Queer Intellectual Curiosity as International Relations Method:  Developing Queer International Relations Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks

Cynthia Weber

Article first published online: 3 SEP 2015 DOI: 10.1111/isqu.12212 This article outlines two theoretical and methodological approaches that take a queer intellectual curiosity about figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” as their core. These offer ways to conduct international relations research on “the homosexual” and on international relations figurations more broadly, e.g. from “the woman” to “the human rights holder.” The first approach provides a method for analyzing figurations of “the homosexual” and sexualized orders of international relations that are inscribed in IR as either normal or perverse. The second approach offers instructions on how to read plural figures and plural logics that signify as normal and/or perverse (and which might be described as queer). Together, they propose techniques, devices and research questions to investigate singular and plural IR figurations – including but not exclusively those of “the homosexual” – that map international phenomena as diverse as colonialism, human rights, and the formation of states and international communities in ways that exceed IR survey research techniques that, for example, incorporate “the homosexual” into IR research through a “sexuality variable.”

1 Queer Intellectual Curiosity as International Relations Method: Developing Queer International Relations Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks Cynthia Weber University of Sussex Forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly Abstract: This article outlines two theoretical and methodological approaches that take a queer intellectual curiosity about figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” as their core. These offer ways to conduct international-relations research on “the homosexual” and on international-relations figurations more broadly, e.g. from “the woman” to “the human rights holder.” The first approach provides a method for analyzing figurations of “the homosexual” and sexualized orders of international relations that are inscribed in IR as either normal or perverse. The second approach offers instructions on how to read plural figures and plural logics that signify as normal and/or perverse (and which might be described as queer). Together, they propose techniques, devices and research questions to investigate singular and plural IR figurations – including but not exclusively those of “the homosexual” – that map international phenomena as diverse as colonialism, human rights, and the formation of states and international communities in ways that exceed IR survey research techniques that, for example, incorporate “the homosexual” into IR research through a “sexuality variable.” The new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals….Homosexuality appeared as one 2 of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. - Michel Foucault (1980:42-43) Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights….The Obama Administration defends the human rights of LGBT people as part of our comprehensive human rights policy and as a priority of our foreign policy. - US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton (2011) We are unity, and we are unstoppable. - Eurovision Song Contest Winner Tom Neuwirth and/as Conchita Wurst (2014)1 What is “homosexuality”? Who is “the homosexual”? How might theoretical and methodological frameworks draw out the relevance of these questions for International Relations (IR)? I outline theoretical and methodological approaches that take a queer intellectual curiosity about figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” as their methodological core. These approaches offer ways to conduct IR research on a broad range of subjects. A queer intellectual curiosity – akin to Cynthia Enloe’s (2004) feminist curiosity – refuses to take for granted the personal-to-international institutional arrangements, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that figure “homosexuality” and “the homosexual.” It investigates how these figurations powerfully attach to—and detach from—material bodies and hence become mobilized in international politics. In doing so, it challenges the common assumption that (homo)sexuality is a trivial matter in world politics. 1 Separating the drag artist Neuwirth from his creation Wurst is difficult if not 3 The quotations that open this article demonstrate the historically variable character of understandings of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual.” For 18thcentury Victorians, homosexuality referred to sexual practices of sodomy between men. Not only did Victorians consider homosexuality an aberrant sexual practice, but they also specified “the sodomite” as a new “alien strain” (Foucault, 1980:53-73)—a new “species” called “the homosexual” (also see Somerville, 2000; Hoad, 2000). The invention of a new population—composed of the perverse “homosexual” as an “abomination” of normal sexuality—occurred by discursively implanting the “perversion” (Foucault, 1980:Chapter 2) of “homosexuality” into the bodies of individuals (Foucault, 1980:36). Subjected to scientific study and biopolitical management, this white Western European “homosexual”—with his naturalized “homosexual” desire for same-sex sodomy—was pathologized and became subject to moral, medical, and psychological correction. These dominant understandings of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” as perverse persist, even in an era when many increasingly see “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” as normal. For example, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s 2011 Human Rights Day speech describes “homosexuality” not as perverse sexual conduct but as love within a same-sex couple. In many circles, the “cringe-worthy” term “the homosexual” that connotes perversion (Peters, 2014) disappears altogether, to be replaced by “the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered”— “the LGBT” for short. Imagined in the image of the white, modern, Western neoliberal citizen, “the LGBT” emerges as a normal minority human being within a universal population of normal human beings. What distinguishes “the LGBT” is unjust discrimination associated with the object of its love/affection. Such discourse surrounding “The LGBT” naturalizes “homosexual” desires for same-sex love. It domesticates “The LGBT” through gay marriage, gay consumerism, and gay patriotism (Duggan, 2003). Indeed, it is not uncommon for people to understand “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” as either normal or perverse. This binary becomes particularly salient when statespeople and religious leaders mobilize its underlying understandings for political gain. We see this in how some European leaders took up the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest winner Tom Neuwirth and/as Conchita Wurst (hereafter Neuwirth/Wurst) as a figure who embodied either a normal or a perverse image of an integrated Europe. Russian nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, for example, claimed Wurst signified “the end of Europe” because, “They don’t have men and 4 women any more. They have “it”” (Davies, 2014). In contrast, Austrian Green Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Ulrike Lunacek commented, “Conchita Wurst has a very important message that…has to do with what the EU stands for: Equal rights, fundamental rights, the right to live your life without fear, for LGBT and