as the Secretary of State. What’s
most interesting
about this is not that it is fundamentally wrong to want a policy or a person to prove their
worth through their outcomes, but rather that only feminine entities—be it policies or people
—are expected to. Masculine entities, however, have failed time and time again. Aggressive actions do not
always fix the problems they set out to fix, often they even make them worse, and masculine
leaders, because they are human, have made countless numbers of mistakes . Still, these masculine
units are assumed to be the most natural and effective options. The reinforcement of the Iran deal as a
multilateral operation has a similar effect in terms of drawing themes of femininity . The idea of
being multilateral in and of itself is not a bad thing —it means the U.S. was following international
protocol and respecting other states with interests in the region . Multilateral operations can also be
considered a form of protection from retaliation of aggrieved states (Ikenberry 2003). Still, there is an underlying
implication of dependence on other nations that follows multilateralism. It also brings with it
connotations of compromise and shared power and leadership responsibility . These are all concepts
that fall under the category of feminized rhetoric, and serve to place multilateralism into this category as well. The idea of a policy
being managed by the United States as dependent on the buy in and political authority of other states and entities such as the
European Union and United Nations served to secure the soft policy solution of the Iran deal as an inherently feminine action.
 Reps - Destabilization/Democratic Peace Theory
“De-stabilized regions” and “failed state” are rhetorical covers that valorize
liberal statehood and reifies hegemonic heterosexual sovereignty under the
guise of critique
Sjoberg, PhD IR, ’14 (Laura, USC, JD@BostonCollege, AssocProfPoliSci@FloridaUniversity, “Queering the “Territorial
Peace”? Queer Theory Conversing With Mainstream International Relations,” International Studies Review, Volume 16, Issue 4) BW

Gibler’s (2007:509) work on the “territorial peace” is an intervention in the Democratic Peace literature that suggests
“joint democracy is actually an instrumental variable that represents the absence of territorial issues in
particular dyads, especially neighbors.” Gibler (2007:509) contends “democracy and peace might both be symptoms—not
causes—of the removal of territorial issues between neighbors” (for example, Vasquez and Gibler 2001). Accordingly, Gibler
(2007:516) argues that states with stable borders are more likely to become democracies, operationalizing border stability as a
product of whether a part of a state’s territory is at risk of capture by its neighbors (and whether that state has the military
capability to defend against any territorial challenges, or pose a similar threat to its neighbors). Suggesting that “focal points” for
coordination of boundaries in “natural” geographic landmarks stabilize borders, Gibler (2007:518, 520) focuses on land borders not
clearly demarcated in “nature” as prone to instability. Using empirical data from 1946 to 1999, Gibler (2007:529, 512) asserts that
“the democratic peace is, in fact, a stable border peace” since “democracies have avoided war with one another because of lack of
territorial issues.” Bodies That Matter In Bodies That Matter, Butler (1993:xi) looks to understand how to “link the materiality of sex
to the performativity of gender.” In so doing, she describes sex as “a regulatory ideal whose materialization is forced” (Butler
1993:xii). This “forcing” is a “regime of heterosexuality” which “circumscribes the materiality of sex” (Butler 1993:xxii). In other
words, the
discursive norm of heterosexuality makes sex differences and straightness seem
“natural” and “natural” does not exist. In this view, “it is no longer possible to take anatomy as a stable referent” and
“the very contours of the body are sites that vacillate between the psychic and the material” (Butler 1993:35, 36). Butler (1993:58,
71) both critiques the assumption that sex and sexuality are “natural” and attempts to divorce them from anything material. Arguing
that “to proscribe an exclusive identification for a multiply constituted subject, as every subject is, is to enforce a reduction and
paralysis,” Butler (1993:78, 83) characterizes the production of gendered identity as the “simultaneous production and subjugation
of subjects.” In this account, “hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealization”
(Butler 1993:85). In other words, assigning one gender or sexual identity to any person is an act of violence
toward that person as well as toward gendered and sexualized identities. It creates “the force of authority through the repetition or
citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices” which both naturalize and reify (Butler 1993:172). Yet, as Butler (1993:176)
contends, denaturalization is not the easy answer it appears to be—because “heterosexuality can augment its hegemony through its
denaturalization, as when we see denaturalizing parodies that reidealize heterosexual norms without calling them into question.”
This “resignification of norms” is “thus a function of their inefficacy”—an inefficacy that can only be corrected by “inhabiting the
practices of its rearticulation,” which can be performed by recognizing the ambivalence, and indeed “drag” of not only
homosexuality but gender generally (Butler 1993:181, 85). In other words, rejecting the materiality of sex and sexuality is as limiting
as refusing to recognize its contingency. An Engagement? As Butler (1993:172) argues, “the term ‘queer’ emerges as an
interpolation that raises the question of the status of force and opposition, of stability and
vulnerability.” The first contribution that (Butler’s) queer theorizing might have for the “territorial peace”
could be complicating the concept and operationalization of stable borders. Gibler carefully considers
ways to define border (in)stability to avoid implicating other variables of interest, but Butler’s analysis suggests that Gibler’s
account pays inadequate attention to borders’ foundational myths and perpetual
unsettledness. Feminist and queer theorists (Weber 1998a, 1999; Peterson 1999) have seen borders as gendered and
sexualized constructions, but reading Butler into Gibler’s work suggests a fruitful analysis of state
sovereignty (and therefore territorial settledness) as what Butler characterizes as “hegemonic
heterosexuality.” If sovereignty is, in Butler’s terms, a “regulatory ideal,” the materialization of which
is circumscribed by a discursive regime naturalizing statehood, then “it is no longer possible” to
see borders “as a stable referent”—no border is stable, because borders are conceptually, psychically, and materially
unstable. They “vacillate” between “the psychic and the material” and “cannot be stabilized” (Butler
1993:150). The regulatory idea of the stable border reifies and is reified by the assumption of compulsory
heterosexuality that often defines families, birthrights, and citizenships. Therefore, it is also fruitful
to see the borders purported to delineate territory as literal regimes of heterosexuality. From early
modern European borders moving with the marriages of royals to present-day legal migration
structures being constructed in part around heterosexual marriage, borders have always been,
and remain, violently entangled with (heterosexual) sexual norms. Belonging within (or being
denied belonging within) borders is often linked to sexual lineage, as are the layouts of borders
themselves—bounded territory (in Butler’s terms) circumscribes and is circumscribed by the materiality of
sex. Yet, Gibler (2012) still finds the robust result that “territorially settled” states are more likely both to become democracies and
to resist initiating. This seems true even over the violent enforcement of (heterosexualized) borders. How? A third engagement with
Butler’s theorizing suggests that the “territorialpeace” could be itself a complicated product of signification
and resignification. State sovereignty (and the accompanying privileging of borders) is normatively
naturalized in global politics, reified even through strategies of denaturalization. Even arguments
about “artificial states” (Alesina, Easterly, and Matuszeski 2011), “unnatural borders,” (Knight 2012), and
“common colonial history” creating border instability appear to denaturalize the idea of borders
while actually reifying the notion that “real” states, “natural” borders, and “stable” territories
exist (Weber 1995). Apparently “settled” borders, then, not only exist, but reify and reproduce themselves, a
“constant and repeated effort to imitate ...[their] own idealization,” in which work like Gibler’s is
complicit. This suggests an account of the “territorial peace” in which regimes of heteronormativity and the regulatory ideals of
borders reinforce each other such that borders and heteronormative behavior are resignified. Yet, following Butler, denaturalization
is not an easy answer either, given that denaturalization of given borders can reify the naturalization borders generally. Recognizing
the layers of “drag” in current borders specifically and the concept of stable state borders generally might be a productive way to
acknowledge this contradiction. This cannot be accomplished within Gibler’s two-dimensional operationalization of borders—more
complexity would need to be included in both definition and quantification. So What? “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. Gibler’s 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 Butler’s account of performances of gender and sexuality, applied to performances of “settled” borders, suggests
that Gibler’s notion of the benefits of territorial settledness is limited. Butler argues that proscribingstability 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 subjects (for
example, Tickner, 1992) and poststructuralist analysis on the inherent instability of the concept of sovereignty (Walker 1983; Ashley
1984), Butler’s contribution suggests that 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). Butler’s work suggests that it is possible that both the fantasy of territorial stability and Gibler’s
rearticulation of it are themselves acts of regulatory, heterosexist violence. A fifth insight that reading Butler onto
the “territorial peace” provides is that it is not only state sovereignty that Gibler’s approach naturalizes and
reifies, but also the democratic peace thesis that Gibler critiques from within. While proposing a different
causal mechanism for the democratic peace result, Gibler’s work might be seen through Butler’s 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, Gibler’s work might be described in Butler’s 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 fetishization of democracy, then, the “territorial peace” might reify it.

The 1AC is a project of mythogenesis that crafts America as the cultural father
and drives pre-empitve warmaking- turns the case
Wiatrowski ‘12
(Myc, MAcPopularCulture@BGSU, now has a PhD@Indiana, “A Man’s Gotta Do: Myth, Misogyny and Otherness in Post-9/11
America,” Bowling Green State University) BW

When threats to national security are put forth the masculinity of our leaders and our country is challenged. In the
case of 9/11 the masculinity of Hero-Father (George W. Bush – and in turn the nation) is challenged, as the attack suggests that the
patriarch is unable to keep his “wards” safe. There
is a challenge to the myth of American masculinity, and so
that challenge must be met by reinventing and rebuilding the myth to suit the cultural needs. From the
literal and figurative rubble of an attack on America it becomes necessary to rebuild order and reimagine how such events were able
to take place. Susan Faludi
writes: “[a] culture forges myths for many reasons, but paramount among them is the need
to impose order on chaotic and disturbing experience—to resolve haunting contradictions and contain apprehensions,
to imagine a way out of darkness.”30 Post-9/11 America became a “nation ... struggling to make sense of ... terror in the homeland,
a terror that its [men] had not been able to check at the familial front door. This was the experience that a national myth was called
to address—by remaking its shame into triumph.”31 Reclaiming
the myth of American masculinity requires a
fallback position from which to begin, a sort of cultural reset point that allows the failed form of
masculinity to be augmented, not scrapped all together. To “imagine a way out of the
darkness,” as Faludi puts it, necessitates the reestablishment of an immediately recognizable
masculine ideology that is grounded in a sense of historical cultural normalcy. Yet, to be clear, this
recognizable narrative is not predicated upon what we would call actual history. History alone is not enough to allow a nation to
rebuild ideologies from chaos; history “can explain the present in terms of the past but it cannot provide an indication of how to act
in the present based on the past, since by definition the past is categorically different from the present. Myths however, can
use the setting of the past to create and resolve conflicts of the present. ”32 This reestablishing of
normalcy from a pseudo-historical mythogenesis occurs in multiple ways, including an amplified form of
the cultural “father” ideology, and a hyper-exclusionary rhetoric surrounding women, yet it is arguable
that both of these previously mentioned approaches are couched in another form of cultural affirmation, primarily that
“[t]he means by which normalcy can be affirmed and protected is through violence.” 33 By affirming
and protecting normalcy through violence on a cultural scale in the national zeitgeist I do not mean to suggest that a purely physical
form of violence is necessarily thrust into the limelight, though this too does occur. There also exists
the presence and
reappropriation of violent rhetoric that is used on a massive scale ranging from the official (political),
to the mass (popular texts), to the folk (individuals and small groups). The concept of a rhetorical reimagining and reclaiming
of a cultural identity through violence is not new to the American imaginary. Many unofficial folk narratives reinforce a rhetorical
strategy of masculine violence, as do available narratives. It is here we find the resurgence of the colonial and cowboy hero
archetypes. Historical folk-hero figures such as Daniel Boone have become a fixed part of the American social consciousness because
they recapitulate a concept of the “American spirit” that can be tied to Herbert Hoover’s ideal of rugged individualism. In
Regeneration through Violence Richard Slotkin explores the use of violence in American rhetoric, culture and history, and examines
how it is integral to the construction of what he calls the American mythogenesis. Slotkin argues that in the rhetorical
narratives that shape the American mythogenesis “the founding fathers were not those eighteenth-century
gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather, they were those who ... tore violently a nation from
implacable and opulent wilderness—the rogues, adventurers, and land-boomers; the Indian fighters, traders,
missionaries, explorers and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness.”34 As a result of many of
America’s foundational ideologies being based on this myth, the means of “regeneration ultimately became the means of violence,
and the
myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the
American experience.”35 It is important to note that the methodology of regenerating cultural myth
through violence is predicated on the agency and actions of men, and the heroic structures
which they adhere to. As shown in the exploration of the colonial hero above, women are symbolically
annihilated as agent, and the action falls to men. Slotkin focuses clearly on the founding fathers and a variety of hero
archetypes in his exploration of the American mythogenesis; and in the violent regeneration of the myth of American ideology what
is ultimately being reimagined and reclaimed is the myth of American masculinity. There exists a relationship between the heroic
ideal and the culture that admires those men who embody that ideal—a type of hero worship where those who become cultural
idols such as the founding fathers are “used as role models for people to identify with.”36 In the reimagined post-9/11 version of
this myth the reimagined American mythology breaks down the elements of the mythogenesis described by Slotkin, and applies
them to more popular heroes.37 The news media celebrated (and continues to celebrate) the most masculine of our “ordinary
heroes,” servicemen who put aside their ordinariness, and are “thrust into a situation of extreme physical danger in which they show
extraordinary courage such as risking or sacrificing their lives to save other people.”38 Indeed, journalist Peggy Noonan, in speaking
about how the 9/11 attacks brought this form of masculinity back to the center stage, writes: “[a] certain style of manliness is once
again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11 ... I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull
things and haul things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in a hundred pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to
go to be safe. Men who are welders, who do construction, men who are cops and firemen.”39 In the immediate aftermath of the
terrorist attacks on September 11th this reconstructed adaptation of the American hero myth presented an augmented version of
the hard bodied masculinity discussed earlier, which was summarized so succinctly by Noonan. This reconstituted mythology publicly
focused on a very specific set of hyper-masculine idols, primarily in the form of the Fire Department of the City of New York. Susan
Faludi writes: In the end, the character actors who won the 9/11 hero sweepstakes, hands down, were the New York City firemen.
They had arrived to save others. Their uniforms and the direction they were heading in provided a clear demarcation between them,
the heroes, and the World Trade Center office workers, the victims. The secretaries and financial brokers ran down the stairs; the
firemen ran up—343 of them to their deaths. And conveniently for the mythmakers, the Fire Department of New York, more than
any other urban fire agency in the nation, was male.40 The FDNY becomes the personification of the masculine heroic life ideal
mentioned previously, where their actions directly threaten the possibility of their returning to everyday routines and directly entail
them deliberately risking their lives to save the lives of others. Yet, when
reality didn’t entirely conform to this risk-
it-all hyper-masculine narrative for this form of courageous masculinity, the “truth” was
rewritten to fit the narrative, and the narrative altered to fit the truth. Media outlets became “busy airbrushing the
emotions of helplessness and fear out of firefighters’ eyes and praising their ‘courage’ to cry as a sign of unshaken manhood.”41 The
cultural narrative is regenerated to accommodate the reality of the situation, yet simultaneously the reality of the situation is altered
to fit the narrative. After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the narrative again shifts, moving away from the heroes who were
the immediate responders, and focuses on the masculinity present in a different servicemen hero narrative embodied by the
American soldier, a narrative of violence centered on the character of the hunter hero. In describing how cultural mythology is
regenerated through violence, Slotkin writes: 28 [t]he hero of the hunter myth is representative of that spirit in us which demands
that the frontiers of our knowledge and our control (the two go together) be ever extended into the unknown wilderness of the
natural world, of the yet unrealized possibilities of our destiny. His starting point is the commonday [sic] world, that part of reality
which we know well and over which we have established our dominion and power.42 The American military comes to represent this
heroic ideal, where our servicemen leave our ordinary world after reestablishing control. They leave the relative safety of American
shores post-9/11 after having “secured the borders,” and so through their journey to secure democracy they come to represent a
national extension into the “unknown wilderness” of the Middle East. Key to understanding the narrative of the hunter-hero
archetype in the reclamation of American masculinity is the fact that “the myth of the hunter...is one of self-renewal or self- creation
through acts of violence.”43 By
asserting dominance over other countries in order to preemptively protect
ourselves we violently renew the myth of the protector father and begin to come full circle in
our mythogenesis. Using this martial servicemen as hunter hero narrative as a means of masculine myth regeneration causes
“the military, as a traditional way in which the nation is built and strengthened, whether through conquest, defense or warfare, [to
function] metonymically for the nation.”44 The American military becomes America itself. The nation and its
military become indistinguishable in the creation of cultural identity in a post-9/11 context; and since the military is composed of
male bodies and masculine elements it comes to code the nation as masculine. 45 It is important to note the
intensely violent nature of the military regeneration of national identity as it associates that masculine ideal with the identity of the
father. If we code the nation as masculine and suggest that the nation and military are indistinguishable in this narrative, then we
can say the violence of the military (whether justified or not, supported by all citizenry or not) is recgonized as the violence of the
American people.
 Reps - Development
The United states weaponizes the “natural homosexual” and idea of a “gay
rights holder” to demonize “undevelopable” people and states which justifies
the use of deadly force and escalation of conflicts
Weber 16 (Cynthia Weber, Cynthia Weber is a Professor of International Relations at Sussex University, Queer International
Relations – Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to Knowledge, Chapter 5 – “The ‘Normal Homosexual’ in International Relations The
‘Gay Rights Holder’ and the ‘Gay Patriot,’” 2016, Oxford University Press)///PSC

Who is the ‘normal homosexual’ in international relations? And how does the will to knowledge
about the ‘normal homosexual’ participate in the figuration of ‘sovereign man’? This chapter argues
that two figures that have recently been introduced into IR theory and practice as normal— the ‘gay rights holder’ and
the ‘gay patriot’—are among specific articulations of the ‘normal homosexual’ in international
relations. These particular figurations of the ‘normal homosexual’ matter for IR because they make possible (by being
included in) specific figurations of ‘sovereign man’ as ‘(neo)imperial man’ and as
‘(civilizationally) developed man’. In the dominant transnational/global queer studies literatures, these figurations
of ‘sovereign man’ as the ‘normal homosexual’ seem to arise out of and in turn produce what
Lisa Duggan calls homonormativity, ‘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). Figurations of the ‘normal homosexual’ are made
to function in (neo)colonialist/(neo) imperialist homonormative discourses as instances of ‘statecraft as mancraft’ (Ashley 1989). In
these discourses, it is ‘the disorderly, pathological state’ that refuses or fails to recognize ‘gay
rights as human rights’ that is figured as the threat to ‘sovereign man’. It is this threat to the
‘normal homosexual’ that produces (and is produced through) specific order-versus-anarchy
binaries. These either/or binaries of the ‘normal state’ versus the ‘pathological state’ participate in the regulation of international
politics because they establish sexualized orders of international relations. In contemporary international relations, answers to the
question, Whichstates are ‘normal states’ and which states are ‘pathological states’? are
increasingly tested against a specific figure in international relations—the ‘gay rights holder’ .
Drawing largely on the work of (transnational/global) queer studies scholars Lisa Duggan (2003), Jasbir Puar (Puar and Rai 2002; Puar
2006; 2007; 2010; 2013), Adi Kuntsman (2009), and Neville Hoad (2002) and (queer) IR scholars Anna Agathangelou (2013) and
Rahul Rao (2014) as the point of departure, this chapter focuses on how the ‘gay rights holder’ is figured so he can
be known as the ‘normal homosexual’ in some Western homonormative discourses on human
rights. In these discourses, the ‘gay rights holder’ is a variation of the entrepreneurial neoliberal
subject who is (re)productive in/for capitalism on behalf of the nation (Duggan 2003).1 This situates this
particular ‘gay rights holder’ firmly within neoliberal economics and within neoliberal cultures of tolerance and diversity . It can
also situate ‘gay rights holders’ within national discourses of patriotism as ‘docile patriots’ (Puar
and Rai 2002) and ‘gay patriots’ (Puar 2006; 2007; also see Kuntsman 2007; Richter-Montpetit 2014a). In these cases, the
‘gay patriot’ is the ‘gay rights holder’ mobilized explicitly on behalf of the ‘nation’ and against
threatening anarchical, pathological, national and international ‘others’. This chapter focuses on how
one Western state—the United States under the Obama administration—figures the ‘LGBT’ as the ‘gay rights holder’. The discursive
production of the ‘LGBT rights holder’ as the ‘normal homosexual’ by Western states like the United States does not mean there are
means
no longer ‘homosexuals’ figured as perverse in international relations discourse, even by these very same states. Rather, it
that the figure of the ‘perverse homosexual’ in contemporary international relations is a figure
whose unruliness and irrationality can be cast as threatening national patriotisms and national
and international (neo)liberalisms. Thus, the ‘underdeveloped’, the ‘undevelopable’, the
‘unwanted im/ migrant’, and the ‘terrorist’ continue to be feared, excluded, and sometimes
killed by Western states, while the ‘gay rights holder’ and the ‘gay patriot’ are celebrated by
these states, even though these ‘normal homosexuals’ are only selectively included and
protected (Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira 2008; Haritaworn 2008a; Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 2013; 2014a;
2014b). To illustrate how the ‘gay rights holder’ and the ‘gay patriot’ are explicitly crafted through a will to
knowledge that sets these figures in opposition to some ‘perverse homosexuals’ like the
‘underdeveloped’, the ‘undevelopable’, the ‘unwanted im/migrant’, and the ‘terrorist’ in
contemporary Western discourses of statecraft as mancraft and to demonstrate how all of these figures might compose complex
versions of homo(inter)nationalism (Puar 2006; 2007; Nath 2008) as sexualized orders of international relations, I offer a close
reading of Hilary Clinton’s ‘Gay rights are human rights’ speech, which she delivered at a UN meeting in Geneva on Human Rights
Day in 2001, when she was President Obama’s secretary of state. First, though, I put the ‘gay rights holder’ and the ‘gay patriot’ into
context, showing how the
‘gay rights holder’ and those states that do not protect the rights of the ‘gay
rights holder’ are incited as problems for Western states . I then outline the four moves Western states might
make to address these problems before showing how these four moves appear in Clinton’s speech. I also explain in detail how
homonormativity and homo(inter) nationalism can be mobilized to solve these problems.

The notion of strategic withdrawal is underpinned by biopolitical management

that posits certain nations as “undevelopable” – this is complicit in liberal
ordering grounded in a valorization of the cis/het Western sovereign
- AT: Thayer- the “biological” justifications of realism are anti-queer / heteronormative
- Empirics / wow the US is so cool for queer people is homonationalism

Weber, PhD, ‘16

(Cynthia, ArizonaStateUniversity, ProfIR@Sussex, Queer International Relations, Oxford University Press, p. 69-71) BW

This last issue is particularly important for international relation scholars precisely because the figures of the ‘underdeveloped’ and
the ‘undevelopable’ and the discourses that generated them are so thoroughly discredited and persistent. On the one hand, Freud’s
civilizational account of sexuality has been repudiated by a whole host of intellectuals, including queer studies theorists and
modernization and development theorists (Hoad 2000; Banuazizi 1987). On the other hand, Almond’s functionalist account of
modernization and development stands out as the most discredited approach to development of its time (Wiarda 1989–1990).9 So,
too, are the explicit and implicit connections Freud and Almond drew between ‘homosexuality’, the ‘homosexual’, and the processes
of civilization and modernization.10 And yet thefigurations of the ‘underdeveloped’ and the ‘undevelopable’ as the
‘temporally perverse homosexual’ persist. Their persistence has several important effects on
contemporary international relations. They participate in the following: • The figuration of the
‘reproductive cisgendered heterosexual couple’ as the logos —the singular authoritative origin—of social and
political development (Peterson 1992; 1999; 2010; 2013; 2014a; 2014b) • The legitimation of international
relation’s governing dichotomy of order versus anarchy and its expression through ‘the Great Dichotomy
between more primitive and more advanced societies’ and states (Huntington 1971, 285) • The understanding
of order versus anarchy, advanced versus primitive, civilized versus uncivilized as not just normal versus perverse but as a
sexualized understanding of normality against a sexualized understanding of perversion • The
creation of sexualized orders of international relations based upon racialized, (dis)ableized, classed, sexed,
gendered, and sexualized understandings of evolutionary biology, supported by specific codings and
arrangements of time, space, and desire • The marking off of the civilizationally and sexually ‘developable’
from its presumed opposite, the ‘undevelopable’ • The legitimation of specific securitizing techniques of
intimate, national, and international biopolitical and necropolitical management and rule of the ‘developable’, the
‘undevelopable’, and the ‘underdeveloped’ through contemporary development policy (e.g., Gibson-Graham 1996;
Bedford 2005; 2007; 2009; Bedford and Rai 2010; Lind 2009; 2010; Bergeron 2010)11 Taken together, what this means is that
these figurations of the ‘perverse homosexual’ not only position the white(ned), Christian, bourgeois, ableized
‘reproductive cisgendered heterosexual couple’ as the privileged ‘evolutionary motor of
species-life’ (Hoad 2000, 142), but also figure this couple as the engine of the production of ‘sovereign
man’ as ‘(neo)imperial man’ and/or ‘developed man’, who grounds the Western sovereign nation-state’s
authority nationally and internationally. All of this, I am suggesting, is in some part supported by the figuration
of the ‘underdeveloped’ and the ‘undevelopable’ as the ‘temporally perverse homosexual’ in
international relations theory and practice. If this claim strikes readers as anachronistic—if it seems to be the preserve of
only nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial discourses—then a cursory reading of contemporary development policy with its
debts to heteronormativities should be enough to persuade them otherwise. These debts are evident, for
example, in the post–World War II Bretton Woods economic system, which made ‘the regulation
of sex … a critical—if generally unrecognized—component of social and economic development policies’ (Gosine
2005, 3). This regulation of sex has continued through, for example, World Bank policies that make ‘couplehood
between a [cis] man and a [cis]woman … a key informal institution necessary for reformulated
development’ (Bedford 2009, 211; and see World Bank 2000 and 2001). Figurations of the ‘temporally perverse
homosexual’ not only are foundational to contemporary development policies. They also inform contemporary
figurations of the ‘unwanted im/migrant’ and the ‘terrorist’, as well as many of the policies that
inform the regulation of these figures. It is to figurations of the ‘unwanted im/migrant’ and the ‘terrorist’ that I now turn.

IR scholarship establishes white masculinity as normative which results in the

endless violent assimilation of alterity
Dunn 08 (Kevin C, PhD from Boston University and professor of Political Science, 6/10/08,
Rethinking the Man Question, Interrogating white male privilege) AG

The normalizing discourses of whiteness and masculinity have enabled definitions and concepts that
privileged this narrow segment of the world’s population to become accepted as the norm
within IR theory and practice, such as power, the state, civil society, security, and so forth.
These concepts are placed at the centre of our intellectual project , which often means that females and
non-whites must employ them if they are to be taken as serious IR scholars. Moreover, the meanings and Two 54 normative
values attached to these concepts are discursively bound to and typically nurture the needs and interests of the
privileged white male subject position and dominant norms of masculinity. While this clearly has
important implications for the construction of theory, it also has significant methodological repercussions. That is,
white male privilege is not only embedded in our structures of knowledge, it also delineates acceptable systems
of inquiry (Ackerly et al. 2006; Cohn 1987). Stephanie Wildman and Adrienne Davis observe, ‘The characteristics and
attributes of those who are privileged group members are described as societal norms – as the way
things are and as what is normal in society. This normalization of privilege means that members of
society are judged, and succeed or fail, measured against the characteristics that are held by the
privileged. The privileged characteristic is the norm; those who stand outside are the aberrant or “alternative”’
(1996: 14). This is extremely relevant for IR theory, particularly in its normative manifestations. For that reason, let
me offer a few examples. Given the privileging of white male subject positions in the dominant discourses (doxa), the habitus
generated by many IR theorists, who are predominantly white males, tend to create a system of
dispositions positing their historical experiences and cultural values as the norm for the international
community. As such, an idealized image of the Westphalian state serves as the norm. This is
clearly articulated in the vast literature on state failure and state capacity. Taking an idealized
North American/ western European state as the norm, much ink has been spilled about how and
why many non-white experiences with the state are aberrant . Rarely does this literature engage in
critical self-reflection, exploring how the assumed norm is the product of subjective experiences, values and imaginations.
Thus, we are presented with a towering mass of work on failed or failing African states, for instance,
but rarely is the assumed norm troubled or its racial and gender underpinnings exposed (Dunn
2001).4 In its most pronounced manifestations, this body of literature contains dangerous policy
prescriptions. Often policies are constructed to make the non-white, non-male other more like us
– for their own good. As Peggy McIntosh has observed, ‘whites are taught to think of their lives as morally
neutral, normative, average, and ideal; thus, when we work to benefit others, it is seen as work which will
allow “them” to be more like “us”’ (2005: 110; see also Eng and Kazanjiian 2002). Of course, it would be a mistake to
assume it is always the goal to make others like us. A good deal Interrogating white male privilege 55 of energy has
historically gone into the project of constructing and violently policing the boundaries between us
and the deviants who challenge accepted understandings and practices of whiteness and
masculinity. For example, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the racist and sexist discourses operating in
western Europe engendered acts of colonial conquest and domination (McClintock 1995; Lindqvist 1992). Today, in its liberal
humanitarian articulation, constructions of alterity have contributed to violent interventionist
wars in Iraq and the Balkans. Informing these policies is a manifestation of white male privilege:
white North American and western European male IR scholars and practitioners claiming to speak for all
humanity because they believe their race- and gender-informed experiences and values are the norm.
 Reps - Nuclear War
The spectacle of nuclear apocalypse is emblematic of a reproductive futurism
that results in the dehumanization of queer people
Saint-Amour, PhD, ’13 (Paul K., English@Stanford, AssocProfEnglish@UPenn, “Queer Temporalities of the Nuclear
Condition,” The Silence of Fallout, ed. Blouin, Shipley and Taylor, p. 59-64) BW

When Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth first appeared in 1982, its most talked-about passage was a graphic description of
what would happen if a twenty-megaton bomb were detonated over the center of Manhattan. The ensuing account of how a
full-scale nuclear change would likely extinguish humankind along with the majority of earth’s species, leaving
a “republic of insects and grass,” completed the book’s infernal vision. Largely owing to this vivid thought-experiment,
Schell’s book helped reenergize the anti-nuclear movement in the U.S., and its cautionary portrait of a dead, irradiated planet was
absorbed into mass-culture such that, read now, it chastens but does not stun. But there is a still-astonishing moment in The Fate of
the Earth. This occurs in a section called “The Second Death,” where Schell adopts “the view of our children and grandchildren, and
of all the future generations of mankind, stretching ahead of us in time.” A
nuclear extinction event, he argues,
would wipe out not only the living but all of the unborn as well; this “second death” would be
the death of a longitudinal, progenerative human future, the death of the supersession of generations and
thus, as he puts it, “the death of death.”2 That we live in the shadow of the death of death, says Schell, is
nowhere more apparent than in our growing ambivalence toward —and here is the surprise—marriage,
an institution that consecrates a personal relationship by connecting it to the biological continuity of the species. “[By] swearing
their love in public,” he writes, “the lovers also let it be known that their union will be a fit one for bringing children into the world.”
In a world overshadowed by extinction, the biological future that endows love with social
meaning begins to dematerialize, and love becomes, in response, “an ever more solitary affair: impersonal, detached,
pornographic. It means something that we call both pornography and nuclear destruction ‘obscene.’” Although Schell is not explicit
about what forms of sexual detachment he laments here, “The Second Death” clearly implies that any sex decoupled
from biological continuity and seeking refuge in licentious, solitary, distant, or momentary enjoyment— any sex that deviates
from a reproductive notion of the future —is a symptom of our nuclear extinction syndrome. Thus
when Schell, oddly quoting Auden, says that the peril of extinction thwarts “Eros, builder of cities,” he doesn’t need to invoke
“sodomy, destroyer of cities” for a link between queerness and extinction to be forged.3 By installing a reproductive futurism at the
heart of his admonitory project, Schell implicitly stigmatizes
as futureless anyone who stands beyond
reproductivism’s pale: not just the homosexual but also the unmarried, the divorced, the impotent, the childless, the
masturbator, the hedonist, the celibate. Schell’s book did not, of course, invent the use of reproduction as a metonym for human
futurity tout court or the figuration of the biological child as the chief beneficiary of future-oriented actions in the present. But it
contributed to these figures’ prominent standing in the anti-nuclear imaginary. “Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians
love their children too” went the absurd refrain of Sting’s 1985 single, “Russians,” which placed the (implicitly reproductive) body at
a level more fundamental than political difference: “We share the same biology / Regardless of ideology.” One could go on to
compile a long list of 1980s
movies, novels, speeches, and tracts that made the nuclear family stand in
for humanity’s beset future or invoked the child as the figure in whose name apocalypse must
be averted or at least survived. These conventions would outlast the Cold War and the waning or reimagining
of the nuclear referent. Think of P. D. James’s 1992 thriller The Children of Men, whose protagonist must safeguard a miraculous
pregnancy in a future where fertility has declined globally to zero.4 Or of how Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) pares the matter
of survival in a post-apocalyptic, ambiguously nuked landscape down to a father’s efforts to protect his son from rape and
cannibalism. In both cases, the future is hanging either literally or allegorically by the thread of a single imperiled child. My aim in
this essay is not to trace the reproductivist energies of Cold War anti-nuclear works or of more recent post-apocalyptic fiction.
Instead, I chart an alternate path through the nuclear condition,5 one that diverges from—and in places dissents
from—the portrait of a future secured primarily for the sake of the biological child and reached
along the straight lines of reproductive heterosexual coupling, familial property heritage, and
linear time. This alternate path is one on which Nuclear Criticism today might keep company with
recent work on queer temporalities, a body of scholarship that places dissident sexuality in a critical relation to normative
models of time and history. One of my broader aims, in fact, is to indicate some of the ways Nuclear Criticism might be reenergized
by an encounter with queer temporalities scholarship. At the same time, I’ll argue that some of the key theoretical and literary
works associated with Nuclear Criticism in its early years were themselves engaged in queering temporality and history. In doing so I
don’t wish to claim Nuclear Criticism as the occulted or lost “origin” of queer temporalities work; in addition to straining credibility,
such a privileging of origin in a narrative of linear development would install queer temporalities scholarship in just the sort of
historical narrative it seeks to vex by its devotion to non-linear modes—the recursive, the discontinuous, the counterfactual. My
point is, rather, that reexamining Nuclear Criticism through the aperture of queer theoretical writings on time allows us to see a
muted or latent critique in the former—a critique whose object was not so much the existence of nuclear weapons as the straitened
portraits of desire, culture, kinship, history, and futurity that were often appealed to in calling for both those weapons’ abolition and
their necessity. What emerges is a redrawn Nuclear Criticism that both deplores the existence of nuclear weapons and declines to
embrace sexually normative and historically reductive grounds for their elimination. “Queer temporalities” as a theoretical rubric
covers a broad range of scholarship by queer theorists and activists working, at least to date, predominantly in the U.S.6 More
specific than a turn toward time as theme, this scholarship considers how heternormative cultures perceive queer subjects in
relation to history and futurity; how queer subjects experience and enact particular relations to history and futurity; and how
queerness itself might be rethought as having less (or less exclusively) to do with sex and sexual typology than with dissident ways of
being in relation to time. I have already referred to one of the chief temporalities from which queer subjects are variously excluded
and dissenting: the “reproductive futurism” that conscripts the child as mascot for a
heternormative politics of hope and a linear conception of history as both powered and figured by
biological reproduction and the modes of inheritance and political succession it undergirds .7 Such a
conception of history militates against certain kinds of transgenerational affect, not least against the
notion that the living could invest affectively in or form communities with the dead. In response, some scholars
working on queer temporalities advocate just such a queer desire for history or “touch of the queer,” the kind of unpunctual,
affective approach that could permit one to ask, as Carolyn Dinshaw does, “How does it feel to be an anachronism?”8 While
acknowledging that the feeling of being out of step with one’s contemporaries can be exploited to repressive ends, Dinshaw remains
optimistic that transtemporal communities—living anachronisms in league with the dead—might produce politically salutary effects
in a present whose dense multiplicity they help to restore.9 Others, contrastingly, refuse a politics of hope they see as irreducibly
heternormative, urging queer subjects to embrace the negative position assigned them by reproductivism. Embracing this negativity
can take many forms: an insistence on the destructive, anti-communitarian, at once selfish and self-shattering dimensions of sex and
particularly homo-sex; an identification of the queer subject with destrudo (i.e., the Freudian death drive) in its relentless opposition
to a procreative understanding of libido; or a refusal of queer triumphalism and an embrace of the shame-laced backward look.
10 Still others look to fuse the negativity of these anti-social, arguably apolitical positions to a radical anti-racist and anti-capitalist
stance, calling for a “punk negativity” whose oppositional politics declines the language of hope, redemption, and
futurity and turns instead to vandalism, masochism, pessimism, and despair.11 Real differences inhere among these approaches.
But they share a core conviction: that temporality—and perhaps futurity even more intensively than historicity— cannot
be thought apart from the sexual norms through which it is figured, licensed, and imbued with or emptied
of affect. Owing to its semi-dormancy since the early 1990s, Nuclear Criticism has largely missed the chance to think through queer
theory, a field whose principal interventions have happened in the interim. You occasionally see comparisons between queer
coming-out narratives and a nation’s coming out as a nuclear power or a military person’s coming out as an anti-nuclear activist. But
the more suggestive commonalities between Nuclear Criticism and queer theoretical writing—most of them under the sign of
temporality—remain unexplored. These include an intimate acquaintance with and even an embrace of the death drive; a related
acquaintance with portraits of the future as negated or foreclosed; a commitment not to reopen the future under repressive terms;
and the alternative, in the face of a seemingly barred future, of soliciting the queer touch of the dead whom for various reasons we
suddenly apprehend as our contemporaries. Exploring these commonalities seems the more urgent, given that queer temporalities
scholarship could provoke debate about what nuclear abolitionists and their opponents have most in common: a practically
automated recourse to reproductive futurism in arguing for their respective positions. Schell’s equation of low marital indices with a
general sense of species futurelessness is an extreme but not an exceptional case of antinuclear rhetoric, which continues today to
invoke “a world safe for our children” in terms nearly indistinguishable from the pro-nuclear side of the aisle.12 The radical
negativity exhibited by some queer temporalities scholars might also expose the limits of a politics of (procreative) optimism on both
sides of the nuclear debate—the limits of acting as if the world could be made safe for “our children” or anyone else by either
retaining or abolishing our nuclear deterrents. Queer theorists, for their part, have turned occasionally during the last twenty years
to Nuclear Criticism, although usually to jump-start an argument headed away from the nuclear referent. Peter Coviello’s essay
“Apocalypse from Now On” (2000) nods in its title to both Jacques Derrida’s inaugural work of Nuclear Criticism, “No Apocalypse,
Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)” (1984) and Susan Sontag’s 1989 AIDS and Its Metaphors (Sontag:
“Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but ‘Apocalypse from Now On’”).13 But Coviello’s essay invokes the
nuclear condition principally in order to set up what he sees as its succession, after 1989, by AIDS as the apocalypse du jour. “Du
jour” in the way a daily special marks the everyday’s domestication of the exceptional: for Coviello, AIDS differs from the nuclear
condition in quotidienizing apocalypse, making it a condition rather than a threatened event and thus particularly useful to the day-
to-day biopolitical operations of the state. Coviello, in other words, sets sail from Port Derrida for Port Sontag—from Nuclear
Criticism to a critique of AIDS and governmentality—without, understandably enough, booking return passage. Before leaving the
nuclear behind, however, he notes “how intimately bonded the nuclear and the sexual actually were, before the advent of AIDS gave
to such bonding a ghastly quality of inevitability.”14 Coviello’s emphasis is not on the usual string of references to the
heteronormative sexualization of nuclear weapons (e.g., “Little Boy,” Bikini atoll, the population bomb, and the nuclear family,
although he mentions these in passing). Instead, he reads
nuclear discourse as having limned, before AIDS, a
“gay death drive” that figured queerness as incarnating (and more rarely as rebuking) the extravagant
sovereignty of nuclear weapons. Glossing Martin Amis’s characterization of the nuclear arsenal as a cocked gun in the
mouths of the procreative, Coviello writes that “power in the nuclear age is horrifying and unlivable because it makes me—or wants
to make me—thoroughly, irremediably queer.” 15 Thus the homophobia of certain anti-nuclear discourses anticipated homophobic
responses to AIDS as an apocalyptic threat emanating from queer subjects. What’s more, Coviello hazards, the apocalypticism that
pervaded debates around both nuclear weapons and AIDS made for strong continuities between Nuclear Criticism and queer theory,
both bodies of work responding to high concentrations of state power in the management of populations, bilateral depictions of the
biological family as under siege, and the pervasive rhetoric of the death wish.16
 Reps – DPT
You should problematize the aff’s democratic peace theory and development
discourse – they’re inseparable from privileged subject positions
Dunn 08 (Kevin C, PhD from Boston University and professor of Political Science, 6/10/08,
Rethinking the Man Question, Interrogating white male privilege) AG

One can see this pattern repeated throughout mainstream IR theory. Democratic Peace Theory is firmly
constructed on an artifice produced by race-, gender- and class-informed subject positions . As Ido
Oren (2002) argues in Our Enemies and US, American political science in general, and the scholars advancing the idea of
democratic peace in particular, are informed by the dominant discourses in which their own
subject positions are privileged; in the case of Democratic Peace Theory, this has resulted in a fluid and
historically contingent understanding of democracy shaped by America’s experience and its historical
rivalries. The gap in Oren’s otherwise damning critique is his failure to adequately expose the racial and gender
components so clearly present in the political science scholarship he investigates. The development sub-field
of IR is also representative of how scholars operate under the assumption that their subject
position is the norm and that they can speak for all humanity. One can see this within the
modernization school, with its explicit attempts to make the non-white world more like the
white one. But it is equally true for the neoliberal approaches to development, with their
subjective agendas obscured behind claims of universalism. While neoliberalism is in principle
gender and race neutral, R. W. Connell notes there has been a ‘sharp remasculinization [and racialization]
of political rhetoric and a turn to the use of force as a primary instrument in policy’ (2005: 1815–16).
Neoliberalism functions as a form of masculinity politics, and ‘[m]any mainstream policies (e.g., in
economic and security affairs) are substantially about men without acknowledging this fact’ (ibid.: 1816).
 IR
The figure of the “perverse homosexual” which exists in opposition to the
“sovereign” man is a dichotomy which undergrids all IR practices
Weber 16 Cynthia Weber, Cynthia Weber is a Professor of International Relations at Sussex
University, Queer International Relations – Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to Knowledge,
Chapter 3 – “The ‘Perverse Homosexual’ in International Relations”, Oxford University Press,
2016, /MegLak.

