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Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 13, No. 1, 2013

The Intended and Unintended

Queering of States/Nations
V. Spike Peterson*
University of Arizona

The appeal to the natural is one of the most powerful aspects of commonsense thinking, but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies
history.
(Weedon 1987:3)
To characterize something as natural both denies its history and erases its
politics. As a contribution to queering states/nations, I consider in this essay the
history hence politics of sex, sexuality, and states. Reading early state
formation the rise of civilization as constituting and normalizing binary
sex/gender difference and heteropatriarchal kinship relations, I argue that
making states is making sex. Making both involves multiple, interactive
transformations: in self/subject and collective identities, symbolic systems of
meaning, institutional arrangements, and regulatory, coercive, and juridical
forms of power. Once states are successfully made, to ensure intergenerational
continuity they monitor biological and social reproduction. This has historically
featured instituting a heteropatriarchal family/household as the basic socioeconomic unit, regulating womens biological reproduction, and policing sexual
activities more generally.
Increasingly formalized in the transition to modernity, patriarchal households
and the sex/gender binary feature in the context of European state-making, the
international system of states/nations it generated, and the (nationalist) colonizing practices it proliferated. These arrangements spurred heteronormative and
nationalist ideologies and subjective investments in both particular (birthright)
political-economic arrangements and (exclusionary) imagined communities of
states/nations. In short, the heterosexism/heteronormativity of modern states is
marked by hierarchical dichotomies constituting sex as malefemale biological
difference, gender as masculinefeminine subjectivities, and sexuality as
heterosexualhomosexual identifications.1

* V. Spike Peterson is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Arizona,

with courtesy appointments in the Department of Gender and Womens Studies and
Institute for LGBT Studies. She is the author of A Critical Rewriting of Global Political
Economy: Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (2003) and co-author, with
Anne Sisson Runyan, of Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (2010).

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V. Spike Peterson: The Intended and Unintended Queering of States/Nations

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.
Early States and Sex/Gender Politics
States have been the worlds largest and most powerful organizations for
more than five thousand years.
(Tilly 1990:1)
While clouded by the mists of time, social relations of prehistory are not entirely
opaque. We have a variety of sources from which to speculate about the prehistory
of early human relations and social formations. The conventional story of human
evolution took shape in the modern era, authorized by Europeans becoming more
aware of and producing knowledge claims about their own history and its relation
to that of temporally and spatially separate Others. The power relations operating
in this historical context inevitably shaped which questions were asked, by whom,
and to what purpose. And presentism was in play then as well as now. The
foundational narrative that was stabilized especially its presuppositions regarding sex difference, patriarchal structures, social hierarchies, and progress through
a Western lens has become, for many, common sense. But that story too is being
rewritten as advances in research (technologies, methods, new evidence) take
place in the context of increasingly prominent critical, feminist, queer, poststructuralist, and postcolonial interventions. What matters here is a growing awareness
of the long duration, hence viability, of small, cooperative groups preceding
agricultural settlements, and of the variation, complexity, and multidimensional
aspects of social relations past and present. The emerging scholarship especially
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challenges common-sense assumptions regarding sex, gender, human nature, and

