Jake Gogats; May 2, 2017

Weber, Cynthia. 2016. “Queer Intellectual Curiosity as International Relations Method:

Developing Queer International Relations Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks.”
International Studies Quarterly 60: 11-23. Accessed January 8, 2017. Oxford University
Press Journals.

Queer Intellectual Curiosity as IR Method: Developing

Queer IR Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks
What is “homosexuality”? Who is “the homosexual”? How might theoretical and methodological
frameworks draw out the relevance of these questions for International Relations (IR)?

Homosexuality: constructed by inserting perversion into bodies, and then pathologizing it so

that it is subject to “moral, medical, and psychological correction” (11-12)

Roadmap:
1. Victorian colonial practice, the concept of “perverse homosexual” and colonized
savage
2. Obama administration foreign policy leveraging of gay rights as human rights, “the
normal homosexual”
3. EU Euro-vision debates about Neuwirth/Wurst, “the normal and/or perverse
homosexual” (12)
Goals:
- “Outline theoretical and methodological approaches that take a queer intellectual
curiosity about figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” as their
methodological core” (11)
- “Each illustrates a different alignment of “homosexuality” with (ab)normality”
- “Examples demonstrate that Queer intellectual curiosity about homosexuality doesn’t
just “add” it to IR, but rather completely re-examines major issues like colonialism” (13)

Developing Queer IR Methods

a. Developing Productive Power, and Networks of Power/Knowledge/Pleasure
i. How did Victorians put sex into discourse?
1. Scientific discourse about sex, to make “the homosexual body”
confess its scientific truth (14)
2. “Science” invented “the homosexual”, “the hysterical woman”,
“the masturbating child”
ii. How did productive power work to figure “the homosexual”?
1. Prescribed a regimen of normalization to “fix” the homosexual
iii. Why did Victorian Society invent the homosexual?
1. Made it possible to identify normal sexual behavior
2. Made the heterosexual couple “normal”
 iv. Who is the homosexual?
1. Was produced by similar construction of “developed” and
“normal” versus “underdeveloped” (14)
b. Figuration (much of this drawn from Haraway)
i. Figuration: Distillations of shared meanings in forms or images
1. Haraway: “employment of semiotic tropes that combine
knowledge, practices, and power to inform how we understand
our worlds”
ii. Haraway: Tropes are material and semiotic expressions of actual things
that express who we understand those things
iii. Haraway: Temporality: expresses a relationship to time, figurations are
historically rooted
iv. Clinton presented the homosexual as a static rights holder, always a
human deserving rights
1. The temporality in this case is the way gay rights were used to
evaluate other nations over time and depending on circumstances
v. Haraway: Performativities: how repeated iterations of acts constitute the
subjects who are said to be performing them
c. Statecraft as Mancraft
i. Logocentrism: how the word (a single specific word) grounds all meaning
in a linguistic system because of how it is positioned as a universal
referent that is located outside of history
ii. Historically, according to Derrida, these have been God, man, and the
modern man
iii. Ashley argues the “modern man” is the foundation of the sovereign
nation-state
1. Also allows Obama Administration and Victorian society to argue
that their understanding of the “homosexual” is ahistorical
a. Obama: homosexuals have always existed and have always
been humans deserving of rights
b. Victorian Society: “science” is supposedly not influenced
by history
d. From Statecraft as Mancraft to Queer Logics of Statecraft
i. A Plural “logoi” (more than one logos, the central word)
ii. “And/or” exceeds a binary logic (like either/or)
1. a subject and be both one thing and another while simultaneously
being one thing or another
iii. Example, Conchita Wurst is a potentially unruly threat to bring “the
violence of the world we live in at the heart of the home at the heart of
the national self” but also a “sovereign man upon whom a normal or
perverse European order might be founded