other minorities” (EurActiv, 2014). The figure of Neuwirth/Wurst inspired such strong views not because Neuwirth/Wurst could be read as exclusively normal or perverse but because Neuwirth/Wurst could also be read as normal and perverse at the same time—and across a number of different registers. Certainly, Neuwirth/Wurst appeared as normal and/or perverse in the registers of sex (male and/or female), gender (masculine and/or feminine) and sexuality (heterosexual and/or homosexual), as the name Conchita Wurst in part implies. The name combines the Spanish slang for vagina (“conchita”) with the German word sausage (“wurst”) and – read together – is Austrian slang for, “It doesn’t matter.”2 But Neuwirth/Wurst can also be read as normal and/or perverse in registers that matter intensely in international relations. These include nationality (where Neuwirth/Wurst is Austrian and/or German and/or Colombian) and “civilization” (where Neuwirth/Wurst is Indigenous and/or Hispanic and/or European). What proves so striking about these figurations of Neuwirth/Wurst, as I elaborate later, is that Neuwirth/Wurst’s IR registers of normality and/or perversion always function through—and never function independently of—Neuwirth/Wurst’s and/or sex, gender, and sexuality. These three very different figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” matter not simply because they mark major historical shifts in dominant Western perspective on “the homosexual” and “homosexuality.” They also illustrate how specific figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” make it (im)possible for Western “experts” to categorize people and geopolitical spaces as normal or pathological—and to react to them accordingly. Indeed, specific figurations of “homosexuality” and of “the homosexual” enable and contest specific modes of organization and regulation of national, regional, and international politics. For example, figurations of “the savage, the primitive, the colonized” (Stoler, 1995:7) and “the underdeveloped” (Hoad, 2000) all appear in Victorian colonial discourse as sexualized and racialized degenerate and/or deviant “perverse homosexuals.” These figurations played a role in licensing Victorian sovereign states 2 Thanks to Melanie Richter‐Montpetit for this translations. 5 to subject entire colonialized populations to imperial rule, as Stoler’s (1995) analysis of colonial educational practices illustrates. Traces of these figurations linger in contemporary Western figurations of “the unwanted im/migrant” and “the terrorist,” which inform policies on immigration and security (Luibhéid, 2008; Puar and Rai, 2002; Puar, 2007). Figurations of “the homosexual” as “the LGBT” justified the Obama Administration’s global support for gay rights as human rights. This support both promised to extend human rights to all “LGBT populations” (Langlois, 2015:28, 34) and justified the Obama Administration’s monitoring of how some states performed against US standards of tolerance toward “the LGBT” (Rao, 2012). Finally, figurations of “the homosexual” as normal and/or perverse sparked debate in contemporary Europe about how the (dis)ordering of sex, gender, and sexuality in traditional binary terms might progress or imperil Europe “itself.” In these debates, European leaders “weaponized” Neuwirth/Wurst (Black, 2014) by deploying some elements of Neuwirth/Wurst’s “unstoppable unity” to enable or disable specific renderings of European integration and of Europe “itself,” Yet because there were at least three legitimate readings of Neuwirth/Wurst circulating in debates about Europe – Neuwirth/Wurst as normal, Neuwirth/Wurst as perverse, and Neuwirth/Wurst as normal and/or perverse – attempts to use Neuwirth/Wurst to anchor any singular vision of an integrated Europe did as much to disorder (knowledge about) European integration as they did to order it/them. 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. In this article, I develop two theoretical and methodological approaches that put a queer intellectual curiosity about “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” at the core of their investigations of international relations. I develop one such approach by mining classic texts in Queer Theory, Feminist Technoscience Studies, Poststructuralist International Relations, and Queer International Relations for theoretical concepts and methodological procedures. Specifically, I use Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1980) to recover three specific elements from his analysis: putting sex into discourse, productive power, and networks of 7 power/knowledge/pleasure. I suggest that these elements—together with Feminist Technoscience Studies scholar Donna Haraway’s conceptualization of “figuration” as the distillation of shared meanings in forms or images (1997),3 Feminist and Queer Theory scholar Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (1999), and Poststructuralist IR scholar Richard Ashley’s arguments about “statecraft as mancraft” (1989)— provide the necessary concepts and devices to analyze figurations of “the homosexual” and sexualized orders of international relations that are inscribed in international discourse and practice as either normal or perverse. These theories in combination generate important research questions, but they neglect to analyze plural figures like Neuwirth/Wurst that defy categorization as either normal or perverse. They therefore lack the tools to assess the sexualized (dis)orders of international relations to which such categorizations give rise. In a second reading of these theories – especially Ashley’s statecraft as mancraft – I attempt to correct this oversight by turning to Roland Barthes’ logic of a pluralized and/or (1974 and 1976). Barthes offers instructions for reading plural figures and logics that signify as normal and/or perverse through what can be vast matrices of sexes, genders, and sexualities. I view those plural figures and logics that are constructed in relation to—but not necessarily exclusively through—sexes, genders, and sexualities as queer. In doing so, I follow Eve Sedgwick’s description of queer as “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). Reading Ashley’s statecraft as mancraft with Barthes’ queer logic of a pluralized and/or, I propose an additional lens through which to investigate figurations of “the homosexual,” sovereign man, sovereign states, and sexualized orders of international relations – what I call “queer logics of statecraft.” Some may view these Queer IR methods as additional instruments in IR’s conceptual toolbox “for organizing empirical material and practical research designs” (Aradau and Huysmans, 2013:2; also see Jackson, 2011). Others may see them as lacking the status of proper or unique methods. They might understand them as a queer lens attached primarily to feminist and poststructuralist techniques (Plummer, 2003:520). Still others may understand them as performative devices “experimentally 3 Thanks to Maureen McNeil for this formulation. 