(adversarial) inter-group relations.2
Consider that accumulation processes were irrelevant for most of human history
(at least forty thousand, arguably one hundred thousand years), as groups subsisted
on a tremendous variety of gathering, hunting, and fishing practices. With respect
to sex and gender, while early humans were presumably aware of anatomical and
biological (reproductive) sex differences, it is unclear what this implied for gender
or sexuality. Dobres (2004:213) observes that
archeologists cannot say with any confidence or agreement . . . how many
different genders may have existed in any given time or place, much less
what were their particularly associated roles, values, and so forth. . . . [I]t is
probable that different cultures practiced different sorts of gender configurations . . . Nor is there any evidence to indicate compulsory heterosexuality.
The possibility of third, fourth, or even fifth genders is quite likely. . . .
Fathers, brothers, uncles . . . probably shared in the caring of children, for
this was likely considered a highly valued and culturally important task, as it
is with modern hunting and gathering cultures.
The idea of private property and processes of accumulation attend the gradual
spread of agriculture and settled communities, followed in some places by early
state formation. The latter entailed effective centralization of accumulation processes, political authority, and military exploits; centralized regulation of social
relations through formal laws (in contrast to customary practices); institutionalization of stratifying divisions of labour and heteropatriarchal household formations; reconfiguration of individual and collective identities; and ideological
legitimation of these transformations, stabilized through the written word that
endured through time and space. All of these had profound implications for social
relations, as civilizations institutionalized structural inequalities.
These dramatic transformations were by no means inevitable: they were widely
resisted perhaps for millennia (Bolger 2010; Mann 1986) and their realization
depended on historically contingent forms of coercion and consent.3 Kinshipbased groups varied, and some engaged in sporadic raiding and feuding that
emphasized male-dominated endeavours. But state formations engaged in organized militarism as a relatively continual aspect of sustaining centralized rule,
expanding territorial control, and enhancing accumulation in the form of both
material goods (war booty) and human labour (concubines, slaves) all in support
of non-productive elites and state projects (construction, military).
The multifaceted, cross-cutting, and nuanced social relations typical of larger
kin networks afforded women (and men) various claims to respect, authority, and
resources. Effective centralization required a reconfiguration of social arrangements, which typically involved states establishing relatively independent
heteropatriarchal family/households as the basic socio-economic unit; the
latter facilitated resource extraction, military conscription, regulation of property
(including women), and centralized control more generally.4 This shift eroded the
authority and power of lineage networks (some of which were matrilineal), and as
one effect, emphasized womens sexual/reproductive role, at the expense of other
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V. Spike Peterson: The Intended and Unintended Queering of States/Nations

previously valued dimensions of their identities and activities. To ensure a numerically adequate population, establish (inheritable) claims to property and membership, and promote in-group allegiance, states regulated sexual relations.
Typically, this involved restrictive expectations as well as legal codes disciplining
womens sexual activities and establishing a norm of (biologically reproductive)
heterosexuality (without presuming modernist understandings of homosexual
identity or proscriptions against homoerotic behaviours). That females faced
greater restrictions than males alludes to deepening sex/gender asymmetries.
In these processes, states abstracted and centralized authority in a political
(public) sphere that was thus distinguished from, while being dependent upon, a
household (private) sphere focused on subsistence and social reproduction. Men
especially those with inherited claims to property acquired status, authority,
and resources as patriarchal heads-of-households, and some gained additional
status through identification with military activities or religious or political authority. Women typically lost status, authority, and resource claims that they variously
enjoyed in kinship communities; in the transition to patriarchy they became
transmitters of property and in norms regarding adultery property of their
men. Relatively isolated in individual households, women became more dependent
upon fathers and husbands, losing access to the countervailing support of extended
kin networks. These altered arrangements amplified malefemale distinctions and
presumably cultivated gender-differentiated identities (subjectivities).
In the Western tradition (flowing from Greek city-states), centralization
involved normalizing foundational dichotomies (publicprivate, reasonaffect,
mindbody, culturenature, civilizedbarbarian, masculinefeminine) both materially (divisions of authority, power, labour, and resources) as well as conceptually
(justificatory ideologies, collective belief systems). Not least because statemaking involved the invention of writing, these systemic transformations were
codified, and that codification (in Western philosophy, political theory, classical
and religious texts) profoundly shaped subsequent theory/practice.
Early states are important then, for the patterns and institutions they stabilized:
sex/gender asymmetries (divisions of labour and status; women as property;
heteropatriarchal households), masculinism (male right to rule; patriarchal transmission of property and membership claims), and inequalities of status, resources,
and power (elite rule; public over private; productive or specialized over reproductive or menial labour; citizens over Others). Given the salience of inherited
claims to property and membership status, (womens) adultery was severely
punished, but non-reproductive sexual behaviours that did not threaten heteropatriarchal structures drew far less attention.
Modern European States/Nations and Heteronormative Politics
[T]o understand the forces that . . . make up the us and them comprising
the affinities and enmities of enduring inter-state inequality and systemically
violent conflict, then we must move . . . towards a deeper understanding of
the rules that hold together the state as a membership organisation.
(Stevens 2006:755)
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While patriarchal dominance and gendered ideology were contested and only
eventually took shape in early state formation, they were largely taken for granted
in European state-making processes and their colonizing practices. In the intervening centuries, patriarchal authority was routinized in monotheistic belief
systems and patriarchal kinship reproduced and extended (unequal) divisions of
authority, power, labour, and resources. The modern eras celebration of
rationalist/objectivist science did complicate how authority was legitimated, but
not how it was gendered masculine.
By definition, European state-making replicated earlier processes: centralization of resources and authority, organization of military capacity, and ideological
consolidation under elite control. But state-making in the modern era was shaped
by both the legacy of earlier states and the emergence of new techniques, modalities, and operations of power. Whether described as the penetrating infrastructural
power of states (Giddens 1987; Mann 1984) or new mechanisms of disciplinary
power and biopolitics (Foucault 1980), the key insight is a shift from more to less
direct operations of power and new understandings of government.
Modern states required far more knowledge about their subjects. Hence, their
interest in and cultivation of the social and human life sciences (to provide
expertise) and development of bio-political strategies (censuses, statistics,
programmes to enhance the health, education, etc. of expanding populations) all
in support of producing civilized subjects who will govern and care for themselves and exercise their citizenship responsibly (Rose 1996:45). In complex and
varying ways, the emerging art of government (re)configured categories and
relations of sex/gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race.5 But while there are many
critiques of sexism, of heteronormativity, and of nationalism, how these overlap
and interact has only recently become a focus of inquiry (e.g. Morgensen 2010;
Puar 2007). I turn then to briefly consider how pervasively nationalism presumes
and tends to reproduce sexist and heteronormative assumptions and practices.6
First, nationalist policies involve regulating under what conditions, when, how
many, and whose children women will bear. The forms taken are historically
specific shaped by socio-religious norms, technological developments, economic pressures, and political priorities. But states often seek to increase or
replenish their numbers, and in the context of pronatalist policies, nonreproductive sexual activities are deemed threatening to national interests. States
may restrict access to contraception, criminalize abortion, reward childbearing,
demonize homosexuality, and/or represent the primary purpose of family life as
sexual reproduction. In general, potentially reproductive women will be encouraged (pressured?) to bear children for the nation while non-reproductive sexual
activities will be discouraged (punished?) for undermining national objectives.
Second, states have an interest in whether children are appropriately socialized, and therefore in the constitution of families/households as primary sites of
social reproduction. In particular, states sustain sexist and heteronormative principles through legislation regarding marriage, child adoption and custody, and
transmission of property and citizenship claims. Exclusively heteropatriarchal
family life ensures that heterosexual coupling and gendered divisions of labour/
power/authority are the only apparent options, which reproduces sexist and heter61

