QUEER

THEORY
DR. ANA ALONSO
• What is queer?
• Why are queer international theories relevant to international
relations?
• What might queer research of international relations look like?
What is
queer?
Queer
• word ‘queer’ was used to
describe homosexuals in the
nineteenth century
• synonym with homosexual or gay
• Had a pejorative sense/
expression of homophobia
(around 1925)
• Reappropiated as a positive self-
designation in 90’s
What is Queer?
• While debates about the meaning of the term
“queer” (Butler 1994; Warner 2012)
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggested that queer
designates “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps,
overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and
excesses of meaning when the constituent
elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's
sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify
monolithically” (1993:8).
• Queer studies has been and remains, as Teresa de
Lauretis described it, an attempt “to rethink the
sexual in new ways, elsewhere and otherwise”in
relation to but also beyond traditional Gay and
Lesbian Studies, Feministand Gender Studies, and
Poststructuralist Studies
ORIGINS
OF
QUEER
THEORY
• United States- Queer Nation organization was
founded in 1990
• The gay newspaper the Advocate proclaimed
1992 as the “year of the Queer”
• Impact of new militancy and activism due by
the media panic over the spread of AIDS and
media attempts to blame gays for it.
• Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT)
Studies – which focus on sexuality and gender.
• Poststructuralist turn’ of the late 1980s and
early 1990
• Lesbian feminist and most of whom self-
identified as Black and Women of Colour
theorists (1970s )
LGBT and Queer Theory
• challenge common ‘assumptions about heterosexuality as the
default sexuality and kinship norm (“heteronormativity”)’ and the
twin premise ‘of two “opposite” and complementary gender
positions (“cissexism”)’(Richter-Montpetit and Weber, 2016)
• Cissexism: “the cultural and systemic ideology that denies,
denigrates, or pathologizes self-identified gender identities that do
not align with assigned gender at birth as well as resulting behavior,
expression, and community” (Lennon and Millster, 2014)
 W H Y L G B T
S T U D I E S
A N D Q U E E R
S T U D I E S
D I S T A N C E D ?
Queer turn and queer teory

• Queer theory challenges the early

gay liberation movement due to
their notion of a stable or core gay
identity. Thus homosexuality is a
category of knowledge rather than
a tangible reality.
• Attemps to broaden definition of
queer beyond gay and lesbian.
Bisexual viewed with suspicion.
Q U E E R T U R N A N D
Q U E E R T H E O R Y

• ‘Queer turn’ in IR is commonly associated with studying LGBT people

and LGBT human rights.
• Queer Theory is committed to the radical contingency of the term
‘queer’ and thus does not assume a pre-given (queer) subject that
exists prior to politics that then seeks rights.
• By refusing to assume a stable ‘LGBT’ subject, Queer IR perspectives
can instead inquire into how (queer) subject-making is a political
process. Queer inquiry thus proceeds on the basis of questioning the
political formations and normalising power of sexuality and gender,
rather than assuming a stable, rights-seeking, liberal political subject.
• to trouble and destabilise – queer – ‘regimes of the normal’ (‘normal’
versus ‘perverse’)
• challenges understandings of gender and sexuality as singular and
stable.

• The LGBT perspective sees LGBT people as pre-given rights-seeking

subjects who enter a political field in order to seek those rights.
Q U E E R T U R N A N D Q U E E R
T H E O RY

The queer critique extends also

to the heterosexual/homosexual
what characterises Queer IR and male/female dichotomies
scholarship is its treatment of underwriting traditional LGBT
queer as an analytical category. and Gender Studies, including
some of the LGBT and Feminist
perspectives in IR.
Activity: US debate over whether
transgender individuals should be free to
use the toilet of their personal choice.
STARTING
POINT FOR
QUEER
THEORY
Michel Foucault
• (1926–84), philosopher, historian and activist,
• most influential of the thinkers whose work is
generally categorised as poststructuralist.
• first volume of History of Sexuality was written in
the 1970s //linking of sexuality and knowledge to
political power.
• the emergence of "sexuality" as a discursive object
and separate sphere of life and argues that the
notion that every individual has a sexuality is a
relatively recent development in Western
societies.
• Construction or emergence of the category of the
homosexual
Judith Butler
• gender is performative – meaning that the performance of gender is what makes
gender exist (Butler, 2002).
• People bring gender into being through gender acts. Such acts are not necessarily
deliberate or consciously chosen, but are the repetitive practices that perpetually
reproduce gender – for example, wearing make-up, trousers or skirts, or calling
people ‘he’ or ‘she’.
• Butler suggests that gender does not come from a rooted identity somewhere
inside us, but that it only exists through our actions, and the actions of others in
society towards us. ‘
• Doing gender can be described as ‘the interactional process of crafting gender
identities that are then presumed to reflect and naturally derive from biology’
(Schilt and Westbrook, 2009: 442). Gender is performed in relation to gender
norms – either in line with them or transgressing them, or somewhere in between.
The relationship to a gender norm is what makes the subject intelligible – either as
a conformer or a transgressor.
• Butler contends that the ‘doing’ and the performance of gender is what constitutes
the identity of a given subject. The idea of having a central essential identity is just
an illusion, created by our performances of gender.
• For Butler, gender is not a real ‘thing’, but purely a social construction. This means
that gender identity and gender differences are beliefs, compelled and supported
by social sanctions. Butler’s idea that gender is a social construction means that
gender can shift, is open to contestation, and is not tied to ‘material bodily facts’. A
key part of queer theorising is delinking gender, sex and sexuality (Lind, 2009) by
showing that these elements do not have a linear relationship to each other based
on biology. Perhaps the example easiest to understand is trans people, who are
living a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth. This disrupts the
expectation that gender comes from biology (Schilt and Westbrook, 2009).
S C H O L A R S
I N I R
V. S P I K E P E T E R S O N
AND CYNTHIA WEBER
PUBLISHED
E X P L I C I T LY Q U E E R
R E S E A R C H A S E A R LY
AS THE MID-1990S