8 connecting and assembling fragments of ontology, epistemology, theories, techniques and data” through which “substantive worlds” are called into being and are acted upon (Aradau and Huysmans, 2013:3, 18). Regardless, engagement with Queer IR methods enriches how we analyze core IR concerns like hierarchy and anarchy (Lake, 2009, Bially Mattern, forthcoming). Queer IR methods broaden our thinking about how to study a wide array of IR mobilizations of normality, perversion and stigma (see Towns, 2010; Adler-Nissen, 2014; Zarakol, 2011). Scholars might consider how “the homosexual” – like “the woman” – becomes another “standard of civilization” (Towns, 2014; Hoad, 2000; Puar, 2007; Rao, 2014a). They might challenge the incorporation of “homosexuality” into IR as primarily “a sexuality variable” (Weber, 1998a). Or they might ponder the intellectual and political effects of employing critical methods in IR and in international politics (Aradau and Huysmans, 2013). In my view, these Queer IR methods make especially plural figures and plural logics easier to identify and analyze. They thereby highligh the roles of plural figures and plural logics in the organization, regulation and conduct of international politics. Queer IR methods hold the potential to disrupt intellectual practices that either exclude or apriori fix understandings of “the homosexual” and other plural figures – from “the woman” (Enloe, 2004; Town, 2014) to “the human rights holder” (Wilkinson and Langlois, 2014) to variously normalized and/or stigmatized subjectivities (Adler-Nissen, 2014; Zarakol, 2011) – as a condition for the conduct of research. Developing Queer IR Methods Discourse, Productive Power, and Networks of Power/Knowledge/Pleasure Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (hereafter HoS) instructs its readers how to analyze modern sexuality by offering four primary recommendations: 1. Analyze how sex is put into discourse; 2. Analyze the functions and effects of productive power; 9 3. Understand productive power as working through networks of power/knowledge/pleasure; and 4. Analyze how understandings of “the normal” and “the perverse” are frozen, without assuming they are either true or forever fixed. In this section, I offer a reading of HoS that draws out these instructions. All of these instructions follow from Foucault’s central claim in HoS that the organizing principle of sexuality from 18th century Europe to “the contemporary West” is how “sex is ‘put into discourse’” (Foucault, 1980:11), e.g., how specific meanings of sexualities and sexual subjectivities are produced through specific – even repressive – discursive formulations that bring sexualities like “homosexuality” and sexual subjectivities like “the homosexual” into being. For while Victorian institutions from law to medicine certainly repressed “deviant” sexual practices and sexuality, in so doing they also discursively invented both sexual norms and the “sexual deviants” who defied them. Foucault’s “Instruction 1” follows from this observation – analyze how sex is put into discourse. How specifically did Victorians put sex into discourse? Foucault’s answer is through scientific discourses about sexuality – a “scientia sexualis” including biology, physiology, and psychology – that sought to make “the homosexual body” confess its scientific truth. “Scientia sexualis,” Foucault claims, functioned as a kind of productive power to invent “the homosexual” and other sexual figurations like “the hysterical woman” and “the masturbating child” during the Victorian era. This is why Foucault offers us “Instruction 2” – analyze the functions and effects of productive power. How specifically did productive power work to figure “the homosexual”? Working on every surface of “the homosexual body” and penetrating deep into “the homosexual soul”, theologians, doctors, and psychiatrists medicalized, surveilled, and managed “the homosexual.” Their biopolitical apparatuses produced “the alien strain” of “the homosexual” as scientific fact (Foucault 1980:42-44, 53-73). “The homosexual”, then, was not a discovery whose empirical reality Victorian scientists examined. Rather, it was through the scientific examination of his “sexual deviance” and the therapeutic correction he was subjected to that Victorian society brought “the homosexual” into being. This scientifically-produced “homosexual” was prescribed a regimen of normalization, presumably to make possible his sexual reconstitution from one who 10 desired perverse sex4 to one who desired normal sex, where normal sex was represented by the presumptively white, Christian, bourgeois, able-bodied, cisgendered, procreative heterosexual “Malthusian couple.” But what this regime of normalization also did was subject “the homosexual” to constant surveillance, management and correction. This is how “the homosexual” was located in a complex nexus of what Foucault calls the system of power/knowledge/pleasure. This brings us to Foucault’s “Instruction 3” – understand productive power as working through networks of power/knowledge/pleasure. Why did Victorian society invent “the homosexual,” diagnose individuals as afflicted with “homosexuality,” and subject them to processes of normalization? Foucault offers several reasons. One reason is that “the homosexual” (like other perverse Victorian figures) made it possible to identify normal sexual behavior, discursively implant normality in the procreative heterosexual Malthusian couple, and circulate social understandings of this couple as exemplary of normal, healthy, moral Victorian sexuality. Thus, a perverse/normal dichotomy produced all manner of Victorian sexual subjectivities and organized them socially, scientifically, and morally in ways that made the “normal,” privileged heterosexual procreative couple appear to be coherent and whole. It is only by abandoning what Foucault calls “the repressive hypothesis” – “the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression” (Foucault, 1980:49) – that we can appreciate how systems of power/knowledge/pleasure actually function. “Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement” (Foucault, 1980:48). What they make possible are figurations of sexualized subjects like “the homosexual” as well as “institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make [normative sexualities like] heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged” (Berlant and Warner, 1995: 548, footnote 2; my brackets).5 Foucault takes seriously the question “who is “the homosexual”?”, then, not so he can get to “the truth” about “the homosexual” but to understand how systems of 4 Or, in the case of “the hysterical woman”, desired no (heterosexual) sex. 5 This is Berlant and Warner’s definition of heteronormativity (1995). 11 power/knowledge/pleasure function to produce the “perverse homosexual” and his “opposite,” “normal” Malthusian couple. This makes possible exploration of the circulation of these apparent representations in intimate as well as national, regional and international contexts. For example, we can explore how our knowledge of “the underdeveloped” as perverse and “the LGBT” as normal are in part produced by/through some of the same scientific systems of power/knowledge/pleasure that produce “the perverse homosexual” and “the normal homosexual” respectively. In IR, we see this in how Modernization and Development Theory draws upon Talcott Parson’s structural-functionalist evolutionary sociology to mark “the underdeveloped” as “the perverse homosexual” who is the deviant, dysfunctional remainder of social, biological, and political development (Weber, 2016). This is in contrast to how Hilary Clinton extents “the normal” to include “the LGBT couple” that is reproductive for their nation-state, to refigure “the perverse homosexual” as “the normal homosexual” (Clinton, 2011; also see Peterson, 2014). What disconcerts many scholars and statespeople is how Neuwirth/Wurst combines aspects “the perverse, underdeveloped homosexual” (e.g., as the rural Colombian Conchita Wurst) and “the normal, developed homosexual” (e.g., as the European “LGBT”) at the same time. Foucault’s “Instruction 4” – analyze how understandings of “the normal” and “the perverse” are frozen, without assuming they are either true or forever fixed – exposes figurations of “the homosexual” as “the underdeveloped,” “the LGBT,” and “the Euro-visioned bearded drag queen” not as true or false but as powerful apparent representations whose meanings and functions vary radically throughout history and across the globe. Foucault’s genealogical method highlights the changeable nature of figurations of “the homosexual”, by focusing on different historical representations of “the homosexual” and asking “How did these very different understandings of “the homosexual” as, for example, the Victorian sexual and developmental “primitive” or “underdeveloped” and the Obama administration’s normal “LGBT” come about?” Yet because Foucault’s instructions about analyzing modern sexuality and sexual subjectivities are very sweeping, it is useful to look to additional theorists to provide more precise concepts and devices. In this vein, I turn to Donna Haraway’s Butlarian theorization of figuration. 