V. Spike Peterson: The Intended and Unintended Queering of States/Nations

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. Mens 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 lands 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 womens 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 1992:56). 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
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shared, in theory all men (compared to women) can identify with the cultural
valorization of men and (hegemonic) masculinity and mens favoured access to
public sphere activities, authority, and power. And in practice, militarization as a
male-dominated activity encourages men to bond politically and militarily as they
play out the us vs. them script of protecting their own women and violating the
enemys men/women. In effect, modern states cultivate male homosocial politics
celebrating masculinitys cultural valorization and (abstract) male bonding across
(actual) differences while decisively proscribing homosexual practices.8
Indeed, in modern states and in most countries today homosexuals (and
women) were excluded from military service. Recent challenges to this exclusion expose how deeply heterosexist premises underpin hegemonic masculinity.
As a site of celebrated (because non-sexual) homosocial bonding, the military
affords men a relatively unique opportunity to experience intimacy and interdependence, especially with men, in ways that heterosexist identities and divisions of labour otherwise constrain. Cohn (1998:145) argues that for many, the
military is effectively a guarantee of heterosexual masculinity, affording a rare
situation where
men are allowed to experience erotic, sexual, and emotional impulses that
they would otherwise have to censor . . . for fear of being seen . . . as
homosexual and therefore not real men. They are not only escaping a
negative imputations of homosexuality but gaining a positive, the ability
to be with other men in ways that transcend the limitations on male relationships that most men live under in civilian life.
Finally, the heterosexist state/nation denies homosexual bonding to both men and
women. But whereas men are expected to bond politically (homosocially) with
other men of the state/nation, the dichotomy of public and private spheres denies
womens homosocial bonding as well. Rather, as an effect of heteropatriarchal
households and inheritance rules, women are linked to the state through their
fathers/husbands and are expected to bond only through and with their men.9
Women then are not merely symbols or victims within nationalist struggles. They
are also agents: supporting their men/nation, participating in militarization, and
increasingly, taking up arms. To be effective, however, in hyper-masculinized
arenas, women are pressured to appear and reinforce heteronormative/masculinist
strategies, including the cultural devalorization and physical destruction of
Others.
The Queering of States/Nations
Heterosexuality is at once necessary to the states ability to constitute and
imagine itself, while simultaneously marking a site of its own instability.
(Alexander 1997:65, citing Hart 1994:8)
I have argued that the hierarchical binaries of embodied male-female sex difference and cultural masculine-feminine gender differentiation were constitutive of
early state-making, and taken for granted in modern (nationalist) state-making and
its colonizing projects. Gradually, most people/nations have been incorporated
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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 groups 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 ones birthplace or parentage, is a movement that will be
queer.
(Stevens 2004:225)
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Notes
1