This chapter and the next argue that four figures that consistently appear in the discourse of
‘Western’ / global ‘Northern’ ‘developed’ states as perverse—the ‘underdeveloped’, the
‘undevelopable’, the ‘unwanted im/migrant’, and the ‘terrorist’—are among the specific (if
surprising) articulations of the ‘perverse homosexual’ in international relations. These particular
figurations of the ‘perverse homosexual’ matter for transnational/ global queer studies and
international relation because they make possible (by being opposed to) specific figurations of
‘sovereign man’ as ‘(neo) imperial man’ and as ‘(civilizationally) developed man’. All of these
figurations of or against ‘sovereign man’ appear to arise out of and in turn produce what Berlant
and Warner call heteronormativity, ‘the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical
orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent ... but also privileged’ (1998, 548
n. 2). By tracing where, when, and how these ‘perverse homosexuals’ are spoken of in past and
ongoing colonial, imperial, and developmental heteronormative discourses that incite them as a
concern, stabilize them as a problem, and regulate solutions to the problems they raise through
specific policies, these chapters analyze how figurations of the ‘perverse homosexual’ are made
to function as instances of ‘statecraft as mancraft’ (Ashley 1989). In these discourses, the
‘perverse homosexual’ is figured as that threat to ‘sovereign man’ who enables the production
of (and is produced through) specific order-versus-anarchy binaries. These either/or binaries
participate in the regulation of international politics because they establish sexualized orders of
international relations. To be clear, I am not arguing that the figure of the ‘homosexual’ as the
‘underdeveloped’, the ‘undevelopable’, the ‘unwanted im/migrant’, and the ‘terrorist’ alone
explains all sovereign statecraft as sovereign mancraft. Rather, I am suggesting that if we dig
down into the evolutionary theories that produce figurations of and opposed to ‘sovereign
man’, what we find is that these theories depend upon understandings of civilization and its
relationships to evolutionary time and geopolitical space that are deeply racialized,
(dis)ableized, classed, sexed, gendered, and sexualized. This is by no means a new proposition,
either empirically or theoretically. For example, even a cursory reading of (neo)imperial
discourses and their supporting discourses of racialization makes it explicit that various
precursors to and variations of the ‘underdeveloped’ owe their temporal and spatial figurations
as perverse in part to how they are coded as perversely sexed, gendered, and sexualized.
Institutions and cultural understandings of encumbered versus unencumbered sexuality (Mead
1928), whiteness versus blackness (Fanon 1967), orientalism (Said 1978), savagery and
coloniality (Stoler 1995 and 2002), and postcoloniality and imperialism (Spivak 1988) have
fueled imaginaries of what came to be known as the ‘underdeveloped’. We see this in figures
such as the ‘noble savage’ unencumbered by sexual prohibition in modern Western anthro-
pology (Mead 1928), the ‘barbaric savage’ and the ‘colonial’ in Victorian discourse (Stoler 1995
and 2002), the ‘blackman’ marked by race in white colonialism and psychoanalysis (Fanon 1967),
‘the black female body’ (hooks 1982; Hammonds 1999; Spillers 2003), ‘the illiterate peasantry,
the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban sub-proletariat’ called the ‘subaltern’ in imperial
discourse (Spivak 1988, 283), and ‘the timeless oriental who does not advance with modernity’
in Western discourse (Said 1978), for example. While international relation scholars are
increasingly aware of how these figures are produced through complex networks of
racialization, (dis) ablization, gender, class, indigeneity, and empire (beginning with Roxanne
Doty’s [1996] seminal international relation study of ‘imperial encounters’), they are just
beginning to grasp how these figures are also implicated in and produced by complex networks
of power/knowledge/pleasure in relation to the figure of the ‘homosexual’. Yet as V. Spike
Peterson has long argued (1992, 1999, 2010, 2013, 2014a, 2014b) in her groundbreaking
international relation analyses of gender and sexuality, figures like the ‘heterosexual’ and the
‘homosexual’ are foundational to international relation conceptualizations of states, nations,
and international politics more widely. My conten- tion in this set of chapters is that figurations
of the ‘homosexual’ in Western discourses of statecraft as mancraft and the sexualized
organizations of international relations to which they give rise are among those modalities of
power/knowledge/pleasure that are the least examined such networks that in part underwrite
international relation theories to this day. My sug- gestion is that to ignore these moves is to not
fully understand how interna- tional relation theories and practices function, how they can be
improved, and how they can be resisted.

IR requires the reproduction of heteropatriarchal relationships- these form the

ideological basis for social inequality and nationalist violence
Spike Peterson in 2013 (Prof of IR @ University of Arizona, The Intended and Unintended
Queering of States/Nations, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 13, No. 1, 2013)

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 women’s 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 male–female biological difference, gender as masculine–
feminine subjectivities, and sexuality as heterosexual–homosexual identifications. I argue that the normalization of
heteropatriarchal relations in early states instituted – via birthright transmission of membership/citizenship and
property ownership claims – intergenerational reproduction of inequalities within and between
polities. On this view, retaining nation-states and existing birthright citizenship and inheritance patterns in effect
sustains heteronormativity and its problematic politics (Peterson 1999; Stevens 1999, 2004, 2010). The
latter includes dramatic and increasing inequalities of resource distribution – exacerbated by
neoliberal policies – and the global insecurities these entail (Peterson 2010b). Yet at the same time, neoliberal
globalization alters the autonomy and arrangements of states, and feminist/queer movements challenge the ‘givens’ of
heteropatriarchy. Hence, at
this historical juncture queer theory is a crucial , arguably imperative, component
of critically analysing ‘politics’ writ large. It offers not only the most telling and informed critique of
heteronormativity and its political effects, but also , potentially, the most transformative analysis of
power inequalities – across individual, interpersonal, group, national, and global levels. The objective of this
essay then is to denaturalize identities, ideologies, and institutional practices that were stabilized through early state formation,
largely taken-for-granted in the transition to (European) modernity, and continue to discipline our being, thinking, and doing in – and
in response to – contemporary local, national, and global politics. The
point is less to offer a definitive history
than to tell a different story – one that illuminates the centrality of sex/gender and sexualities
in constituting and reproducing structural inequalities.
 Human Rights
Even attempts to withdraw influence depoliticize violence abroad -
Contemporary feminist human rights frames delocalize violence from the
borders of the US
Puar 07 (Jasbir K., PhD ethnic studies, Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke
University Press. 2007 pg5)
InderpalGrewal, for example, argues against the naturalization of human rights frames by feminists,
noting that the United States routinely positions itself ‘‘as the site for authoritative condemnation’’ of
human rights abuses elsewhere, ignoring such abuses within its borders . Grewal alludes to the
American exceptionalism that is now requisite common sense for many feminisms within U.S.
public cultures: ‘‘Moral superiority has become part of emergent global feminism, constructing American women
as saviors and rescuers of the ‘oppressed women .’ ’’Ω The recent embrace of the case of Afghani and
Iraqi women and Muslim women in general by western feminists has generated many forms of U.S. gender
exceptionalism. Gender exceptionalism works as a missionary discourse to rescue Muslim
women from their oppressive male counterparts. It also works to suggest that, in contrast to women in
the United States, Muslim women are, at the end of the day, unsavable. More insidiously, these discourses of
exceptionalism allude to the unsalvageable nature of Muslim women even by their own feminists,
positioning the American feminist as the feminist subject par excellence.∞≠ 6 introduction One pertinent
example is culled from the interactions of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan ( rawa) with the Feminist
Majority Foundation, which ended with an accusation of appropriation and erasure of rawa’s e√orts by the foundation. A letter
written on April 20, 2002 condemns the foundation’s representation of its handiwork as having ‘‘a foremost role in ‘freeing’ Afghan
women’’ while failing to mention rawa’s twenty-five-year presence in Afghanistan (indeed, failing to mention rawa at all), as if it had
Calling the
‘‘single-handedly freed the women of Afghanistan from an oppression that started and ended with the Taliban.’’
Feminist Majority Foundation ‘‘hegemonic, U.S.-centric, ego driven, corporate feminism,’’ rawa
notes that it has ‘‘a longer history than the Feminist Majority can claim’’ and cites multiple instances of the
foundation’s erasure of rawa’s political organizing . rawa also berates the Feminist Majority for its omission of the
abuse of women by the Northern Alliance, atrocities that at times were more egregious than those committed by the Taliban, stating
that ‘‘the
Feminist Majority, in their push for U.S. political and economic power, are being careful
not to anger the political powers in the U.S.’’ ∞∞ The ranks of ‘‘hegemonic, U.S.-centric’’ feminists enamored with
the plight of Afghan women under Taliban rule included the Feminist Majority Foundation, which had launched ‘‘Our Campaign to
Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan’’ in 1996.∞≤ This campaign arguably led to commodity fetishes such as Eve Ensler’s v-Day
benefit with her ‘‘tribute to Afghan women,’’ a monologue entitled ‘‘Under the Burqa’’ performed by Oprah Winfrey at New York
City’s largest arena, Madison Square Garden, to a sold-out audience in February 2001.∞≥ The event also promoted the purchase, in
remembrance of Afghan women, of a ‘‘burqa swatch,’’ meant to be worn on one’s lapel to demonstrate solidarity with Afghan
women through the appropriation of a ‘‘Muslim’’ garment. While these forms of celebrity feminism might provide us momentary
sardonic amusement, they are an integral part of U.S. feminist public cultures and should not be mistaken as trivial. Their agendas
are quite conducive to that of serious liberal feminists in the United States such as those in the ranks of the Feminist Majority, and in
the age of professionalized feminism these purportedly divergent circuits divulge their imbrication through various modes of
commodification. These feminists, having already foregrounded Islamic fundamentalism as the single greatest violent threat to
women, were perfectly poised to capitalize on the missionary discourses that reverberated after the events of September 11.
Despite their active stance against the invasion of Afghanistan, homonationalism and biopolitics 7 they
were caught in a complicitous narrative of U.S. exceptionalism in regard to the removal of the
Taliban.∞∂ As Drucilla Cornell notes, the silence of the Feminist Majority Foundation on the replacement of the Taliban by the
Northern Alliance ‘‘forces us to question whether the humanitarian intervention discourse of the U.S.
government was not a particularly cynical effort to enlist U.S. feminists in an attempt to
circumscribe the definition of what constitutes human rights violations —to turn the Feminist
Majority into an ideological prop that delegitimizes the political need for redressing h uman-rights
violations.’’ Cornell basically implies that mainstream U.S. feminists traded rawa’s stance against punitive state laws penalizing
women who refuse to wear the burqa (but not against women wearing burqas, an important distinction) for the celebratory media
spectacle of unveiling rampant in the U.S. media after the ‘‘successful’’ invasion of Afghanistan.∞∑ Under the burqa indeed. But as a
final comment, it is worth heeding Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s observation, ‘‘We will see, every time, the narrative of class
mobility.’’ Complicating any indigenous positioning of rawa, she writes, ‘‘It is the emergence of [the] middle class that creates the
possibility for the kind of feminist struggle that gives us a rawa. And this middle class, the agent of human rights all over the world, is
altogether distant from the subaltern classes in ‘their own culture,’ epistemically.’’∞∏ Despite rawa’s feud with the Feminist
Majority, invariably they remain complicit with a displacement of other Afghan women’s organizations that cannot so easily enter
dominant reception of feminist discourses on
the global feminist stage. Spivak’s caution is a reminder that the
Muslim women is a tokenistic liberal apology that often leaves uninterrogated a west/Islam
binary.

The affirmative’s notion that ending one sale of arms is enough only justifies
the violence they outline and mirrors cold war era reforms that remove blame
from the state in contributing to militarism. Only through a feminist
examination of human security can we ever hope to resolve the contradictions
inherently held within the state
Stravriankakis 18 (Anna Stavrianakis, Anna Stavrianakis is a Lecturer in International
Relations at the University of Sussex. Her main research interests are NGOs and global civil
society; the arms trade and military globalisation; and critical approaches to the study of
international security, “Controlling weapons circulation in a postcolonial militarised world,”
Review of International Studies, doi:10.1017/S0260210518000190, 5/16/18, pg.5-11 )

The 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, which formalised the human security agenda, was
explicit about the role of ‘excessive militarization and the international arms trade’ as a ‘critical
source of insecurity’.26 Arising from ‘the world’s previous preoccupation with deterrence and
territorial security’, arms transfers, military assistance, proxy wars, excessive military spending, politicised militaries in
developing countries, and the military-industrial complex, were all identified as impediments to the realisation of
human security.27 The report identified concrete policy recommendations, including an
international agreement to phase out military assistance; a list of prohibited items for transfer; a
strengthened UN Register reporting system; the regulation and elimination of subsidies; and a
tax on arms sales to finance peacekeeping .28 Such moves, alongside increased spending on demilitarisation efforts,
were envisaged as ‘an important step towards achieving human security’.29 While there was an emphasis on ‘Third World
disarmament’, the report was clear that this must be one component of a ‘blueprint for global disarmament’.30 So
here we
have an agenda for practical action on the weapons trade, challenging militarism to improve
human security. The UNDP report identified the nation-statist ideologies of deterrence and
territorial security, as well as the transnational practices of military assistance and proxy wars,
as key causes of insecurity. Simultaneously, it reopened the debate about the link between
security and development ‘that had been closed since the somewhat sterile polemic around
the link between disarmament and development’ of the 1970s and 1980s .31 This earlier, now
ostensibly out-dated debate surmised that ‘the North (that is, both sides of the East–West conflict) should disarm, and devote the
resources freed up by arms reduction to development in the South’.32 As part of this shift in debate, the
move away from
state-centred definitions of security was accompanied by an acknowledgment of the
legitimate and crucial role of the state in providing security – especially as security was
emphasised as a precondition for development. So the anti-militarist call that identified the
state as a creator of insecurity was balanced against recognition of the legitimate role of the
state in providing security. There was also a downgrading of military threats as a particular type of threat to human
security: military threats do not appear as one of the seven main categories articulated in the report (economic, food, health,
environmental, personal, community, political). Rather, threats from war (defined as ‘threats from other states’) are listed
under the category of ‘personal security’, alongside threats of physical torture and ethnic
tension, as well as crime, rape, domestic violence, and suicide .33 The analytical and political
move made in the 1994 UNDP Report was to equate war with the state and move away from a
concern with territorially based definitions of security and inter-state war, which it equates
with militarism. There is a shift in focus to the spectrum of armed violence and non-conflict violence, which are to be
remedied in the name of human security, in part through the (re)construction of legitimate coercive apparatuses. The shift
away from militarism and towards human security claims to acknowledge the changing
character of conflict and the role of the state in monopolising legitimate violence, without
privileging it unthinkingly. Research in this vein has flourished in the years since the 1994 report, and brings significant
advantages to bear over traditional state-centric analyses, such as the ability to account for the geographical
diversity of rates of armed violence within as well as between states; sustained and distinct
attention to gendered patterns of violence, including the specific character of femicide as a
distinct form of violence; and the incorporation of questions of public health and socioeconomic
inequality into discussion about weapons transfers .34 For all these developments, the human security agenda’s
take on war, conflict, and armed violence has not been without its critics. It has been described as the ‘new orthodoxy’ that is
‘unable to provide the basis for a substantive change of the system of international security’, despite finding ‘the old language of
interstate war and conflict … lacking’.35 Similarly, its
emphasis on ‘progressive’ initiatives such as
‘eliminat[ing] certain types of weapons’ stands accused of failing to adequately examine ‘the
pathologies inherent in the structure of the international system’ that generate such
challenges.36 And when the ‘human’ in human security is naturalised as masculine, the
inclusion of novel threats and new actors leaves the parameters of security untouched,
meaning that ‘state-based, militarised security remains unchallenged’ .37 Feminist scholars have
critiqued the gendered concepts and practices of war, peace, militarisation, peacekeeping and soldiering, going well beyond the
human security framework in the process.38 Feminist critiques that challenge the parameters of human
security can usefully be combined with postcolonial accounts of IR that emphasise the ways in
which the discipline ‘can both deny empire while simultaneously normalizing an imperial
perspective on the world’.39 Some of the main themes of the human security agenda are illustrative of the need for an
imperial perspective in how we understand the challenges facing weapons control. By this I mean interpreting them with
the aid of scholarship that challenges methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism in its
analysis, mobilises feminist critiques of militarism, and puts the legacy of empire and
colonialism, and the racial, gendered, and classed politics of imperial control, front and centre in
its assessment of contemporary challenges.40 Deploying such resources gives us a chance to rethink some of the key
assumptions around human security and the prospects for regulating weapons circulation. Three core themes of the
human security agenda are ripe for an imperial critique . First, the claim that the character of
conflict has changed, from inter-state war towards internal conflict, has become axiomatic in
much of IR, including the human security literature.41 The greatest threats to human security are deemed to
stem from internal conflict and criminal violence, or the state itself, rather than from an external adversary as per the traditional
security agenda. As such, ‘international
security traditionally defined – territorial integrity – does not
necessarily correlate with human security ’.42 Second, the changing character of conflict requires
a shift in the referent object of security, according to the human security agenda: away from
the state and inter-state war, and towards the individual and the broader range of threats
they face. 43 And third, the human security agenda nonetheless emphasises the importance of
the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence and role in security provision.44 Yet the
circumstances have been transformed with the end of the Cold War. Kaldor attributes a ‘profound
restructuring of political authority’ to the new wars, and sees human security as an opportunity for ‘reconstructing political authority
in the context of the processes we call globalisation’.45 Hence the need for security sector reform (SSR), demobilisation,
disarmament, and reintegration (DDR) and other reforms of coercive practices and apparatuses. Each
of these three
themes is premised on the significance of the rupture that occurred with the end of the Cold
War. But understanding the Cold War as predominantly an East–West ideological and
geopolitical confrontation marginalises longer historical patterns of North–South power
relations and conflict, and of hot war in the South. And the increased focus on internal conflict, while fruitful in
terms of changing the scale of analysis, risks disconnecting the micropolitics of violence from broader systems and structures of war
preparation, ignoring one of the key lessons of feminist scholarship, which is that the scales or so-called levels of analysis are
interdependent. As Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via put it, ‘absolutely
distinguishing between the personal,
national and international level of war and militarism lacks conceptual and empirical rigor at
best’: feminist attention allows us to understand both the impact of war and militarism on
people (especially, but not only, women) as well as the gendered construction of war and militarism. 46 A
longer historical view that is not hamstrung by a state-centric ontology allows us to see that arms transfer practices have long been
part of the simultaneously transnational and asymmetrical constitution of force. Historical
scholarship on the arms
trade emphasises the importance of decolonisation as the shift from empire to a system of
formally sovereign states in which North– South power asymmetries continue to resonate . One
of the key transformations in weapons transfer practices that came with decolonisation was a
shift on the part of the Soviet Union and China from support for national liberation
movements, to the defence of sovereignty as a means of resisting US-led domination, in either
anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist modes.47 The supply of weapons and military training was a common feature of
both Soviet and US relations with the Third World: despite their differences, North–South politico-military relations had much in
common between the two blocs.48 Ostensibly new
or transformed challenges of the post-Cold War era, such
as Somali piracy, new wars in Africa, or insurgency and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, are
thus better understood in postcolonial terms, with militarised transnational continuities as well
as changes associated with the end of superpower rivalry. 49 Amina Mama and Margo Okazawa-Rey emphasise
the continuities between colonial and contemporary militarism that not only led them to prefer the terminology of postcolonial
conflicts over that of new wars, but also emphasise the fundamentally gendered characteristics of the physical and structural
violence at stake.50 And as Cooper argues, arms control regimes have long featured both ‘proscription and
permission’51 operating in tandem, challenging the optimism of accounts premised on the end of
the Cold War as the changed permissive factor that allows humanitarian concerns to be the core objective of weapons control.
This emphasis on history and power generates scepticism about the optimism and presentism of
most accounts of the emergence of the ATT, and the linear, benevolent account of history found
therein.52 A longer historical perspective allows us to see how state security (whether national or imperial) and (what is today
called) human security have long been two sides of the same coin. There are thus continuities of imperial forms of
practice despite the turn to formal sovereignty . A focus on the systematic or organised and
North–South character of much armed violence is not to return to Cold War politics or the
‘sterile polemic’ of past debates about weapons issues mentioned earlier. Rather, it is to emphasise
that historical weapons supply routes and power relations continue to resonate; that massive
and uneven levels of global military spending and proxy wars continue to matter; and that
clients continue to use weapons in ways that are often unanticipated by patrons. Ostensibly civil or internal wars are
enmeshed in wider regional and international projects.53 There are internationalised sources of much of what
counts as domestic, civil or intra-state, including colonial legacies and internationalised weapons
supply chains. In many accounts, human security has been mobilised as an attempt to ‘cope with
[the] pathological results’ of how security has been defined in postcolonial states in the South .54
Yet this encourages internalist analysis that sees the problems of armed violence as having their sources primarily within the global
South. In conceding the terms of debate to ‘traditional’ security studies, and seeking to shift
inwards from the state to the individuals living within it, rather than critiquing the conception of
the international system, the human security agenda continues to ‘occlude and distort imperial
relations’ in the way that more traditional ‘Westphalian terms of reference’ do .55 In the human
security agenda’s account of the shift from wars between states to wars within them, war falls off the agenda as it is deemed
analytically outdated and politically regressive. Yet neo-realist, Cold War accounts of national security were never adequate, and in
trying to overcome them, many human security accounts take them at face value and get the critique wrong. With its
emphasis on the enduring power of war preparation, the concept of militarism suggests that
much contemporary violence remains coordinated or facilitated (by state, paramilitary, militia, or other
organised actors), and systematic within society, despite the shift towards discussion of armed
violence and intentional homicide, which is suggestive of disorganised violence . So how are we
to mobilise the concept of militarism in light of the imperial turn, in ways that help us think
more productively about weapons control? First is to defend the use of the concept at all.
According to Mary Kaldor, the concept of militarism has outlived its usefulness as it is ‘drawn
from the Cold War and before’: the changes with the end of the Cold War necessitate new
terms.56 To capture the ways that organised violence blurs state/non-state and national/foreign boundaries, whether in the form
of paramilitary groups, organised crime or terrorist cells, or in the form of peacekeeping troops, Kaldor coins the terms ‘Netforce’
and ‘Protectionforce’ respectively.57 Kaldor restricts the concept of militarism to ‘the new American militarism’ and the ‘neo-
modern militarism’ (‘the evolution of classical military forces in large transition states’ practising inter-state war or
counterinsurgency) of states such as Russia, China, and India.58 But in differentiating some types of organised violence as not-
militarism, we lose the opportunity to compare them, to see the overlaps, similarities, and differences in modes of organised
violence. Feminists have long been able to capture this with the concept of militarism, showing
us that ‘it is not quite so easy to set aside “ordinary” aggression, force or violence as “not
war”’59 – especially when we pay attention to the experience of violence in the global South. 60
Second, and relatedly, the specificities of combinations of actors, degrees of state support, and so on,
are subject to empirical and historical specificity, and a common rubric of militarism helps us
understand similarities and differences between them . Working in a historical sociological tradition, Bryan
Mabee and Srdjan Vucetic draw up a typology of forms of contemporary militarism.61 They contrast Michael Mann’s
concept of civil society militarism – ‘the use of organized military violence in pursuit of social
goals that is “state-supported, but not state-led ”’62 – to ‘nation-state militarism’ in both its
authoritarian and liberal forms; to ‘neoliberal militarism’ structured around socioeconomic
liberalisation; and to ‘exceptionalist militarism’ seen in practices associated with the War on
Terror. Feminists tend not to operate in such formal typological ways, but have long been
articulating the idea of war and militarism as a spectrum or a system, in which the forms,
intensities, and characteristics may vary, but the gendered basis of violence is central .63 And a
focus on militarism can be usefully mobilised to consider the connections and feedback loops between Northern and Southern
practices, giving a more internationalised account that is better attuned to the operation of power in contexts of armed violence.
Indeed, Rita Abrahamsen refers to ‘global militarism in Africa’ because ‘while militarism is always specific (and often
national), it
is also simultaneously global’, and the ‘analytical challenge is to capture at one and the
same time the global and the local, and their intersection in particular locations’ .64 Third, while I want
to defend the concept, and think about types of militarism in relation to each other, it is crucial to acknowledge that
contemporary militarism and human security have shaped each other in the last twenty years .
Human security, with its emphasis on human rights and IHL, has become a mediating element in
the relation between war and society. Post-Cold War processes of democratisation have ‘often coincided with new
forms of militarism’ that tend to be analysed under the rubric of policy-oriented concepts such as security sector reform.65 As
Abrahamsen argues, ‘The securitization of underdevelopment … is the condition of possibility for a
global militarism justified in the name of human security and development. ’66 We must take heed of
Abrahamsen’s warning that ‘Paradoxically, transformations that initially entailed a critique of
militarization and militarism have ended up according a new importance to security actors
and laying the groundwork for new expressions of militarization and militarism. ’67 Human security
has – against its self-image as a progressive social force – facilitated a resurgent as well as transformed militarism.

The US uses human rights discourse to rationalize interstate violence

Muso 17 (Shavana, Lecturer in international law, security and human rights at the University of
Manchester, and a Fulbright Scholar in Cyber Security at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington DC., “The Saudi-Led Coalition in Yemen, Arms Exports and
Human Rights: Prevention Is Better Than Cure,” Journal of Conflict and Security Law,
file:///Users/lexyyeager/Downloads/Aff%20-%20LT.pdf) kb

Evidence has shown that Saudi

Arabia has used US defence articles contrary to the statutory restrictions
prescribed by the AECA. US PGMs have been used to strike at medical facilities and residential
areas contravening AECA provisions. Although, it could be argued that Saudi Arabia was invoking
collective self-de- fence through Hadi’s request, however, the AECA terms are aligned with the
DOD Security Assistance Management Manual that US weapons are only to be used against
‘legitimate military targets’.105 The systematic and intended targeting of civilians could not be established as proportionate or
necessary, and thus lawful in this case. Saudi actions are therefore in contravention of the AECA. Another US law, the Leahy Law106 regulates arms
transfers based upon human rights criteria fulfilled by recipient countries. This law lies within the Foreign Operations Appropriations and Defence
Appropriations Acts 2001 and 2002. The
law refers specifically to human rights stating that military assistance
could not be provided to ‘any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of
State has credible evidence that such unit has committed gross violations of human rights’. 107
Since its implementation, it has been integrated within both the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act and Defence Department
Appropriations Act. Unfortunately, the provision has allowed leeway that questions the Leahy Law’s impact. It
allows the
Secretary of State to proceed with assistance if the potential human rights violator ‘is taking
effective measures to bring the responsible members of the security forces unit to justice’ or if
‘corrective steps have been taken’ as per the Defence Appropriations Act. This was extended to
assistance— including military—or funding continuing only when the individual responsible for
human rights infringements was ejected. While approval must be given by the Secretary of State on human rights
standards, some commentators have suggested that assistance was being approved even when human rights violations
continued.108 This amendment to the Leahy Law must also be reintroduced every year through the Foreign Operations
Appropriations and Defence Appropriations Acts. The
Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) 1961109 regulates US
foreign assistance to other countries and affirms the US’s core foreign policy aims to ‘promote
the increased observance of internationally recognised human rights by all coun- tries’. This is
supplemented by the additional affirmation that security assistance may not be provided to the
police, domestic intelligence, or similar law enforcement forces of a country, and licenses may
not be issued under the Export Administration Act of 1979 for the export of crime control and
detection instruments and equipment to a country, the govern- ment of which engages in a
consistent pattern of gross violations of inter- nationally recognized human rights unless the
President certifies in writing to the Speaker [. . .] that extraordinary circumstances exist
warranting pro- vision of such assistance and issuance of such licenses .110
 LGBTQAI+ Rights Violations
Western states weaponize LGBTQI rights violations under the guise of seeking
progress and social reform to demonize less modernized nations justifying
regional conflict and interventionism
Picq and Thiel 15 (Manuela Lavinas Picq is Professor of International Relations at Universidad
San Francisco de Quito, Markus Thiel is Associate Professor at Florida International University,
Mehmet Sinan Birdal, Michael J. Bosia, Francine D’Amico, Sandra McEvoy, Anthony J. Langlois,
Momin Rahman, Laura Sjoberg, “Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ claims shape
International Relations,” Routledge, pg 94-5, 2015)///PSC

There is similarly limited evidence on Muslim minority populations but what exists does indicate
a higher than average resistance to homosexuality . A survey of Muslims in the USA showed that 61% thought
that homosexuality should be discouraged compared with 38% who thought the same in the
general population (Pew, 2007). A survey on Canadian Muslim attitudes to homosexuality found that only 10% of Muslims
expressed strong agreement with same-sex marriage (legal in Canada) while 58% expressed strong disagreement with this right
(Rahman & Hussain, 2011). A
cross-national Gallup survey (2009) found that none of the 500 British
Muslims interviewed showed any acceptance of homosexuality (compared with 58% of the general public);
only 19% in Germany showed acceptance (compared with 68% of the general public) and only 35% of French Muslims showed
acceptance in comparison with 68% of the general population. The preceding is only a brief sketch of the extent
of Muslim antipathy to homosexuality and there are both methodological issues with the existing quantitative
evidence and limitations in the scale of available qualitative evidence on attitudes and beliefs.5 Nonetheless, what evidence we have
does indicate Muslim majority nations and Muslim populations tend to be resistant to homosexual rights and identities. This
resistance is explained by an assumption regarding the lack of modernization on the part of
Muslim states and populations, which makes them unwilling to accept homosexuality. Processes
that symbolize modernization like economic development, democratization, and secularization are
understood as the foundational basis for the social equality of LGBTIQ . For example, Becker confirms the
modernization thesis on tolerance and acceptance of non-normative identities. The thesis argues that economic development leads
to wider acceptance of issues of “self-expression,” whereas less
developed countries emphasize patterns of
economic survival that correlate with less tolerant attitudes (Inglehart & Baker, 2000; Inglehart & Welzel,
2005). Adamczyk and Pitt’s analysis on the “self expression” versus “survival” thesis concludes that if Muslims appear to be the least
tolerant of homosexuality they share similar levels of disapproval with Protestants – particularly when the “survivalist” culture of
their nation is predominant (2009: 349). In light of the available quantitative evidence, and the limited supporting qualitative
evidence (Rahman, 2014), the modernization thesis seems useful in explaining Muslim antipathy to homosexuality because the
evidence is cross culturally consistent: men are less tolerant than women, higher levels of class and education produce more
tolerance, broader social and gender equality seem to be important contextual factors. What
concerns me is that,
within this frame, the “solution” to Muslim antipathy to sexual diversity becomes focused on
modernizing “progress.” There is therefore an inevitable assumption that the teleological
diffusion of socioeconomic conditions, democratic institutions and associated cultural values
would permit the acceptance of homosexuality. These assumptions reduce modernity from a global
historical social formation to a specific set of processes that are both derived from Western
experiences of modernity and are seen to have reached a critical threshold in the West . This
model informs much contemporary research on queer Muslim experience (Yip, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009) as well as broad theoretical
arguments about globalized social change around sexuality (Weeks, 2007).
The reduction of arms sales is rooted in human security and the liberal order,
legitimizing future arms sales under the guise of human rights
Stravriankakis 18 (Anna Stavrianakis, Anna Stavrianakis is a Lecturer in International
Relations at the University of Sussex. Her main research interests are NGOs and global civil
society; the arms trade and military globalisation; and critical approaches to the study of
international security, “Controlling weapons circulation in a postcolonial militarised world,”
Review of International Studies, doi:10.1017/S0260210518000190, 5/16/18, pg. 3-5 )

The ATT is in many ways the epitome of post-Cold War humanitarian arms control and the
broader human security agenda. The purpose of reducing human suffering, the inclusion of IHL
and human rights in the operative provisions of the treaty and of SALW in the scope of
weapons to be regulated, as well as the landmark inclusion of gender-based violence (GBV) as
an issue States Parties must take account of when approving weapons exports, all point to the
ways in which human security and humanitarian arms control attempt to protect individuals
in war and in situations of armed violence. Key features of the negotiating process – the role of
small and middle powers, and civil society; and the challenges posed to the sclerotic UN
negotiating machinery – resonate with the global governance elements of previous human
security-related weapons campaigns against landmines, cluster munitions, and SALW .6 Indeed,
Jennifer Erickson describes the process as a ‘marriage between traditional security and human security begun by the landmine
campaign’.7 Activists and scholars have attempted to elevate human rights and humanitarian concerns for the broad swath of the
world’s population above the political economy and security interests of states and arms-producing companies. Weapons-
specific initiatives such as the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty and 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions
had shown the impact that a humanitarian framing can have in relation to particular
technologies. The negotiation of the 2001 Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and
Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects showed the
challenge of applying human security principles to weapons with legitimate military and security
uses – a challenge that was to resurface during the ATT negotiations. Regulating the conventional arms trade as a whole cannot
take a purely disarmament or humanitarian frame, given its deeply entrenched legitimacy. This makes the ATT a human
security initiative rather than a primarily humanitarian arms control or disarmament one 8 –
while it has the reduction of human suffering as a named purpose, this sits alongside
‘international and regional peace, security and stability’ in Article 1 of the text . As Mary Martin and
Taylor Owen put it, ‘The idea of arms control is appealing to proponents of human security because
it sets out to control tools of violence, as well as seeking to curb the dominance of the state in
determining the forms of insecurity to which policy solutions must be found. ’9 Jody Williams,
founding coordinator of the ICBL, calls on governments and civil society to work together, including on initiatives like the ATT, ‘to
advance human security as a viable alternative to militarism and violence and war’.10 Sympathetic criticism of the ATT has been
aired from within the academic and scholarpractitioner community. Matthew Bolton and Katelyn E. James argue that the
treaty
represents a ‘melding’ of a ‘“maximalist” human security – civil society approach with concerns
of developing countries and the “minimalist” strategic and commercial interests of the major
arms exporters’.11 Christine Chinkin and Mary Kaldor argue that ‘the humanitarian achievements’ of post-Cold War weapons
control ‘need to be complemented by disarmament’. That is, as well as ‘bringing states’ human rights
obligations into the heart of weapons control’, human security requires ‘the reduction of
existing weapon stocks and prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of
further weapons’.12 Such a call echoes the demand of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF),
one of the civil society organisations active on the ATT, for disarmament as a longstanding, yet marginalised feminist concern.13
Others have been less sympathetically critical. For Neil Cooper, initiatives like the ATT ‘do not represent a
novel post-Cold War development that symbolizes progress on an emancipatory human security
agenda’.14 Post-Cold War arms trade regulation has been based on a ‘discourse around
humanitarianism, human security and weapons precision’ that has served to legitimise high-tech
military technologies.15 Cooper and others emphasise the deep historical roots of the way humanitarian
impulses intersect with economic and security ones, including in late nineteenth-century
efforts to regulate the supply and circulation of weapons in the imperial peripheries that are
remarkably resonant with contemporary efforts.16 Historically minded scholars remind us that surplus and
obsolete weapons have long circulated in the peripheries of empire, and new weapons tested
there; and political authorities were licensing weapons exports as early as the sixteenth century
– in part to avoid blowback.17 Arms trade regulation, then, has a ‘historically contingent’ character, marked by the
ongoing importance of ‘power, interest, economy, security’.18 Militarism emerges as a core concern out of such critiques and
provides the jumping-off point for this analysis. Inparticular, there are long traditions of historical
sociological and feminist scholarship on militarism ,19 defined here as ‘the social and international relations of
the preparation for, and conduct of, organized political violence’.20 In relation to arms control, I have argued
elsewhere that the ATT has been mobilised by liberal democratic states primarily to legitimise
their arms transfer practices.21 And Cooper concludes that ‘campaigners need to return to a strategic contestation of
global militarism rather than searching for tactical campaign victories dependent on accommodation with the language and
economic and security paradigms of contemporary military humanism’.22 This is part of a political economy
critique of the way ‘the regulation of pariah weapons might alternatively be described as
“arms control from below within the logic of militarism from above”’, 23 in line with a wider
critique of human security as having been ‘institutionalised and co-opted to work in the
interests of global capitalism, militarism and neoliberal governance ’.24 Neil Cooper and David Mutimer,
surveying the history of and prospects for controlling the means of violence, argue that ‘ the longer term, indirect effect
should be to reduce militarism and promote cultures of peace’ or ‘at the very least, avoid
further embedding cultures of militarism ’.25 How, then, should we think about the impact of
the human security agenda on militarism, and vice versa; and what are the ramifications for
weapons control?