12 Figuration What exactly might we look for when we examine figurations of “the homosexual”? Writing in a very different context to Foucault’s,6 Donna Haraway discusses some specific techniques of “figuration” that allow us to employ figuration as a critical conceptual devise (Kuntsman, 2009:29). Haraway’s conceptualization of figuration – which is compatible with Foucault’s analysis and builds upon Butler’s notion of performativity – can help us explore in more detail the figure of “the homosexual.” Figurations are distillations of shared meanings in forms or images. They do not (mis)represent the world, for to do so implies the world as a signified pre-exists them. Rather, figurations emerge out of discursive and material semiotic assemblages that condense diffuse imaginaries about the world into specific forms or images that bring specific worlds into being. This makes figurations powerful signifiers that approximate but never properly represent seemingly signified worlds, even though figurations are evoked as if they did represent pre-existing worlds. It is this latter move that reifies figurations and the worlds they create, making both potentially “flat, unproductive, stifling and destructive” (Grau, 2004:12; McNeil, 2007). This is why we need techniques like Haraway’s to analyze precisely how figurations are crafted and employed. Haraway explains figuration as the employment of semiotic tropes that combine knowledges, practices, and power to (in)form how we map our worlds and understand the actual things in those worlds (1997).7 Unpacking Haraway’s description, we are left with four key elements through which figurations take specific forms: tropes, temporalities, performativities, and worldings (1997:11). Tropes are material and semiotic expressions of actual things that express how we understand those actual things. Tropes are figures of speech that are not “literal or self-identical” to what they describe (Haraway, 1997:11). Figures of speech enable us to express what something or someone is like while (potentially) at the same time 6 Haraway employs figuration to capture ideas about embodiment and materiality in the context of Feminist Technoscience Studies. 7 My explanation of figuration condenses and paraphrases a longer discussion in Weber (2015), which explains why there appears to be no queer international theory. 13 grasping that the figuration is not identical to the figure of speech we have employed. This is what makes figuration something that both makes representation appear to be possible and interrupts representation in any literal sense. Haraway argues that language necessitates deployment of figuration and its inability to achieve literal representations. This is because all types of language – whether textual, visual, artistic – involves “at least some kind of displacement that can trouble identifications and certainties” (Haraway, 1997:11) between a figure and an actual thing. Investigating figurations of “the homosexual” as “an alien species” to the Victorians as opposed to “the homosexual,” as “the LGBT rights holder” to the Obama administration and as both “an alien species” and “the normal LGBT rights holder” in the figure of Neuwirth/Wurst allows analysis of what makes these figurations possible but also what keeps them from referring to specific material bodies engaged in specific forms of sexual practices, specific forms of loving or specific forms of (singular) being. Haraway’s second element of figuration is temporalities. Temporality expresses a relationship to time. Haraway notes that figurations are historically rooted in progressive, eschatological temporality because they are embedded within “the semiotics of Western Christian realism.” Because Western Christian figures hold the promise of salvation in the afterlife, they embody this progressive temporality (Haraway, 1997:9). This medieval notion of developmental temporality persists as a vital aspect of (some) contemporary figurations, even when contemporary figures take secular forms (e.g., when it is science, not God, that promises to deliver us from evil through technological innovation; Haraway, 1997:10). But this developmental time may not be applied to every figuration in the same way. For example, because the Victorian “homosexual” was figured not only through European scientific discourses but also through discourses of race and colonialism (Stoler, 1995), how “the homosexual” was related to developmental temporalities depended very much on who it was (colonizer vs. savage) and where it was (Europe vs. the colonies). It was in part thanks to how developmental temporalities were racialized (Stoler, 1995) and spatialized (Hoad, 2000) that it was possible for the white Western European “homosexual” to be put on a course of progressive correction so he could live within Victorian society, while figurations of whole populations of racially darkened colonial subjects endlessly oscillated between the irredeemable “non-progressive homosexual” and the redeemable “morally 14 perfectible homosexual” (Bhabha, 1994:118), both of whom must live under Victorian imperial rule. Centuries later, these racialized and colonial legacies of “the homosexual” live on, but in ways that appear to be completely different from those of their Victorian predecessors. For example, Clinton’s “LGBT rights holder” is not cast as progressing. Rather, “the LGBT” is a temporally static figure articulated in universal moral terms. By definition, this figure always was and always will be a human being like every other human being. This is what empowers “the LGBT” to “claim gay rights as human rights, as every human being has a claim to human rights. This does not mean that a developmental temporality is absent from Obama administration discourse on “the LGBT”. Rather, developmental temporality is central to Obama administration discourse, albeit differently than it was to the Victorians. This is because developmental temporality is not implanted in the figure of “the LGBT” itself. Instead, it is located in relations between sovereign nationstates, where the Obama administration uses a state’s progress toward their appreciation of gay rights as human rights as their measure of development. This is evident in US policies toward Uganda and Russia, for example (Rao, 2014b; Wilkinson and Langlous, 2014). Striving toward this specific kind of development is what it means to the Obama administration “to be on the right side of history” (Clinton, 2011; also see Rao, 2012). It is, somewhat surprisingly, Tom Neuwirth’s Euro-pop bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst that most closely engages with Western Christian realism and its progressive, eschatological temporality as described by Haraway. While Neuwirth/Wurst’s declaration, “We’re unstoppable” aligns Neuwirth/Wurst with a modern progressive developmental temporality, as a cis-male styled with long flowing hair and a beard while wearing a gown and singing “Rise like a Phoenix”, Neuwirth/Wurst has been read as a resurrected Christ-like figure (Ring, 2014). This has lead some European political and religious leaders to debate whether Neuwirth/Wurst is a developmental vision of salvation or sacrilege for contemporary Europe (Weber, 2016). These differences in how figurations of “the homosexual” relate to temporalities underscore the importance of Haraway’s third element – performativities. Coined by Judith Butler to explain how sexes, genders, and sexualities appear to be normal, natural and true, the term performativity expresses 15 how repeated iterations of acts constitute the subjects who are said to be performing them (Butler, 1999:xv). Applying Nietzsche’s idea that there is no doer behind the deed and that the deed is everything (1999:33) to an analysis of sexes, genders and sexualities, Butler argues that enactments of gender make it appear as if sex – which Butler understands as a social construct – is natural and normal, and as if particular sexed bodies map “naturally” onto particular genders. It is through the everyday inhabiting of these various sexes, genders, and sexualities by everyday people who performatively enact them that the subjectivities of these doers of sex, gender, and sexuality appear to come into being. This does not mean that – once enacted – performativities freeze sexed, gendered, and sexualized subjectivities and the networks of power and pleasure which are productive of them. Rather, because each enactment is itself particular, it holds the possibility of reworking, rewiring and resisting both “frozen” notions of sex, gender and sexuality and their institutionalized organizations of power. Following Butler, Haraway argues that “[f]igurations are performative images that can be inhabited” (Haraway, 1997:11). In the case of the Victorian “homosexual”, “the LGBT rights holder,” and “the Euro-pop bearded drag queen,” this means these figurations – these figures of speech – through their repetition under specific conditions come to be understood as inhabitable images of oneself (or, e.g., one’s vision of Europe) or of others. “The homosexual” may choose to performatively inhabit these figurations, or this inhabiting might be imposed upon “the homosexual.” For example, it is hard to imagine the Victorian “homosexual” willingly embracing himself as “perverse.” It is even harder to imagine colonial subjects embracing their figuration by Victorians as akin to the “homosexual” in their perversion while distinct from the “homosexual” because their racialization and “primitiveness” designate them as incapable of progression or slow to progress. In contrast, the contemporary figuration of “the homosexual” as “the LGBT” may seem to be uncontroversially positive. Many “homosexuals” welcome the opportunity to inhabit the image of “the LGBT rights holder” because of how it appears to signify both normality and progress. At the same time, other contemporary “homosexuals” find the image of “the LGBT rights holder” too constraining. Their objections center on how “the LGBT” is produced by and is productive of institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that value only hetero/homonormative ways of being “homosexual” (in marriage, the military, and 16 consumption) and devalue queer ways of inhabiting one’s sexuality (Duggan, 2003:50), illustrating a tension between IR conceptualizations of norms as uniformly beneficial (e.g., Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998) and queer critiques of norms/normalization. As for Neuwirth/Wurst, by both embracing and exceeding hetero/homonormativities, his/her/their performative figuration complicates both “the LGBT” and a hetero/homonormative vs. queer dichotomy. These illustrations suggest figurations are never stable. For every performance of a figuration depends upon innumerable particularities, including: historical circumstances, geopolitical context, spatial location, social/psychic/affective/political dispositions as well as perceived/attributed traits (racial, sexual, classed, gendered, [dis]abled) of individuals in relation to the figurations they are presumed to inhabit, an individual’s success, failure or jamming of their assigned/assumed figuration as they performatively enact it, and how these performativities are received and read by others. Because no two performative enactments are ever identical (Butler, 1999), every repetition and inhabitation introduces some, even tiny, amount of difference. What this means for figurations of “the homosexual” is they are never completely frozen, for they are always only distilled forms or images that change – even in small ways – through their every iteration and inhabitation. Therefore, institutional arrangements of power/knowledge/pleasure – be they heteronormativities and/or homonormativities – are likewise less stable than they appear to be. All of these aspects of performativity – in combination with how tropes and temporalities are deployed – combine to produce the final element of figuration – worlding (in IR, see Agathangelou and Ling, 2004). Worlding “map[s] universes of knowledge, practice, and power” (Haraway, 1997:11). In the cases of the Victorian “homosexual,” the Obama administration’s “LGBT rights holder,” and European debates over Neuwirth/Wurst, knowledge about these figurations, the way they are performatively put into practice, and the power relations running through them combine so differently in each case that it is sometimes difficult to remember that we are speaking about the same general figure – “the homosexual.” The sometimes extreme differences in how the figure of “the homosexual” is worlded emphasizes another of Haraway’s points – the maps produced by worlding practices are as contestable as the figurations to which they give specific form (1997:11). In Foucault’s terms, this means neither understandings of “the 17 homosexual” nor the networks of power/knowledge/pleasure that produce this figure are ever frozen. Rather, they are products “of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures…[that define] new rules for the game of powers and pleasures” (Foucault, 1980:48). These games are played not only in intimate relations but also in national, regional and international relations. Statecraft as Mancraft Combining Foucault’s insights about discourse and productive power with Haraway’s Butlerian unpacking of figuration makes it possible to offer a more nuanced account of the figuration of “the homosexual.” By layering this analysis with Richard Ashley’s “statecraft as manscraft,” what comes into sharper focus is how states (and other political communities) attempt to freeze meanings of “the homosexual” when they enter international games “of powers and pleasures” (Foucault, 1980:48). Ashley argues it is impossible to understand the formation of modern sovereign states and international orders without understanding how a particular version of “sovereign man” is inscribed as the necessary foundation of a sovereign state and how this procedure of “statecraft as mancraft” produces a specific ordering of international relations. I unpack Ashley’s argument by making two moves. I illustrate Ashley’s argument with reference to “the homosexual” in Victorian and in Obama administration discourse. I use the analyses above of Foucault, Haraway, and Butler to argue that Ashley’s “statecraft as mancraft”8 both furthers understandings of figurations of “the homosexual” generally and provides specific IR research questions for analyzing figurations of “the homosexual” in sexualized orders of international relations. Writing about international relations from a poststructuralist perspective, Ashley’s arguments build upon Foucault’s analysis of the constitution and problematization of subjectivities. Yet Ashley adds Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive critique of logocentrism to this analysis, based upon his reading of Derrida’s texts from the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., 1977, 1981). Logocentrism refers to how “the word” –a singular, specific word signifying a specific presence – grounds all meaning in a linguistic system because of how it is 8 Ashley's use of the gendered term "man" is intentional. 