Briefly here: Heteropatriarchy combines the twin processes of heterosexualization

and patriarchy (Alexander 1997:65); masculinism refers to the system/structure of
masculine privilege and/or the ideological codes that normalize gender hierarchy;
gender operates intersectionally; and while masculinity is generally privileged over femininity, context-specific masculinities may be devalorized relative to hegemonic masculinities. I understand feminism as theoretical/practical efforts to transform all structural
hierarchies (e.g. racism, heterosexism, imperialist geopolitics) intertwined and naturalized by feminizing (devalorizing) the Other (e.g. Peterson 2005; Peterson and Runyan
2010).
2
As Cameron (1997:21) notes, Hobbes depiction of life in the state of nature as
nasty, brutish and short was pure speculation. Critiques of Eurocentric and masculinist bias in archaeological research include Bolger (2006, 2010); Conkey (2003);
Dobres (2004); Joyce (2008); Nelson (1997, 2006); Nelson and Rosen-Ayalon (2002);
and Pyburn (2004).
3
There was resistance to initial centralization as well as cycles of resistance after some
stabilization of state formation (Feinman and Marcus 1998); and of course, non-state
formations continued to exist both during and beyond the period of early state formation.
My account draws especially from Cameron (1997); Dobres (2004); Frader (2006); Lerner
(1986); and Stearns (2006). This short essay cannot address complexities and debates but
summarizes from extensive research and reflects well-developed arguments in the relevant
bodies of scholarship. For references in support of the claims and argumentation presented
here and my own attempts to complicate them see, e.g., Peterson (1988, 1992, 1997,
2010a).
4
Terms referenced here (family, household, public, private) carry multiple meanings and
typically overstate the formalization of such categories in early social formations. They
appear here for brevity and to highlight the significant contrast between kinship networks
(without rigid divisions) and states (with their structural divisions and new household
base).
5
On developing gender and race hierarchies and ideologies, see, e.g., Federici (2004);
Hartman (2004); Landes (1998); McClintock (1995); Mosse (1985, 1996); Pateman (1988,
1989); Stoler (1995).
6
For elaboration and extensive references, see Peterson (1999), from which the following
section draws.
7
On justifying colonial wars and obscuring their racist, economic, and heteronormative
dynamics, see Chatterjee (1986); McClintock (1995); Said (1979, 1993); Spivak (1987);
Stoler (1991). Marginalized (read: feminized) men more generally are subject to this
crusading logic: in colonial wars to modernize gender relations, nationalist wars to
promote idealized (heteronormative) families, wars on poverty that demoralize the (racialized) underclass, and battles against HIV/AIDS that demonize gay men.
8
As Parker et al. (1991:6) note: Typically represented as a passionate brotherhood, the
nation finds itself compelled to distinguish its proper homosociality from more explicitly
sexualized male-male relations, a compulsion that requires the identification, isolation, and
containment of male homosexuality. See also Sedgwick (1985, 1990).
9
In Alexanders (1997:64) words, womens sexual agency . . . and erotic autonomy have
always been troublesome for the state . . . pos[ing] a challenge to the ideological anchor of
an originary nuclear family, . . . which perpetuates the fiction that the family is the cornerstone of society. Erotic autonomy signals danger to the heterosexual family and to the
nation.

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