The logic of US interventionism present in the restriction of arms sales justifies

Western savior politics that that force people with same-sex desires into
colonial categories of “gay” and “lesbian” that work to “stabilize” resistant
“Oriental” desires
Massad 02 Joseph Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World”,
Duke University Press, May 1st 2002, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-2-361, /MegLak

One of the more compelling issues to emerge out of the gay movement in the last two decades is the universalization
of
“gay rights.” This project has appropriated the prevailing U.S. discourse on human rights in order to
launch itself on an international scale . Following in the footsteps of the white Western women’s movement, which had
sought to universalize its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women’s movements in the non-Western world
—a situation that led to major schisms from the outset—the gay movement has adopted a similar missionary role.
Organizations dominated by white Western males (the International Lesbian and Gay Association [ILGA] and the
International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission [IGLHRC]) sprang up to defend the rights of “gays and
lesbians” all over the world and to advocate on their behalf. ILGA, which was founded in 1978 at the height of the Carter
administration’s human rights campaign against the Soviet Union and Third World enemies, asserts that one of its aims is to
“create a platform for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people internationally, in
their quest for recognition, equality, and liberation, in particular through the world and regional conferences.”1 As for
IGLHRC, which was founded in 1991, its mission is to “protect and advance the human rights of all people and communities subject
to discrimination or abuse on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status.”2 It
is these missionary tasks,
the discourse that produces them, and the organizations that represent them that constitute
what I call the Gay International. Like the major U.S.-based human rights groups (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International) and many white Western feminist organizations, the Gay International has reserved a special place
for the Muslim world in both its discourse and its advocacy. This orientalist impulse, borrowed from
predominant representations of the Arab and Muslim worlds in the United States and Europe, continues to guide all
branches of the human rights community. As a relative latecomer to this assimilationist project, the Gay
International has had to catch up quickly. To do so, supporters of the Gay International’s missionary tasks have
produced two kinds of literature on the Muslim world: an academic literature of historical,
literary, and anthropological accounts, written mostly by white male European or American gay scholars,
which purport to describe and explain “homosexuality” in the past and present of the Arab and Muslim
worlds; and journalistic accounts of the lives of so-called gays and (much less so) lesbians in the contemporary
Arab and Muslim worlds.3 The former seeks to unravel the mystery of Islam to a Western audience, whereas the latter aims to
inform white gay sex-tourists about the region. The larger mission, as I describe below, is to liberate Arab and
Muslim “gays and lesbians” from the oppression under which they allegedly live by transforming
them from practitioners of same-sex contact into subjects who identify as homosexual and gay. The
following remarks may be taken as typical. Lisa Power, co-secretary general of ILGA , states that “most Islamic
cultures don’t take kindly to organized homosexuality, even though male homoeroticism is deep
within their cultural roots! . . . most people are too nervous to organize, even in countries with a high level of
homosexuality.”4 Robert Bray, public information director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and an officer of ILGA,
understands that “cultural differences make the definition and the shading of homosexuality different among peoples. . . . But I see
the real question as one of sexual freedom; and sexual freedom transcends cultures.” Describing his adventures in Morocco and
southern Spain, Bray states that “at least one guy expressed a longing to just be gay and not have to live within the prescribed sexual
behaviors, and he said that there were others like him.” Seemingly convinced by this one conversation, Bray declares: “I believe this
longing is universal.”5 In
contradistinction to the liberatory claims made by the Gay International in
relation to what it posits as an always already homosexualized population, I argue that it is the
discourse of the Gay International that both produces homosexuals , as well as gays and lesbians,
where they do not exist, and represses same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be
assimilated into its sexual epistemology .6 I show how this discourse assumes prediscursively that homosexuals,
gays, and lesbians are universal categories that exist everywhere in the world, and based on this prediscursive axiom, the Gay
International sets itself the mission of defending them by demanding that their rights as “homosexuals” be granted where they are
denied and be respected where they are violated. In doing so, however, the
Gay International produces an effect
that is less than liberatory. The Gay International , through its most well-known organization, ILGA, launched a
new and aggressive universalization campaign in 1994 , coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
Stonewall Uprising. After ILGA achieved official NGO status at the United Nations in 1993 (which it later lost), its international
activities intensified, including
efforts to stop “the mass execution of homosexuals in Iran,” an
unsubstantiated propagandistic claim that was also bandied about by an official of the U.S.
State Department.7 Part of the commemorations of Stonewall was ILGA’s convening of its sixteenth annual World
Conference, 23 June to 4 July 1994 in New York. Whereas ILGA boasted delegates from Western Europe, East Asia, Latin America,
Eastern Europe, and the United States, it “was working hard to bring activists from Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean.”8
The commemorations included the “International March on the United Nations to Affirm the
Human Rights of Lesbian and Gay People ,” which called for, among other things, the proclamation of
an “International Year of the Lesbian and Gay People (possibly 1999),” and the application of the UN’s Universal
Declaration of Human Rights to “lesbian, gay, bisexual, drag and transgender people.”9 This aggressive campaign at the
United Nations has continued throughout the 1990s into the present. Rex Wockner , the author of
an acutely othering article on “gays and lesbians” in the Arab world and Iran, which was reprinted in a large
number of gay publications in the United States and Britain, appears baffled by Arab and Iranian men who practice
both “insertive” same-sex and different-sex contact and refuse the Western identification of
gayness: “Is this hypocritical? Or a different world?” he marvels. “Are these ‘straight’ men really ‘gays’ who
are overdue for liberation? Or are humans by nature bisexual, with Arab and Moslem men better tuned into reality than
Westerners? Probably all the above.”10 It is precisely this perceived instability in the desires of Arab and Muslim
men that the Gay International seeks to stabilize, as its polymorphousness confounds gay (and straight) sexual
epistemology. As I show below, the assumptions underlying the mission of the Gay International demand that
these resistant “Oriental” desires, which exist, according to Wockner, in “oppressive—and in some cases murderous—
homelands,” be re-oriented to and subjected by the “more enlightened” Occident .11 This essay surveys
the literature of the Gay International with an eye to the politics of representation it enacts and its stated project of “defending gays
and lesbians.” Although I look at different kinds of literature—academic studies, journalistic accounts, and human rights and tourism
publications—which are governed by different professional demands, political configurations, markets, and audiences, I do not seek
to flatten them by erasing these differences but rather to demonstrate how, despite these manifest differences, a certain ontology
and epistemology are taken as axiomatic by all of them.
 Warmaking
The AFF’s attempt to end arms sales and “demilitarize” IS a form of masculine
militarism that does not scrap masculinity, but augments it in worse forms
Cannen 14
(Emma Cannen, PhD candidate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, where she has
taught courses in global politics, international studies, gender studies and sociology. Her thesis, Investigating US and Venezuelan
Presidential Masculinities in the First Decade of the ‘War on Terror’, looks at the presidential masculinities of George W. Bush,
Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez and their relationship to militarism and geopolitics in the region. She also researches Indonesian
and Australian militarized masculinities, 11-13-2014, Cannen, E. (2013). Avant-Garde Militarism and a Post-Hip-Hop President.
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16(2), 255–277. doi:10.1080/14616742.2013.780375)

In 2008 Obama used hip-hop icon Jay-Z’s ‘Get That Dirt Off Your Shoulder’ gesture when dismissing Hillary Clinton’s criticisms of him
during the presidential primaries. Then, he caused a stir by fist bumping future First Lady Michelle in his acceptance speech. Later,
he did the inaugural presidential dance to the tune of Beyonce´ singing Etta James’s ‘At Last’. In 2012 he sang Al Green’s ‘Lets Stay
Together’ at a New York fundraiser in Harlem and ‘slow jammed the news’ (a style of rhythm-and-blues spoken word singing) on
Jimmy Fallon’s late-night television show. Clearly, Obama is not your average US president, yet Landreau’s (2011) analysis of
Obama’s national security rhetoric and policy suggests otherwise. For Landreau, Obama’s
presidency is oriented by
the same logic of American masculinity and myth of American Exceptionalism that has long
propelled US militarism.1 Whilst Obama performs ‘a softer, more inclusive presidential
masculinity in the area of global politics and terrorism’ fundamentally his foreign policy and presidential
masculinity are ‘in a line of continuity with Bush’ (Landreau 2011: 2–4). In this article, I build on and speak back to
Landreau’s analysis, fleshing out the concept of presidential masculinities and Obama’s presidential masculinity. I base my analysis
on Obama’s visual discourse as presented on the official White House website.2 In contrast to Landreau, I argue that, whilst Obama’s
policies and rhetoric follow Bush’s, his broader masculinity politics sometimes do not. As a black man, Obama does not embody
American masculinity in the same way as all previous US presidents. The vignettes above indicate this. Obama
has mastered
the negotiations necessary for an African American politician to ‘make it’ in mainstream US
politics and consciously constructs and performs a contemporary, hybrid presidential
masculinity, that is demilitarized and characterized by a post-hip-hop ghetto-style cool. This presidential masculinity can
and has been ‘framed in stark contrast to the shoot-‘em up cowboy masculinity of the Bush Administration’ (Shaw and Watson 2011:
145). Indeed, Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, despite sharing many of his predecessor’s policies. Thus Obama’s
‘softer, more inclusive presidential masculinity’ that Landreau identified yet, perhaps, underexamined, is worthy of
feminist attention as it rebrands and obscures ongoing US militarism . Obama’s convincing 2012 election victory
over Republican Mitt Romney further demonstrates this. His contemporary presidential masculinity, of which his defence of
women’s rights and the American middle class is key, triumphed repeatedly over Romney’s conservative, even sexist and racist,
American values and his stiff, upper-class millionaire, Mormon masculinity. WHY PRESIDENTIAL MASCULINITIES? Feminists
have argued that the relationship between masculinity, militarism and war is toxic , mutually
constitutive and allows, even encourages, the horrific reality of war to be viewed as ‘both intelligible
and acceptable as a social practice and institution’ (Hutchings 2008: 389). I investigate this relationship in the
political sphere, particularly, the embodiment, performance and construction of presidential masculinities. To date, feminists and
masculinities scholars have identified past, present and changing hegemonic masculinities in relation to geopolitical events such as
the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the first Iraq War, 9/11 and the current ‘War on Terror’ (WOT).3 They have also researched the
militarization of political offices, in particular, Bush’s embodiment of US hegemonic masculinities during the early WOT.4 However,
only Landreau (2011) frames his analysis around presidential masculinity. This article contributes to this literature by introducing the
concept of presidential masculinities more concretely and initiating a discussion on what role they play in global politics.
Presidents are the ultimate leaders of militaries and decision-makers in war. This is especially
the case in the US where the presidency is clearly militarized. This militarization of the
presidency ‘is a profoundly gendered distortion that shrinks the meaning of governance and
gives a presidential officeholder and “his” strategists a constant incentive to feature military
solutions above more subtle, prolonged, complex sorts of solutions’ (Enloe 2004: 154). Moreover, ‘war
plays a special role in anchoring the concept of masculinity, providing a fixed reference point for
any negotiation or renegotiation of what masculinity or, in particular, hegemonic masculinity may mean’
(Hutchings 2008: 390). I build on these analyses to investigate how US presidential masculinities have been renegotiated throughout
the WOT. Since 9/11 the US presidency was further militarized, in a very conventional way under Bush and now,
as I elucidate shortly, in an avant-garde fashion under Obama.5 Using presidential masculinities as a descriptive and analytical
category encourages a more nuanced engagement with the changing relationship between militarism, war and political leadership.
It helps us understand the broader militarization of political offices that Enloe (2004) speaks of and the renegotiations of masculinity
in war – in this case the WOT – that Hutchings (2008) highlights. Thus, theoretically, presidential masculinities are not necessarily
synonymous with hegemonic masculinities, but they are closely related. It is important to broaden feminist theorizing because
‘whether the process of militarization is stalled, reversed, or propelled forward in any society is determined by the political
processes that bolster certain notions of masculinity and certain presumptions about femininity’ (Enloe 2004: 218). As a concept,
presidential masculinity focuses attention on these processes as embodied in one of the most prominent, symbolic, meticulously
constructed and scrutinized ‘masculinities’ of a nation. Presidential
masculinities, therefore, tell us about a
society’s gender orders and its processes of de/re-militarization. Moreover, in the US, the president is
‘almost always the most significant human protagonist’ in the myth of American Exceptionalism
(Landreau 2011: 4) and this myth is deeply entangled in US militarism . Thus, a focus on presidential performances
of masculinity, as well as their embodiment and telling of the myth of American Exceptionalism, is essential. This article examines
the relationship between Obama’s presidential masculinity in visual terms, and US militarism in policy terms, in the post-Bush post-
9/11 era. I argue that Obama’s
presidential masculinity has rebranded, sustained and possibly even
reinvigorated US militarism – in both rhetoric and practice – across the globe. I focus less on Obama’s
presidential masculinity and processes of US militarization domestically, but see this as a worthwhile future research project.
Overall, my work heeds Mann’s (2008: 194) call that ‘Feminists must ask: What other manhood, what other womanhood, is to take
place of American national manhood in post-9/11 United States? How shall it announce itself? What Stories must it tell?’.
Investigating Obama’s presidential masculinity in the post-9/11 post-Bush era and the stories it tells is one place to start.

Focus on external war obsfugates structural violence and the ways in which
violence of arms trade produces intimate, everyday violence
Stavrianakis 16 [Anna Stavrianakis, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at University of
Sussex, MScEcon in Security Studies from University of Wales, Aberystwyth and PhD in Politics
from University of Bristol, author of Taking Aim at the Arms Trade, “Legitimizing liberal
militarism: politics, law and war in the Arms Trade Treaty”. Third World Quarterly, 37 (5), pp.
840-865, 2016, http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/57545/1/TWQ%20Legitimizing%20liberal
%20militarism%20-%20accepted%20clean%20version.pdf] kb
Nonetheless, the treatment of GBV illustrates the challenges of addressing militarism. Cynthia Enloe describes Article 7.4 as ‘a
transnational feminist success’, ‘buried in [the ATT’s] thirteen pages of formal diplomatic language’.98 WILPF characterises the
forms of harm caused by the arms trade in terms of sexual violence, repression and state
violence, and homicide and domestic violence,99 illustrating feminist arguments about war as a
continuum or a system. This connects up ‘domestic’ or intimate partner violence to war, and
‘internal’ repression and state violence to ‘external’ war, exposing what Enloe calls ‘the causal
connections between group armed violence and violence perpetrated inside homes and
families’.100 But alongside the inevitable diplomatic and bureaucratic politics of
implementation, there is the question of how this broader feminist, anti-militarist critique could
be operationalised, not least because of the raising of the bar in the treaty text, such that GBV
risks have to constitute serious violations of IHL or IHRL to be a reason to deny exports. As Paul
Kirby puts it: ‘is there ever a conflict where arms flows could not be said to facilitate serious acts of gender-based violence – harms
strongly correlated with, but not necessarily inflicted by, the deployment of weaponry? Is the use of white
phosphorous ‘gender-based’ because it is indiscriminate, and therefore likely to inflict harm on innocent ‘womenandchildren’? ...
Are massacres of battle-aged males by AK-47s gender-based?’101 A feminist critique that all violence (direct and
structural) facilitated by the circulation of weapons is gendered and that all weapons transfers
have the potential for GBV is indicative of the scale of the challenge facing anti-militarist
accounts of weapons control. It is also indicative of the ongoing obstacles facing ‘the development of anti-militarist
politics of peace’ in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda more widely,102 which has itself demonstrated a ‘tendency
towards militarization’.103 The
disappearance of historical feminist commitments to disarmament in
the WPS agenda represents in part a pragmatic choice by campaigners, but also ‘exposes the
lack of compatibility between the ontologies of feminist peace and the state system’.104

Gendered implications and reasonings for acts of violence go unanalyzed in

examinations of war scenarios – meaning their understanding of war-peace
relations is fundamentally lacking
Cockburn 4 Cynthia Cockburn, “The Continuum of Violence – A Gender Perspective on War
and Peace”, in Sites of Violence – Gender and Conflict Zones, chapter 2, 2004, /MegLak

But first a question needs to be asked: Why is conventional analysis so often gender-blind? Feminist analysis
often asserts that it is “not enough just to add women and stir.” What is it, then, about everyday perceptions that must be changed
to constitute a gender analysis? I suggest, first, that women can be understood only as part of a gender dyad, in which men and mas-
clinity warrant as much attention as women and femininity. Second, beyond distributions by sex (men do this, women do that), we
need to observe the functioning of gender as a relation, and a relation of power, that compounds other power dynamics. gender:
normalized or invisibilized This kind of analysis is rather rare in everyday discourse. Gender has a curi- ous way
of being simultaneously present and absent in popular perceptions. Very often in casual conversation,
in media reporting, and even in academic work about incidents of violence on individual, group, or national scales,
the sex of the actors is mentioned but not analyzed. Gender as a relation remains implicit, either taken
for granted or altogether overlooked. This can be illustrated by an example of violence at the level of the group. Many
countries have recently seen outbreaks of murderous violence in insti- tutions, particularly
schools. In April 1999, for instance, at the Columbine High School in Denver, Colorado, USA, two students shot dead
twelve other students and a teacher and then turned their guns on themselves. In the many pages of popular reports and
analyses of this school massacre it was rare to find any mention of gender relations. The
Newsweek special report on the incident is a good example. Its cover text posed the question, “What can a nation
learn from the latest high school horror?” The paper of course reported that the killers were boys . This was, it
seems, widely anticipated, indeed taken for granted, because when the police came in and released the
surviving students, “every male student had to be frisked and treated as a possible suspect” (“An
American Nightmare” 1999: 76, italics added). On the other hand, the significance of this gender specificity was
over- looked. It is characteristic that when the unnamed authors of the Newsweek Special Report analyzed the likelihood of individuals
turning to murder, they stated that “having any of the following risk factors doubles a boy’s chance of

becoming a murderer: coming from a family with a history of criminal vio- lence; being abused;
belonging to a gang; abusing drugs or alcohol” (82, ital- ics added). Thus the report did not formulate its
analysis in terms of the risk factors increasing an individual’s chance of becoming a murderer . Had
the authors taken this route they would have certainly found themselves obliged to include being a boy

as a highly significant factor. Being male augments the chances of becoming a killer by several orders of magnitude. Also
invisible in news reports following the school massacre was the sig- nificance of gender as a
relation, specifically as one involving a power dynamic between and among men. Reports immediately
following the events described two main groupings of students in Columbine High School: the “jocks,”
the dominant group of boys, admired by many girl students, and a subordinated category of boys who were despised
because they were seen as being physically incompetent, “brainy” computer geeks and who were insulted for their
“uncool” fashion sense. It was two of the latter category of boys who, in their killing spree, turned on
the males they resented and some of the girls associated with them. Subsequent reporting recognized that
the school was a micropolitical world made up of differentiated subcultures in acute conflict and that the young killers had inflicted
terror on people seen as “different” from them- selves, as “other.” What tended to escape analysis was the gender factor. Here, in
fact, were the “multiple masculinities” identified in gender theory. R. W. Connell (1987) has stressed the
complexity of gender regimes, with one form of masculinity tending to have hegemony over others, as
well as over femininity. The concept of hegemony, deriving from Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of class relations, refers to the
cultural dynamic by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in social life through the tacit consent of other groups.
“Hegemonic masculinity,” writes Connell, “can be defined as the configuration of gender practice
which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy,
which guar- antees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the sub-
ordination of women” (77). The jocks of the Newsweek report embodied such a hegemonic masculinity,
and some girls were, it seems, their camp follow- ers. The young killers were an inferiorized and alienated
masculinity, the nerds, “expelled from the circle of legitimacy” (Connell 1987: 79). It was vio- lent animosity not just
between two cultures (as Newsweek has it) but between two masculine cultures (a gendered relation) that
prompted the young men of the alienated group to kill others and themselves. The Newsweek analysis of the
killings focused on access to guns in the United States. A gender analysis would have dwelt not only on the
dangers of gun ownership but also, and equally, on the dangers inherent in certain masculine
cultures that foster it. This connection, once seen, would have informed an analysis of wider conflicts. The weapons
that the young killers stockpiled in the family garage were produced by the armaments industry
that stocks the arsenals of the U.S. Air Force and the Yugoslav government . The student subcultures
were by no means separate from certain larger cul- tures and movements within U.S. society.
These masculinities can be seen at play in every boardroom and software laboratory. If we were more alive to the
gender factor in small-scale processes of this kind, expressed in such phe- nomena as bullying,
exclusion, and an infatuation with weapons, we would have better conceptual tools for
understanding and perhaps ending violence on the macro scale. We might, for instance, have
seen something gendered in the incompa- rably more destructive conflagrations such as the
conflict in the Balkans, which the Columbine tragedy only momentarily displaced from the head- lines during the terrible
spring of 1999. With a gender perspective we would have observed, in reports of the war in and against Yugoslavia, how men and
women were differently positioned both in the conflict and in opinion polls concerning the conflict. We
might have
analyzed political discourses to see the gender cultures involved, the manly vigor and pride at
stake for the lead- erships of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries and Yugoslavia as they
balanced the advantages of negotiation against those of military attrition . And, furnished with a gender
analysis, we might have antic- ipated that some women would organize against the war . And indeed
some did. Women in Black in Belgrade outspokenly linked masculinity and mili- tarism , publicly
opposed their government’s policies, sheltered army desert- ers, and maintained traitorous links with “the enemy”
(Women in Black 1999). I have used the Columbine story to illustrate how traditional perceptions of women and men, and of the
relation between them, may be gendered per- ceptions without taking account of or questioning gender relations. Although there
are varied inflections from one culture to another, a differrence between men and women is, in two senses,
normally emphasized. Dif- ference between men and women is habitually represented. And simultane- ously it is reinforced
as a norm. It is normally represented as natural, rooted in biology, and confirmed in history. Sex roles and responsibilities
are accepted, even idealized, as contrasted and complementary. The power relations of gender, however, are
absent from this discourse. In some environments traditionalism has given way to a new set of con- ventions: “sex-
equality” thinking. Perversely, this too, out of a sense of fair play, can sometimes produce a version of gender blindness. Its
exponents say, “It should make no difference whether you are a woman or a man,” and this
comes to mean “There is no difference.” If the normalization of sex dif- ference reflects traditionalism,
this stress on the similarities of men and women and equality between them is associated with twentieth-
century modernism, liberalism, and individualism. It is an important ideal. But deploying the concept often
obscures the fact that, in practice, gender differentiation and male power live on.
 Globalization
Current understandings of globalization and queerness invoke binaries
incapable of explaining the imperialist and commodified roots of western-
influenced queer discourses
Tellis and Bala 15 Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala, “Introduction: The Global Careers of
Queerness”, in The Global Trajectories of Queerness: Re-Thinking Same-Sex Politics in the Global
South, pg. 15-17, 2015, /MegLak
They are quick to recognize, of course, that saying that does not at all “get at the complex terrain of sexual politics that is at once
national, regional, local, even ‘cross- cultural’ and hybrid” (ibid.). Globalization they assert is neither simply a homogenizing
movement nor simply neocolonialism. They prefer the word “transnational” (Grewal and Kaplan 664) and proceed to
enlist five defining characteristics of the discourse of the transnational in the context of the US academy: (1) a
discourse of migration, without an analysis of labor ; (2) a discourse of the irrelevance of the
nation state, which erases an analysis of political economy and new forms of governmentality ;
(3) one of diaspora, which mystifies and romanticizes displacement as subcultural and always
resistant to the nation-state; (4) that of neocolonialism, which mystifies forms of exploitation
before globalized capitalism, and (5) the NGO-ization of social movements, a “transnationalism
from below” (Grewal and Kaplan 666), that relies on a universal subject and is tied to colonial processes and imperialism.
These five co-ordinates usefully lay out the main components of the field in the Global South
(and not just in the academies of the Global South), albeit in modified form, given the different scales and
spaces. In these spaces, the field of same-sex politics can be said to be marked by migrations, both internal and external, and of
different kinds, but all without an analysis of labor; there is a rhetoric of rights that exceeds the nation state and engages the nation
with extra-national tools pretending the nation-state is irrelevant when it is, in fact, more relevant than ever; diasporic narratives of
identity riding the globalization jet are the materials used to form subcultures in urban spaces; the
rhetorics of
neocolonialism, from the Left in many parts of the Global South , for example, are still predicated
upon the complete erasure of same-sex politics and an insufficient critique of Third World
capitalism; the NGO-ization of the women’s movements and the same-sex “movements” has
taken place with little reflexive critique of the repercussions.

Incalling for a new interdisciplinarity to deal with globalization in the US academy, Kaplan and
Grewal, however, proceed to undertake undertake a series of problematic moves . They dismiss
psychoanalysis as universalist, Eurocentric and a form of biomedicine (667), accuse gay and lesbian and
queer studies of focusing on the white middle-class as the only nationalist subjects (669), argue
that a tradition/modernity divide persists in the US academy where tradition is the less
developed Third World and moder- nity is the liberated West , and position sexual minority subjects as purely
oppositional. In a corrective to a practice attributed to an unnamed “many”, they say: “queer subjects are not always already avant-
garde for all time and in all places” (670), clinching their argu- ment with the pitting of gay men against lesbians, when they say:
“Lesbian sexuality and practices in many sites have to struggle against patriarchal formations, while gay male sexualities may not”
(ibid.). Grewal
and Kaplan conclude with a call for a new mode of study that “adopts a more
complicated model of transnational relations in which power structures, asymmetries, and
inequalities become the conditions of possibility of new subjects” (671). They acknowledge this as a writing
of present history, point to the limitations of iden- tity politics and indicate that it is links between various institutions that produce
sub- jects, not
just the politics of identity as we know it. Salutary stuff, to be sure, but just how are
these “new subjects” going to be theorized? Grewal and Kaplan end with broad brushstrokes that suggest more
where these “new subjects” can be located or zones that will furnish materials of use to constitute them rather than the materials of
their subject formation themselves. The zones for Grewal and Kaplan are: the discourses of modernity and
cultural production, tourism, and immigration. Another engagement with the question of globalization came in
2002 in the collec- tion edited by Martin Manalansan and Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé titled Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the
Afterlife of Colonialism. The opening statement in the book’s intro- duction claims: “Queerness is now global” (Manalansan and
Cruz-Malavé 1). When was queerness not global, if by queerness they mean non-
heteronormativity? Or do they implicitly mean that queerness as a concept emerged in the US and has now reached across
the globe? Queerness as a word and category still does not mean any- thing in many places in the
world and in yet others, it means something different from its US academic definition , which in
turn is different from its ACT UP definition. The next assertion is that queerness has become an object of
consumption (ibid.). Yet isn’t the historical formation of gayness, which moves into queerness, as John
D’Emilio has shown us, intertwined from the start with capitalism? Manalansan and Cruz-Malavé
proceed to employ a series of binaries. First, between commodification and politics . As if politics is
completely outside the realm of commod- ification. As if queer intervention is not capable of being
commodified and with deleterious effects as is clear in many parts of the Global South. Second, between
dispossession and empowerment. As if empowerment cannot dispossess . It sure can, and queer politics
in many sites has shown that eloquently. What apparently empowers might actually dispossess. Third, between home (the
nationalist sphere) and diasporas (Euro-American queer politics). As if the two were so neatly separable. As if queer North
American and Western European politics were also not tied up with nationalist projects and as if the diaspora’s
“queernesses” were not always already contaminated by Euro-US queer politics. These three
binaries make them invoke the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) and The International Gay and Lesbian
Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) and the language of human rights without any interrogation of their
discourses and their imperialisms . Manalansan and Cruz-Malavé want to unfix the word “gay”
and open it to its global signifying capacities and situated contextualities. Fine rhetorical moves again, but what
constitutes “situated knowledge” in the global con- text? How does it exactly break with hegemonic notions of
“gay”? They then outline five basic processes within globalization: a) heterogeneity obscures power
relations in it, b) queerness is often appropriated to legitimize hegemonic discourses like nationalism and
US imperialism, c) the non-West is teleologically interpolated into an evolutionary narrative
moving toward the fully-formed West, d) all non-Western queer identities are translated into
Euro-US categories and e) there is a complicity between home (nationalisms) and global values. A
fourth binary creeps in. How are nationalisms separable, even schematically, from the global
economy? How, allowing for the binary, can queerness become a third term, outside of the
terms of the binary (“local, global, mobile”) to dissolve it? What liminal “free” space does or can queerness
occupy even as it partakes of both? From which space does it operate? They offer the South Asian Lesbian and Gay
Association (SALGA) in the US as the way out and this is questionable, not least because it is based on an invocation of notional
activist links between SALGA in New York and CALERI in Delhi, but also because of the theoretically and politically unsubstantiated
privileging of the “disaporic positionality” (Manalansan and Cruz-Malavé 7). The
final and fifth binary they introduce is
between globalization and subjectivity, building on Elizabeth Povinelli’s and George Chauncey’s complaint
that globalization studies does not speak of the embodiment and the desires of the queer
subject (Manalansan and Cruz-Malavé 8). Manalansan and Cruz-Malavé’s answer is the neces- sarily counter-
hegemonic queer subject whose “agency might become legible in map- ping the circuits and
flows of globalization” (ibid.). Queer subjectivity is not a narrative that can be so beautifully
disinterred from the debris of globalization and offered as a pure counter-hegemonic narrative. Nor is it only
in the mapping of the “counter- hegemonic rhetorical strategies” (ibid.) as they put it, that
queer subjectivities become legible. That conflates queer subjectivity with queer critique. Queer
subjectivities in the sites explored in this book, are anything but purely counter-hegemonic. They are often dovetailed quite
comfortably and disturbingly with the hegemonic. The ways out of these crippling binaries is to see the
implicatedness of all these diametrically counter- posed narratives in each other and see what
form of subject emerges from that melange.
 Terrorism
The act of disarming foreign countries is form of “overseas contingency
programming” used to justify demonization of the East and a tactic of fear used
by institutions to assert power over the populous using self-surveillance and
panopticon tactics
Kumar 17 Deepa Kumar, “See Something, Say Something: Security Rituals, Affect, and US
Nationalism from the Cold War to the War on Terror”, Duke University Press, 2017,
https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/30/1/143/516819/0300143.pdf,
/MegLak

Domestically, the project of winning consent for the war on terror involved a revamped form of
emotion management articulated through the concept of “resilience.” The DHS defines resilience as “the ability to
adapt to changing conditions and withstand and rapidly recover from disruption due to emergencies.” The list of emergencies
includes “acts of terrorism, cyber attacks, pandemics, and cata- strophic natural disasters” (DHS 2016c). While the
threats may have changed, one can see continuity between Cold War and war on terror emotion management. Today, however,
the state’s relationship to fear is more complex. During the Cold War, fear was not a military objective of the
Soviet Union but a secondary effect of nuclear deterrence. In the war on terror, fear or terror as a tactic is
mobilized by various groups to achieve their political goals. For the US state, therefore, impeding its enemies’
ability to spread fear is itself a way of countering terrorism. However, this places counterterrorism policy makers in a double bind.
On the one hand, their stated aim is to reduce fear (terror); on the other hand, their institutional
power rests on the
circulation of fear. The challenge they face is to generate a productive fear that legitimates the
expansion of the national security state. The Bush administration was falling short on meeting this challenge. A DHS
report on the eve of the Barack Obama administration identified resilience as one of the top challenges facing the incoming
secretary of homeland security (Kahan, Allen, and George 2009: 1). Obama
himself gave substantial emphasis to
resilience during his campaign and within a few months of being elected set up a new National
Security Council Directorate for Resilience (ibid.: 2). Hamilton Bean, Lisa Keränen, and Margaret Durfy (2011) argue
that resilience has since become a key aspect of policy discourse in both the United States and the United Kingdom. As they note:
The problem of modulating citizen fear and apathy in response to “existential threat” [sic] is a
task that has united U.S. and U.K. administrations for nearly 70 years . Just as Cold War–era of cials and
commentators endeav- ored to “naturalize” the threat of Soviet nuclear annihilation, officials and commentators in the
twenty-first century increasingly describe terrorism as an “inevitable” consequence of the forces
of globalization. In this con- text, resilience is rapidly becoming the naturalized policy posture of the United Kingdom and
United States. (Ibid.: 432) Arun Kundnani (2014) observes that the Obama administration drew heavily from the United Kingdom’s
counterterrorism strategies.4 The Obama administration implemented various changes— the “global war on terror” was
renamed “overseas contingency operations” and the “clash of civilizations” framework was rejected in favor of the
language of tolerance and inclusivity. This ideological shift from neoconservatism to liberalism was part
of a policy shift; it was a means to bolster the United States’ declining global image and to put
the war on terror on more sound footing. On the domestic front, Bush’s color-coded terror alert system was
replaced by the NTAS; the key poster of the campaign ( g. 1) is one that centers resilience. The Obama administration
emphasized “homegrown terrorism” and the need to engage communities inside the United
States in counterterrorism activity. As in the United Kingdom, the role of citizens in watching for signs of radicalization
among their neighbors, friends, and community members was now deemed important (Kundnani 2014). The 2010 nationwide
“See Something, Say Something” campaign needs to be understood in this context . The DHS adopted a
slogan originally used by the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City because it fit with the counterterrorism think- ing of
the Obama administration. It
was an attempt to produce a “smarter” emer- gency preparedness system
that emphasized resilience in the face of natural and human-made catastrophes; along the way, it
normalized the further expansion of the national security state and its surveillance capacities
during the Obama years.The DHS (2016f) website describes the “See Something, Say Something” campaign in the following way:
Across the nation, we’re all part of communities. In cities, on farms, and in the suburbs, we share everyday moments with our
neighbors, colleagues, family, and friends. It’s easy to take for granted the routine moments in our every day—going to work or
school, the grocery store or the gas station. But your every day is different than your neighbor’s— filled with the moments that
make it uniquely yours. So if you see something you know shouldn’t be there—or someone’s behavior that doesn’t seem quite right
—say something. Because only you know what’s supposed to be in your everyday. Informed, alert communities play a critical role in
keeping our nation safe. “If You See Something, Say SomethingTM” engages the public in protecting our homeland through
awareness-building, partner- ships, and other outreach. In this description, the nation is constructed as a collection
of communities clus- tered in cities, in suburbs, and on farms, where individuals share their “routine” and
“everyday” lives with neighbors, colleagues, friends, and family. In contrast to the reality of life under neoliberalism,
which has raised the levels of atomiza- tion and alienation to alarming levels (Davidson 2016), the DHS campaign is based
on an idyllic image of a cohesive national community . To belong to this ideal imagined community
(Anderson 1992), however, one must participate in security rituals. Ernest Gellner (2006) argues that modern
nationalism has deep roots within the structural requirements of industrial capitalism; here we see its neoliberal adaptation. In its
current form, it appeals to citizens to be vigilant and not “take for granted the routine moments in our every day.” Instead, they
are to routinize surveillance and identify objects or people who don’t belong, in order to keep
the “nation safe” and reproduce the idyllic imagined community . In this sense, security nationalism offers
atomized individuals a sense of belonging through the enactment of security rituals. Further, it offers a form of psychologi- cal
security in an era characterized by economic insecurity and precarity. How- ever, as we will see shortly, who belongs and who does
not belong is demarcated along lines of race.
 Climate
Spectacularized fears of climate change create a universal modern subject and
are driven by reproductive futurism – this denigrates queer modes of
consumption and precarity.
Ahuja, PhD, ‘15(Neel, TransnationalCulturalStudies@UCSanDiego,
AssocProfFeminist&CriticalRace/EthnicStudies@UCSantaCruz, “Intimate Atmospheres Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions,” GLQ,
Volume 21, Issue 2-3) BW