18 positioned as a universal referent that is located outside of history. In the classical age, “God” was the most common example of a “logos” in a logocentric system. In the modern age, as Nietzsche argued, “man” displaced “God” from this logocentric position. Understood as “a pure and originary presence – an unproblematic, extrahistorical identity, in need of no critical accounting” (Ashley, 1989:261), it is now “modern man” who functions in modern discourse as “an origin, an identical voice that is regarded as the sovereign source of truth and meaning” (Ashley, 1989:261). Derrida argues that by identifying one word, one being, one presence as an originary “logos” from which all other meanings flow, logocentric systems create conditions of possibility for both hierarchies in linguistic systems and specific narratives of history. Applying Derrida’s ideas to modern renderings of international politics and international theory (especially to Kenneth Waltz’s neorealist theory), Ashley explains how “the logos” is the “sovereign source of truth and meaning” in the manifestation and analysis of the modern nation-state and in specific renderings of domestic and international orders. Specifically, Ashley argues that in international relations theory and practice, “modern man” as sovereign man functions not only as “the logos” of modernity in general but also as the foundation of the sovereign nation-state. This is because since the move from monarchical to popular sovereignty, “modern man” has given the modern nation-state its sovereign authority. The state’s sovereign authority that had previously been vested in the monarch – as transcendental, as reasonable, as the interpreter of meaning – is now vested instead in “modern man”. To be sovereign, then, every sovereign nation-state inscribes a particular sovereign man as an always already existing domestic presence as the foundation of its authority domestically and internationally. What emerges from Ashley’s analysis are three key points that I illustrate with reference to the Victorian “homosexual” and to Clinton’s gay right’s holding “homosexual”. First, because the modern sovereign nation-state is intimately tied to “modern man”, the sovereign inscription of the modern state is intimately tied to the sovereign inscription of “modern man”. To put it in Ashley’s terms, “Modern statecraft is modern mancraft. It is an art of domesticating the meaning of man by constructing his problems, his dangers, his fears” (1989:303; italics in original). These are projected into the dangerous realm of international anarchy that sovereign 19 man with his foreign policies attempts to tame. For example, Victorian modern man as “imperial man” required the dangerous, unruly, racially darkened and sexualized “savage” as his “colonial (perverse homosexual) subject” to justify both the reasonableness of Victorian “sovereign man” and his imperial rule. In contrast, some have argued (Rao, 2012) that the Obama administration’s modern man as “neoimperial man” requires the dangerous, unruly, racially darkened and sexualized “postcolonial (perverse homosexual) state” to justify both the reasonableness of an enlightened US “sovereign man” who internationally proclaims gay rights as human rights to legitimize his neo-imperial rule. These examples illustrate why “paradigms of man are themselves tools of power” (Ashley, 1989:300). Second, this has implications for understanding how international relations are ordered. For, as Ashley argues, “modern mancraft” does not just give rise to the modern sovereign state; it also gives rise to modern understandings of international order. For just as the “logos” in Derrida’s logocentric system makes it possible to establish hierarchies, the “logos” of “modern man” as the “logos” of the modern state organizes international relations according to hierarchies as well. These include: reasonable man/pure danger, civilized/barbaric, security/danger, peace/war, domestic/international and order/anarchy. In this logocentric system, whatever can be narrated from the point of view of “the logos” and made to “speak from a sovereign voice” is what is valued and protected; what cannot be made to speak from a sovereign voice (e.g., anarchy and terror) must be violently opposed (Ashley, 1989:284). Specifying “modern man” in “the Malthusian couple” as their civilized, secure, domestic logos, Victorians narrated the deviant “homosexual” as an intimate, national and international source of barbarism, danger and instability to “modern man” (Stoler, 1995). Expanding hetero/homonormative figurations of “the normal couple” to include “the LGBT couple”, the Obama administration in contrast narrated those unreasonable states that do not recognize the gay rights of “the LGBT” as sources of barbarism, danger and instability to “modern man”, established neo-colonial education policies to enlighten unreasonable state’s leaders (e.g., by distributing “LGBT” human rights tool kits to foreign embassies) and imposed sanctions on some states that failed to embrace gay rights as human rights (Clinton, 2011). This is how “modern man” as sovereign man authorizes the potential use of violence by the sovereign state on behalf of his presumed transcendental reason (Ashley, 1989:268). 20 Third, Ashley argues that none of these figurations – of “modern man,” of the modern state, or of international orders that we in IR understand as variations of order vs. anarchy – are stable or ahistorical. For the reasonableness of “modern man” can always be shown to be unreasonable, just as the order of domestic politics can always be shown to contain aspects of anarchy. To put it in Derrida’s terms, the binaries that order domestic and international relations constantly deconstruct themselves, making them both unstable and (because unstable) unreliable. What this means is that various invested actors – from citizens to states to formal international institutions – constantly attempt to stabilize these unreliable hierarchies and the figurations that authorize them so they appear to be ahistorical, given, and true so that they might more reliably function in domestic and international politics. The anxious labor that both the Victorians and the Obama administration employ(ed) to construct their opposed figurations of “the homosexual” – often in the face of international resistances by colonial states (in the case of the Victorians; Stoler, 1995) and by postcolonial and post-communist states (in the case of the Obama administration; Rao, 2012; Wilkinson and Langlois, 2014) – are cases in point. This in part explains why international politics is inscribed as dangerous by