Yet the greenwashing spectacle of the outsized, universal, waste-defined human masks more complex
chains of interspecies relation. Farmed animals and mined fossil bodies in these processes amplify atmospheric
carbon, creating an odd form of time travel in which the bodies of the dead fuel the lateral expansion and
acceleration of carbon-privileged bodies in the present (globalization’s “time-space compression”) at the
expense of bodies cast out of the bioengineered economy and into uncertain futures. While there
is much more work needed to tease out these situated relations, feminist critics of reproduction have for some time
explored linkages of neoliberal metabolism , species, and reproductive labor, arguing that the
generation of surplus implicates entire social systems in the toxic administration of life. As Greta
Gaard explains, critical-race feminist work on “reproductive justice” points to ways that capital controls reproductive
capacities for precaritized women. The northern media’s focus on women as individuals torn between child rearing and
careers masks environmental conditions of declining fertility, the reproductive inputs of industrial animal breeding, and the
production of a transnational market in southern surrogates.46 Reflecting on the consequences of such entanglements for an
analysis of queer liberalism, Heidi Nast highlights how the
international divisions of labor and life furthermore
produce “surplus” populations to fill the flexible labor forces of sweated manufacturing.47 Claims that gay
and lesbian publics experience freedom from sexually dimorphic reproduction , for Nast, mask the
economic mandate that others elsewhere biologically reproduce this labor force.48 The offshoring
of reproduction to southern zones of flexible labor and commoditized surrogacy—as well as the creeping of capital into the
plastic form of living species—allows for expansive practices of consumption and the constitution of
homonormative kinship by wealthy publics that are shrinking in both numerical terms and purchasing power.49

“Footprints” of environmental destruction collect complex itineraries of biocapital into a generic

opprobrium against certain styles of consumption. In such renderings of climate crisis, ecologically
threatened children often become moralizing fetishes for environmental government. Whereas
Edelman’s analysis in No Future frames dystopic fictions of declining northern fertility—most notably, P. D. James’s novel Children of
Men—as fascistic signs of a compulsory reproduction, such narratives may also emerge as symptoms of
contradictions in the geographic logics of production. Queer publics fall on all sides of these
contradictions, particularly those of race, nation, and class, and many homosexual and trans subjects are
increasingly rendered disposable to the orders of capital even as a privileged few attain
benefits of marriage, adoption, and employment inclusion. Edelman’s critique of reproductive
futurism thus might reflect an atmosphere of climate-driven fears of imperial decline and
shrinking capacities to reproduce extant divisions of labor and life. What if many of those
populations who do not, will not, or cannot sexually reproduce are in effect doing what growing swaths of
humanity are doing: exercising a phantasmic “choice” to refuse reproduction against an increasingly
precarious world of unemployment, toxicity, and violence? Put simply, the sovereign choice to
refuse reproduction may be redundant from the viewpoint of a late-carbon liberalism unwilling
to distribute any more social goods and unable to guarantee life support. From here we can understand that
there are constraints to ecological metaphors of the human as a universal waste-defined parasite; the human remains a divided
biopolitical assemblage connecting multiple species into unequal flows of energy and labor.
 Disease
The securitization of bacterial disease abroad is emblematic of an affective
prophylaxis that reproduces cisheteronormative forms of imperial control in
tandem with military withdrawal.
Ahuja, PhD, ’16 (Neel, TransnationalCulturalStudies@UCSanDiego,
AssocProfFeminist&CriticalRace/EthnicStudies@UCSantaCruz, Bioinsecurities, Duke University Press, p. 78-83) BW

In 1942, the United States and Panamá established a cooperative venereal disease control program, initially set up as a system of
registration and health surveillance for sex workers. This system openly tolerated soldiers’ purchase of sex in Panamanian cities. In
1946, however, facing rapid increases in soldiers contracting bacterial infections of syphilis and gonorrhea, the military set forth an
official policy to suppress prostitution in the armed forces worldwide. At this point, the cooperative control program shifted focus
toward arresting and quarantining sex workers through the
end of 1947, when the United States agreed to
substantially reduce its military presence on the isthmus in the face of Panamanian nationalist criticism. Fears of
bacterial venereal diseases drew upon US military and Panamanian anxieties concerning immigration
and miscegenation, making possible repressive measures for the carceral quarantine of female
bodies, new forms of regulation aimed at soldier sexuality, and transformations in Panamanian
urban space. The targeting of Panamanian and Caribbean migrant women as infectious parasites suspected of harboring
syphilis and gonorrhea furthermore impacted the broader relations between an imperial United States
and emerging nationalisms on the isthmus. Facing increased migration and economic expansion, US health officials
worked to institutionalize sanitary measures that presumed the contagiousness of women as reservoirs of disease. Thus even as
the official wartime deployment was ending, a new medical-police-military authority was
established that criminalized women’s bodies and thus constructed a particular, racialized figuration
of “woman” that drew affective power from their feared interspecies contacts with sexually
transmitted bacteria. The conjunction of new medical testing, sex education, modern pharmaceutical
technologies, and the deployment of carceral quarantine worked in tandem to extend the state of war
beyond the official end of hostilities. This medicalized state of war aimed strict regulations at
women’s bodies and women’s public presence at the moment when a new regime of rights declared
that they were full citizens of the Panamanian Republic. At the same time, new forms of soldier discipline were established
that attempted to disrupt the smooth functioning of heterosexual desire during recreation leaves in the cities. Although male
soldiers were seen as inherently and uncontrollably given over to sexual desires, these desires could be molded and channeled by
forms of signaling that attempted to minimize soldiers’ intimate contacts with the abyss of tropical microbes. The
resulting
unequal policing of sexuality—women’s bodies were criminalized while soldier sexuality was
tolerated and subtly disciplined—forged a unique formation of transborder and interspecies
containment through the uneven distribution of fears and pleasures across the time and space of
occupation. Affective Prophylaxis US military constructions of risk for venereal diseases involved sexual
and racial surveillance as well as various forms of public signaling that I call affective prophylaxis.
While in advanced stages syphilis manifests dramatic rashes covering the body, venereal diseases were often hidden beneath the
clothing or limited, like gonorrhea and chancroid, largely to genital areas. Thus the medicalized state of war against venereal
diseases had to do the work to visualize the hidden microbial hybridity of the venereal disease carrier and to guide soldiers in sexual
self-regulation, especially during recreation leave. The technologies that disciplined soldiers’ experiences of space and time made
the prohibition of miscegenation an imperative of both soldier health and the preservation of national moral character. In the
process, they incorporated normative knowledges of race and sex even as they at times had to minimize overt
stereotypes of racial risk in order to guide the experience of urban recreation for soldiers. From the perspective of military health,
the figure of the Panamanian woman was made into a particular symbol of veiled contagion, a
reservoir transmitting disease to soldiers and ultimately a biologized traitor to the Allied cause. Following World War II,
the Panama Canal Department of the US Caribbean Command published a classified history of venereal disease among US soldiers that makes such associations clear. As
justification for a variety of measures undertaken to control the sexuality of both US soldiers and women in Panamá during the half-century of US occupation, the report claims
that Panamanian sex workers were “100% infected or infectious.” The document, titled Control of Venereal Disease and Prostitution in Panama, names the bodies of
Panamanian women as “reservoirs of infection.”17 Whereas Wenger used the trope of the malarial reservoir to refer to the Panamanian population at large, in this instance the
specific body of woman was the microbial breeding ground, one that could infect and reinfect US forces over time. There was already a strong connection among tropical
medical experts between the granulomas of leprosy and the chancres of syphilis; although the skin presentation and progression of the diseases were different, both of these
bacterial infections connected fears of the tropical environment to sensationalized sites of oral and genital touch that treaded the borders of the erotic and the phobic. By
adding the malarial trope of a female reservoir of bacteria, the discourse on syphilis in US-occupied Panamá aligned with fears of bodily penetration and exchange of fluids
accomplished by the mosquito vector. Women themselves became living vectors requiring militarized intervention. Venereal disease was widely represented as a feminized
traitor or Axis agent in army propaganda and public health campaigns.18 A globally circulated poster in the late years of the war effort notes that a woman “may look clean—but
pick-ups, good time girls, and prostitutes spread syphilis and gonorrhea.” In the Canal Zone context, a Canal Commission circular from around 1920 parlayed the deathly touch of
the leper discussed in chapter 1 into the figure of the Panamanian sex worker: “Warning! Beware of Whores! Nine out of ten of the prostitutes ashore are diseased. . . . Some of
them look pretty good on the outside. They’ve got the female lure that puts a quiver down your backbone. But inside! . . . They’re putrid, simply foul with disease. . . . You
wouldn’t rub up against a woman that was covered with leprosy. Well, many of these women have the leprosy inside.” Contrasting the surface “lure” of the prostitute with the
“leprosy” that made her “putrid” within, the circular figured the sex worker as bearer of an invisible taint of bodily mutation and degeneration. The sexed female body was both
seductive and inhabited by unruly microbial life. Situating male soldier desire as preceding perception of sexual risk, sex education attempted to harness the categories of race
and sex to intervene in sorting sexual objects, publicizing the gothic image of the leprous sore penetrating the inner life of the suspected prostitute. To contain what it depicted
as the exotic and seductive form of the Panamanian woman, the US military enforced restrictive measures to combat disease. The vice repression effort under the cooperative
venereal disease control campaign undertaken by the Republic of Panamá, under US military supervision, in the cities of Colón and Panamá from 1946 to 1947, subjected
women to arrest as “venereal disease suspects” (Panama Canal Department 85). Women testing positive for disease were sentenced to hospitals for enforced treatment, in
practice confining them for up to six months per arrest. US soldiers were banned from visiting addresses classified as brothels, and the Panama Canal Department surgeon
organized surveillance of the sex trade with Panamanian police and military police. Meanwhile, the military carried out sex education campaigns and expanded its long-standing
use of prophylaxis stations in an attempt to force soldiers to self-regulate. While the arrests and carceral quarantine attempted to criminalize women’s public presence,
gendered quarantine emerged within a broader formation of affective prophylaxis that attempted both to spatially segregate soldiers from potential sex partners and to
distribute a number of cues within soldier recreation time that would interrupt the normative unfolding of recreation into unregulated sexual encounters. These cues include the
posting of venereal disease contraction scenarios on barracks bulletin boards, the use of pass sheets requiring soldiers to self-report sexual encounters during leaves, declaring

As Allan Brandt notes, the

addresses of suspected brothels off limits, and an expanded number of chemical prophylaxis stations for use following sexual contact.

larger military health context figured venereal disease as a threat to an idealized white family and, in
particular, white femininity. Brandt discusses army health circulars that figure soldier venereal disease as a sign of failures in
responsibility to both wives and mothers on the home front.19 Roderick Ferguson has argued that one
of the main effects
of modern discourses of race is to universalize a binary gender system and normalize
heterosexuality, and in these images an excessive and nonmonogamous soldier sexuality threatens
the idyllic domesticity attached to whiteness (figure 2.1).20 The racial schema of the cooperative venereal disease
control program similarly linked sexuality and race by invoking the soldier’s responsibility to white femininity and by figuring women
of color as hypersexual or diseased, leaving an indelible racial taint upon the unfaithful soldier that would undermine his return to
domestic space (home/land). Eradication thus exhibited
a defensive logic of security—it would leave
bacteria to proliferate among certain groups (racialized and feminized groups seen as inherently
susceptible) but block the transmission of disease across lines of difference. Although it was the soldiers
themselves who spread venereal diseases worldwide at the end of the war, sex education persistently figured women, who were
always already potential prostitutes, as the site of risk.
 Masculinity
The affirmative is always doomed to fail because its discourse and thought
process is rooted in masculine ideals that only allows for aggressive policies
Emond 18 (Rachel Emond, Rachel Emond is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Center
for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. She works on issues related to nuclear policy with a
special emphasis on the history and future of women in the field. As her first major introduction
to nuclear policy, Rachel completed an undergraduate thesis, titled “American Foreign Policy
has a Masculinity Problem,” on the gendered discourse surrounding the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action with Iran, “American foreign policy has a masculinity problem: a discourse
analysis of the Iran deal,” University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, August 2018, pg. 6)///PSC

American foreign policy has a masculinity problem . The ideology of masculinity is so engrained
into the culture of our political system that anything that does not align with the language of strength
and dominance is seen as illegitimate. This limits our foreign policy options at the outset because
certain options are already mobilized off of the agenda , while aggressive and military solutions are given
prominence. This can be seen in the preeminence of military service as a prerequisite for foreign policy expertise (Enloe 2005).
Moreover, the language we use to discuss foreign policy reflects this view. We almost exclusively view foreign
policy and national security through a masculine lens, in which the United States must come out as the
dominant player above all others. Dominance places an emphasis on physical power and supremacy, and
more specifically involves the emasculation of others (Coe et al. 2007). Emasculation is a significant concept,
particularly in the discussion of the rhetoric of foreign policy. The U.S.’s emasculation of their political
adversaries not only involves the stripping of traditionally masculine qualities, such as courage
and nobility, but it also involves attributing to them typically feminine qualities, such as
weakness or lack of emotional control (Coe et al. 2007). It is not just that the United States seeks to be the most
dominant player in any political relationship, but that the U.S. seeks to be the most masculine . Carol Cohn (1993)
argues, “…gender discourse informs and shapes nuclear and national security discourse, and in so
doing creates silences and absences…it degrades our ability to think well and fully about nuclear
weapons and national security, and shapes and limits the possible outcomes of our deliberations,” (emphasis not my
own). My project intentionally takes up these silences and absences to explore how American
foreign policy is shaped and limited. The findings of this research add to a growing interest in issues of gender in
American foreign policy, and aims to add nuance to this wider body of literature. It also hopes to spark a greater
conversation about the gendered hierarchy of values I’ve traced here and about how those in
the discipline can work to change it . The American affinity to the use of aggression and the ease with
which our foreign policy makers gravitate towards it as the most sensible solution to a conflict keeps diplomatic responses
on the backburner; this occurrence is demonstrated by the language with which policy
solutions are discussed. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the language that is being used, and to discuss what the
discourse of American foreign policy is currently ignoring.

The rhetoric of the 1ac cements masculinity into foreign policy and recreates
the violence they seek to stop
Emond 18 (Rachel Emond, Rachel Emond is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Center
for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. She works on issues related to nuclear policy with a
special emphasis on the history and future of women in the field. As her first major introduction
to nuclear policy, Rachel completed an undergraduate thesis, titled “American Foreign Policy
has a Masculinity Problem,” on the gendered discourse surrounding the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action with Iran, “American foreign policy has a masculinity problem: a discourse
analysis of the Iran deal,” University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, August 2018, pg. 19)///PSC

In general, there is a difference in the way that foreign policy overall is gendered in comparison to
domestic policy. Foreign policy, because of its relationship to war, power, conflict, and security
and to the language that inherently follows these concepts, is gendered masculine (Tickner 1988).
Domestic issues, such as health care and education policy, are typically gendered feminine because
they are associated with characteristics such as nurturing (Tickner 1988). The public—policies that affect the
greater good, i.e. foreign policy—is in opposition to the private—policies that impact citizens more in their daily lives, i.e. domestic
policy. This
perception of foreign policy as innately masculine and domestic policy as feminine
means that female voices are considered unimportant and unreliable (Tickner 1992). This gendering of
the two types of policy is why it’s been easier for women to enter into the overall field of public policy work through feminized
positions than through masculinized positions. Currently,
there is one woman on the U.S. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, but ten women on the Committee on Education and the Workforce . It is
important to recognize the way that our perceptions of public policy can have an effect on the people that we accept as worthy of
playing a role in our foreign affairs. After the 2002 midterm elections, Bill Clinton famously said, “When people are feeling insecure,
they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who’s weak and right,” (Goldstein 2003). The
Bush
administration’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was littered with language about
strength, dominance, and aggression in the face of a challenge (Christensen 2008; Coe et al. 2007; Drew
2004; Ferguson 2007; Goldstein 2003; Takacs 2005). The Republican party did well in the midterm elections
following the 9/11 attack because their rhetoric expressed what Richard Goldstein (2003) called
“patriarchal values of strength and order,” while the Democratic party talked about empathy,
equity, conciliation, and peace talks —all words that trigger a feminine image in the minds of their constituents. The
strategic use of gendered language by the Bush administration didn’t just refer to statements about dominating the Middle East and
fighting back against terrorism. The
language used by President Bush signified that America in its current
state was vulnerable; the United States needed to use military might—a masculine entity due to
its inherent aggressive nature—to “defend its honor,” to protect the weakest among us—
women and children—and become survivors of our tragic victimization (Drew 2004; Christensen 2008).
The United States was painted as a feminine entity, one that was clearly weak and susceptible to violation, and the only solution was
to begin projecting strength and hard power, that is to become more masculine (Drew 2004). There
was no mistake in
the way the Bush administration chose to characterize the United States. The mixture of
feminine and masculine language to create the image of the United States military as the
knight in shining armor swooping in on a white horse to save the damsel in distress —which
became U.S. citizens, Western ideals of democracy and freedom, and women and children in the Middle East wrapped up in one—
helped to legitimize the War on Terror. George W. Bush was certainly not the first president to promote the
idea of a masculine America. The rhetoric surrounding American foreign policy has always taken
on a tone of dominance and aggression (Dean 1998; Enloe 2005). The conversation about American
foreign policy and gender is much deeper than just the rhetoric used by politicians and
journalists on TV and in the newspapers, because foreign policy becomes more than intangible
language. Historically, policies of aggression involving military force have been, and continue to be, perceived as more viable
options than those of diplomacy involving negotiations (Cohn 1993). The concepts of hegemonic masculinity and
mutual exclusivity discussed previously allow us to draw important conclusions about why
aggressive policies are more legitimate than peaceful ones . Dominant males who personify the ideals of the
true “manly man” are the people who have controlled American foreign policy since it existed, and the few women who have
cracked into this glass encased field, such as Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, and Hillary Clinton, have been attributed many of
the qualities identified as masculine. In his 1998 article titled “Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of
Foreign Policy,” author Robert Dean stated, “Internalized
ideals of manliness influenced the way leaders
perceived threats posed by foreign powers. Fear of the consequences of being judged
“unmanly” influenced the reckoning of political costs or benefits associated with possible
responses to those threats.” The relative success of the United States is often credited to our style of foreign policy, and
because that foreign policy has traditionally been saturated with a masculine dogma, any policies associated with soft power and
femininity are delegitimized (Goldstein 2003; Tickner 1992; Cohn 1993). Thisinherent delegitimization of soft
power policy solutions limits the scope with which American foreign policy can respond to the
multitude of challenges that face our political leaders on a daily basis. Shortly following World War II, Albert Einstein
notoriously stated, “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war .” What Einstein was alluding to
was the concept of nuclear deterrence and the building up of arsenals of biological and nuclear
weapons. Einstein’s statement characterizes what I argue throughout this thesis, whereas, more generally, he was alluding to the
threat of force—which is the use of hard power—in order to prevent another war. There exists a dichotomy between
soft and hard power—one cannot exist in the same instance as another; and furthermore,
because hard power has historically been accepted as the most logical way to respond to
foreign adversaries—clearly Einstein’s warning meant little to both the United States and Russia—soft power policy
solutions are systematically overlooked as even potential choices. In some ways there was actually
hypocrisy among the feminized rhetoric used to describe the Iran Deal; it was cast as both “dangerous” and “ineffective.”
Regardless, those who opposed the deal were baffled that it was even being considered as a viable solution in the first place, and
that mindset exists because of the reality of illegitimacy that soft power lives in.

The logic of human security assumes the nature of the “human” and naturalizes
the masculinized trope of humanity
Stavrianakis 16 [Anna Stavrianakis, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at University of
Sussex, MScEcon in Security Studies from University of Wales, Aberystwyth and PhD in Politics
from University of Bristol, author of Taking Aim at the Arms Trade, “Legitimizing liberal
militarism: politics, law and war in the Arms Trade Treaty”. Third World Quarterly, 37 (5), pp.
840-865, 2016, http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/57545/1/TWQ%20Legitimizing%20liberal
%20militarism%20-%20accepted%20clean%20version.pdf] kb
For all these developments, the human security agenda’s take on war, conflict, and armed violence has not been without its critics. It
has been described as the ‘new orthodoxy’ that is ‘unable to provide the basis for a substantive change of the system of
international security’, despite finding ‘the old language of interstate war and conflict ... lacking’.35 Similarly,
its emphasis
on ‘progressive’ initiatives such as ‘eliminat[ing] certain types of weapons’ stands accused of
failing to adequately examine ‘the pathologies inherent in the structure of the international
system’ that generate such challenges.36 And when the ‘human’ in human security is
naturalised as masculine, the inclusion of novel threats and new actors leaves the parameters of
security untouched, meaning that ‘state-based, militarised security remains unchallenged’.37
Feminist scholars have critiqued the gendered concepts and practices of war, peace, militarisa-
tion, peacekeeping and soldiering, going well beyond the human security framework in the
process.38 Feminist critiques that challenge the parameters of human security can usefully be
combined with postcolonial accounts of IR that emphasise the ways in which the discipline ‘can
both deny empire while simultaneously normalizing an imperial perspective on the world’.39
Some of the main themes of the human security agenda are illustrative of the need for an
imperial perspective in how we understand the challenges facing weapons control . By this I mean
interpreting them with the aid of scholarship that challenges methodological nationalism and
Eurocentrism in its analysis, mobilises feminist critiques of militarism, and puts the legacy of empire and
coloni- alism, and the racial, gendered, and classed politics of imperial control, front and centre
in its assessment of contemporary challenges .40 Deploying such resources gives us a chance to rethink some of the
key assumptions around human security and the prospects for regulating weapons circulation. Three core themes of the human
security agenda are ripe for an imperial critique. First,
the claim that the character of conflict has changed,
from inter-state war towards internal conflict, has become axiomatic in much of IR, including the
human security literature.41 The greatest threats to human security are deemed to stem from
internal conflict and criminal violence, or the state itself, rather than from an external adversary
as per the traditional security agenda. As such, ‘international security traditionally defined – territorial integrity – does
not necessarily correlate with human security’.42 Second, the changing character of conflict requires a shift in the
referent object of security, according to the human security agenda: away from the state and inter-state war, and
towards the individual and the broader range of threats they face. 43 And third, the human security agenda
nonetheless emphasises the importance of the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence and role in security provision.44 Yet the
circumstances have been transformed with the end of the Cold War. Kaldor attributes a ‘profound restructuring of political
authority’ to the new wars, and sees human security as an opportunity for ‘reconstructing political authority in the context of the
processes we call globalisation’.45 Hence the need for security sector reform (SSR), demobilisation, disarmament, and reintegration
(DDR) and other reforms of coercive practices and apparatuses. Each of these three themes is premised on the significance of the
rupture that occurred with the end of the Cold War. But understanding the Cold War as predominantly an East–West ideological and
geopolitical confrontation marginalises longer historical patterns of North–South power relations and conflict, and of hot war in the
South. And the increased focus on internal conflict, while fruitful in terms of changing the scale of analysis, risks disconnecting the
micro- politics of violence from broader systems and structures of war preparation, ignoring one of the key lessons of feminist
scholarship, which is that the scales or so-called levels of analysis are interdependent. As Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via put it,
‘absolutely distinguishing between the personal, national and international level of war and militarism lacks conceptual and
empirical rigor at best’: feminist attention allows us to understand both the impact of war and militarism on people (especially, but
not only, women) as well as the gendered construction of war and militarism.46 A
longer historical view that is not
hamstrung by a state-centric ontology allows us to see that arms transfer practices have long
been part of the simultaneously transnational and asymmetrical constitution of force. Historical
scholarship on the arms trade emphasises the importance of decolonisation as the shift from empire to a system of formally
sovereign states in which North– South power asymmetries continue to resonate. One of the key transformations in weapons
transfer practices that came with decolonisation was a shift on the part of the Soviet Union and China from support for national
liberation movements, to the defence of sovereignty as a means of resisting US-led domination, in either anti-capitalist or anti-
imperialist modes.47 The supply of weapons and military training was a common feature of both Soviet and US relations with the
Third World: despite their differences, North–South politico-military relations had much in common between the two blocs.48
 Saudi Arabia
The aff’s desire for influence over Saudi Arabia is rooted in fetishized Western
understandings of West Asia from a colonial contradiction of a desire to tame
the Orient and one to exploit its supposed licentiousness.
Massad 7 Joseph A Massad, Desiring Arabs, 2007, /MegLak
Sex was always an important feature of Orientalist fantasy and scholarship. Said explained how Orientalists
described the Orient “as feminine, its riches as fertile , its main symbols the sensual woman, the ha-
rem, and the despotic—but curiously attractive—ruler.”19 He noted that many an Orientalist writer like Edward W. Lane and
Gustave Flaubert showed much interest during their Egyptian sojourn in almahs and kha- wals, dancing girls and boys,
respectively.20 In reading Flaubert, who in his novels “associates the Orient with the escapism of sexual
fantasy,” Said asserted: “Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual
promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies, is
something on which one could speculate : it is not the province of my analysis here, alas, despite its frequently noted
appearance. Nevertheless, one must acknowledge its importance as something eliciting complex responses, sometimes even a
frightening self-discovery, in the Orientalists, and Flaubert was an interesting case in point.” In fact, Said did venture a speculation.
The [Orientalist representational] repertoire is familiar, not so much because it re- minds us of Flaubert’s
own voyages in and obsession with the Orient, but because, once again, the association is
clearly made between the Orient and the freedom of licentious sex. We may as well recognize that for
nineteenth-century Europe, with its increasing embourgeoisiment , sex had been institutionalized to a very
considerable degree. On the one hand, there was no such thing as “free” sex, and on the other, sex in society entailed a web
of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations of a detailed and certainly encumbering sort. Just as the various
colonial possessions . . . were useful as places to send wayward sons, superfluous populations of
delinquents, poor people, and other undesirables, so the Orient was a place where one could
look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe . Virtually no European writer who wrote on or traveled to the
Orient in the period after 1800 exempted himself or herself from this quest: Flaubert, Nerval, “Dirty Dick” Burton, and Lane are only
the most notable.21 Richard F. Burton (“Dirty Dick”) was exceptional among these, how- ever, in his attempt to
theorize the sexual question, especially among men . In his 1885–86 translation of The Arabian Nights, Burton
included a now-infamous “Terminal Essay,” in which he discussed such matters under the heading “Pornography .” After
offering a spirited defense to his readers for including sexual words that might be regarded as
offensive, Burton adds, in reference to male homosexuality, that “there is another element in The
Nights and that is one of absolute obscenity utterly repugnant to English readers, even the least
prudish. It is chiefly con- nected with what our neighbors call Le vice contre nature—as if anything can be contrary to nature
which includes all things. Upon this subject I must offer details, as it does not enter into my plan to ignore any theme which is
interesting to the Orientalist and the Anthropologist.”22 Burton spoke of the existence of what he called the
“‘Sotadic Zone,’” a reference to the third-century B.C. Greek-Egyptian poet Sotades, who wrote homoerotic poetry. Here the
emphasis is geographical and clima- tological, if not topographical, bound as it is by latitudinal lines: it is decidedly “not racial.” The
Sotadic Zone encompasses not only Arab countries in Africa from “Morocco to Egypt,” extending
eastward to in- clude “Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldea, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab and
Kashmir,” as well as China, Japan, Turkistan, the South Sea Islands, and the New World, but also includes “meridional France, the
Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece.”23 Inside the Sotadic zone “the Vice is popular and endemic, held at the
worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined
practise it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically
incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust .”24 Burton is one of
the few nineteenth-century thinkers who did not deploy a racialist or evolutionary schema to ex- plain the other. As Neville Hoad has
argued, “as problematic as Burton’s refutation of evolution is, it represents an attempt to think the other- ness of sexual norms in
terms that do not subsume the other into the self in the narrating of identity.”25

The aff engages in a form of pinkwashing that creates the guise of sexual
freedom to cover gendered violence and discrimination
Medien ‘ 17 (Kathryn, Research Associate in the Department of Sociology and a member of
the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at Cambridge, “Thinking Life, Death, and Solidarity
through Colonized Palestine: An Interview with Jasbir K. Puar,” Journal of Middle East Women's
Studies, Volume 14, Number 1, March 2018, pp. 94-103) /ly

Terrorist Assemblages includes a short section that addresses the

conditional queer solidarities offered around
Palestine,which usually revolve around a narrative of “we support you in your statehood, but you
need to get your act together around gender and sexuality .” This informed my thinking about Islamophobia,
the Islamophobic queer, and progressive queer organizing structured around Islamophobic principles well before 9/11, for example,
in Britain and northern Europe,which have very different and in some ways earlier and more entrenched histories of Islamophobia
than the United States. I think of the United States and Israel as collaborators in naturalizing settlercolonial
ideology and settlement practices insofar as they are both states with the most to gain from
homonationalist projections of sexual tolerance and sexual freedom. Both can deploy
homonationalism on multiple scales: internally, in relation to territories they occupy, and at the
level of global cosmopolitanism. Homosexuality becomes a marker of the sovereign capacity of a
state and a foil, even justification, for settler colonialism and the violence of empire. At least since the 1990s,
multiple states, societies, cities, and even businesses actively deploy pinkwashing as a strategy that
produces them as gay-friendly. Pinkwashing is pivotal to the global gay and lesbian tourism industry, which has
prolifically produced a distinction between gay-friendly and not gay-friendly locations for several decades. For Palestinians,
the recruitment and instrumentalization of LGBTQ tourists into the Brand Israel ideology is the
least of it. Palestinian queer activists forcefully taught me the devastating effects of Israeli pinkwashing on Palestinians.
They understand pinkwashing as a form of internal colonialization , an introjection and reification
of the discourse of “Palestinian homophobia ” into the psyches and souls of Palestinians, thus suturing the
occupation to yet another vector of inferiority . It is a damning and insidiously powerful strategy .
Often the focus of queer solidarity with Palestinians and criticism of the Israeli state’s instrumentation of LGBTQ
identities is structured around “not in my name” antiwar and antioccupation protests by Jewish queers
and queers globally, rather than around the effects of pinkwashing on the colonized. In your work on the war on terror, you take the
homosexual body as a site through which to examine the “progressive” politics of sexuality. Butalongside pinkwashing,
the Israeli state regulates sexuality in other ways, through Jewish pronatalist policies, regulating
miscegenation between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, and sterilizing black Jewish women
against their will or knowledge. Does an examination of the sexual politics of the Israeli state warrant a different kind of
analytic? To what extent do you think the homonationalist analytic developed in Terrorist Assemblages travels across the terrains of
Zionist occupation and In my recent monograph, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Puar 2017a), I conjoin
pinkwashing, which essentially centralizes a binary that pits the putative sexual freedom of the
Israelis against the purported sexual repression of Palestinians , with the biopolitical regulation of
sexuality that cuts across homohetero divides. In June 2017 Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again
denied requests that women and men have equal access and space at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. Thus the so-
called gay haven of Tel Aviv—if you are not Arab—easily coexists with strict gender segregation among some Jewish communities in
Jerusalem and multiple Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Israel
is also preoccupied with regulating
heterosexual reproduction, children and child rearing in gay partnerships, and women’s
sexuality, gay and straight. These coexisting realities challenge the LGBTQ acceptance versus homophobia
binary and
show how the discourse of LGBTQ rights and freedoms obscures much more than the
occupation. colonization?
 Iran
Traditional policy reduces diplomacy to weakness and femininity and removes
the option in any time of risk
Emond 18 (Rachel Emond, Rachel Emond is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Center
for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. She works on issues related to nuclear policy with a
special emphasis on the history and future of women in the field. As her first major introduction
to nuclear policy, Rachel completed an undergraduate thesis, titled “American Foreign Policy
has a Masculinity Problem,” on the gendered discourse surrounding the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action with Iran, “American foreign policy has a masculinity problem: a discourse
analysis of the Iran deal,” University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, August 2018, pg. 40)///PSC

The emphasis placed upon dependence on military action is perhaps the most obviously
feminine rhetoric available within the larger theme of dependence in general . General Martin E.
Dempsey, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the implementation of the Iran Deal, said that the
agreement [was] “better than launching a military strike, but I will sustain the military options in
case it becomes necessary.” President Obama attempted to mollify concerns about the deal by assuring that Israel would
always have military superiority over their neighbors. Senator Marco Rubio called for the United States to
instead gain a stable military position in the Middle East “to signal readiness and restore a
credible military option.” The King of Saudi Arabia was unhappy with the United State’s approach to Iran, and negotiated a
$1 billion arms agreement with the Pentagon to provide weapons for the Saudi Arabian war effort and bolster Saudi forces in order
to reassure those with concerns about the shortcomings of the Iran Deal. Saudi
Arabia was noted as becoming
“increasingly assertive,” signifying that states who choose to use weapons are assertive, while
those who choose not to use weapons are the opposite: passive, meek, compliant. The previous
discussion of hegemonic masculinity, idealized masculinity, and military masculinity all being relatively synonymous make the
relationship between the rhetoric of dependence on the military and lack of masculinity quite palpable. The
assertion that
the Iran Deal would not be sufficient on its own accord from both the support and the dissent
implies that the deal is feminine in nature, and is a strong indication that this form of foreign
policy is not seen as entirely legitimate because of that implication . “Weakness is always
considered a danger when issues of national security are at stake,” states Tickner (1992, emphasis my
own). The frequent portrayal of the Iran Deal as dependent in any form did more than just link the deal to ideas of weakness
because it was also consistently paired with phrases that codified the deal as dangerous. This is significant because it further allowed
the option of using military force to seem like the safe alternative, even though the use of military troops puts the livelihood of
American soldiers in direct risk. Classifying
the Iran Deal as a dangerous, unstable, or volatile policy
solution that could only be made credible through the use of a hard power solution created a
dichotomy in which the feminized Iran Deal existed in direct opposition to the masculinized
military. This hierarchy inherently places hard power solutions above soft power solutions , and
therefore allowed the Iran Deal to be depicted as a less legitimate response than the use of military force.

The logic of human security assumes the nature of the “human” and naturalizes
the masculinized trope of humanity
Stavrianakis 16 [Anna Stavrianakis, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at University of
Sussex, MScEcon in Security Studies from University of Wales, Aberystwyth and PhD in Politics
from University of Bristol, author of Taking Aim at the Arms Trade, “Legitimizing liberal
militarism: politics, law and war in the Arms Trade Treaty”. Third World Quarterly, 37 (5), pp.
840-865, 2016, http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/57545/1/TWQ%20Legitimizing%20liberal
%20militarism%20-%20accepted%20clean%20version.pdf] kb
For all these developments, the human security agenda’s take on war, conflict, and armed violence has not been without its critics. It
has been described as the ‘new orthodoxy’ that is ‘unable to provide the basis for a substantive change of the system of
international security’, despite finding ‘the old language of interstate war and conflict ... lacking’.35 Similarly,
its emphasis
on ‘progressive’ initiatives such as ‘eliminat[ing] certain types of weapons’ stands accused of
failing to adequately examine ‘the pathologies inherent in the structure of the international
system’ that generate such challenges.36 And when the ‘human’ in human security is
naturalised as masculine, the inclusion of novel threats and new actors leaves the parameters of
security untouched, meaning that ‘state-based, militarised security remains unchallenged’.37
Feminist scholars have critiqued the gendered concepts and practices of war, peace, militarisa-
tion, peacekeeping and soldiering, going well beyond the human security framework in the
process.38 Feminist critiques that challenge the parameters of human security can usefully be
combined with postcolonial accounts of IR that emphasise the ways in which the discipline ‘can
both deny empire while simultaneously normalizing an imperial perspective on the world’.39
Some of the main themes of the human security agenda are illustrative of the need for an
imperial perspective in how we understand the challenges facing weapons control . By this I mean
interpreting them with the aid of scholarship that challenges methodological nationalism and
Eurocentrism in its analysis, mobilises feminist critiques of militarism, and puts the legacy of empire and
coloni- alism, and the racial, gendered, and classed politics of imperial control, front and centre
in its assessment of contemporary challenges .40 Deploying such resources gives us a chance to rethink some of the
key assumptions around human security and the prospects for regulating weapons circulation. Three core themes of the human
security agenda are ripe for an imperial critique. First,
the claim that the character of conflict has changed,
from inter-state war towards internal conflict, has become axiomatic in much of IR, including the
human security literature.41 The greatest threats to human security are deemed to stem from
internal conflict and criminal violence, or the state itself, rather than from an external adversary
as per the traditional security agenda. As such, ‘international security traditionally defined – territorial integrity – does
not necessarily correlate with human security’.42 Second, the changing character of conflict requires a shift in the
referent object of security, according to the human security agenda: away from the state and inter-state war, and
towards the individual and the broader range of threats they face. 43 And third, the human security agenda
nonetheless emphasises the importance of the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence and role in security provision.44 Yet the
circumstances have been transformed with the end of the Cold War. Kaldor attributes a ‘profound restructuring of political
authority’ to the new wars, and sees human security as an opportunity for ‘reconstructing political authority in the context of the
processes we call globalisation’.45 Hence the need for security sector reform (SSR), demobilisation, disarmament, and reintegration
(DDR) and other reforms of coercive practices and apparatuses. Each of these three themes is premised on the significance of the
rupture that occurred with the end of the Cold War. But understanding the Cold War as predominantly an East–West ideological and
geopolitical confrontation marginalises longer historical patterns of North–South power relations and conflict, and of hot war in the
South. And the increased focus on internal conflict, while fruitful in terms of changing the scale of analysis, risks disconnecting the
micro- politics of violence from broader systems and structures of war preparation, ignoring one of the key lessons of feminist
scholarship, which is that the scales or so-called levels of analysis are interdependent. As Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via put it,
‘absolutely distinguishing between the personal, national and international level of war and militarism lacks conceptual and
empirical rigor at best’: feminist attention allows us to understand both the impact of war and militarism on people (especially, but
not only, women) as well as the gendered construction of war and militarism.46 A
longer historical view that is not
hamstrung by a state-centric ontology allows us to see that arms transfer practices have long
been part of the simultaneously transnational and asymmetrical constitution of force. Historical
scholarship on the arms trade emphasises the importance of decolonisation as the shift from empire to a system of formally
sovereign states in which North– South power asymmetries continue to resonate. One of the key transformations in weapons
transfer practices that came with decolonisation was a shift on the part of the Soviet Union and China from support for national
liberation movements, to the defence of sovereignty as a means of resisting US-led domination, in either anti-capitalist or anti-
imperialist modes.47 The supply of weapons and military training was a common feature of both Soviet and US relations with the
Third World: despite their differences, North–South politico-military relations had much in common between the two blocs.48
 Israel
The securitized narrative of Israeli existential threats is a product of US empire
and the aff’s rhetoric of human rights is rooted in the logic of American
exceptionalism.
Puar 07 (Jasbir K., PhD ethnic studies, Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke
University Press. 2007)

With the United States currently positioning itself as the technologically exceptional global
counterterrorism expert, American exceptionalism feeds off of other exceptionalisms,
particularly that of Israel, its close ally in the Middle East. The exceptional national security
issues of Israel, and the long term ‘‘ existential’’ threat it faces because of its sense of being
‘‘entangled in a conflict of unparalleled dimensions ,’’ for example, proceeds thus: ‘‘exceptional
vulnerability’’ results in ‘‘exceptional security needs,’’ the risks of which are then alleviated and
purportedly conquered by ‘‘exceptional counterterrorism technologies .’’∞π In this collusion of
American and Israeli state interests, defined through a joint oppositional posture toward
Muslims, narratives of victimhood ironically suture rather than deflate, contradict, or nullify claims to
exceptionalism. In other words, the Israeli nation-state finds itself continuously embroiled in a
cycle of perceived exceptional 8 introduction threats of violence that demand exceptional uses of force against the Palestinian
population, which is currently mirrored by U.S. government o≈cials’ public declarations of possible terror
risks that are used to compel U.S. citizens to support the war on terror . Reflecting upon contemporary
debates about the United States as empire, Amy Kaplan notes, ‘‘ The idea of empire has always paradoxically entailed
a sense of spatial and temporal limits, a narrative of rising and falling, which U.S. exceptionalism has long kept at bay.’’
Later, she states, ‘‘The denial and disavowal of empire has long served as the ideological cornerstone
of U.S. imperialism and a key component of American exceptionalism.’’∞∫ Thus, for Kaplan the distancing of exceptionalism
from empire achieves somewhat contradictory twofold results: the superior United States is not subject to
empire’s shortcomings, as the apparatus of empire is unstable and ultimately empires fall; and the United States
creates the impression that empire is beyond the pale of its own morally upright behavior , such
that all violences of the state are seen , in some moral, cultural, or political fashion as anything but the violence of
empire. U.S. exceptionalism hangs on a narrative of transcendence, which places the United States above
empire in these two respects, a project that is aided by what Domenico Losurdo names as ‘‘the fundamental tendency to
transform the Judeo-Christian tradition into a sort of national religion that consecrates the exceptionalism of American people and
the sacred mission with which they are entrusted (‘Manifest Destiny’).’’∞Ω Kaplan, claiming that current narratives of empire ‘‘take
American exceptionalism to new heights,’’ argues that a concurrent ‘‘paradoxical claim to uniqueness and universality’’ are
coterminous in that ‘‘they share a
teleological narrative of inevitability’’ that posits America as the arbiter
of appropriate ethics, human rights, and democratic behavior while exempting itself without
hesitation from such universalizing mandates.≤≠
Impact
 Interventionism
Masculine centric politics justifies US interventionism, war crimes, and the
disenfranchisement of the LGBTIQ community
Emond 18 (Rachel Emond, Rachel Emond is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Center
for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. She works on issues related to nuclear policy with a
special emphasis on the history and future of women in the field. As her first major introduction
to nuclear policy, Rachel completed an undergraduate thesis, titled “American Foreign Policy
has a Masculinity Problem,” on the gendered discourse surrounding the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action with Iran, “American foreign policy has a masculinity problem: a discourse
analysis of the Iran deal,” University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, August 2018, pg. 7)///PSC

Men who portray only the ideals of masculinity have historically been rewarded with success in
their pursuit of power in American society. The fervor with which our society has held on to this idea of what men should act
like has led to what has been coined hegemonic masculinity. Because the men in power portray characteristics
like strength and dominance, we associate these terms with what “real” men should act like. Over
time, the United States military has used this idea of hegemonic masculinity to draw on who
they most want to be the members of the armed forces. The military has consistently
portrayed its ideal candidate as an able-bodied male who is both heterosexual and cisgender,
someone they can build into a strong, dominant, patriotic man (Locke 2013). Thus military masculinity and
hegemonic masculinity have become virtually synonymous with one another, creating a problem when we seek to
create soft power policy solutions—characterized as feminine—in opposition to military
solutions. We also know of course that the terms listed above do not define the characteristics of all men; or in other words, not
all men fit into one classification of masculinity (Paechter 2006; Hoffman 2001; Lansky 2001). Hegemonic
masculinity in practice devalues not only women, but also men who do not fit into the
idealized version of masculinity. “Masculine gender role training is probably more rigid than its feminine equivalent…
men are confined to a much narrower range of acceptable gender performances ,” (Lansky 2001) and
we can see examples of how this plays out in our society fairly easily. Conservatives heavily ridiculed President
Obama, questioned his authenticity, and called him “pathetic” and “weak” after he shed tears
when discussing the 2012 Sandy Hook School Shooting (Bobic 2016; Lussenhop 2016). Homosexual men
have been systematically discriminated against throughout the history of the military (Sinclair
2009). Up until President Clinton’s 1993 policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, homosexual men were strictly banned from
the United States military, a policy that presumed that homosexuality inherently rendered
someone not masculine enough—or rather, too feminine—to be capable of serving in the military (Sinclair 2009). Even
the DADT policy assumes that homosexuality, once known of, has a negative effect on an organization structured on idealized
masculinity (Sinclair 2009).
 Homonationalism
The impact is homonationalism – a form of sexual exceptionalism that expels
racial and sexual others from the American empire.
Puar 07 (Jasbir K., PhD ethnic studies, Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke
University Press. 2007. Pg2)

National recognition and inclusion, here signaled as the annexation of homosexual jargon, is contingent upon
the segregation and disqualification of racial and sexual others from the national imaginary. At
work in this dynamic is a form of sexual exceptionalism—the emergence of national homosexuality, what I term
‘‘homonationalism’’—that corresponds with the coming out of the exceptionalism of American empire.
Further, this brand of homosexuality operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness,
queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual
subjects. There is a commitment to the global dominant ascendancy of whiteness that is implicated
in the propagation of the United States as empire as well as the alliance between this propagation and this brand of homosexuality.
The fleeting sanctioning of a national homosexual subject is possible, not only through the proliferation of sexual-racial subjects who
invariably fall out of its narrow terms of acceptability, as others have argued, but more significantly, through the
simultaneous engendering and disavowal of populations of sexual-racial others who need not apply. In
what follows I explore these three imbricated manifestations—sexual exceptionalism, queer as regulatory, and the ascendancy of
whiteness—and their relations to the production of terrorist and citizen bodies. My goal is to present a dexterous portrait, signaling
attentiveness to how, why, and where these threads bump into each other and where they weave together, resisting a mechanistic
explanatory device that may cover all the bases. In the case of what I term ‘‘U.S. sexual exceptionalism,’’ a narrative claiming the
successful management of life in regard to a people, what is noteworthy is that an
exceptional form of national
heteronormativity is now joined by an exceptional form of national homonormativity , in other
words, homonationalism. Collectively, they continue or extend the project of U.S. nationalism and
imperial expansion endemic to the war on terror. The terms of degeneracy have shifted such that homosexuality
is no longer a priori excluded from nationalist formations. I unearth the forms of regulation im- homonationalism and biopolitics 3
plicit in notions of queer subjects that are transcendent, secular, or otherwise exemplary as resistant, and open up the question of
queer re/production and regeneration and its contribution to the project of the optimization of life. The ascendancy
of
whiteness is a description of biopolitics pro√ered by Rey Chow, who links the violence of liberal deployments of
diversity and multiculturalism to the ‘‘ valorization of life’’ alibi that then allows for rampant
exploitation of the very subjects included in discourses of diversity in the first instance . I elucidate
how these three approaches to the study of sexuality, taken together, suggest a trenchant rereading of biopolitics with regard to
queerness as well as the intractability of queerness from biopolitical arrangements of life and death.
 Heteropatriarchy
Heteropatriarchy is vital to sustaining inter and intro group inequalities- it
differentiates public and private within the nation, and feminization of the
‘home’ against foreign threats bolsters national militarism
Spike Peterson in 2013 (Prof of IR @ University of Arizona, The Intended and Unintended
Queering of States/Nations, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 13, No. 1, 2013)

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
into a world system that presumes heteronormative sex/gender/sexuality and heteropatriarchal
transmission of property and citizenship claims. From a critical perspective, these arrangements tend to
(re)produce intergenerational inequalities not only of sex/gender and sexuality but also of class,
ethnicity/race, and nationality. Yet these arrangements are also being transformed by feminist challenges to sex/gender
relations, queer disruptions of heteronormative premises, and neoliberal erosions of state-based political power. These
contradictory developments reveal the instability of heterosexual and state-centric arrangements. For present purposes, I suggest
they reveal a queering of states/nations: intentionally by critics of heteronormativity and unintentionally by advocates of neoliberal
policies that alter state-based formations. More generally, these points illuminate the centrality of sex/gender ,
sexualities, and kinship rules in constituting and reproducing structural inequalities . Heteronormativity
is political then not only because it oppresses those who identify as non-heterosexual but also
because (in state-making processes) it is produced by and (re)produces hierarchical sex/gender and
the corollary asymmetric valorization that ‘legitimates’ domination of all – women, ‘effeminate men’,
‘Others’ – who are stigmatized as feminine. I draw two related conclusions. In fundamental ways (e.g. polarized
gender identities, heteropatriarchal family/household forms, masculinist/militarist/ nationalist ideology), heterosexist
polities achieve group coherence and continuity through hierarchical (sex/gender) relations within
the group. As the binary and corollary inequality that is most naturalized (read: whose history is lost and politics
erased), sex/gender difference is at the same time invoked to justify hierarchical (adversarial) relations
between groups. On this view, the sex/gender/ heterosexist hierarchy of masculine over feminine
and the nationalist domination of insiders over outsiders are doubly linked . First, (state-based)
nationalism reproduces gendered/heterosexist privilege and oppression within the group – at
the expense of women and feminized (non-heterosexual, racialized, ‘under-class’, etc.) males – regardless of
the group’s ‘identity’ differentiation (based on political ideology, ethnicity/race, religion, etc.) from other
groups. Second, nationalism is sexed/gendered/heterosexist in terms of how the justification of
adversarial relations between groups (through devalorization of feminized ‘Others’) invokes and reproduces
the ‘foundational’ binary of sex difference and (depoliticized) masculine dominance .
Sex/gender and heteronormative sexuality are thus ‘naturalized’ and their histories – and politics –
erased. In this important sense, feminist and queer critiques of heteronormativity are central to all
critiques of structural inequalities/hierarchies, including the problematic politics of
(heteropatriarchal) nation-states. In the final analysis the social movement that will be the vanguard of a revolution
against all forms of state boundaries, that could organize on behalf of the unhindered movement and full-fledged development of
capacities regardless of one’s birthplace or parentage, is a movement that will be queer. (Stevens 2004:225)
Alternatives
 Epistemic Disruption
The alternative is a radical reexamination of western sexual identity and politics
in favor of an international and varied understanding of sexuality and power
struggles. And, any attempt at pragmatic reform connected to the state only
reifies the euro-centric relationship tying modernization to LGBTIQ rights
Picq and Thiel 15 (Manuela Lavinas Picq is Professor of International Relations at Universidad
San Francisco de Quito, Markus Thiel is Associate Professor at Florida International University,
Mehmet Sinan Birdal, Michael J. Bosia, Francine D’Amico, Sandra McEvoy, Anthony J. Langlois,
Momin Rahman, Laura Sjoberg, “Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ claims shape
International Relations,” Routledge, pg 95-6, 2015)///PSC

The equation of LGBTIQ with modernization is based on these conceits about Western
societies that purport to generalize the Western experience of modernity to all societies. This
means that we have to question current Western conceptualizations of sexual identity and
equality in LGBTIQ politics since they derive from a partial, rather than universal, model of
queer identity and politics. The modernization thesis is a problematic “solution” to Muslim
homophobia because it assumes all modernization processes equate to a Western outcome of
gendered binaries and sexual identities, rather than a potentially different outcome which is
produced through cross-cultural intersections between West and East or, in IR terms, between
the core and the non-core. Western patterns of development cannot be replicated in the East, as if it merely needed to
“catch up” to the Western threshold of modernization. First, the foundational components of socioeconomic
wealth, democratic governance, and secularization must be understood in their national or
regional context in terms of how they impact gender and sexual organization . Analysis from Western
societies shows important complexities and variations within each of these categories when accounting for attitudes to
homosexuality (Gerhards, 2010) and the development of sexual diversity identities and politics (Adam et al., 1999), and so we must
also adopt a more complex approach to non-Western societies. As
evidence just cited suggests, Muslims are
similar to other highly religious groups in the West. In addition, not all Muslims exhibit the same
religiosity, calling for a nuanced assessment of the impact of the “Islamic” variable as an
ethnocultural identity (Meer, 2010). Second, the conditions for LGBTIQ politics in the non-core
today are significantly different than those found in the period of gay liberation in the West .
We cannot sustain the assumption that sexual diversity will emerge in the same way as it has in the West. The discourse of LGBTIQ
rights promoted by intergovernmental organizations with the support of Western countries politicizes the international context in
which queer politics unfold. Similarly, LGBTIQ visibility is now global through popular cultural technologies
such as the internet, broadcast media, and political campaigns that internationalize queer
human rights. The recent campaigns against Russia’s anti-gay laws in the lead up to the 2014
Olympics and Uganda’s criminalization of homosexuality are just the most recent examples of how LGBTIQ
rights have become part of international politics. None of these conditions existed in the formative period of
Western gay liberation or for most of the recent period that saw the formalization of queer
citizenship (Hildebrandt, 2014). Muslim reactions to same-sex identities and homosexuality must be
understood in a contemporary context that is markedly international , and thus fundamentally different
from Western gay liberation that was nationally focused. Third, it is important to consider this
internationalization of the gay rights discourse in the context of global Islamophobia. Gay
rights are increasingly instrumentalized within a discourse of Western civilizational superiority
that underpins Islamophobia (Puar, 2007; Mepschen et al. 2010; Rahman, 2014). We have to approach the
formation of Muslim homophobia within the context of Islamophobia rather than reduce it to a
preexisting component of a pre-modern, monolithic Islamic culture . Can we logically claim that Muslim
societies and Muslim populations have to simply “catch up” with Western modernization in order to be accepting of sexual
diversity? Muslim
antipathy to homosexuality is a complex combination of factors. It may become
further embedded in Muslim identities as a consequence of the contemporary “exemplary”
positioning of LGBTIQ rights as central tenets of Western modernity (Mepschen et al., 2010). Moreover,
public queer politics has become one of “natural” sexual minority politics, leaving the dominant heterosexual matrix untouched.
We should be aware that the context of current human rights strategies – both in national and
international contexts – is based on Western experiences of coming out and the consequent
constructions of gender and sexuality. These culturally specific essentialist formations are reinforced by the political
strategies that purport to provide universal routes to sexual liberation but do not challenge the naturalized dominance of
heterosexuality that remains a foundational cause of homophobia. This is not to deny that rights discourses and strategies based on
identity politics have been successful in many contexts because they provide the basis to both represent experiences of oppression
and for collective political participation. We
need, however, to acknowledge the successes of LGBTIQ
politics in their political and sociological context, rather than uncritically reinstate a progress
narrative of modernization that somehow implies the sexual liberation of a pre-political
identity group of subjects has occurred in the West and now simply needs to be extended to
others around the world. Gay liberation has been part of Western experiences of modernity because it has emerged
through Western forms of political and sociological subjectification. This conceit of sexual equality as
modernization is based on a eurocentric view of modernity, whereby its Western formation is
understood as the exemplary model that other parts of the world will inevitably follow (Bhambra,
2007).

Any examination of power rooted in western understandings of knowledge and

power is doomed to fail and only the alternative can solve
Picq and Thiel 15 (Manuela Lavinas Picq is Professor of International Relations at Universidad
San Francisco de Quito, Markus Thiel is Associate Professor at Florida International University,
Mehmet Sinan Birdal, Michael J. Bosia, Francine D’Amico, Sandra McEvoy, Anthony J. Langlois,
Momin Rahman, Laura Sjoberg, “Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ claims shape
International Relations,” Routledge, pg 96-9, 2015)///PSC

Cross-cultural research on sexuality has challenged one of the conceptual confusions in the
modernization thesis – that of a universal, essential sexual identity . We might be tempted, therefore, to
make a claim for culturally specific versions of gender and sexual identity as the basis for regional or national versions of queer rights
that challenge the various conceits of LGBTIQ equality as modernity. Murray and Roscoe suggest, however, that
“‘homosexualization,’ the social forces and historical events that produce modern Western
homosexual identity, is spreading throughout 96 Momin Rahman the world” (1997: 55) and
consequently that Muslim ways of knowing and being sexual are under threat . Joseph Massad is more
specifically interested in who is responsible. He identifies the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) and International
Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) as key players in imposing Western sexual formations
(2007), particularly through their emphasis on a human rights discourse foregrounded in development policies since the 1990s
(Springborg, 2009).6 Massad’s
criticism of the “Gay International” can be seen as inflating the
successes of the internationalization of queer rights since this institutionalization has not been
uniformly successful, either nationally or internationally (Sweibel, 2009; Waites, 2009).7 Nonetheless, he
rightly questions the teleology of a putative international gay liberation because the liberal
human rights discourse defaults to an essentialist understanding of sexual identity . Its
internationalization provides a route for Western conceptualizations of sexuality under the shell of an apparently universal
technology of equality. There
are, however, certain assumptions operating in his postcolonial
analysis that are indicative of further conceptual confusions around sexual identities,
colonialism, and modernity. In Muslim cultures, the historical diversity of sexual behaviors was connected to pre-Islamic
local influences that were not uniformly transformed by the advent of Islam, whether the religion was chosen or imposed through
imperialism (Roscoe, 1997). Inboth the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods, evidence suggests that
sexuality was not seen as identity in the modern Western sense. European imperialism played
a significant role in transforming traditional Muslim homoeroticism and gender binaries by
creating an epistemological cultural shift in understanding diverse sexual behaviors as
indicative of binary sexual identities thus creating the modern sense of homosexuals as a
“type” of person (Murray & Roscoe, 1997; Massad, 2007). Colonial discourses on homosexuality also served
to construct the “home” nations as morally superior, reinforcing the gender hierarchies and
sexual moralities that were being consolidated during the imperial industrial eras by
characterizing Eastern and native homoeroticism as depraved and contrasting this with superior
Western morality (McClintock, 1995; Murray & Roscoe, 1997; Morgenson, 2010). The historical emergence of
homosexuality and homophobia through colonialism does not, however, simply disappear in postcolonial
times. Instead, it is furthered with the deployment of more rigid gender/sexual moralities as part of
national liberation strategies and national resistance to Western cultural influence in
postcolonial times. This occurs from Algeria and Palestine (Abdulhadi, 2010) to India, where the anti-sodomy law imposed by
the British in 1861 was retained by post-independence political elites as a defense of traditional Indian culture (Vanita & Kidwai,
2000; Bhaskaran, 2002). In another example, Singapore defended keeping colonial anti-sodomy laws on the basis of national and
Asian “values” (Chan, 2009), a discourse repeated across Southeast Asia (Peletz, 2006; Blackwood, 2007). I have agreed with those
like Massad who criticize the current political formations of gay politics as conceits of Western modernity. I
resist, however,
the argument that the antidote to Western impositions can be culturally exclusive and
“authentic” non-Western traditions of gender and sexual organization. I do not think that we
can explain “homosexualization” as a process that is a one-dimensional continuation of
colonialism in contemporary times. The significance of contemporary LGBTIQ identity cannot be reduced
to its neocolonialist politics; rather politics in the form of liberal democratic individualist rights
strategies is one component of the way in which queer identity was constructed . There is a wider basis
to the emergence of homosexual identity that includes bureaucratization and social control;
urbanization and the creation of homosocial leisure spaces; the reorganization of gender
divisions and ideologies based on wage labor/domestic binaries; the impact of legally free wage
labor in industrial societies on notions of individuality ; and the medicalization of sexual identity (Greenberg,
1988; Weeks, 1989; Seidman, 1996). Modern states have had the ability to deploy homophobia because
“homosexualization” creates a stigmatized other as the target, but technologies of oppression
are part of a wider sociological development of regulation in modernity . Political homophobia may
therefore have emerged in Western modernity and then been exported, but we cannot argue that it is limited to the
West in the current era because modern statehood has developed globally along with
homosexualization. Homophobia has thus become a widespread phenomenon in postcolonial states and increasingly, in
transnational movements (Weiss & Bosia, 2013). For example, Awwad’s analysis of the Queen Boat affair in Cairo provides a complex
rendering of the Egyptian state’s repression of sexual license. Prostitution was identified with servicing the British colonizers
producing a movement towards regulation and more conservative morality in postcolonial politics. This later converged with the
state’s attempt to preempt the rise of conservative transnational Islamism by increasing sexual regulation (2010). We
cannot
seriously contemplate that modern sources of social control, regulation, and socioeconomic
ordering are exclusively Western when we know that contemporary states have many, if not
all, of these aspects at their disposal and are happy to use them against LGBTIQ populations.
Even if we begin with the proposition that Western epistemologies have dominated national
cultures of gender and the sexual since colonial times and now dominate the international arena, that
analysis cannot fully explain the investment in these epistemologies by national cultures that
are often seeking to distinguish themselves from Western neoimperialism . In postcolonial times, the
continued and sometimes expanded regulation of homosexuality suggests a continuing connection in how sexuality
can be conceptualized by a ruling national elite (whether exclusively as a government or more widely in elite
public culture) to promote its own governing legitimacy (Lennox & Waites, 2013; Weiss & Bosia, 2013). That fact
alone suggests that we cannot simply see modern constructions of sexuality as wholly Western in
contemporary times, even if the technologies that brought them to bear are understood as
emanating from the West. In terms of the consequences for international politics, many others have criticized the potential
cultural imperialism of queer human rights discourses but they have also simultaneously recognized that the translation of anti-
essentialist, culturally variable understandings of sexual identities into viable political frameworks is extremely difficult because
there is an inevitable institutional momentum to talk in terms of human rights that are “attached” to a specific identity group, seen
as the reflection of natural, essentialist, identities (Waites, 2009; Budhiraja et al., 2010). As Waites points out, the
tension
between recognizing cultural variability in sexual identities and organization and the Western-
derived concepts that dominate political strategies “is the context in which it is necessary to
develop a strategy for engaging with these concepts, appraising costs and benefits for political
movements” (2009: 152). Massad’s rejection of queer rights and identities as Western imperialism
is a symptom of conceptualizations that ultimately replay cultural exclusivity between Western
and Eastern social constructions of sexuality. The characterization of queer rights as a battle between Arab
formations and Western ones indicates a theoretical assumption about the “ownership” of modernity that equates modernity with
colonialism and LGBTIQ identities as part of this view of “modernity as colonialism.”

Deconstructing hierarchies of masculinity and militarism is a prerequisite to any

affirmative action and breaking down militarism. Independently the
affirmative’s epistemology justifies the male/female divide that provides the
foundation for all other hierarchies
Wibben 18 (Annick Wibben, Professor of Politics and International Studies as well as the
director of the Peace and Justice Studies program. She contributes to the Politics, International
Studies, Gender & Sexualities Studies, Peace & Justice Studies and Legal Studies curricula. Before
joining the USF faculty, she worked as co-Investigator (with James Der Derian) of the
Information Technology, War and Peace Project infopeace.org at the Watson Institute for
International Studies at Brown University from 2001-2005, “Why we need to study (US)
militarism: A critical feminist lens,” Security & Dialogue, 2018, journals.sagepub.com/home/sdi,
2018, pg. 143)

Militaries and militarism have discursively and practically been dependent on deploying
gendered myths and images – and on a variety of persons inside and outside militaries who accept them and act them
out. It thus becomes imperative not only to simply assert a link between (hegemonic)
masculinity and war, but also to explore more deeply how ‘masculinity in the context of the
military operates as a kind of intersection of hierarchies, in which a dominant hierarchical
distinction between masculine and feminine sustains other hierarchies within and between
men and women in different categories of military life’ (Hutchings, 2008: 392). This can be observed
in descriptions of basic training, where masculinity is bolstered not just by denigrating femininity
and female anatomy, but also at the intersection with sexuality, when those who are perceived
to deviate from the heterosexual norm are disparaged .9 Melissa Herbert’s (1998) study of the ways in which US
servicewomen have to negotiate femininity and masculinity is revealing here: she notes that women who minimize their
femininity to become ‘one of the guys’ are just as likely as women who play up their
femininity to have both their gender identity and their sexuality questioned . Notably, when
traditional femininity is emphasized, this is less threatening to military hierarchies since these servicewomen do not make a claim to
authority on the basis of hegemonic masculinities. Importantly, while
these intersecting hierarchies are fluid (as
we can see after the reversal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the policy that did not allow gay and
lesbian service members to serve openly in the US military, where the threat of being labeled
lesbian or gay is less costly), ‘the only absolutely fixed element in the concept [hegemonic
masculinity] is its signification of superior value in a formal dynamics of valorization’ (Hutchings,
2008: 394).10 The official opening of all military occupational specialties in the US military to women, especially in branches such as
the US Marine Corps that have vehemently resisted this move, consequently must also be interpreted as a direct attack on this
hegemonic value system. Indeed, reading the resistance of the US Marine Corps as a deeply gendered
response to a (perceived) attack on hegemonic masculinity and its attendant privileges allows
for a deeper understanding of the length to which its leadership went to defend the status quo,
for example by producing a flawed study (Walters, 2015). At the same time, we might also consider
evidence from other fully integrated militaries (e.g. Eichler, 2013), which indicates that the integration
of women into combat is unlikely to impact the US Marine Corps’ culture without further
intervention by the leadership. Hutchings’ claims about shared norms of manliness and warfighting are supported by
Aaron Belkin’s (2012) analysis of military masculinity in the US military. He describes military masculinity ‘as a set of
beliefs, practices and attributes that enable individuals – men and women – to claim authority
on the basis of affirmative relationships with the military or with military ideals’ (Belkin, 2012: 3).
Importantly, as Herbert attests also, while ‘military masculinity has been more available to men than to women for sustaining claims
to power … women have harnessed it as well’ (Belkin, 2012: 3) – albeit with varying success. In her discussion of post-traumatic
stress, Sandra Whitworth (2008: 110) points out that it
‘lays bare the fragile ground on which [white] military
masculinity is built’.11 Given that the experience of military masculinity is dependent on gender
as well as on race, however, Whitworth finds that ‘whereas white [male] soldiers discover
through their emotions that they have not lived up to the norms of the warrior brotherhood,
women and marginalized men discover they were never equal partners in the ‘brotherhood’ to
begin with’ (Whitworth, 2008: 110–111). In the case of the US military, this is a common theme in recent (auto)biographical
accounts of servicewomen who have been on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is more, since women from
underrepresented groups serve at higher rates than white women (in the US military), the
intersections of gender and race crucially compound the effects of post-traumatic stress and
deserve more attention. The question of how gendered (and raced!) myths and images shape militarism concerns not just
women who are serving in the military, of course. Feminist scholars have long been paying attention to women’s lives also outside
and alongside militaries (for the divide is more false than real in everyday life). They find: Militaries
rely on women, but
not all women experience militarization identically. Militaries have needed and continue to
need some women to provide commercialized sexual services to soldiers, other women to
commit themselves to marital fidelity in military families; simultaneously, they need other
women to find economic security and maybe even pride in working for defense contractors . At
times, governments even need some civilian women to act as feminist lobbyists promoting women’s rights to serve in the state’s
military. (Enloe, 2007: xii) Feminist insights into the broader, everyday experiences of militarism provide support for feminist
skepticism regarding the current move to further integrate women into the US military – and leads us back to the questions posed in
the introduction: Who benefits and how? What changes and what stays the same? What is clear is that feminist scholarship has
much to contribute to current debates. Commenting on the state of feminist research on militarism and security, Annica Kronsell
and Erika Svedberg (2012: 6) assert that ‘the
implications [of these feminist interventions] are extensive;
theories of war are flawed if they lack a gender dimension and every strategy to end war for
peace must include a change of gender relations’. It is hard not to agree given the deep
enmeshment of norms of gender and war.
 Queer IR
Our alternative is a queer logic of statecraft – we deconstruct and reconstruct
the research object of the 1AC
Thiel, PhD IR, 18 (Markus, Miami, ProfPtx&IR@FloridaInternationalUniversity, https://www.e-ir.info/2018/01/07/queer-
theory-in-international-relations/, January 07) BW

Tensions between mainstream advocacy and radical queer approaches signify the need to
rethink simplistic IR analytical approaches. Political tensions in the ‘real’ world prompt the
queer IR theorist to question generally accepted , established conceptions of international
governance. In doing so, queer theorists use existing literature or audio-visual material such as movies or even
performances to go beyond the apparently obvious to deconstruct and then reconstruct IR events
and processes. They often exhibit a critical perspective towards naturally assumed conditions of
space and time that tend to conceal and flatten differences among actors and interpretations of
international events. For example, Cynthia Weber (2016) uses Hillary Clinton’s sexual rights speech at
the United Nations in 2011 and contrasts it with Conchita Wurst’s winning performance at the
Eurovision song contest in 2014 to highlight a ‘queer logic of statecraft’ that contests traditional,
gendered and binary approaches to governance. Weber highlights how despite transforming the
notion of the homosexual from deviant into normal rights-holder in her speech, Clinton still
produced an international binary of progressive versus intolerant states. On the other hand,
Conchita Wurst – a character created by Thomas Neuwirth – challenged accepted notions of what is
considered normal or perverse by performing in drag with a beard. In the course of this, Wurst
destabilised racial, sexual, gendered and geopolitical notions of what it means to be a European.
Taken together, both cases show how seemingly stable ideas in international relations are far from
natural. Instead, they are intentionally created, normalised, challenged and reconfigured.
 Feminist Anti-war praxis
The alternative is feminist anti-war praxis through the lens of martial politics-
incremental de-militarization is an easy out that fails to account for the violence
that structures the liberal order
Howell, PhD, ’18 (Alison, PoliSci@YorkUniversity, AsstProfPoliSci@Rutgers, Forget “militarization”: race, disability and the
“martial politics” of the police and of the university, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Volume 20, Issue 2) BW

Feminist praxis can benefit from questioning the concept of “militarization” so as to more fully
excavate the violence of liberal order. In particular, the methodological primacy of examining “women’s lives” (or
militarized masculinities) risks subsuming analyses of race, Indigeneity, disability and coloniality under gender. The result is an
incomplete accounting of the ways in which war-like
relations and systems that are “of war” are symbiotically and
thoroughly part of liberal order, and not an exceptional aberration from it. To capture these dynamics, I
have proposed an alternate concept, “martial politics,” which seeks to illuminate the histories of our present imbrication with war –
a move made possible by shifting to an analysis that foregrounds historical relations of race, Indigeneity and disability alongside
sexuality and gender. Yet whatis at stake here is not only feminist methodology and theory, but also our
activism. So, what of expediency? Do we lose too much if we can no longer demand demilitarization?
In the 1980s when sex-negative radical feminists engaged in anti-porn activism, they found themselves with strange bed- fellows in
the Christian right. This should have served as ample evidence that it was time to reconsider their perspective, and it is a lesson for
the present day. Feminist scholars and activists should be similarly concerned that the concept of “militarization” is popular amongst
small-state, right-wing libertarians associated, for example, with the Cato Institute (see Balko 2013). With this lesson in mind, I argue
the concept of (de)militarization guides us in asking for too little of the wrong things. From the
perspective of “demilitarization,” Obama’s 2015 cancellation of the federal government program of
granting local police forces military equipment seems like a significant victory, but to be satisfied with
this fails to address how policing imposes order through laws that criminalize Blackness,
Indigeneity, disability and gender deviance or queerness. We must demand more. By
recognizing that we are steeped in martial forms of politics, feminist anti-war praxis could work
not (just) towards demilitarization; it could also more consistently align with anti-racist and
disability organizing for prison abolition and deinstitutionalization by recognizing these
institutions as central to “martial politics” – that is, because they are war-like and “of war.” This kind of resistance is
already robust, not only in Black Lives Matter and prison abolition activism in relation to policing, but also in relation to the colonial
foundations of universities. Recent
student movements from South Africa to the UK, from India to the US and beyond,
have been calling into question the Whiteness of universities and their founding in, and continuing
celebration of, (settler) colonialism. For instance, students have contested the continued celebration of brutal colonist Cecil Rhodes
on the University of Cape Town and Oxford University’s campuses, and slave owner Isaac Royall Jr.’s family crest at Harvard, tying
these histories into contemporary racial inequalities in admissions and campus life. They have demonstrated that diversity is
insufficient, and that the university must be decolonized. Similarly, disability and anti-racist student activists have
drawn attention to the continued legacies of eugenics in universities. If we are to understand the martial politics of the university,
the police, or of any other institution, we would do well to pay attention to this activism. The
concept of “militarization”
is, at this point, an easy out. In a time when academics are under increasing pressure to produce articles
and books at breakneck speed, it may seem expedient to apply the framework of “militarization,”
especially when the concept is reduced to the surface analysis of military aesthetics in so-called civilian life.
The careful historical work for which I am calling in order to specify expressions of “martial politics” is not fast or
easy, but what is at stake is too important. If we are to grapple with the violence of liberal orders in a more
robust way, if we are to attend not only to the gendered dynamics of military power but also to race, ableism, (settler)
colonialism and other forms of injustice, we need to do better and do more.
 Suicide Bomber/Terrorist Assemblages
Thus, we advocate to understand queerness, securitization, and Orientalized
bodies through the lens of the Suicide Bomber. The Suicide Bomber obliterates
the Self/Other dialect central to the War on Terror and denaturalizes stagnant
understandings of race and sexuality.
Puar 7 – Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers University. [“conclusion: queer times, terrorist assemblages.”
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.] /MegLak

Ghassan Hage wonders ‘‘why it is that suicide bombing cannot be talked about without being
condemned first,’’ noting that without an unequivocal condemnation, one is a ‘‘morally suspicious person’’ because ‘‘only un-
qualified condemnation will do.’’ He asserts, ‘‘There is a clear political risk in trying to explain suicide
bombings.’’ With such risks in mind, my desire here is to momentarily suspend this dilemma by
combining an analysis of these representational stakes with a reading of the forces of affect, of
the body, of matter. In pondering the modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a pastiche of oddities: a
body machined together through metal and flesh, an assemblage of the organic and the
inorganic; a death not of the Self nor of the Other, but both simultaneously, and, perhaps more
accurately, a death scene that obliterates the Hegelian self/other dialectic altogether . Self-
annihilation is the ultimate form of resistance , and ironically, it acts as self-preservation, the preservation
of symbolic self enabled through the ‘‘highest cultural capital’’ of martyrdom, a giving of life to the future of
political struggles—not at all a sign of ‘‘disinterest in living a meaningful life.’’ As Hage notes, in this limited but nonetheless
trenchant economy of meaning, suicide bombers are ‘‘a sign of life’’ emanating from the violent
conditions of life’s impossibility, the ‘‘impossibility of making a life.’’ This body forces a reconciliation of opposites
through their inevitable collapse— a perverse habitation of contradiction. Achille Mbembe’s devastating and brilliant meditation
on necropolitics notes that the historical basis of sovereignty that is reliant upon a notion of (western)
political rationality begs for a more accurate framing: that of life and death, the subjugation of life to the power
of death. Mbembe attends not only to the representational but also to the informational productivity
of the (Palestinian) suicide bomber. Pointing to the becomings of a suicide bomber , a corporeal
experiential of ‘‘ballistics,’’ he asks, ‘‘What place is given to life, death, and the human body (especially the
wounded or slain body)?’’ Assemblage here points to the inability to clearly delineate a temporal, spatial,
energetic, or molecular distinction between a discrete biological body and technology; the entities ,
particles, and elements come together, flow, break apart, interface, skim off each other, are never stable, but are
defined through their continual interface , not as objects meeting but as multiplicities emerging from
interactions. The dynamite strapped onto the body of a suicide bomber is not merely an appendage
or prosthetic; the intimacy of weapon with body reorients the assumed spatial integrity
(coherence and concreteness) and individuality of the body that is the mandate of intersectional
identities: instead we have the body-weapon. The ontology of the body renders it a newly becoming
body: The candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the soon-to-be-detonated weapon. Unlike
the tank or the missile that is clearly visible, the weapon carried in the shape of the body is invisible. Thus concealed, it
forms part of the body. It is so intimately part of the body that at the time of its detonation it
annihilates the body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of others when it does not reduce them to pieces.
The body does not simply conceal a weapon . The body is transformed into a weapon , not in a
metaphorical sense but in a truly ballistic sense. Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and
becoming fuse into one: as one’s body dies, one’s body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide
bomber. Not only does the ballistic body come into being without the aid of visual cues marking its
transformation, it also “carries with it the bodies of others.” Its own penetrative energy sends shards of metal and
torn flesh spinning off into the ether. The body-weapon does not play as metaphor, nor in the realm of meaning and
epistemology, but forces us ontologically anew to ask: What kinds of information does the ballistic
body impart? These bodies, being in the midst of becoming, blur the insides and the outsides, infecting
transformation through sensation, echoing knowledge via reverberation and vibration. The echo is a queer
temporality—in the relay of affective information between and amid beings, the sequence of reflection, repetition, resound,
and return (but with a difference, as in mimicry)—and brings forth waves of the future breaking into the present. Gayatri Spivak,
prescient in drawing our attention to the multivalent textuality of suicide in ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak,’’ reminds us in her latest
ruminations that suicide terrorism is a modality of expression and communication for the subaltern
(there is the radiation of heat, the stench of burning flesh, the impact of metal upon structures and the ground, the splattering of
blood, body parts, skin): Suicidal
resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means
will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other. For you die with me for
the same cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are, there are no designated
killees in suicide bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you won’t respond to me, with
the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death. We have the proposal that there are no sides, and that
the sides are forever shifting, crumpling, and multiplying, disappearing and reappearing, unable
to satisfactorily delineate between here and there. The spatial collapse of sides is due to the
queer temporal interruption of the suicide bomber, projectiles spewing every which way. As a queer
assemblage— distinct from the queering of an entity or identity—race and sexuality are denaturalized through
the impermanence, the transience of the suicide bomber, the fleeting identity replayed backward through its
dissolution. This dissolution of self into other/s and other/s into self not only effaces the absolute
mark of self and other/s in the war on terror, but produces a systemic challenge to the entire order
of Manichaean rationality that organizes the rubric of good versus evil . Delivering ‘‘a message inscribed on the
body when no other means will get through,’’ suicide bombers do not transcend or claim the rational nor accept the
demarcation of the irrational. Rather, they foreground the flawed temporal, spatial, and ontological
presumptions upon which such distinctions flourish. Organic and inorganic, flesh and machine, these wind up as
important as (and perhaps as threatening) if not more so than the symbolism of the bomber and his or her defense or
condemnation.