sovereign nation-states (Ashley, 1989:304). For by not ceding to the will of a particular national sovereign man, international politics (anarchy) always threatens to expose sovereign man and the sovereign order he guarantees as historical and contingent. That explains why the order/anarchy boundary is so highly policed, both in international practice and in international theory. Ashley’s Derridian analysis, like Foucault’s and Haraway’s analyses, suggests contemplating how figurations and the orders (and anarchies) they produce and that are produced by them are fixed and frozen as well as unfixed and unfrozen. But because Ashley’s analysis is IR-focused, it additionally provides specific IR research questions that allow analysis of both how “modern man” is figured as sovereign man on behalf of sovereign nation-states and how specific figurations of “modern man” as sovereign man participate in the production of domestic and international orders. These research questions are: • How does speaking “the truth” about “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” participate in the organization and regulation of international relations? 21 • What ordering principles of sexuality generate and sustain – and are generated and sustained by – figurations of “the homosexual,” and how do they function in international relations? • How do figurations of “the homosexual” function as instances of “statecraft as mancraft,” and how specifically is his normality or perversion figured as “the logos” of or against “sovereign man”? • How do these ordering principles of sexuality and figurations of “the homosexual” as or against “sovereign man” work together to order international relations? • What do various practices of statecraft as mancraft make possible in world politics, and what contingencies are rendered necessary by and through these practices (Ashley, 1989; also see Hopf, 2010)? From Statecraft as Mancraft to Queer Logics of Statecraft The above research questions go some way toward elaborating Queer IR research programs informed by a queer intellectual curiosity. Yet I suggest here that they are limited by Derrida’s initial understanding of deconstruction and its relationship to “the logos” and “the plural”. In the texts Ashley consults, Derrida argues deconstruction is not something we bring to a text; rather, it is something that is inherent in a text. This is because meanings in a text (or, in Foucault’s broader terms, a discourse) are always already plural. The logocentric procedure that tries to impose a singular meaning upon a text or a discourse, then, is always as political as it is impossible. This explains why politics – like the politics of statecraft as mancraft – endlessly loops through circuits in which states (or other political communities) attempt to impose order onto anarchy. By critiquing the logocentric procedure as it functions in domestic and especially international politics, Ashley’s analysis takes us some way toward understanding how “paradigms of man are themselves tools of power” (Ashley, 1989:300), not just in specific times and places (as in e.g., Kuntsman, 2009; Puar and Rai, 2002; Puar, 2007) but more generally. For Ashley explains how these impossibly singular normal or perverse paradigms of sovereign 22 man attempt to figure impossibly singular normal or perverse international orders in their own image. This is how actors attempt to impose order onto anarchy. As powerful as this account is, I suggest it overlooks a crucial aspect of how figurations of sovereign man are mobilized to craft domestic and international orders. What is missing is an account of how not just a singular logos but a plural logoi potentially figures sovereign man and orders international politics in ways that construct and deconstruct these figures and orders. Why this matters in Queer IR contexts is because this plural logoi can be understood as simultaneously normal and/or perverse as it is enacted through sexes, genders and sexualities as well as through various registers of authority (something I will explain further with reference to Neuwirth/Wurst). A plural logoi – especially a normal and/or perverse logoi – appears, on the face of it, to be counterintuitive. This is especially the case because of how Derrida initially sets up “the logos” as the necessarily singular (and presumptively normal) “word” that he opposes to the necessarily plural (and possibly perverse) “text.”9 Following Derrida, Ashley analyzes accounts of sovereign man as the necessarily singular (and presumptively normal) “sovereign orderer” who is opposed to the necessarily plural (and presumptively perverse) “anarchy.” While Ashley insists on the plurality of man (1989:308), he does not consider how this plural man might function as a sovereign man who might be necessarily plural.10 As a result, Ashley neglects to consider how the plural might be empowered not just because it is foundationally normal(ized) but because it is also foundationally perverse (perverted). Ashley’s analysis therefore misses opportunities to investigate how the normal and/or perverse plural might function as a possible or even necessary foundation of meaning 9 In his later work, Derrida relaxes his account of the logocentric procedure. See Derrida on aporia (1993). For an extended discussion, see Weber (2016). 10 Ashley’s account of statecraft as mancraft implicitly recognizes and/or logics – as they produce modern man and as they produce domestic and international orders – to make arguments that deconstruct the figure of sovereign man and the orders sovereign man makes possible as absolute, durable or indeed actual. Where Ashley stops short in his analysis is in considering how and/or logics might not always be aschewed by those wielding sovereign logics in the logocentric procedure but embraced by them to make the logicentric procedure possible. 23 in a logocentric system, rather than always in opposition to the singular (presumptively normal) logos. What might a plural logoi look like, and what might its implications be for understandings of statecraft as mancraft? My notion of a plural logoi comes from Roland Barthes’ (1994 and 1976) description of the rule of the and/or. To explain what the and/or is and how it functions, I use illustrations of sex, gender, and sexuality first to contrast the and/or with the more traditional “either/or” and second to pluralize the rule of the and/or itself. The “either/or” operates according to a binary logic, forcing a choice of either one term or another term to comprehend the true meaning of a text, a discipline, a person, an act. For example, in the binary terms of the “either/or”, a person is either a boy or a girl. In contrast, the and/or exceeds this binary logic because it appreciates how the meaning of something or someone cannot necessarily be contained within an “either/or” choice. This is because sometimes (maybe even always) understanding someone or something is not as simple as fixing on a singular meaning – either one meaning or another. Instead, understanding can require us to appreciate how a person or a thing is constituted by and simultaneously embodies multiple, seemingly contradictory meanings that may confuse and confound a simple either/or dichotomy. It is this plurality that the and/or expresses. According to the logic of the “and/or”, a subject is both one thing and another (plural, perverse) while simultaneously one thing or another (singular, normal). For example, a person might be both a boy and a girl while simultaneously being either a boy or a girl. This might be because a person is read as either a boy or a girl while also being read as in between sexes (intersexed), in between sexes and genders (a castrato) or combining sexes, genders, and sexualities in ways that do not correspond to one side of the boy/girl dichotomy or the other (a person who identifies as a “girl” in terms of their sex, as a “boy” in terms of their gender, and as a “girlboy” or “boygirl” in terms of their sexuality). In these examples, a person can be and while simultaneously being or because the terms “boy” and “girl” are not reducible to traditional dichotomous codes of sex, gender, or sexuality either individually or in combination, even though traditional “either/or” readings attempt to make them so. While Barthes’ rule of the and/or is derived from his description of the castrato’s body that he reads as combining two sexes and two genders (1974), the plural that constitutes a subjectivity can also be more than one thing and/or another. 