Assemblage theory resolves the link – rather than adhering to post-colonial

understandings of queerness as static, it recognizes that it has no definition
beyond the act itself.
Puar 7 – Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers University. [“conclusion: queer times, terrorist assemblages.”
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.] /MegLak

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 con- glomeration that recognizes other contingencies of belonging (melding, fusing, viscosity,
bouncing) that might not fall so easily into what is some- times denoted as reactive community formations—identity politics—by
control theorists. The
assemblage, as 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 that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections . There are no
points or positions. . . . There are only lines. 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. 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
you become an identity, yes, but also timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of
identification:
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 state—census, demography, racial profiling, surveillance —in that “difference” is 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.” 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.’’

The alt solves and explains every other type of violence

Agathangelou 19 (Anna M. Agathangelou, Professor Agathangelou teaches in the areas of
international relations and women and politics. Some of her areas of expertise are time and
temporality in global politics, the body, time and ecology, international feminist political
economy and feminist/postcolonial and decolonial thought. She is the co-director of Global
Change Institute, Cyprus and was a visiting fellow in the Program of Science, Technology and
Society at John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard (2014-2015). She is currently
involved on two multinational SSHRC partnership research projects focusing on sexual violence
and human security, global governance, and biotechnology. She has researched ethnic conflict
in Cyprus, as well as reconstruction in post-conflict societies with a focus on sexual violence,
displaced peoples and the missing, 6/20/2019, York University, “From the Colonial to Feminist
IR: Feminist IR Studies, the Wider FSS/GPE Research Agenda, and the Questions of Value,
Valuation, Security, and Violence,” doi:10.1017/S1743923X17000484, pg. 743-45) ///PSC
The incessant coproduction of insecurity and accumulation regimes does not merely depend on
sovereign force (i.e., state and military) and market relations (i.e., work/re-production). Rather and from the vantage
point of slavery and the “racial calculus and . . . political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (Hartman 2007, 6) and
continue in our times, we are able to recognize that state force and corporations as forms of
exploitation evade broader notions of violence. The insight that even feminists have been
“drafted into the service of destructive force[ s]” (Saunders 2008, 67) to “do . . . violence to [blacks’]
own capacities to read, think, and imagine otherwise ” (Sharpe 2016, 13) is a major reason that FGPE
and FSS ought to speak to a broader notion of violence . It is also pivotal to acknowledge that the
entanglement of slavery/indigeneity/ colonialism and the erection of a capitalist (and carbon-
based) set of practices are co-constitutive of a broader notion of violence (i.e., imperiling, skewing life
opportunities, subjecting some to premature death and devaluation) and order. While it remains important to analyze violence
by “consider[ing] a broad range of materialities” (Hudson 2015, 416), we also need to theorize how valuation and
ideas about wage-earning capacities become entangled with the transfer of capital and
whiteness to “successful” states linking simultaneously freedom and power with the
management of global authority and “failed” states with authoritarianism/obsolete
reproduction/rape. Similarly, these grammars of the body politic inscribe themselves on ecologies and people differentially
based on a race, sexuality, ability, class, and “reproductive” calculus. Slavery/settler colonialisms seem to always be
coded as institutions of the past making racial domination and reproduction “obsolete” possible
by naturalizing the penetration of feminized/heteronormativized bodies . And capital economy is coded as
forward looking/generative/masculinized/racialized as white. But a decolonial/feminist/queer compositional
reading (Agathangelou 2013; Peterson 2014) ruptures normativized reproductions of meaning and value
and grapples with tensions in feminist research programs to understand how labor, capital,
and ecologies coded as political economy, and security and juridical contracts as security
studies, become bounded objects erected as independent areas or fields drafted for dominant
projects (i.e., in the name of a stronger nation; in the name of democracy, or fair military/ corporative policies). Moreover, the
very distinction between economic and noneconomic violence is in crisis—that is, normative
notions of production/reproduction are equally problematized and demand new directions, the
design and creation of new social imaginaries and organizing practices . With the emergence of
financialized accumulation regimes inscribed in the very fabric of our everyday lives, entire communities’ efforts are
militarized/policed in their challenge of corporations’ and states’ authority simultaneously challenging their own existence. These
regimes zoom in at a molecular register of the body/body politic, albeit with asymmetrical
interventions, altering the very material infrastructure of bodies and forms of existence,
including the international and political itself: what is security and what is the market and work, when the
coproduction of biofinance and capitalist order penetrate our everyday? A feminist compositional reading that inquires about
value/valuations could place FGPE and FSS and its products (i.e., what is social reproduction and what is security when and where) in
a poetic relationship to each. It could also allow them to examine how the state/ civil society
segregation becomes possible and what notions allow for distinctions and tensions between
immediate (noneconomic) and mediated (economic) violence that make these notions/practices
possible. This reading of and by FGPE and FSS could highlight how modernity’s assemblage of
knowledge/power has recruited us and our work to invest and participate in a mode of a
certain human sociality by differentiating one sort of human (i.e., the European from the rest; the
productive man from the reproductive woman; the queer from the heterosexual) from the other. However, these
distinctions pivot on complex negotiations of reproduction within indigenous environments
under biofinancialization modalities and vice versa . By asking FGPE and FSS to reconsider the sexual division of
intellectual labor, labor, value/valuation, capital, and security through this compositional approach and to
reflect on how economic quandaries are not settled through financial means but through
social, existential, and techno-scientific transformations, we might generate research that
illuminates naturalizations and tensions amidst their intellectual productions and those that
mainstream IR dismisses. A compositional FGPE and FSS practice could place untimely world political moments and
products in poetic relationship to each other rupturing anachronistic bracketing to imagine a more truly global ecopolity.

Masculine identities dominate IR and legitimize aggressive policies that exclude

consideration for gender discourse
Repo ’06 (Jemima, University of Helsinki- Department of Political Science World Politics,
“GENDERING THE MILITARISATION OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM: Discourses and
Representations of Masculinities and Femininities,”
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3599/3d7484d04f867e9ae09a4cefbf38cce731f9.pdf)

Feminist theory identifies international politics from its realist roots essentially as a masculine-
constructed arena therefore its rules, values and expectations are gendered in favour of men by a
process of socialisation— “how individuals are taught culturally appropriate attitudes and behaviours”
(Peterson and Runyan, 1993: 19)— forming gender identities . 5 Peterson and Runyan call “gender ideology” the
belief system of gender stereotypes legitimised in this process ( 1993: 26). Butler concurs, saying that
“genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent” but still punishments are distributed to those who do not abide by
them (Butler, 1990: 141-140). As
a consequence, men’s experiences and knowledge in IR are accepted as
universal and even superior (Hoffman-Hizi, 2002: 7). The continuing public-private dichotomy
structurally sustains this perception, where masculinities are political and active, and femininities are personal and
passive. For example, central concepts such as ‘power’ and ‘security’ that have origins in realist
thought have distinctive gender constructions that legitimise an aggressive masculine identity .
Taking the concept of ‘power’ as an example, Spike V. Peterson and Anne Runyan point out that it, Is usually defined as ‘power-
over,’ specifically, the ability to get someone to do what you want. It is usually measured by control of resources, especially those
supporting physical coercion... and obscures the fact that power reckoning is embedded in sociocultural dynamics and value
systems. (Peterson and Runyan, 1993: 33) It is not that this
type of power is not a so-called reality, but that it is
a socio-culturally determined interpretation, which is essentially biased towards perpetuating
self-sustaining cycles of violence; The point is not that power-over, aggressive behaviour, and life-threatening conflicts
are not ‘real’ but that they are only a part of a more complicated story. Focusing on them misrepresents our reality even as it (to
some extent unnecessarily) reproduces power-over, aggressive behaviour and life threatening conflicts. (Peterson and Runyan 1993:
35) The concept of ‘security’ is similarly gendered . It “is understood not in terms of celebrating and sustaining life
but as the capacity to be indifferent to ‘others’ and, if necessary, to harm them” (Peterson and Runyan, 1993: 34). Peterson and
Runyan refer to ‘Gender ideology’ as the belief system of gender stereotypes that are legitimised in the process of socialising
individuals to particular gender roles. In gendering IR, feminist theorists pay close attention to the oppositional dichotomous
structures in IR. They structurally sustain the perception of masculinity/men as political, active, and rational, and femininity/women
as personal, passive and irrational, respectively. For example, self/other, autonomy/dependence, agency/passivity,
rational/emotional, fact/value, hard/soft, mind/body, civilised/primitive, public/private are all androcentric 6 dichotomies. (Peterson
and Runyan 1993: 25) Dichotomies hold a set of assumptions that allocate dominance to term A at the expense of not-A. (Gatens,
1991: 93) Feminists are particularly interested in deconstructing them because of their dominance
over social thinking and practices, and thus over constructions of gender, man and woman, where men’s
experiences and knowledge are accepted as universal and even superior, even in IR (Hoffman-Hizi, 2002: 7). Their
deconstruction provides opportunities to break down existing divisions and imagine how they
might be reconstructed differently
Gendered violence is ignored in IR and seen as illegitimate because it isn’t a
security concern
Repo ’06 (Jemima, University of Helsinki- Department of Political Science World Politics,
“GENDERING THE MILITARISATION OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM: Discourses and
Representations of Masculinities and Femininities,”
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3599/3d7484d04f867e9ae09a4cefbf38cce731f9.pdf)

Feminist IR theorists thus argue that the

state too is gendered due to the male domination of political
elites and the ‘cult of masculinity’ among its members. As such, state policies are also gendered. This does
not mean that women are invariably oppressed by the state, but women are nonetheless frequently marginalised
or ignored in state affairs, delegitimising and de-politicising their experiences, sufferings, and security concerns by binding
them to the ‘private’ sphere. Feminists especially point to structural violence, such as poor health care, sexual harassment, wage
gaps, rights and resources that sustain structural inequality and power relations. (Peterson, 1992: 45-46) Physical
violence,
too, is gendered. The state concerns itself with ‘hard’ security issues, in other words, violence
that engages the power of the state for the protection of its own power and existence, often
against another state. However, the state does not act as the securer of the protection of women’s bodies. (Peterson, 1992:
46) Sexual violence and violence against women (including domestic violence) interpreted as ‘private’ and thus not of public or
political interest is especially disturbing. The shocking scale violence that is targeted against women and their children behind the
closed doors of the home is not considered to be a matter of state concern. This apathetic posture helps legitimise the idea of
violence against women as an unstoppable natural reality of everyday life and heterosexual relationships. The state can thus prove
to be lethal to its female, second-class citizens7 . The main point here, however, is that the
state is not only the
legitimate actor of violence, but also the determinant of what violence warrants state
intervention by dividing of violence into categories public and private . This division prioritises
the interests of masculinist elites, marginalises women’s sufferings and keeps them in a
subordinate social position. This division also becomes problematic when examining the issue of terrorism, as will be
discussed later. It is also necessary to mention that these structures are also legitimised by gendered national
identities, on which a state’s continued existence and success is dependent. Because nationalist
identities invoke ideas of community, which consists of familial relations, gender roles are more
difficult to distinguish. However, the family implies matrimonial relations that create metaphors of motherlands, fatherlands
and homelands that appeal to a shared sense of transcendental purpose and community for states and their citizens alike. In
addition, these
national identities are frequently used by political elites to promote state interests
throughout the society in question, while concealing racial and social class divisions . (Tickner, 2001:
54- 56) In wartime, women’s bodies become sites of national security.

Disarmament policies should include gendered discourse – it’s the only way to
confront harmful patriarchal norms
Acheson ’18 (Ray, Director of Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom, “The gender and weapons nexus recognized; feminism need apply in 2019 and
beyond,” Forum Arms Trade, https://www.forumarmstrade.org/blog/the-gender-and-weapons-
nexus-recognized-feminism-need-apply-in-2019-and-beyond)/ly

Our current situation is dire. Trillions

of dollars are being spent on militaries and technologies of
violence while poverty, inequality, and climate change threaten our collective security and
safety. Disarmament, as a policy and practice that leads us away from militarism and towards
peace, requires new understandings, perspectives, and approaches to weapons and war. It requires the
effective and meaningful participation of survivors of gun violence, of nuclear weapons use and
testing, of drone strikes, of bombardment of towns and cities. It requires the effective and meaningful participation of
marginalized communities—LGBT+ folks, people of color, those at a socioeconomic
disadvantage, people with disabilities. Diversity is not about political correctness. It is the only way we are
ever going to see change in the way that we confront issues of peace and security . Where we have
achieved the most disarmament progress in recent years—banning landmines and cluster bombs and nuclear weapons, for example
—we have engaged with diverse communities and put humanitarian perspectives over the profits of arms industries or the interests
of powerful governments. This is not just about including women, especially women who come from the same or similar
backgrounds as the men who already rule the table. It’s about completely resetting the table; or even throwing out the table and
setting up an entirely new way of working. Disarmament
requires that we change the way we think about
and confront war and violence as social and economic institutions , and we can’t do that just by giving some
privileges to those who do not challenge the thinking or the behavior of those who have the most privilege. Diversity is not for its
own sake, but for how it impacts what is considered normal, acceptable, and credible. Confronting norms, especially
gendered norms, around weapons and war is imperative to making progress on disarmament. As
a feminist disarmament activist, I have come to believe that more than anything else , the association of weapons with
power is one of the foremost obstacles to disarmament . This association comes from a particular—
and unfortunately, very dominant—understanding of masculinity . This is a masculinity in which ideas like strength,
courage, and protection are equated with violence. It is a masculinity in which the capacity and willingness to
use weapons, engage in combat, and kill other human beings is seen as essential to being “a real
man”. This type of violent, militarized masculinity harms everyone . It harms everyone who does not
comply with that gender norm—women, queer-identified people, non-normative men . It requires
oppression of those deemed “weaker” on the basis of gender norms. It results in domestic violence . It results in violence
against women. It results in violence against gay and trans people. It also results in violence against men. Men mostly
kill each other, inside and outside of conflict. A big part of this is about preserving or protecting their masculinity—a masculinity that
makes male bodies more expendable. Women and children, obnoxiously lumped together in countless resolutions and reports, are
more likely be deemed “innocent civilians,” while men are more likely be to be considered militants or combatants. In conflict,
civilian men are often targeted—or counted in casualty recordings—as militants only because they are men of a certain age. We are
all suffering from the equation of violence and power with masculinity. It prevents those who identified as men from being
something else—from performing gender differently. Itprevents all of us as human beings to promote or
explore strength, courage, and protection from a nonviolent perspective. It makes disarmament
seem weak. It makes peace seem utopian. It makes protection without weapons seem absurd. It also
makes it impossible to achieve gender justice. It keeps men and women in binary boxes based
on their biological sex. It maintains a strict hierarchy between these boxes, in which men are tough, rational, and violent,
while women are weak, irrational, and passive. In this narrative, men are agents; women are victims. (And reinforces the idea that
there is nothing outside of this binary.) The norm of violent masculinity will continue to cause suffering and reinforce inequalities
until we get serious about doing something differently. This
is a project of dismantling the patriarchy, which is a big
project, but
it starts with the language we use, the people we include in discussions, and the norms we are
willing to challenge.  
 Queering Pathology
We should queer individualistic pathology that compresses life into normative
categories and disrupts co-constitution with other forms of life.
Ahuja, PhD, ‘16
(Neel, TransnationalCulturalStudies@UCSanDiego, AssocProfFeminist&CriticalRace/EthnicStudies@UCSantaCruz, Bioinsecurities,
Duke University Press, p. 8) BW

Infectious disease is normally understood as a pathological state of hybridity in which microbial

species occupy and reproduce within the bodies of larger species (including humans). From this perspective, a
disease-causing microorganism is a parasite that threatens the body’s functions, even life itself. Yet when we take a step
back from the spectacular imagery of contagion as a deathly and debilitating pathology, it is possible
to glimpse the queer potential that disease reveals as immanent to life itself. To call life itself
“queer” is to dislodge it from commonplace pro-life discourses that compress biological life into
the able-bodied, individuated, and anthropomorphized reproductive form of the body.10 The
greatest error of anthropomorphism is not that animals or objects are incorrectly attributed human characteristics; it is that those
viewed as transparently human are extracted as such from their constitution in a broader domain
of biosocial life. Ed Cohen helps us understand the scale politics that anthropomorphize the human, that imagine that
human bodies are self-contained and stable in contradiction to their entanglement with and
constitution through other bodies. For Cohen, “The politics of viral containment relentlessly plays upon
the contingency of the human ‘we.’ It conceptually and materially confounds our understanding both of
how individuals constitute our collectives and how we exclude other collectivities . . . whether these
‘others’ are other individuals, other populations, other humans, other species, or other non-vital entities.”11 At minimum, life
writ large exceeds the parameters of the living done by any body or population marked by
species, race, or other biologized category; in this book when I refer to “life,” I mean the interconnected life that
crosses organisms, species, and technologies. Mel Chen, however, prefers “animacy” rather than “life,” for the interaction of all sorts
of matter from rocks to plants calls into question the assumption of the holism of mammalian bodies. It enlivens the apparently
dead bodies of minerals, toxins, viruses, and other objects whose affective traces are mobilized in discourses of environmental risk
or which prosthetically extend the body’s capacities to affect others in time and space.12 Fears
of epidemic disease
highlight the shared animacies of species and matter, demonstrating the transitional nature of
bodily entanglements.
 AT Discourse doesn’t matter
Discourse shapes reality
Emond 18 (Rachel Emond, Rachel Emond is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Center
for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. She works on issues related to nuclear policy with a
special emphasis on the history and future of women in the field. As her first major introduction
to nuclear policy, Rachel completed an undergraduate thesis, titled “American Foreign Policy
has a Masculinity Problem,” on the gendered discourse surrounding the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action with Iran, “American foreign policy has a masculinity problem: a discourse
analysis of the Iran deal,” University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, August 2018, pg. 23)///PSC

As the previous sections alluded to, themes of masculinity and femininity are pervasive in American
foreign policy. We can see them in the existence of particular stories that are told about what policies are viable, and the
language used to critique these policies. In “W” Stands for Women, author Michaele L. Ferguson (2007, 13) states, “ Rhetoric is
never merely rhetoric, it constructs a particular (if incomplete) world view that enables us to see
certain connections, yet occludes others. Like a picture frame, the rhetorical framing of political issues shapes and
contextualizes the perspective of the audience.” Perception is reality, and rhetoric is undeniably used to
influence the way that abstract concepts such as foreign policy become reified. Discourse, as it
is essentially the action of nuanced communication, is constantly changing. Thus, the importance of
tracking discourse over time is unquestionable. This thesis has two main components: the empirical and the theoretical. The
empirical evidence—found through a discourse analysis of the Iran Deal , discussed below, and a
contextual discussion of masculinity, femininity, and the relationship between gender and
American foreign policy—is used to shape the theoretical discussion of the legitimacy granted to
the Iran Deal. It is important to note that this style of research intrinsically links the research completed to the researcher.
Discourse analysis is a unique style of research in that it is based on observation and theory
building, both of which are subjective and interpretative in nature . This study in particular is loosely
influenced by Roxanne Doty’s 1993 discourse analysis of the U.S.’ counterinsurgency policy in the Philippines.

Neg research is falsifiable and grounded in empirics

Emond 18 (Rachel Emond, Rachel Emond is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Center
for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. She works on issues related to nuclear policy with a
special emphasis on the history and future of women in the field. As her first major introduction
to nuclear policy, Rachel completed an undergraduate thesis, titled “American Foreign Policy
has a Masculinity Problem,” on the gendered discourse surrounding the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action with Iran, “American foreign policy has a masculinity problem: a discourse
analysis of the Iran deal,” University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, August 2018, pg. 25)///PSC

Doty (1993) uses what she calls the “Discursive Practices Approach,” to study the “linguistic
composition of reality” in regards to U.S.-Philippines policy. I use this approach because I am interested in uncovering the
underlying meanings and implications of the discourses on a particular American foreign policy. While Doty (1993) also
points out the connection between the researcher and the research due to the interpretative
nature, she explains the validity and reliability well. Doty (1993) analyzes rhetoric by looking for
distinctions in the presupposition, predication, and subject positioning of the subjects and
objects related to her topic of choice . At its most fundamental level, discourse analysis is about
identifying a subject, examining the language used to describe and discuss that subject, and
then explaining the meaning given to that subject through its description. Meaningful discourse in and
of itself is not always easily identified, and discourse analysis in practice can be ambiguous because of the multitude of meanings
one type of discourse can take on at any point in time. Discourse analysis allows us to identify the ways in
which our language is built upon a system of hierarchies and preconceived notions that impact
our understanding of any given topic. Through my discourse analysis of the Iran Deal I seek to investigate the identity
created for this specific soft power foreign policy solution through the rhetoric used to discuss the agreement. In my conclusion, I
use the competing gendered characterizations of the Iran deal by critics and supporters to argue
that this structure of language impacts the way that the Iran deal, and other soft power
solutions thereafter, is perceived and thought about. I argue that the different language used to discuss the Iran
deal is not simply arbitrary, but actually constructs multiple realties within which the Iran deal exists depending on the type of
language that is used.

Data sides neg – foreign policy is rooted in masculinity

Emond 18 (Rachel Emond, Rachel Emond is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Center
for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. She works on issues related to nuclear policy with a
special emphasis on the history and future of women in the field. As her first major introduction
to nuclear policy, Rachel completed an undergraduate thesis, titled “American Foreign Policy
has a Masculinity Problem,” on the gendered discourse surrounding the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action with Iran, “American foreign policy has a masculinity problem: a discourse
analysis of the Iran deal,” University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, August 2018, pg. 31)///PSC

The explicit language, presented in Table 1, is not surprising . These descriptors were taken from phrases
such as, “an imperfect deal,” “a smarter, more responsible way to protect,” “strong and
disciplined diplomacy,” “vulnerabilities of the deal,” and “worrisome implications.” These are
direct phrases that politicians used when discussing the Iran Deal in public settings (such as on the
House and Senate floors, in press conferences, and in television interviews) or were stated directly to journalists , and
were then reported in one of the two media outlets. In some cases, such as with the phrase “Iran…[is] rubbing Obama’s face in the
weakness of his enforcement position,” (emphasis my own) the language is used not by a politician, but instead directly by the
author of the article. As can be seen, there is a significant difference in the type of language that those who supported the Iran Deal
chose to use in comparison to the type of language used by those who did not support the agreement.
Valuable (1)Promises possibility (1)Appropriate (1)Fair (1)Comprehensive (1)[Exemplifies]
leadership (2) This difference can also be seen in the implicit language, presented in Table 2,
that was used. These descriptors were taken from phrases such as, “to signal readiness and restore
a credible military option,” “providing a pyromaniac with matches,” “does not inspire
confidence,” “instead of chest-beating,” “better than nothing,” “spur a nuclear arms race,”
“increases the chances of war,” “disloyal to the U.S.,” and “will sustain the military options in
case it becomes necessary.”
 AT US Interventionism Good – solves
homophobia in ME
Anti-queer legislation and practices exist in the Middle East because of US
interventionist practices
Massad 02 Joseph Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World”,
Duke University Press, May 1st 2002, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-2-361, /MegLak

The arrests prompted a torrent of media collusion with the government , condemning the practice of
“deviance” as a new Western imposition—ironically, the hysteria that gripped the Gay International and their
local agents only further ignited the rhetoric . IGLHRC was joined by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
in condemning the arrests and in orchestrating a letter-writing campaign to Egyptian officials.67 They were joined by GLAS and by Al-
Fatiha’s nowinfamous founder Faisal Alam who not only called for worldwide demonstrations in support of the arrested men, but
also solicited the signatures of members of the U.S. Congress, who were recruited by openly gay Massachusetts congressman Barney
Frank and by the anti-Arab and anti-Egyptian Tom Lantos to sign a petition threatening a cutoff of U.S. aid to Egypt if the government
failed to release the men.68 Western diplomats and the Western press, who are usually silent about
most human rights abuses in Egypt as well as the poverty that afflicts the country, flocked to the
trial hearings in droves and registered their horror at the proceedings. The reaction of the Egyptian press
and of the Egyptian government was swift: more vilification campaigns of deviant sex as an
imperialist plot, as evidenced by the real alliances that the Gay International makes with
imperialists— Al-Fatiha’s activities were seen as particularly egregious. Indeed, the vilification campaign against these men
intensified precisely as a result of the actions of the Gay International and the Western politicians whose support it solicited. During
the hearings, the prosecution frequently referenced the Gay International’s campaign, pledged to defend the “manhood” of Egypt
against attempts to “violate” it, and wondered what would become of a nation who sits by idly as its “men become like its women”
through “deviance.”69 The
press and conservative Islamists have begun to call for explicit laws
criminalizing same-sex practice.70 The Gay International and its activities are largely responsible
for the intensity of this repressive campaign . Despite the overwhelming evidence that gayness, as a
choice, is proving to bring about more repression, not “liberation,” and less sexual freedom rather than
more for Arab men practicing same-sex contact, the Gay International is undeterred in its
missionary campaign By inciting discourse about homosexuals where none existed before, the
Gay International is in fact heterosexualizing a world that is being forced to be fixed by a
Western binary. Because most non-Western civilizations, including Muslim Arab civilization, have not
subscribed historically to these categories, their imposition is producing less than liberatory
outcomes: men who are considered the passive or receptive parties in male-male sexual contacts are forced to have one object
choice and identify as homosexual or gay, just as men who are the “active” partners are also forced to limit their sexual aim to one
object choice, women or men. Most “active” partners see themselves as part of a societal norm, so heterosexuality becomes
compulsory given that the alternative, as presented by the Gay International, means becoming marked outside the norm—with all
the attendant risks and disadvantages of such a marking.71 Also, most
Arab and Muslim countries that do not
have laws against sexual contact between men respond to the Gay International’s incitement to
discourse by professing antihomosexual stances on a nationalist basis . This is leading to harassment by
police in some cases and could lead to antihomosexual legislation. Those countries that already have
unenforced laws have begun to enforce them. 72 Ironically, this is the very process through which
“homosexuality” was invented in the West .73 It is not the Gay International or its upper-class supporters
in the Arab diaspora who will be persecuted but rather the poor and nonurban men who practice
same-sex contact and who do not identify as homosexual or gay. The so-called passive
homosexual whom the Gay International wants to defend against social denigration will find himself in
a double bind: first, his sexual desires will be unfulfilled because he will no longer have access to
his previously available sexual object choice (i.e., exclusively active partners, as in the interim they will have become
heterosexual); and second, he will fall victim to legal and police persecution as well as heightened
social denigration as his sexual practice becomes a topic of public discourse that transforms it
from a practice into an identity. When the Gay International incites discourse on homosexuality in the non-Western
world, it claims that the “liberation” of those it defends lies in the balance. In espousing this liberation project, the Gay
International is destroying social and sexual configurations of desire in the interest of
reproducing a world in its own image, one wherein its sexual categories and desires are safe
from being questioned. Because it has solicited and received some support from Arab and
Muslim native informants who are mostly located in the United States and who accept its sexual categories and identities,
the Gay International’s imperialist epistemological task is proceeding apace with little opposition
from the majority of the sexual beings it wants to “liberate” and whose social and sexual worlds it is
destroying in the process. In undertaking this universalizing project, the Gay International ultimately makes itself feel
better about a world it forces to share its identifications. Its missionary achievement, however, will be the creation not of a queer
planet but rather a straight one.
 AT “You’re not real world”
Queer IR is the best methodology for solving material inequality – it’s a plurality
of methods that transcend limitations with modern political frameworks.
Montpetit 18 (Melanie Richter, PhD in political science and lecturer in International Security,
Millenium, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (in IR) But were Afraid to Ask: The
‘Queer Turn’ in International Relations) AG

sexuality and gender are important registers in the making and

Queer research demonstrates that
governing of subjects (people; states; organisations) and the international. The books under review have
produced rich and innovative analytical and empirical work on core IR concepts and concerns,
including sovereignty, security, neoliberal development and (global and regional) hegemony. As firmly established by three decades
of feminist scholarship, the masculine epistemological and ontological commitments of much of the
discipline have traditionally led IR research to underestimate and/or outright ignore fundamental
dimensions of contemporary formations of global and international power. Queer IR echoes feminist analyses
of the central role of practices, actors and social relations cast as merely ‘personal’, ‘private’, or ‘merely cultural’ in
orthodox and prominent non-feminist critical IR scholarship. These ‘low politics’ are often constitutive of the
‘high politics’ of states and markets. Queer research not only extends these feminist insights through
registers of sexuality and queerness, but also challenges and reworks heteronormative and cissexist
ontologies underwriting feminist IR. Picq’s and Thiel’s criticism that queer research is limited to
poststructuralist deconstruction, treats real world politics as secondary and leaves unchallenged
‘material inequalities’104 is not vindicated. Rather a wide range of theoretical and
methodological commitments, including historical materialism and materialist postcolonial
approaches, animate Queer IR scholarship . Thus, Queer IR research equally proves wrong queer
voices that frame empirical research as inherently essentialising . Finally, poststructuralist queer
scholarship, including Weber’s Queer International Relations, has produced rich accounts of ‘real world’
geo/political struggles and contestations over sexual politics, including LGBT rights. Returning to Picq and Thiel’s critique of
queer research as depoliticising, if anything, queer scholarship would point to the analytical and political
limitations of LGBT Studies frameworks that limit the scope of the political to notions of
‘discrimination’, ‘equal inclusion’ and ‘human rights’ for leaving many fundamental structures of
oppression, exploitation and violence unchallenged. The politics of inclusion and the notion that
meaningful political activism is only possible based on ‘identifiable categories to combat
discrimination’105 often come at the cost of LGBT subjects who sit in marginal relation 240 Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 46(2) to ‘LGBT’ in many complex ways. Simultaneously, the reviewed books make it clear that
while queer is commonly associated with non-normative gender and sexual practices and subjectivities, ‘ queerness’ and
queer analytics cannot be conflated with transgression and anti-normativity. If anything, the books
emphasise that there is nothing inherently progressive about queer. It is thus critical for Queer IR to pay close
attention to questions of difference, positionality and the politics of citation 106 practices. In particular
Queer/ Trans of Colour scholarship has important lessons to offer to Queer IR in this regard.
 AT Perm
The perm fails – masculinity coopts difference into its folds to masquerade as
multiculturalism. Instead, you should affirm a critical ethnographic gaze that is
fundamentally incompatible with white comfortability.
Dunn 08 (Kevin C, PhD from Boston University and professor of Political Science, 6/10/08,
Rethinking the Man Question, Interrogating white male privilege) AG

It should be noted that because white male scholars often enjoy the privilege and ability of determining
the worthiness of others, past attempts to open up multicultural space have been met with
limited and contradictory success. As Richard Dyer warns, ‘postmodern multiculturalism may have
genuinely opened up a space for the voices of the other , challenging the authority of the white West, but it
may also simultaneously function as a side-show for white people who look on with delight at
all the differences that surround them’ (1997: 3–4). By failing to trouble their own privileged subject
positions, white males can appropriate postmodern multiculturalism to reinforce a liberal project
that strengthens their positions of privilege. One way to address this, however, is to place white male privilege
under a critical gaze. In her discussion of classroom conversations about whiteness, bell hooks notes that white
students often react with anger and amazement at being placed under a critical ethnographic
gaze. She writes, ‘Often their rage erupts Interrogating white male privilege 61 because they believe that all
ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we
are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear’ (1992: 167). Though they regularly see
others predominantly through racialized and gendered lenses, white males continually fail to
view themselves the same way. Rather, they project themselves as being just people, which , as
noted earlier, allows them to define the parameters of normality and speak for all of humanity while also
acting as the gatekeepers at the boundaries they have helped construct.

Anti-queer formations complicate theorizing international relations- queer

politics can’t just be “added” to normative analysis.
Cynthia Weber, PhD, ArizonaStateUniversity, ProfIR@Sussex, Queer Intellectual Curiosity as International Relations Method:

Developing Queer International Relations Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks, 20 16, Pg 5-6
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/30612939.pdf //AL

Because policymakers occasionally employ these figurations to construct and legitimate how they order international politics and
tame anarchy, figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” participate in constructing
“sexualized orders of international relations” —international orders that are necessarily
produced through various codings of sex, gender, and sexuality. Such encodings carry with them practical
empirical consequences for individuals, populations, nation-states, and the conduct of foreign policy . Viewed through queer
intellectual curiosity, a plethora of sexualized and queer IR figurations, as well as their stakes for
international relations, come into focus. These include how figurations of Thai “ladyboys” function in
international sex trafficking and “the asexual Japanese couple” inform domestic and international scenarios that link
sexual and economic (re)production. But less familiar to IR audiences might be the growing body of Queer IR
scholarship that analyzes less obviously sexualized and queered IR figurations: “the terrorist”
(Weber, 2002; Puar 6 and Rai, 2002; Puar, 2007), “the torturer” (Richter-Monpetit, 2014), “the slave” (Agathangelou,
2014), “the nationally bordered body” (Weber, 1998; Sjoberg, 2014; Peterson, 2014), “the human rights holder” (Wilkinson and
Langlois, 2014; Rao, 2014a; Picq and Thiel (2015), “the revolutionary state and citizen” (Weber, 1999; Lind and Keating, 2013) and
“the homosexual” more generally (Weiss and Bosnia, 2014). Together these analyses demonstrate how, for
example, (inter)national conjunctures of homophobia (fearing “the homosexual”) and
“homoprotectionism” (protecting “the homosexual”; Lind and Keating, 2014) complicate IR
theories and practices about/of war and peace, state and nation formation, and international
political economy. Available space prevents a discussion of each sexualized and queer IR figuration
and its importance in IR. Thus, I limit my analysis to the three illustrations that open this article: Victorian colonial practices,
Obama administration foreign policy leveraging of gay rights as human rights, and EU Euro-vision debates about Neuwirth/Wurst. I
do so for three reasons. First, each illustrates a different alignment of “homosexuality” with (ab)normality, producing three distinct
sexualized figurations of “the homosexual” for analysis – the perverse Victorian “homosexual”, the normal Obama administration
“homosexual,” and the normal and/or perverse Euro-visioned “homosexual.” Second, separately and together these examples
demonstrate that by placing a queer intellectual curiosity about figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” at its
methodological core, this
particular Queer IR method does more than just “add (homo)sexuality” to
IR. It offers ways to map phenomena as diverse as colonialism, human rights and the formation
of states and international communities that provide vastly different renderings of international
politics than those that emerge when we include a “sexuality variable” in our survey research
instruments, for example.
 AT Ruti
Ruti mischaracterizes Puar’s analysis and neglects perspectivalism
Aldieri, PhDc, ’18 (Eric, Phil@DePaul, BAPhil&Humanities@Villanova, “On the State of Contemporary Queer Theory: A
review of Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects,” Postmodern Culture, Volume 28, Number 3) BW

While these examples offer the best exegetical-critical moments in The Ethics of Opting Out, Ruti's accompanying polemics can
rely on reductive versions of her interlocutors. If the rhetorical flare of queer theory is a critical target for Ruti
throughout the text, it also seems as though she slips into a similar performative-imperative at certain moments. While deeply
critical of Edelman throughout the book, Ruti remains generous and delicate in her representation of his work (perhaps because
they share a Lacanian background). The same cannot be said in relation to her treatment of Judith Butler, Jasbir Puar, and Jack
Halberstam. In chapter one, Ruti portrays Puar as the Deleuzian representative in queer theory. This characterization is not too far
off; Puar's Terrorist Assemblages explicitly works within a generally Deleuzian framework of affect and assemblage. However, Ruti
takes Puar's analysis of the terrorist body in Terrorist Assemblages to "elevate the suicide bomber… to
an icon" of queerness (32). While Puar does recognize the fact that suicide bombing "is a modality of expression and
communication for the subaltern" (218) – which, I think, is an almost inarguable characterization – she by no means idealizes
this method of communication. And while the terrorist body is constructed and represented as queer
due to neo-colonial and orientalist modes of discourse that have gained new life with the advent of homonationalism, I do not
take Puar to claim that the terrorist body should represent a queer ideal of resistance. In other
words, I believe perspectivalism is at work in Puar's book, and Ruti fails to consider that in her
polemic (at least in print). Instead, she interprets descriptive moments prescriptively, hindering a
robust understanding of Puar's stakes and framework and causing her critique of Puar to
remain on the surface level. While Ruti's polemical critique of Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure is more precise,
similar concerns arise in relation to what should be read prescriptively, and what should be read descriptively. Perhaps this
ambiguity is more Halberstam's failure than Ruti's, but polemical style nonetheless comes at the cost of intellectual generosity in this
section.
Aff
 Perm
Their links are to the status quo, not the aff – history proves the perm solves
best by incorporating the perspective and analysis of gender minorities into
arms control policy
Acheson 18 (Ray, director of Reaching Critical Will, interviewed by Kristina Lunz, CFFP
Germany Director, Center for Feminist Foreign Policy, 12/6/18,
https://centreforfeministforeignpolicy.org/interviews/2018/12/5/ray-acheson)///AG

- GBV = Gender-based violence

- WILPF = Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

KL: TheArms Trade Treaty from 2014 was the first treaty on disarmament that included gender
specific issues such as GBV. Can you elaborate a bit more on where gender specific aspects are included in
disarmament work and especially what is missing? RA: Yes, there was a campaign that was lead by WILPF together with the
International Action Network on Small Arms and Amnesty International to ensure that gender-based violence was included in the
Arms Trade Treaty as a legally binding provision so that states
would not be able to export arms if there was a
risk of gender-based violence being committed. It was a tough campaign in the beginning, countries were not
convinced at all about the relationship between gender-based violence and the arms trade , but we
did a lot of work over a seven-year period to educate diplomats and other officials, and to work with civil society groups to raise
these issues, and, by
the end of the negotiations, we had over 100 countries agreeing that there
should be a legally binding provision in the Treaty. That now is a legally binding requirement for any
country that has joined the Arms Trade Treaty. But what we're seeing is that a lot of countries keep saying that
they don't really understand how to implement it, so a few years ago RCW did a big study on what resources export officials need to
look at, how they can find information about the risk of gender-based violence and how to make proper decisions on this issue. Of
course, for
WILPF, it's a little bit tricky because we're opposed to militarism and the arms trade is a
big contributor to the use and proliferation of weapons around the world, but we are trying to
provide government with tools to implement this provision and think about how conflict and
gender-based violence are intimately related . In the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons there is also a
reference to the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons specifically in relation to women and girls because of the impact that
ionising radiation physically has on women and girls’ bodies. There
is also a recognition of the importance of
women's participation in disarmament and arms control negotiations and policies and practices
in the TPNW. Some other strides that been made; recently at the UN, 57 countries came together to join a
statement on gender and disarmament looking at the way in which countries need to take up
the question of gender diversity, including women's participation in disarmament negotiations
and processes, and also the gendered impacts of weapons. There was also a reference to the
need to understand how gender norms impact disarmament and arms control policies. There is
a growing recognition of the importance of women being included in peacebuilding and peace
processes and disarmament, but it really often stops there. Sometimes we get acknowledgement of the gendered
impacts, which means how women might be physically or even socially impacted differently from the use of proliferation of
weapons, but we haven't gone further than that. The
work that has been done so far largely leaves out an
analysis of gendered norms and dynamics, such as consideration of violent masculinity and the
ways in which ideas about the what is “feminine” and “masculine” affect our approaches to
disarmament and disarmament issues. It also excludes anybody who does not identify as a cisgender
man or a woman, as there is no recognition of a non-binary, transgender, genderqueer or other identities and experiences.
Including these perspectives and people in disarmament discussions is going to be of vital
importance moving forward in order to develop a robust understanding of gender and weapons,
implications for disarmament, and for developing feminist foreign policies.

Queer theory necessitates incorporating all viewpoints – justifies the perm

Thiel, PhD IR, 18 (Markus, Miami, ProfPtx&IR@FloridaInternationalUniversity, https://www.e-ir.info/2018/01/07/queer-
theory-in-international-relations/, January 07) BW

Queer theory offers a significant avenue through which to deconstruct and then reconstruct
established IR concepts and theories. Stemming from various fields that transcend a narrow
view of IR, queer research applies an interdisciplinary outlook to advance new critical perspectives on
sexualities, gender and beyond. A single viewpoint in a field as diverse as IR would unnecessarily limit
the range of scholarly viewpoints. It would also preclude a nuanced debate about the contents
and forms of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) perspectives, queer scholarship and queer scholarly
politics in IR. Due to these themes, and because of its diversity, it is difficult to define queer theory precisely .
Indeed, a narrow definition of it would not be in line with queer theoretical tenets . Queer theory is not
just confined to sexualities or sexual rights. It also questions established social, economic and political power relations – and critically
interrogates notions of security.

Queer optimism and avoids all of their offense – The permutation is a pragmatic
orientation with immanent value in critical discussion and rejects the passivity
of the alternative
Snediker 6 (Michael Snediker, Associate Professor of English @ University of Houston, PhD (American Literature), Johns
Hopkins University, “Queer Optimism”, Postmodern Culture 16.3, 2006,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v016/16.3snediker.html)
For all the lexical and semantic differences between the above epithets ("hegemonic," for instance, hardly seems synonymous with
"premature"), the optimism to which these epithets attach is fundamentally the same. This optimism can describe the utopic energy
that motivates counterpublics (along the lines drawn by Michael Warner); or more generally, the liberal nation-state; or cynically,
the inane recalcitrances of the Bush administration; or literarily, the pluck of Pollyanna or Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick. I do not seek
a new relation (oppositional, proponential) to this optimism. Rather, my essay calls for a revaluation of optimism itself. The
particular élan that underwrites utopic optimisms can be traced to Leibniz, and I shall turn later in the essay to the ways Leibnizian
optimism crucially differs from that of my own project. Succinctly: utopic optimism--and following, the optimism that crops up
both in queer theory and critical theory more generally--is attached, temporally, to a future. Not unrelated to its
futural (promissory, parousiac) stakes is its allergic relation to knowledge. For Leibniz, as we shall see, optimism's attachment to faith
would render knowledge superfluous. In current critical thought, optimism's very sanguinity implies an epistemological deficit. This
ostensibly definitional antagonistic relation to knowledge has had the perhaps unsurprising effect of taking optimism out of critical
circulation. Queer optimism, oppositely, is not promissory. It doesn't ask that some future time
make good on its own hopes . Rather, queer optimism asks that optimism, embedded in its
own immanent present, be interesting. Queer optimism's interest --its capacity to be interesting, to hold
our attention--depends on its emphatic responsiveness to and solicitation of rigorous thinking.
Queer optimism, immanently rather than futurally oriented, does not entail a predisposition
in the way that conventional optimism entails predisposition. More simply, it presents a critical
field and asks that this field be taken seriously. If my investigation, then, extends to the likes of happiness, this is
not because if one were more queerly optimistic, one would feel happier. Rather, queer optimism can be considered
as a form of meta-optimism: it wants to think about feeling good, to make disparate aspects
of feeling good thinkable. Queer optimism , then, seeks to take positive affects as serious and
interesting sites of critical investigation . Likewise, queer optimism insists on thinking about
personhood (as opposed to subjectivity) in terms of a durability not immediately or proleptically
subject to structuralist or post-structuralist mistrust. Queer optimism concerns persons , rather
than subjects or even selves. The latter categories inhabit (and unknowingly curate) particular discursive labyrinths (Cartesian,
Foucaultian, Althusserian, Hegelian, Lacanian, etc.) of discipline, desire, and knowledge to which examinations of personhood at best
only obliquely speak. My theoretical preference for persons over subjects asks how personhood variously can be characterized,
removed from the columbarium of subjectivity. This
critical project is born of the sense that queer theory,
for all its contributions to our thinking about affect, has had far more to say about negative
affects than positive ones. Furthermore, that in its attachment to not taking persons as such for granted, queer theory's
suspicious relation to persons has itself become suspiciously routinized, if not taken for granted in its own right. Risking charges of
producing but another reductive binary, I shall for present, heuristic purposes be calling this tropaic gravitation toward negative
affect and depersonation queer pessimism. It's worth noting that queer
pessimism has as little truck with
conventional pessimism as queer optimism trucks with optimism , per se. Still, queer theory's
habitation of this pessimistic field is cause for real concern. Melancholy, self-shattering, the
death drive, shame: these, within queer theory, are categories to conjure with. These terms and the scholarship energized
by them do not in and of themselves comprise queer theory. To argue that they do caricatures
both queer theory and the theorists who have put these terms on the map. However, these terms have dominated
queer-theoretical discourse, and they have often seemed immune to queer theory's own perspicacities. My essay
conducts a purposive survey of the work of Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman. Without taking as
definitive either this survey or my analysis of any given author, I wish these analyses to articulate a certain shape, to describe a
current of enchantment that has privileged "suffering" and "dereliction" (to invoke two of Badiou's terms) as sites both of ethics and
understanding. Queer theory's analyses of negative affect and ontological instability have been and continue to be both generous
and generative. My
wish is to clear a space for the possible generosities and generativities of queer
optimism's corresponding milieu. As space-clearing, this essay does not deliver the queer-optimistic "goods," per se:
positing a compact or even synecdochal account of queer optimism is at cross purposes with my reluctance to reduce queer
optimism's field before expanding it. I offer "Queer Optimism," here, in the spirit of exordium and invitation.

The perm is best --- the alt fails alone but combining strategies provides NEW
meaningful avenues for peacebuilding
Paris, 10 – (Roland, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs,
University of Ottawa, “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding,” February 17, 2010,
http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~rparis/Saving_Liberal_Peacebuilding_FINAL.pdf) // kt **modified for
ableist language

If there is no realistic or preferable alternative to broadly liberal approaches, what can be

done in the face of the current “crisis” of liberal peacebuilding ? The first step is to question the extent to
which this crisis is real or imagined. In this article, I have attempted to show that some of the most sweeping critiques of
liberal peacebuilding have rested on dubious claims and logic , including the conflation of post-
conquest and post-settlement peacebuilding; unnuanced analogies of peacebuilding and
colonialism or imperialism; definitions of the liberal peace that are too broad;
mischaracterizations of the peacebuilding record; and oversimplifications of the moral
complexity of peacebuilding . Considered in this light, the purported crisis of liberal peacebuilding
appears to be less severe and less fundamental than some have claimed. The challenge today
is not to replace or move “beyond” liberal peacebuilding, but to reform existing approaches
within a broadly liberal framework. This enterprise has both conceptual and policy elements .
Peacebuilding remains ripe for theoretical treatments that shed light on the meaning and
effects of these operations. In other words, the peacebuilding literature need not, and should not,
be limited to narrowly policy-oriented or “problem solving” analyses. In the 1990s, most of the peacebuilding
literature was preoccupied with practical policy issues and paid little attention to the relationships between peacebuilding and larger
phenomena in international politics. The rise of more critical
analysis since then has been part of a welcome broadening of the
field, which now places greater emphasis on exploring the theoretical underpinnings and
implications of these missions. The great strength of critical approaches has always been their focus on exposing and
dissecting widely held assumptions and orthodoxies. But critical scholarship can lose its intellectual and
empirical moorings if it fails to be self-reflective and self-critical – that is, if its logic, evidence and
implications are not themselves subject to scrutiny and challenge . Nothing in the recent critical
literature offers a convincing rationale for abandoning liberal peacebuilding, rather than
reforming it. If anything, the rise of what I have called hyper-critical scholarship – and particularly its dubious yet
seemingly ritualized rejection of liberal peacebuilding – has served to cloud rather than clarify our
understanding of what peacebuilding is, and what it does. 38 Of course, there is no single “best” way of
analyzing these missions or the broader phenomenon of international peacebuilding. This field of research is – and
hopefully will remain – a diverse bazaar of different theoretical and empirical approaches, open
to discussion and debate across intellectual traditions and methodologies . This article has sought to
contribute to this debate by arguing for a rethinking and rebalancing of liberal peacebuilding critiques. In contrast to the
unconvincing hyper-criticism of today, or the irrational exuberance of earlier years,
a more constructively critical
approach might build on the recognition that: (1) both liberalism and liberal peacebuilding are
deeply problematic concepts – in theory and application – and their internal contradictions play
themselves out in peacebuilding, sometimes in troubling and destructive ways; (2) liberally-
oriented peacebuilding can, in principle, accommodate a great deal of internal variation and adjustment,
including many of the specific changes proposed by many critics; (3) scholars who repudiate liberal
peacebuilding or call for “alternative” strategies should be expected to reflect carefully on the
normative underpinnings of their own arguments, and to clarify the alternatives they may be
proposing, including the moral and practical implications of pursuing these alternatives . The third
point should be particularly important for those who believe that critical peacebuilding scholarship has an important contribution to
make to the field – and that the recent turn towards a reflexive anti-liberalism has diminished the force of these critiques.
Adopting a constructively critical orientation does not mean accepting the current practices of
peacebuilding. It does not mean that peacebuilding must be “top-down” instead of “bottom-
up” – that is a criticism of centralism, not liberalism. It does not mean that peacebuilding should be fixated
on formal institutions to the exclusion of informal or customary methods of governance – that is
a criticism of formalism, not liberalism. It does not mean that peacebuilders should adopt a “fixed, non-
negotiable concept of what the state should eventually look like”117 – that is a criticism of institutional
isomorphism, not liberalism. Nor does it mean that peacebuilders should assume that liberalization will
necessarily foster peace – that is a criticism of naïve Wilsonianism, one variant of liberalism.118 Addressing all of
these real problems may entail probing the internal tensions of liberalism, but it does not
require a sweeping rejection of liberal peacebuilding. In fact, there are many recent examples of
constructively critical research that raise important theoretical and practical questions, some of
which challenge liberal premises without making the mistake of discarding the baby with the
bathwater. For instance: What are the sources and dynamics of “legitimacy” in international
peacebuilding?119 What obligations, if any, do international actors have in rebuilding societies after conflict?120 What are the
limits of external democracy promotion efforts?121 How might “non-elite” populations of host states be
included more directly into peace negotiations and post-conflict institutional reform ?122 What is the
relationship between power-sharing arrangements and peace?123 How might ideas of “local ownership” be
developed in a manner that avoids simplistic bromides about the need for greater local
ownership or emancipation?124 Other examples include: How do “discursive frames” and
organizational procedures shape the design and conduct of peacebuilding in practice ?125 How can
peacebuilding agencies learn from experiences across missions without falling into the trap of assuming that “technical” knowledge
is readily transferrable across diverse local circumstances?126 Why does the UN seem to make peacebuilding commitments that it
subsequently fails to fulfill in practice?127 What are the economic impacts of peacebuilding operations?128 What
is the relationship between “peace conditionalities” in economic assistance and the durability of the ensuing peace?129 How can
economic liberalization be pursued in ways that minimize the dangers of strengthening black markets?130 Under what
circumstances should peacebuilding missions end, and how should they “exit”?131 This is just a small sampling of research questions
that represent a broad mix of normative approaches. They point to even larger unresolved questions, including the crucial issue of
how one should define peacebuilding “success.”132 Many of these research efforts also offer the possibility of making peacebuilding
operations more effective, and more just, in the future. Whichever research paths one may chose to follow, those engaged in
constructively critical analysis have an immense task ahead of them: peacebuilding is tremendously complex and prone to
unanticipated consequences, yet it is also too important to lose or abandon. As
long as both scholars and
practitioners embrace an open, critical discussion of peacebuilding’s merits and flaws, without descending
into unwarranted hyper-criticism , there is still hope of improving both the conception and delivery of
international assistance to societies embarking on difficult transitions from war to peace.

Engagement with the military is prior---pure critique fails to recognize centers of power or to
produce tangible change

Rech et al. ’15 (Mathew Rech – PhD in Human Geography @ Newcastle University, Associate
Research Fellow in Human Geography. Daniel Bos. teaching associate in cultural geography. K
Neil Jenkings – PhD in Sociology @ the University of Nottingham, Senior Research Associate at
the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology. Alison Williams – PhD in Human Geography @
the University of Hull, Senior Lecterer in Political Geography. Rachel Woodward. “Geography,
military geography, and critical military studies,” Critical Military Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1,
2015)

We argue that the

study of the military, of militarism, and of processes of militarization, should
not be undertaken solely for its own sake , but should also be guided by the possibility of
engagement with the forces and institutions responsible , and should not be bashful about
doing so. There are two reasons for this. First, to be critical is to be engaged in critique; it is not to be
dismissive . Critical engagement with military forces, and military and militarized institutions,
can be underpinned by an understanding of these institutions as accountable to the civilian
world, and necessarily understood as potentially open to collaboration and knowledge
exchange, even where this idea may initially appear ridiculous . Our backgrounds in human geography and
sociology, with their rich methodological traditions of fieldwork and of co-inquiry and recognition of the necessity for academic
labour as a communicative and engaged social practice, prompt us to return continually to questions about the possibilities and
limits of collaboration with military institutions. The
question which follows, then, is about the opportunities a
critical military studies might provide for envisioning and promoting possibilities for change
within the institutions and practices which constitute its focus . This is not a simple issue. There are
issues of visibility and voice at play, of making critiques heard not just within scholarly
communities but more broadly within social debates. Critiques are often complex entities ,
arguments drawing on a range of empirical evidence and political positions which may be nuanced in ways that
more simplistic positions (such as “pro-military” or “anti-military”) might find hard to
accommodate. Far better that they are conducted with an intention in mind to inculcate
change, even where that seems on the face of it to be unlikely, than not at all. That seems, to us, to be the point. The second
reason for wanting to open up a space for considering the potential of engagement with military institutions, organizations, and
personnel as part of the critical military project concerns issues of access. Military-related research can be quite different from other
social scientific inquiry in other social contexts because of issues of secrecy and security (some justifiable, some less so) in these
institutions (see Williams et al., forthcoming). To be engaged in informed critique may require the collection
of reliable empirical evidence . This is partly a question of access and trust. This may also be a question of direct
collaboration around research, including through the provision of defence funding.1 In our view, the critical military
studies project has to develop on the basis of informed critique in which the nuances and
complexities of civil-military relations are identified, rendered transparent (or as transparent as any
other complex social phenomenon might be) and shared across academic, military, and other civilian
spheres. This requires direct engagement with military forces , and a critical approach to those encounters.
Thus, critical military geography offers opportunities to strive for progressive change in social sciences’ engagements with the
military, militarism, and its processes of enactment, which enable us to undertake critical inquiry into military phenomena.

The aff is a strategy of “immanent critique” – a strategy of locating particular

possibilities for progressive change within the existing system – the most
productive application of critical security studies is to move away from
universalizing assumptions to focus on particular contingencies and solutions
Browning & McDonald 13 (Christopher S., University of Queensland, c/o Political Science
and International Studies and Matt, University of Queensland, “The future of critical security
studies: Ethics and the politics of security,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 19,
No. 2, pg. 248-251)

If the critical security studies project is deficient in providing us with a sophisticated and
convincing understanding of either the politics or ethics of security — two core animat - ing themes of its
research agenda — where does this leave such a project? Does the contribution of critical security
studies extend no further than a compelling critique of traditional approaches to security on a
range of analytical and normative grounds? We would argue that there is a future in critical security
studies. This future will ulti - mately be determined by the extent to which scholars recognize the
limits and tensions of existing approaches (especially ‘Schools’) and take up the challenge of moving
beyond first principles or universalized assumptions about security to engage in nuanced, reflexive
and context-specific analyses of the politics and ethics of security . Indeed, we make such a case
using the critical theoretical tool of immanent critique, defined here as a method of critique
concerned with locating possibilities for progressive change in existing social and political
orders. 6 In this context, we note in particular the possibility for building upon the tensions and limits in existing critical security
studies scholarship to move this research project forward. We identify two key imperatives for this project by way
of conclusion. The first of these imperatives concerns the need to develop understandings of the poli - tics of
security that are context-specific; that recognize and interrogate the role of differ - ent security
discourses and their effects in different settings; and that come to terms with sedimented meanings and logics without
endorsing these as timeless and inevitable. In terms of context-specificity, the Western-centric nature of (critical) security studies
has ultimately encouraged a focus on how security ‘works’ in liberal democratic settings. This is particularly applicable to the
Copenhagen School framework, whose dichotomy between ‘panic politics’ and ‘normal politics’ ultimately suggests a conception of
politics parasitic on a liberal democratic political context (see McDonald, 2008; Williams, 2003). While some have attempted to
explore securitization dynamics outside these settings (e.g. Wilkinson, 2007), the framework itself continues to work with a security–
politics dichotomy that may be wholly unfamiliar to those outside liberal democratic states. In a fundamentally illiberal state regime
such as Burma or North Korea, for example, what does the language of security do and what does ‘normal politics’ mean? In
what
ways do different cultural, social and historical contexts determine different security logics, and
how do these dynamics look in terms of communities above and below the state? And can we accept the claim
that there is no difference in the logic or effects of securitization if security is understood as
referring to the welfare of the most vulnerable in global soci - ety, for example, rather than the
territorial preservation of the nation-state? Here, the failure to differentiate between logics of
security on the basis of what understanding of security inheres in a particular discourse potentially
blinds Copenhagen School and post- structural theorists of security to (the possibility of) difference in
security dynamics and logics in different places, for different actors and at different times . In the
case of the Copenhagen School, such parsimony might be in part a response to the desire to provide analytical boundaries around
the study of security rather than ‘descend’ into contextual analysis (see Williams, 2010: 213–216), but it nonetheless results in a
partial and (we would argue) Western-centric image of the politics of security. at University of Kansas Libraries on February 25, 2016
ejt.sagepub.com Downloaded from Browning and McDonald 249 Ultimately, these points suggest the need for far more nuance than
is currently evident in critical security studies scholarship. As noted earlier, the critical security studies pro - ject appears bifurcated
between opposing logics of security that position the logic of security as inherently pernicious (Copenhagen School, post-
structuralism) or inherently progressive (Welsh School). In a sense, these ‘Schools’ correct the limits and tendencies of each other in
important ways, suggesting (immanent) possibilities for a more nuanced understanding of the politics of security in the critical
security studies project as a whole. Copenhagen School and post-structural theorists explore the logic of security that fol - lows from
the dominant discourse of security in contemporary world politics, rightly cautioning against any assumed linkage between security
and progress and pointing to the ways in which the promise of security can be used to justify illiberal practices. The Welsh School
framework, meanwhile, recognizes that this dominant discourse of secu - rity does not necessarily capture
the essence of security across time and space , in the process pointing to possibilities for progressive
change in security dynamics and prac - tices. In a sense, these different approaches to the logic of security broadly
reflect struc - tural and agential tendencies in International Relations more generally. We would argue that they suggest the
need to take seriously the political limitations associated with domi - nant security discourses
while recognizing and exploring the possibility for security to mean and do something different.
A brief analysis of the different constitutive security logics underlying various secu - rity communities around the
world provides ample evidence of the problems of univer - salizing claims about the politics of
security. As Rumelili (2008) has noted, an instructive comparison can be drawn between the EU and ASEAN,
in particular in terms of how these organizations’ conception of self-identity results in them relating
themselves to otherness very differently. Propounding an inherently inclusive (i.e. democratic) identity
and normative agenda, the EU is liable to locate otherness in an inferior position to itself , as
something to transform and render acceptable/normal. Otherness is therefore something to be eradicated and to the extent to
which it rejects transformation, it becomes destabilizing and potentially threatening. Such processes are, for example, clearly
evident in the European Neighbourhood Policy (Browning and Pertti, 2008). In contrast, ASEAN operates with a
largely exclusivist (i.e. civili - zational, geographic, ethnic) identity where norms of sovereignty and non-
interfer - ence dominate. This, Rumelili suggests, facilitates more equitable relationships with otherness since the goal in
such relationships is not one of conversion to the cause. In terms of the politics of security, what becomes evident here is
how concepts of security and subjectivity are intimately connected to conceptions of identity
and the limits of political community in different contexts. The second imperative for the future of the critical
security studies project concerns the ethics of security. We advanced the claim that a shared concern with expanding the realm of
dialogue underpins much of the critical security studies project, albeit to differ - ent degrees and in different ways. But to the extent
that an ethics of security — a concep - tion of the good or progress regarding security — orients around a concern with such a
position, this commitment needs to be acknowledged and defended. A range of pressing questions suggest themselves here,
including the bases for prioritizing open dialogue; the relationship between spheres of deliberation and material conditions of
existence; the at University of Kansas Libraries on February 25, 2016 ejt.sagepub.com Downloaded from 250 European Journal of
International Relations 19(2) possibilities for and limitations to the establishment of open dialogue; and the broader relationship
between dialogue and outcomes. Elaborating on these commitments would also entail engaging with the argument that movements
towards greater dialogue could potentially encourage the desire to exclude power, identity, emotion and other central features of
global politics (see Price, 2008). Where difficult questions emerge about this and other dimensions of an ‘ethical’ engagement with
security — such as the role of violence in the Welsh School framework, for example (Peoples, 2011) — these need to be confronted.
If there is a consistency across critical security studies scholarship in this sense, it is that ethical commitments are evident (in
commitments to resistance, desecuritization or emancipation, for example) but are insufficiently developed to provide a genuine
account of what constitutes ethical action regarding security. Indeed, immanent
possibilities for the development
of the criti - cal security studies project arise from these (often implied) commitments that need draw -
ing out and examining in the context of difficult dilemmas in world politics. This process of drawing out
ethical commitments should be viewed as a reflexive movement towards recognizing the assumptions and potential implications of
one’s own theorizing, a posi - tion central to both broader definitions of Critical Theory (see Cox, 1981) and to the compelling
critique of traditional security studies as insufficiently engaged with the eth - ics and effects of its own theorizing about world
politics. And it needs also to be matched up with the preceding understanding of the politics of security. Is the expansion of delib -
eration and movement away from violence, for example, always progressive, and does it require the rejection of security as a
political category or its reform? The example of Australian debates around the arrival by boat of asylum-seekers in 2010 illustrates
tensions and ambiguities at work regarding the ethics of security, particu - larly as understood in key critical approaches to the study
of security. In that context, Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s call for ‘a frank, open, honest national conversation’ about asylum
and border security particularly encouraged the articulation of negative and exclusionary views of asylum-seekers, paradoxically
rendering the (re)securitization of asylum in the Australian context more likely (see McDonald, 2011). Particularly strik - ing here was
the Prime Minister’s suggestion that this national conversation should take place outside the limits imposed by political correctness
that would otherwise discourage the articulation of right-wing or racist sentiments towards asylum-seekers. In this exam - ple, the
apparent opening of dialogic space encouraged by the Prime Minister was inti - mately related to the movement towards
exclusionary security logics and practices orienting around the imperatives of ‘border security’. The point of this example is not to
illustrate the limits of open dialogue per se, but rather to illustrate two broader claims regarding the relationship between security
and ethics in the critical security studies project that we make here. First, while normative preferences are evident, these are often
insufficiently developed or robust to enable the ethical adjudication between different practices or outcomes. The normative
preference for deliberation evident in the commitment to desecuritization, for example, is not suf - ficiently robust to enable us to
engage with difficult questions concerning the forms of deliberation that should be encouraged or even the circumstances in which
‘hate speech’, for example, might be curtailed (on this, see Gelber, 2010). Second, and to return to the central argument of the
article, the Australian example reminds us of the need to explore the implications of security conceptions and practices in particular
contexts, rather than at University of Kansas Libraries on February 25, 2016 ejt.sagepub.com Downloaded from Browning and
McDonald 251 assume that a particular security logic will inhere — or outcomes will follow — from the use of the term ‘security’ or
a stated political commitment to ‘dialogue’. The core challenge for the critical security studies project is ultimately moving beyond
critique and agenda-setting and towards a contextual analysis of security dynamics and practices in global politics. There is no
question that a focus on the politics of security and the ethics of security are crucial intellectual endeavours too readily elided or
ignored in traditional approaches to the study of security. For this reason alone we need a ‘criti - cal security studies project’.
However, universalizingclaims concerning the politics of security — found in the securitization
framework and much post-structural engagement with security — must ultimately give way to
nuanced analyses of the ways in which security is constructed and challenged in particular
social, historical and political con - texts. A range of theorists have — in different ways — sought to engage with
precisely this question, illustrating the various ways in which security dynamics ‘play out’ in dif - ferent settings in terms of
constructing community (e.g. Bubandt, 2005), challenging identity binaries (e.g. Avant, 2007) or enabling space for different forms of
political response (e.g. Doty, 1998/9). Yet these insights ultimately remain marginal to key ‘Schools’ and conceptual frameworks
of security, and are too often forgotten in our search for the universal in a complex world. Beyond the
development of nuance in our understanding of the ‘politics of security’, the critical security studies project urgently needs to move
beyond normative ‘leaps of faith’ concerning the ethics of security. This particularly applies to the Copenhagen and Welsh School
preference for dialogue as a progressive means of escaping exclusive and illiberal security logics and practices. While genuinely open
dialogue regarding the construction of security and threat has much to recommend it, crucial here is the need for advocates to
reflect upon and lay bare the bases upon which these claims are made in philosophical terms, and to reflexively examine the
implications of alternative security conceptions and practices in analytical terms rather than assume particular dynamics to be
progressive. This too suggests
the need to move towards a focus on the particular social, historical and
politi - cal contexts in which security is constructed and practised in global politics.

Perm do both – queering Asia solves every disad to the permutation while
producing a synergistic theory that overcomes the shortcomings of both queer
theory, and Asian studies by recentering sexual exceptionalism away from the
West
Chiang and Wong 17 (Howard, PhD in History and professor at UC Davis, and Alvin, PhD in
literature and assistant professor in comparative literature at University of Hong Kong, 3/17/17,
Asia is burning: Queer Asia as critique) AG

Beyond the shared value in ambivalence, theoretical openness, and indeterminacy, one
advantage in stressing the critical alliance between ‘queer’ and ‘Asia’ lies in their mutual
transformative potentials in overcoming some of the enduring blind spots in each of their cognate
fields of scholarly inquiry. If queer theory needs Asian studies in order to overcome its Euro-American
metropolitanism and continual Orientalist selective inclusion of Asia and the non-West into its
self-critique, so too can Asian studies revitalise itself through the queer disentanglement of the
older version of ‘area studies’ and its complicity with the nation-state form. Here, we
acknowledge the perverse and indeed powerful intervention in queering Asian studies through the
invocation of pairing ‘area studies’ with the ethic of ‘impossibility’ , which approaches both queerness and area
studies as ‘a placeholder that might partly express a promiscuous or incoherent desire or a desire
whose content continues to be under erasure’ (Arondekar and Patel 2016: 154). In dialogue with this approach, our collective
work on queer Asia contributes to a more synergetic project of collaboration and even unruly
alliance between the two fields. Instead of the 2 H. CHIANG AND A. K. WONG idiom of failure, erasure and impossibility,
however, queer Asia as we envision here contributes to ‘a broader transborder project of Asian
queer studies’ that is truly comparative, trans-regional, global and in many ways, Inter-Asian.2
Yet, despite the importance of feminist and queer interventions to the growth of global area studies, inter-Asian cultural studies and
diaspora and migration studies, non-Western queerness oftentimes remains as merely the empirical
‘object’ of study within area studies formation severed from ‘theory’ proper. This special issue proceeds with the premise that
superseding such a ‘method’ bias in our intellectual agenda offers a privileged means to draw
innovative connections, convergences and comparisons across different manifestations of ‘Asia’ in all its
complexity. Contributors from different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences join
us in examining the historical, political and socio-cultural formations of queer modernities in globalising Asia. The climate and
tensions surrounding the Cold War transition in the last century index an especially valuable genealogy for our investigation. Across
Asia, noteworthy turning points constituted the backdrop for broader social and cultural change as the
world prepared for a new millennium: the launch of the Đổi Mới reform policy in Vietnam in 1986; the lifting of Martial Law in
Taiwan in 1987; the Marxist Conspiracy arrests in Singapore in 1987; the June Democracy Movement in South Korea in
1987; the Tiananmen Square incident in mainland China in 1989; Akhito’s ascendance to the imperial throne in
Japan in 1989; the beginning of economic liberalisation under Rao in India in 1991; the Black May protest in Thailand in 1992;
the postcolonial handover of Hong Kong in 1997; to name just a few. Drawing on the intellectual vitality made possible by this
co-constitutive historical context, this special issue features theoretically rigorous and empirically robust inquiries that complement
but also problematise the significance of these episodic political unrests, mapping the ways in which the limitations of
mainstream Eurocentric paradigms of modernism reshape the place of Asia in convergent and discrepant
processes of globalisation. The study of queer Asia is a flourishing field with an increasingly
interdisciplinary orientation. With only a few notable exceptions, most of the literature to date is confined to national or
regional contexts. This special issue adds more nuanced texture to existing research by highlighting the inter-connectivity across
different subregions of Asia. A key objective of our intervention is to enable specialists of East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia to
no longer construe the West as the only alibi for serious discussion about sexual globalisation or
the ultimate neoliberal model of juxtaposition. Rather, we hope to make more transparent the modular
comparability of the different regional expertise brought together here. Our project incorporates the agenda of using ‘Asia as
method’, as proposed by Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) and others, by asking interlocutors in the growing field of queer Asian studies
to rethink the vectors of linkage across various longstanding ‘minor’ regions in area studies (e.g. Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, etc.)
whose significance are made poignant via such transnational affinity, rather than always being mediated through a
centre, be it China, Japan or the West. We redress the value of queer theoretical perspectives for contesting the
hegemonic preferences of traditional academic disciplines, mapping the biopolitics of gender and sexuality onto
the geopolitics of world systems.
 Squo solves
IR is already shifting toward more gender-inclusive arms control policies– the
UN has already pushed gender advocacy with success
Acheson ’18 (Ray, Director of Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom, “The gender and weapons nexus recognized; feminism need apply in 2019 and
beyond,” Forum Arms Trade, https://www.forumarmstrade.org/blog/the-gender-and-weapons-
nexus-recognized-feminism-need-apply-in-2019-and-beyond)/ly

2018, for some reason, was a turning point for international diplomatic recognition of gender
dimensions of weapons and disarmament policy . After years or even decades—or in WILPF’s case, a century—
of feminist advocacy for governments and activists to take gender into account in their work, we
seem to breaking new ground. In March, the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations in Geneva
collaborated with WILPF, Small Arms Survey, and the Gender Mine Action Programme on a one-
day training for disarmament diplomats about including gender perspectives in their work . In April,
WILPF coordinated with the Canadian mission in New York on a meeting that brought together the women,
peace and security (WPS) and disarmament diplomatic communities to exchange on the same subject.
In May, UN Secretary-General António Guterres launched his new disarmament agenda, Securing our Common Future. It
includes a section on “Ensuring the equal, full, and effective participation of women,” and there are several references
throughout the document to the gendered impacts of weapons, gender-sensitive arms control, or
women’s participation in disarmament, including urging states to incorporate gender perspectives in their
national legislation and policies on disarmament and arms control . In June, the Third Review Conference to
the UN Programme of Action on small arms and light weapons (UNPoA) adopted a report with groundbreaking references to armed
gender-based violence, the gendered impacts of small arms, and women’s participation in disarmament. The document
builds on gains made in 2012 and 2016 to alleviate the overall gender blindness of the UNPoA. The International
Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) Women’s Network coordinated input and advocacy amongst civil
society groups and diplomats for the inclusion of these elements in the outcome document, including
through the civil society Call to Action on gender and small arms control. In August, the Convention on Certain Conventional
Weapons (CCW) considered gender issues for the first time , in a side event hosted by the government of Canada,
International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), Mines Action Canada, Project Ploughshares, and WILPF on the
relationship between gender and fully autonomous weapons . Participants addressed gender diversity and
equality in disarmament negotiations and discussions; gender norms in relation to the development and use of weapons, gendered
impacts of existing weapon systems; and the importance of feminist foreign policy approaches in relation to disarmament and arms
control. In October, theCanadian mission to the UN organized a push to increase gender references in
resolutions at the UN General Assembly First Committee on Disarmament and International Security. Working with
other governments and civil society groups, they managed to achieve language in 17 resolutions that
advocates for women’s equal participation, recognizes gendered impacts of weapons, or urges
consideration of gender perspectives more broadly. This accounts for 25 percent of all First
Committee resolutions in 2018. Six of these resolutions included gendered language for the first time, while three
improved the gendered language. For comparison, in 2017, 15 per cent of resolutions made gender references. This figure was 13
per cent in 2016 and 12 per cent in 2015. The
number of First Committee delegations speaking about
gender and disarmament in their statements also continued to increase this year. Namibia on behalf
of 56 states dedicated a whole statement to this topic, urging examination of how “underlying assumptions about how gender
shapes [delegations’] own work and the dynamics of joint disarmament efforts.” Also in October, the
Latvian ambassador,
who will preside over the Fifth Conference of States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty,
announced that the conference and its preparatory meetings will focus on the gender-based
violence provision of the Treaty as a special theme.

Pragmatic change is possible and happening – UN conferences, increased

gender diversity in disarmament talks, increased academic activism, inclusion of
gender-based violence in arms treaties and recognition of gendered impacts of
nuclear weapons
Acheson 18 (Ray Acheson, is the Director of Reaching Critical Will, the disarmament programme of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). She provides analysis, research, and advocacy across a range of disarmament
and arms control issues, and brings a feminist perspective to this work. Ray leads WILPF’s efforts to stigmatise war and violence,
including by campaigning for a nuclear weapon ban treaty, challenging the arms trade and the use of explosive weapons, and
working to prevent the development of new technologies of violence such as autonomous weapons. In all of these efforts, Ray
highlights gendered norms and perspectives and the impact these have on policies related to weapons and war. She has an Honours
BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Toronto and an MA in Politics from The New School for Social Research, and
previously worked for the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, 12-19-2018, "The gender and weapons nexus recognized;
feminism need apply in 2019 and beyond," Forum on the Arms Trade, https://www.forumarmstrade.org/blog/the-gender-and-
weapons-nexus-recognized-feminism-need-apply-in-2019-and-beyond)///PSC

In June, the Third Review Conference to the UN Programme of Action on small arms and light
weapons (UNPoA) adopted a report with groundbreaking references to armed gender-based
violence, the gendered impacts of small arms , and women’s participation in disarmament. The document builds on
gains made in 2012 and 2016 to alleviate the overall gender blindness of the UNPoA. The International Action Network on Small
Arms (IANSA) Women’s Network coordinated input and advocacy amongst civil society groups and
diplomats for the inclusion of these elements in the outcome document, including through the
civil society Call to Action on gender and small arms control . In August, the Convention on Certain
Conventional Weapons (CCW) considered gender issues for the first time, in a side event hosted by the government of Canada,
International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), Mines Action Canada, Project Ploughshares, and WILPF on the relationship
between gender and fully autonomous weapons. Participants
addressed gender diversity and equality in
disarmament negotiations and discussions; gender norms in relation to the development and
use of weapons, gendered impacts of existing weapon systems; and the importance of
feminist foreign policy approaches in relation to disarmament and arms control . In October, the
Canadian mission to the UN organized a push to increase gender references in resolutions at the UN General Assembly First
Committee on Disarmament and International Security. Working
with other governments and civil society
groups, they managed to achieve language in 17 resolutions that advocates for women’s equal
participation, recognizes gendered impacts of weapons, or urges consideration of gender
perspectives more broadly. This accounts for 25 percent of all First Committee resolutions in 2018. Six of these resolutions
included gendered language for the first time, while three improved the gendered language. For comparison, in 2017, 15 per cent of
resolutions made gender references. This figure was 13 per cent in 2016 and 12 per cent in 2015. The number of First Committee
delegations speaking about gender and disarmament in their statements also continued to increase this year. Namibia
on
behalf of 56 states dedicated a whole statement to this topic, urging examination of how
“underlying assumptions about how gender shapes [delegations’] own work and the dynamics
of joint disarmament efforts.” Also in October, the Latvian ambassador, who will preside over the Fifth Conference of
States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty, announced that the conference and its preparatory meetings will focus on the gender-based
violence provision of the Treaty as a special theme. This
will provide an opportunity in 2019 to advance
consideration of how to implement this aspect of the ATT, including using guidance and case
studies published by groups like WILPF previously. In addition to these forum-based efforts, the UN Institute
for Disarmament Research joined the governments of Ireland, Namibia, and Canada to form the
Disarmament Impact Group as an output of the International Gender Champions . The Group
aims to “support the disarmament community in translating gender awareness into practical
action across the range of multilateral disarmament processes and activities .” Meanwhile, academic
sources like Critical Studies on Security and the Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace and Security, news sources like The Nation, and
public speaking forums from TEDx to the London School of Economics featured articles and talks about feminism, gender, and
weapons. Thishas signaled an opening of academic and activist spaces for increased
consideration of these issues. So, why has all this happened so quickly? In reality, it hasn’t. It is built on
a firm foundation of activism and analysis. Feminist disarmament activists and academics,
particularly those with groups like WILPF and the IANSA Women’s Network, have been writing
and campaigning on gender and disarmament for decades . UN agencies and some governments have been
working to mainstream gender in their programming for a long time, certainly since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution
1325 in 2000. This
has led to concrete outcomes at international disarmament diplomacy forums
in recent years: the first UN General Assembly resolution on women, disarmament, non-
proliferation and arms control in 2010; the inclusion of gender-based violence in the Arms
Trade Treaty in 2013; the recognition of the gendered impacts of nuclear weapons and
encouragement of women’s effective participation in disarmament in the Non-Proliferation
Treaty Chair’s summary and the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017 .
External factors are also at play. The #MeToo movement has arguably awoken new acceptability and credibility of previously hidden
or shamed perspectives and experiences. Women, trans, queer, non-binary, and non-conforming folks, as well as men who have
experienced sexual and gender-based violence have collectively created new spaces to amplify these realities and demand change.
At the same time, several governments have begun pursuing what they term “Feminist Foreign Policy”. While
it is debatable
whether or not the foreign policies outlined by these governments can yet be truly described as
feminist, it is a welcome development for government offices to be considering feminism not
just a valid but an imperative approach to their international engagement. In disarmament forums,
momentum certainly seems to be on our side. There is a growing acceptance among a diverse range of governments, international
organizations, and civil society groups about the reality that weapons have gendered impacts, and that women’s participation in
disarmament is important. This is good progress, and imperative to making change in this field. But it’s not enough.
 AT Shatter Self/Desubjectification/Edelman
The alt necessitates a position of privilege, is bad scholarship, and is
disconnected from concrete activism
Baitinger, PhDc, ’19 (Frederic C., French@CUNY, “The Subject of Jouissance: The Late Lacan and Gender and Queer
Theories,” CUNY) BW

The problem with the anti-relational position is that it only reflects the stance of certain queer scholars who are
mostly interested in promoting the subversive potential of radical negativity, by highlighting the connection
between jouissance and self-undoing. Munoz, during the PMLA round table from which the very split between relation
and anti-relational theories emerged, called this position “the last stand of the white gay man.” 35 To support
his claim, Munoz argued that the antisocial position is actually a position that implies, on the behalf of the one who
defends it, not be threatened in his identity in the first place. It is a position that takes as its point of
departure a strong subject, encapsulated in itself, and as its point of arrival, a shattered subject, which is to say
a subject that has the capacity to shatter its own self without completely collapsing. This is why one can go as far as suggesting that
such an ethical position, primarily defended by Lee Edelman in No Future, but also by Lynn Huffer in Mad for Foucault, is
actually a position that reflects a certain white privilege. Such a position, moreover, always relies on the
most simplistic reading of post-structuralism, by taking Foucault's concept of desubjectivation,
Deleuze & Guattari praise of schizophrenia, and Lacan’s emphasis on jouissance in his late teaching, as an
unproblematic claim, instead of interrogating the historical context in which such a fascination for the
shattering of the self-emerged. As Carolyn Dean argues, in the The Self and its Pleasure, or Allan Stoekl in Politics, Writing,
Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, Ponge, the
very idea of such a shattering of the self, which
became central in the work of Maurice Blanchot or Samuel Beckett for example, was created in Europe, after the
Second World War, by white men who were not only occupying a privileged position in the symbolic order, but
who also had a very high sense of self-mastery (as it is still clearly the case with Lee Edelman). As such, the
ideal of self-shattering or decentering represented for them a form of subversion of their too self-
secured sense of identity. But, in turn, one can wonder what does it mean to propose such a "subversion" to
contemporary subjects who are neither secure about their symbolic position (their economic
sustainability), nor in their identity (their subjective sense of oneness). This is why, most of the time, anti-relational
queer theorists remain at the level of rhetoric, and give the impression that they are deeply
disconnected from any concrete practice of political activism. Perhaps, instead of praising the antisocial turn for its
rhetorical radicalism, one should question wether this systematic attack on the subject , in the name of its
“queerness,” is not, actually, a politico-ethical dead end? The larger question is whether it is possible to reclaim the
category of the subject without falling back onto the imaginary trap that the humanist subject entails?
 AT Puar/Homonationalism
Puar’s theorizing makes queerness impossible to use as a political category and
is complicit in imperialist interpellation of diverse subjects
Ruti, PhD, ’17 (Mari, CompLit@Harvard, ProfCriticalTheory/Gender@Toronto, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s
Defiant Subjects, Columbia University Press, p. 32-34) BW

Puar's account of queer exceptionalism illustrates that she recognizes the downside of the trope of queer
mobility. Yet ultimately even she cannot resist the siren song of this trope, for she ends her analysis
with an enthusiastic celebration of Deleuzian-Guattarian fluidity, offering a rhizomal model of “assemblage” to counter the
(presumed) rigidities of intersectional analysis. If intersectionality – in Puar's opinion – presupposes identities that can be named,
discerned, understood, represented, and rendered meaningful, assemblage pulverizes identities, allowing us to envision
“movements, intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities” (2007,
215). That is, if intersectionality freezes identities into legible entities, assemblage allows “for becoming beyond and without being”
(216). It would be possible to argue that Puar is creating a false dichotomy between intersectionality and assemblage, that
intersectional analyses also often rely on a notion of identity as an open-ended process of becoming, that identity in the
intersectional sense does not need to be fixed for all times to come (does not need to congeal into a stable state of “being”). But
what is most relevant for our purposes is that Puar's
allegiance to the Deleuzian-Guattarian ideal of the utter
pulverization of subjectivity leads her to elevate the suicide bomber – whose “identity” is, literally, blown
to pieces – to an icon of a “queer assemblage,” to assert that “self-annihilation is the ultimate form
of resistance” (2007, 216). Furthermore, Puar reads the fact that the suicide bomber gives his or her life in order to advance a
political goal, to preserve “the ‘highest cultural capital’ of martyrdom,” as a sign that the bomber is, somewhat paradoxically,
interested “in living a meaningful life” (216). The suicide bomber, in short, opts out of the hegemonic order because of his or her
fidelity to a higher cause, thereby enabling collective life-the symbolic life of a political struggle revitalized by martyrdom-to emerge
from the very destruction of individual life. Puar emphasizes the identity-dissolving effect of suicide bombing: “The dynamite
strapped onto the body of a suicide bomber is not merely an appendage or prosthetic; the intimacy of weapon with body reorients
the assumed spatial integrity (coherence and concreteness) and individuality of the body that is the mandate of intersectional
identities” (2007, 217). In this way, Puar reads suicide bombing as the epitome of anti-individualist politics. The dissolution of
subjectivity that poststructuralist, particularly Deleuzian-Guattarian, theory has for decades advocated as a politicoethical goal
becomes, in this vision, concretized in the image of splattered blood, muscle, tissue, and bone fragments. Indeed, by presenting the
suicide bomber as a queer figure, Puar takes the queer rhetoric of opting out to a level that some might hesitate to embrace, for it
is not merely unitary identities, narratives of progress, and other targets of posthumanist
critique that get blown up with the body of the terrorist but also , arguably, any viable conception
of queerness as anything but an all-purpose placeholder for whatever is destructive. In this
manner, Puar reveals one of the main limitations of queer theory's long-standing aspiration toward “subjectless” critique. On the
one hand, this aspiration leads to capacious analyses that, by refusing to reduce queerness to sexual orientation, draw productive
analogies between variously marginalized subjects, so that “queerness” comes to encompass anyone with a troubled, wounding, or
antagonistic relationship to social processes of normativization. On the other, this
aspiration can throw what Annamarie
Jagose calls a
“proprietary loop” (2007, 186) around an ever-widening array of subjects, so that there
seems to be no limit to what queerness can accommodate. This not only threatens to dilute the
meaning of queerness to the point that the concept becomes theoretically useless but it also
arguably amounts to an imperialist gesture of interpellating subjects – such as the suicide bomber – who
might well resent their induction to the queer nation. Puar , however, does not concern herself with
such anxieties, unhesitatingly concluding that “queerness is constitutive of the suicide bomber” (2007, 221).

Puar’s concept of homonationalism provides no way out---fundamentally

dooms its utility as an explanatory theory
Schotten 12 – Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in Women's and Gender
Studies @ U Mass-Boston (Heike, “Queers Resisting Zionism: On Authority and Accountability
Beyond Homonationalism,” http://alqaws.org/articles/Queers-Resisting-Zionism-On-Authority-
and-Accountability-Beyond-Homonationalism)

This proliferation of existing critical theory and activism raises the bar for arguments like Puar
and Mikdashi’s, challenging all of us not simply to re-hash familiar critical terrain, but to begin
to speak the language of complicity, contradiction, and, crucially, strategy . In other words,
what now? Indeed, the article left us wondering, “how can this criticism help to advance our
work?” Part of the reason we believe we can find no answer to this question is because the
critique of “they” and “them” unfolds in a moralizing manner that would otherwise have been
impossible if the authors had included themselves within the movement. Our fellow activists felt
blamed, humiliated, or singled out by this piece. Some were unsure if they were the target of
critique, given that the authors did not cite any examples. The authors may have been
legitimately cautious about naming specific people or organizations in an already small
movement. However, the lack of concrete evidence for their claims leaves us wondering just
where the finger is pointing. And it is clear that finger-pointing is going on. Although the authors
are careful to specify that their argument about the homonationalist structure of pinkwatching
is not a normative one, by the end of the article, pinkwatchers’ alleged complicity with
homonationalism emerges as an egregious intellectual, political, and strategic error. This error
needs to be called out, but apparently lacks any solution or productive mode of address (or at
least none the authors care to offer). Such finger-pointing is, we believe, very different from
invitation or constructive critique. ∂ Unfortunately, this dynamic is nothing new in solidarity
work. Many of us may recall working under the powerful shadow of Joseph Massad’s work on
the Gay International. For many, Massad’s work effectively produced a straw image of the “Gay
Arab” who is, by definition, complicit with cultural imperialism and an agent of international gay
organizations. Massad's discourse reinforced an academic/activist hierarchy that obscures the
ways in which academics' privileged position can force activists to spend their time measuring
and assessing themselves according to the academic’s discursive rubric, putting themselves on
trial before one another and the academy. However, Massad’s critique did not by any means
promote a new discourse, more aware communities or better queer activism in Arab societies.
This came from within activist fields of experience, through activists’ efforts to analyze their own
needs and explore their internal and external working dynamics. ∂ We want to suggest that the
“homonationalism” and “normalization of settler colonialism” of Puar and Mikdashi’s article
have the potential to operate in much the same way. To praise the piece for its properly critical
perspective (i.e., for its willingness to provoke disagreement and divisiveness) is a familiar
academic positioning that we ought to be cautious about reproducing. As well, the claim that
homonationalism is not only a contemporary critical model but, moreover, the state of things
today might be understood as a form of bolstering one’s own academic brand. Puar and
Mikdashi’s vague generalizations, academic authority, and general lack of evidence have the
potential to produce a new set of straw caricatures—not the Gay Imperialist and Gay Arab this
time, but the Homonationalist Pinkwatcher and Token Palestinian Queer. Moreover, these new
characters seem to be offered not in the spirit of furthering a movement, but rather from a
position of academic observation, analysis, and judgment. It is almost as if the task has become
to differentiate the “proper” pinkwatcher from the “improper,” homonationalist pinkwatcher
(much less the “proper” Palestinian queer from the patsy for homonationalist gay American
activists).∂ We appreciate Puar and Mikdashi’s vigilance in holding us accountable to our
principles in our activist work. However, we are troubled by the ways in which they fold
pinkwatching into a homonationalist framework. While they offer a worthy critique of
pinkwatching activism, because of the implicit valorization of academic theorizing and analysis
and the gaping lack of specific examples of homonationalist pinkwatching, we end up wondering
not only to whom, but about whom, this article was written. We worry that a set of straw
caricatures is being erected, and entreat the authors to specify in greater detail to what (or
whom) they are referring. Such vague, critical musings seem less productive to us than an
engaged critique that implicates its authors even as it prods a movement to look more closely
at its own workings and motivations. The relationship between academia and activism is
potentially a positive and interactive one, wherein both sides can inspire and sustain one
another organically, with the ultimate goal of pushing our movement(s) forward together. We
hope that this exchange can initiate precisely such a constructive and self-reflective process
regarding pinkwashing, pinkwatching, and homonationalism within our movement.

Homonationalism provides a simplistic account of relationship between

tolerance and violence---specific analysis of material structures and institutions
is necessary to solve
Ritchie 14 [Jason, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University,
“Pinkwashing, Homonationalism, and Israel–Palestine: The Conceits of Queer Theory and the
Politics of the Ordinary,” Antipode, 3 Jun 2014]

My argument is not, of course, that racism does not exist in many contemporary contexts —
including Israel–Palestine—nor I am arguing that “tolerance” of homosexuals has not, in many of those
contexts, been marshaled to provide cover for the imposition of violence against racialized
others (eg the Israeli occupation). My argument, instead, is that the popularity of the concept of
homonationalism owes much to its oversimplifications. Power, in this framework, is reducible
to racism, and racism is understood in a universalizing manner that allows the critic to avoid the
messy work of “[locating] the meanings of race and racism … within particular fields of
discourse [and articulating their meanings] to the social relations” in concrete socio-historical
contexts (Solomos and Back 1995:415).¶ I have utilized the metaphor of the checkpoint to demonstrate
what I believe to be a more empirically convincing and politically engaged account of the everyday
violence queer Palestinians face. Focusing on the checkpoint requires one to locate the racist
violence of the Israeli state in a specific time and place, structured by identifiable social and
political processes and inhabited by actual human beings who embody multiple subject
positions that differently inflect the ways in which they encounter those processes and one another. Such a strategy will do little
to challenge the monopolization of queer spaces in North American and European cities by racist neocons like Michael Lucas, nor
will it provide a convenient mechanism for radical activists—or theoretically sophisticated academics—to validate their queer
credentials. But if queers who live in other places have some value beyond serving as grist for North American and European queers
to consolidate a properly radical subjectivity and mitigate their privilege, homonationalism's activist critics—and its
theorists—might consider resisting the impulse to homogenize this or that queer as the victim
or the victor and work instead to develop a nuanced framework for building coalitions to fight
—rather than platforms on which to fight about—the complex and unpredictable ways space is
organized, difference is enforced, and some bodies in some places are allowed to move more freely than others.
 Statephobia bad
Refusal of queer critique to engage the state recreates neoliberal ideology by
falsely staticizing the state as always violent---tactical engagement is better
than pure rejection
Nikita Dhawan 15, Professor of Political Science (Political Theory and Gender Studies) and
Director of the Research Platform Gender Studies: "Identities – Discourses – Transformations" at
the University of Innsbruck, Austria, Homonationalism and State-phobia: The Postcolonial
Predicament of Queering Modernities, Academia.edu

As Foucault himself warns state-phobia is deeply inscribed in liberal and neo-liberal ideas of civil society .
The wickedness of the state is juxta- posed against the inherent goodness of civil society, so that the aim is the ‘whithering away of the state’. This anti-
state-centric approach to political power, locates radical politics in extra-state space of innovation. This is why Puar and others reject pragmatic

politics of same-sex marriage or anti-discrimination legislations. In

contrast they support civil society campaigns like
pink-watching that increasingly deploy the strategy of surveillance for shaming states into
good behavior. Even as one critiques the harnessing of gender and sexuality by neo-liberal capitalism, the rejection of all
feminist- queer politics oriented towards the state as part of a biopolitical agenda is
disingenuous state-phobic rhetoric. Postcolonial-queer-feminists are caught in an ambivalent,
double-bind vis-à-vis the state: On the one hand, the state has historically been the source of
violence and repression through the criminalization and pathologization of non-normative sexual practices. And yet,
queer strategies seek to instru- mentalize the state to promote sexual justice. Even as the
state is known to perpetuate heteronormative ideologies, which are founding myths of
nations, the hope is that the state can function as a site of redress of gender and sexual inequality.
Despite the problematic track-record with regard to sexual politics of all nation-states , whether
European or non-European, it is dangerous to disregard the immense political implications of state-

phobic positions, which are increasingly popular in radical discourses in the West. As the recent re-
criminalization of homosexuality in Uganda, India and Nigeria demonstrate, negotiations with state are indispensable and imperative for emancipatory
queer politics in the global South. This
is not a plea for statism; rather, one must be aware of the dangers
of the replacement of state with non-state actors as motors of justice . Against this background, the
recent anti-statist stance within postcolonial queer scholarship is alarming, as it ignores the
importance of the state for those citizens who do not have access to transnational
counterpublic spheres to address their grievances. Decolonization, whether in USA, Israel or
India , cannot be achieved merely through a strategy of shaming the state. Rather in the Gramscian-
Spivakian sense, it is imperative to enable vulnerable disenfranchised indi- viduals and groups to

access the state (Dhawan 􀀲􀀰􀀱􀀳). Accordingly, instead of a for or against position vis-à-vis the state,
the more challenging question is how to reconfigure the state, given that its institutions and
policies are the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities . Thus the chal- lenge is
how to pursue a non-statephobic queer politics that at the same time neither rationalizes the
biopolitical state project nor makes the queer bodies governable . In postcolonial contexts, the
state is like a pharmakon , namely, both poison and medicine. Postcolonial queer politics must
explore strategies of converting poison into counterpoison (Spivak 􀀲􀀰􀀰􀀷: 􀀷􀀱). Herein the ambivalent
function of the state must be addressed . As Pharmakon, the inherent condradictions must be
engaged with: Violence and justice, ideology and emancipation, law and discipline. If, following
Foucault, the state has no stable essence, then it is marked by undecidability or doubleness. The
sole focus on the negative aspects of the Pharmakon, namely the destructive and repressive
traits, neutralizes and ignores the enabling and empowering aspects . Thus postcolonial-queer-
feminist poli- tics must transform poison into remedy and formulate critique of the state
beyond state-phobia . A challenging task, but anything else would be too risky !
 L/T
Decreasing arms sales directly correlates to decreasing hr violations – the aff
solves
Musa ’17 (Shavana, Lecturer in international law, security and human rights at the University
of Manchester, and a Fulbright Scholar in Cyber Security at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington DC., “The Saudi-Led Coalition in Yemen, Arms Exports and
Human Rights: Prevention Is Better Than Cure,” Journal of Conflict and Security Law, /ly

The transfer of arms has long been on the agenda of States. While they continue to be the object of defence,
security and economic affection, the consequences spiralling from poorly regulated arms
transfers can be devastating. In fact, the lack of a stringently applied legal framework can not only
lead to the illicit trafficking of arms, but can have more serious humanitarian and developmental
consequences. Nothing can signify what is meant by ‘devastating’ quite like the conflict situation in
Yemen, which has plagued the headlines in recent months. At the heart of Yemeni reports has been the involvement of
countries like the UK and the USA in inadvertently causing a percentage of the bloodshed
through its supply of weapons to Saudi Arabia. As a result, even the British national courts have been brought into the
equation to assess UK practices on arms transfers as per a judicial review case submitted by the organization Campaign Against the
Arms Trade (CAAT) against the UK Government. The Saudi–Yemen case strikes at the core of effects that poorly regulated and law-
abiding state practice on arms transfers can have on innocent populations. Similarly, it
shows the clear risk of
widespread and systematic violations of human rights and humanitarian law violations , which can
inevitably take place. Despite the impact of arms transfers, as shown by the Saudi-led Coalition’s actions in Yemen, there is a
drought in the number of international lawyers contending with issues on the regulation of the arms trade and thus, on the
prevention of violations. It has become apparent that international lawyers have a general preoccupation to deal with the
international applicability of laws after the fact, usually after a violation has occurred and how it can be remedied. The judicial
review case brought by CAAT concerning UK arms transfers to Saudi Arabia, which the High Court subsequently rejected, is a prime
example of legal work (including critical scholarship) taking effect after mass atrocity. Much more international legal work to
properly assist governments in the application of international laws on the arms trade is needed. If
the arms trade is
regulated properly, it could potentially prevent , or at least reduce the exponential rises in human
rights and humanitarian law violations and the commission of crimes such as genocide, war
crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because the global arms trade is the substrate for these
violations and crimes. There is a causal link between strict international law considerations
preexport and levels of deaths and casualties post-export . There is also an indirect socio-economic impact from
armed conflicts and international crimes, as fuelled by poorly regulated arms, including famine, family segregation, disease, lack of
education, refugee levels and even a decline in foreign investment—the list is not exhaustive.1 It is also believed that
conventional weapons, such as small arms, cause far more deaths than any other weapon . These
links affirm the greater obligations that must be placed upon States and suppliers to effectively control arms transfers and provide a
basis to reinforce the evolving norm against these specific actors, rather than merely those pulling the trigger.3 While the Yemen
case has perhaps placed a more magnified spotlight on the responsibility of States with regard to authorized transfers, there
have been endless examples of authorized transfers that were utilized for the purposes of
infringing human rights and humanitarian law. Belgium, has in the past, approved the transfer of arms to Nepal, even
though its government had been involved in violations such as summary executions, as well as the torture and abduction of
civilians.4 Past transfers to Rwanda, the DRC and Sri Lanka5 have also caused the shift towards a stronger link between arms
transfers and the responsibility of States, not just the end-user. While international law has come a long way in terms of content,
legal developments on the arms trade has been somewhat lacking.
Foreign arms sales support gender-based violence – justifies a form of IR that
aids discriminatory policies
Musa ’17 (Shavana, Lecturer in international law, security and human rights at the University
of Manchester, and a Fulbright Scholar in Cyber Security at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington DC., “The Saudi-Led Coalition in Yemen, Arms Exports and
Human Rights: Prevention Is Better Than Cure,” Journal of Conflict and Security Law) /ly

Whilst it is beyond the means of this article to address all international

human rights standards, some that can be
linked to arms control issues are listed below. . Equality and Non-Discrimination : The accessibility and use of
conventional weapons have severe consequences on the exercise of the rights to equality and non-discrimination. Numerous studies
have shown that poorly regulated arms can lead to the commission of sexual and genderbased
violence. Small arms are used as an ‘expression of male power within already unequal societies
on the basis of sex and gender’125 and often leads to violence (and threats) against women and children, as was
demonstrated by the systematic and widespread rape of women during the Rwandan Genocide and Bosnian War.126 Ethnic
cleansing was also evident in both these conflicts demonstrating racial discrimination . Gender-based,
racial, religious, as well as discrimination against children, among others, would not have occurred but for the use
and availability of arms. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,127 ICESCR,128 ICCPR,129 International Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,130 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities131 and Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women132 all state that no one can be exposed to de jure or de factor
discrimination in the exercise of their human rights based on issues such as race, gender, religion and ethnicity, as well as emphasis
on equality before and equal protection to the law. Since discrimination under international human rights law
constitutes ‘distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference or other differential treatment that
is directly or indirectly based on the prohibited grounds of discrimination and which has the intention or
effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of Covenant rights’,133 certain
arms transfers could be discriminatory , as per this definition Right to Food134/Right to Housing135/Right to
Health:136 The supply of arms can hinder the enjoyment of these rights , as the conflict in Yemen
has shown. The earlier sections of this article highlighted the attacks on medical facilities and residential areas in certain districts
in Yemen. The use of arms here violated these human rights. As a consequence of the transfer of arms, the Saudi-led Coalition were
able to apply a naval blockade of Yemeni ports, which resulted in the deprivation of food, water and other crucial supplies to
civilians. This has contributed to the ‘largest food security emergency in the world’ 137 and an
infringement of the right to food and health to many. Under a number of legal instruments, everyone has the right to an adequate
standard of living for themselves and their family and there is an obligation for States to ensure that the enjoyment of this right,
through international cooperation.138 Small arms have also been established as a key underlying factor causing forced
migration, as well as preventing sustainable repatriation and/or resettlement.139 This inhibits the standard that
individuals must not be subjected to arbitrary interference of their privacy, home or family and
not arbitrarily displaced either.14Right to Life/Right not to be Tortured: The two non-derogable human rights standards most
apparently relevant to arms transfers are the right to life141 and the right not to be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or
degrading treatment or punishment.142 Many
conflicts, including in Yemen, exemplify how arms transfers
may cause and aggravate the violation of these two norms. The military intervention in Yemen
caused large numbers of civilians to be deprived of their right to life. In this case, the UK’s arms transfers to
Saudi Arabia can be directly correlated with the hindrance of Yemeni civilians to enjoy the right to life.143 States should avoid
interpreting standards such as the right to life narrowly and adopt positive measures within their arms control processes to apply
this right and ensure that no weapons they transfer will be used to deprive individuals of this right. In assessing a potential recipient
country’s human rights adherence, exporters should also look at the frequency, magnitude and nature of human rightsviolations.
These should be made with reference to infringements of any civil, political, socio-economic rights and their gravity and prevalence.
The history must be assessed in light of the risk of continuing human rights respect, as certain countries may have implemented
remedial mechanisms in the meantime and therefore their history is no longer indicative of current day practice. In the same vein,
exceptional cases of one-off incidents need not be the basis of denying an arms transfer. National rules, regulations and mechanisms
of recipient States are useful sources to assist export assessment. The analysis of national policies and practices
would not only have an impact on the legality and legitimacy of the transfer at hand, but it
would ensure a domino effect, where an exporter could influence a country to continue properly
regulating arms, potentially reform or even create their arms control law to conform to
significant international law, such as the ATT.145 Consequentially, this would facilitate a more responsible
arms trade and nurture a self-fulfilling human rights and humanitarian law prophecy, minimizing the impact associated with
potential human rights violations.

Link turn – the arms trade is a parcel of the globalized gender apparatus that
they’ve criticized.
Connell 16 (R. W., Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, PhD. “Men, Gender and the State.” Among Men: Moulding
Masculinities, Volume 1. Routledge, Dec 5, 2016. https://books.google.com.au/books?
id=HBSmDQAAQBAJ&q=arms+trade#v=snippet&q=arms%20trade&f=false, pg 25-26)

A case in point: the arms trade The gender meaning of weapons is familiar, and has deep historical roots.
Fembach (1981) speaks of the “masculine specialization in violence” that can be traced from the first
armies, in the first urban societies. Armed forces are overwhelmingly composed of men today. Recent
research on civilians in the United States, which has probably the most heavily armed population in the world, shows gun ownership
about four times as high among men as among women (Smith and Smith, 1994) The masculinization of weapons is not
a natural fact, but a cultural pattern. ( So far as natural difference goes, guns are aptly called, in Damon Runyon stories,
“equalizers.”) It must be constantly regenerated and reproduced. A recent study by Gibson (1994) provides a striking illustration.
Gibson traces the hypermasculine cult of weaponry in “paramilitary culture” in the United
States, the cult of the “new war” developed in the period since the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. This
was dramatically brought to public attention by the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. What is worked out culturally in
gun cults and violent “action movies” is also an economic reality in the forms of the arms trade. This ranges
from government-to-government sales of high-technology weapons systems, to the private
circulation of small arms in countries whose governments officially permit arms sales, or cannot
prevent them. The largest part of the arms trade is the legal equipping of military and paramilitary forces. This is no small
industry. United States arms exports in 1993 totalled $32 billion. The metal does not come naked: it comes
clothed in social forms. The army is a patriarchal institution. It is no accident that civil wars, from Bangladesh
(at its separation from Pakistan) to the current conflict in Bosnia, include rape in the spectrum of military operations; this is a
familiar form in which armies assert
dominance over conquered peoples. Recent social research inside
armed forces in the United States (Barrett, 1996) reveals an oppressive but efficient regime designed to
produce a narrowly defined hegemonic masculinity . It is hardly surprising that institutions with such gender
regimes have difficulty incorporating women under equal opportunity rules, and difficulty with the concept (though not the reality)
of gay soldiers. Because of the social forms in which armaments are embedded, the arms trade is a
vector of the globalization of gender, much as the international state is. Indeed, the two overlap, since the arms
trade is connected to the globally linked military and intelligence apparatuses of the major
powers. The social forms of military masculinity are exported to post-colonial states by military
aid and advice programs (the mechanism by which the United States became involved in the Vietnamese war in the 1960s, with
U.S. advisers constantly urging greater aggressiveness on officers of the Saigon regime), and by the training of officers in
the military schools of the metropolis. In a world perspective, the modest gains of women’s representation in parliaments and
bureaucracies at a national level may well be outweighed by the growth of the apparatuses of patriarchal violence at an
international level.
 Alt fails
Alt fails – can’t account for multifaceted nature of fem ir
Sjoberg et al 16 (Laura Sjoberg1, Kelly Kadera2, and Cameron G. Thies3, 1Department of
Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA 2Department of Political Science,
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA 3School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State
University, Tempe, AZ, USA. “Reevaluating Gender and IR Scholarship: Moving beyond Reiter’s
Dichotomies toward Effective Synergies” Dialogue and Debate Feature. 849-70.) kb

We resist the temptation to make predictions or recommend future directions for gender and IR
research for several reasons. First, feminist inquiry is by nature collective and organic rather
than led (e.g., Ackerly, Stern, and True 2006; Tickner 2005). Second, the complexity of dialogue
among the approaches Reiter calls ‘‘posi- tivist’’ and ‘‘nonpositivist’’ means that productive
discussions are at the level of particular research subjects and questions, rather than about
sweeping claims regard- ing gender and IR. Third, because feminist scholars have carefully
thought about the privilege of authorial voice12—neither we nor anyone else should arbitrate
the legitimacy of different sorts of work on gender and IR. Instead, we recommend that
dialogues between different approaches to gender and IR pay attention to both substantive and
representational diversity in agenda- setting, field-mapping, research topic choice, and selection
of methods. Such a dialogue has the potential to escape the disciplining dichotomies of
sex/gender, positivist/postpositivist, and epistemology/ontology to learn more about gender
and politics, avoiding false equation, unnecessary differentiation, and the construction of
gendered dichotomies among scholars and scholarship. General IR scholarship and conflict
scholarship specifically are just beginning to tap the potential of gender analysis, even with
three decades of rich feminist IR work and the recent exponential growth of scholarship
addressing both sex and gender. We hope that we have encouraged more careful and more
productive dialogue and look forward to being a part of that evolving conversation.

Discourse in debate fails – can’t resolve differences in lit

Sjoberg et al 16 (Laura Sjoberg1, Kelly Kadera2, and Cameron G. Thies3, 1Department of
Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA 2Department of Political Science,
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA 3School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State
University, Tempe, AZ, USA. “Reevaluating Gender and IR Scholarship: Moving beyond Reiter’s
Dichotomies toward Effective Synergies” Dialogue and Debate Feature. 849-70.) kb

In other words, scholarship with different understandings of gender asks different questions and
gets different answers. Scholarship with such differences can be brought into dialogue, but we
need to improve upon the missing sex/gender distinc- tion in Reiter’s analysis. Conclusions
cannot be compared directly if studies analyze different things. Research on women leaders and
investigations of gender in lead- ership can share insights, but they are not the same, and cannot
be effectively brought into dialogue if their differences are elided. Instead, productive dialogue
must recognize and navigate those differences.
Lack of nuanced research means the alt is vague and can’t solve the aff
Sjoberg et al 16 (Laura Sjoberg1, Kelly Kadera2, and Cameron G. Thies3, 1Department of
Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA 2Department of Political Science,
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA 3School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State
University, Tempe, AZ, USA. “Reevaluating Gender and IR Scholarship: Moving beyond Reiter’s
Dichotomies toward Effective Synergies” Dialogue and Debate Feature. 849-70.) kb

The complementarity of this work, then, is neither straightforward (where the work can be
cleanly paired) nor chronologically linear (where positivist gender and IR research is the next
step after postpositivist gender and IR research). Instead, it relies on understanding
epistemological and ontological differences, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Moving
away from a standard that judges postpositivist work only by its utility to generate positivist
work broadens our understanding of gender and IR. For example, postcolonial feminists
(Chowdhry and Nair 2002; Marchand and Runyan 2011; Agathangelou and Ling 2004) highlight
the intersection of race and gender in global politics as a unique kind of discrimination rather
than an additive relationship between sex discrimination and race discrimination. Feminist
scholarship on mar- ginalized identities (D’Costa 2006; Lee-Koo and D’Costa 2008; Teaiwa 2001)
examines the ways that the identity difference between the researched and the researcher
shapes the ways the researcher understands the subject. Some ethno- graphic field researchers
in conflict zones analyze content of privileged knowledge derived from feeling safe and outside
of war as compared to the experience of people whose lives are constantly endangered,
especially in gendered ways (Sylvester and Parashar 2009; Parashar 2013a; Park-Kang 2015).
Other feminist scholars explore (in)security as felt, smelled, tasted, and experienced (e.g.,
Alexander 2010). Still others extend gender analysis to include sexuality analysis, advocating
queer theo- rizing for questions of global politics and security (e.g., Weber 1999, 2016; Sjoberg
and Weber 2014; Picq and Thiel 2015; Wilkinson and Langlois 2014). A broader, more careful
approach to synthesis can explore these more nuanced causal and constitutive connections
between sex, gender, and global social and political relations. Dialogue among ‘‘positivist’’ and
‘‘nonpositivist’’ research should cross not only methodological and epistemological differences
but also ontological and political 864 Journal of Conflict Resolution 62(4) ones. We object to
Reiter’s reduction of scholarship to a positivist/nonpositivist dichotomy because it misses the
most important substantive distinctions in gen- der/IR research. The tradition Reiter calls
‘‘nonpositivist’’ is explicitly feminist, bringing ontological and political commitments that shape
its epistemological approaches. Any complementarity across gender and IR research cannot be
based merely on agreement or similarity. It must acknowledge contributions, dialogue across
disagreements, and recognize the ability of different types of work to provide different types of
information. Such synergies ultimately provide a fuller under- standing of gender and IR.

Only nuanced engagement solves - The alt oversimplifies the complex nature of
fem ir
Sjoberg et al 16 (Laura Sjoberg1, Kelly Kadera2, and Cameron G. Thies3, 1Department of
Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA 2Department of Political Science,
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA 3School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State
University, Tempe, AZ, USA. “Reevaluating Gender and IR Scholarship: Moving beyond Reiter’s
Dichotomies toward Effective Synergies” Dialogue and Debate Feature. 849-70.) kb

Productive dialogues across perspectives on gender and IR rely on understanding the

relationships between their various contributions. Setting aside differences in the
conceptualization of gender, holding postpositivist work to positivist standards, and inaccurately
mapping the literature hinder effective dialogue while making that dialogue appear enticingly
simple. A more nuanced engagement generates reflective integration and debate by considering
the strengths and weakness, and different aims, of scholarship traditions. Consider, for example,
the diverse research on women’s political violence in the international arena. As Reiter (2015)
documents, positivist gender and IR work does, and can, address questions about where women
are and what they do by measuring sex and political violence and estimating their statistical
relationships with each other and related factors (e.g., women’s political rights) or controls (e.g.,
economic development). Some studies examine the ways in which sex predicts perpetration of
political violence (e.g., Bloom 2005; Dalton and Asal 2011; Vogel, Porter, and 856 Journal of
Conflict Resolution 62(4) Kebbell 2014). Others examine how politically violent organizations
structure rules about the sex of participants and the resulting roles that male and female
participants are assigned (e.g., Dearing 2010; Davis 2013). They generate data about female
combatants in armed groups (e.g., Wood and Thomas Forthcoming), how they are positioned
within those organizations (e.g., Thomas and Bond 2015), and how such organizations
differentiate (or not) between men and women (e.g., Dalton and Asal 2011; Davis 2013).