24 For a subjectivity can be one thing and another and another, etc. as well as one thing or another or another, etc. in relation to sexes, genders, and sexualities, as there are multiple sexes, genders, and sexualities individually and in combination (FaustoSterling, 1993). This suggests both the limitations of deploying Barthesian plural logics as if they expressed a singular rule of the and/or and the expansive possibilities of plural logics that pluralize the rule of the and/or itself. This discussion makes two significant points. First, the singular choice we are forced to make by an “either/or” logic (e.g., boy or girl) excludes the plural logics of the and/or. Plural logics of the and/or contest binary logics, understanding the presumed singularity and coherence of its available choices (either “boys” or “girls”, either normal or perverse), their resulting subjectivities (only “boys” and “girls”), and their presumed ordering principles (either hetero/homonormative or disruptively/disorderingly queer) as the social, cultural and political effects of attempts to constitute them as if they were singular, coherent, and whole. Therefore, it is only by appreciating how the (pluralized) and/or constitutes dichotomy-defying subjectivities that we can grasp their meanings. Second, when the (pluralized) and/or supplements the “either/or”, meanings are mapped differently. For in the (pluralized) and/or, meanings are no longer (exclusively) regulated by the slash that divides the “either/or”. Instead, meanings are (also) irregulated by this slash and by additional slashes that connect terms in multiple ways that defy “either/or” interpretations. Importantly, Barthes does not argue that “either/or” logics are unimportant. He suggests it is both the “either/or” and the (pluralized) and/or that constitute meanings. Yet he stresses texts should not be reduced to an “either/or” logic, so we can “appreciate what plural constitutes” a text, a character, a plot, an order (Barthes, 1974:5; emphasis in original). “[R]eleasing the double [multiple] meaning on principle”, the logic of the (pluralized) and/or “corrupts the purity of communications; it is a deliberate ‘static’, painstakingly elaborated, introduced into the fictive dialogue between author and reader, in short, a countercommunication” (1974:9; my brackets). The (pluralized) and/or, then, is a plural logic that the “either/or” can neither comprehend nor contain. It is how the (pluralized) and/or introduces a kind of systematic, nondecidable plurality into discourse as “that which confuses meaning, the norm, normativity [and, I would add, antinormativities]” (Barthes, 1976:109, my brackets; on antinormativities see Wiegman and Wilson, 2015:1-3) around the normality and/or 25 perversion of sexes, genders, and sexualities rather than just accumulating differences (as intersectionality suggests; Crewshaw, 1991) that makes it a queer logic (Weber, 1999:xiii; also see Weber, 2014). For a (pluralized) Barthesian and/or accords with Sedgwick’s definition of queer as “the...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) as exclusively “and” or as exclusively “or.” Identifying these often illusive figurations, the now queer Barthesian and/or suggests how we should investigate queer figures. Barthes’ instruction is this – read (queer) figures not only through the “either/or” but also through the (pluralized) and/or. While Barthes offered this instruction in the context of reading literature (1974), his queer rule of the (pluralized) and/or applies equally to foreign policy texts and contexts. For “sovereign man” as a plural logoi in a logocentric procedure can figure foreign policy and (dis)order international politics.11 For example, consider the case of the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest winner Tom Neuwirth and/as Conchita Wurst. At least since winning the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest and announcing in her/his/their acceptance speech, “We are unity, and we are unstoppable,” Neuwirth/Wurst has been taken up by some Europeans as a figuration who embodies either a positive or a negative image of an integrated Europe. This places Neuwirth/Wurst in an “either/or” logic of statecraft as mancraft (Ashley, 1989), in which the crafting of a singular “sovereign man” for the European Community functions through a traditional understanding of sovereignty as “a complex practice of authorization, a practice through which specific agencies are enabled to draw a line” between who can legitimately be included and excluded from the political community 11 Weber (1998b, 1999) argues “the revolutionary state” of Castro’s Cuba was figured as a pluralized and/or sovereign logoi through its multiple codings of sex, gender, and sexuality that prompted a “queer performative” foreign policy response by the US. Lind and Keating (2013) argue President Correa’s figuring of Ecuador’s sovereign logoi “revolutionary citizen” as complexly “homoprotectionist” and/or “homophobic” effects wider Latin American policy. Also see, e.g., Agathangelou, 2014; Peterson, 2015; Picq and Thiel, 2015; Puar and Rai, 2002; Puar, 2007, Rao, 2014a; RichterMonpetit, 2014; Sjoberg, 2014; Weber, 2002; Weise and Bosnia, 2014; Wilkinson and Langlois, 2014. 26 this “European sovereign man” grounds (Walker, 2000:22). In this traditional “either/or” logic of statecraft as mancraft, what is debated is whether or not Neuwirth/Wurst as a proposed “sovereign man” of the new Europe is/should be licensed to draw a line between properly integrated and normalized Europeans and improperly integrated and perverse Europeans in a Europe that has been striving for integration in one form or another since the end of World War II. This is in part why Neuwirth/Wurst’s Euro-vision of Europe engendered such strong expressions of disgust or approval. For example, far right Bulgarian MEP candidate Angel Dzhambazki remarked that, “This bearded creature, called with the European name Conchita Wurst is like genetically modified organism and won the Eurovision. And I wonder, if the vice of our time is that we tolerate the perversity. I don’t want such a song contest for my children” (Kosharevska, 2014:np). In contrast, the UN spokesperson for Ban Ki-Moon commented: Everyone is entitled to enjoy the same basic rights and live a life of worth and dignity without discrimination. This fundamental principle is embedded in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Conchita is a symbol in that sense and I think it's good for them to meet. [The meeting allows us] to reassert his [Ban Ki-Moon’s] support for LGBT people and for them to ensure that they enjoy the same human rights and protection that we all do (Duffy, 2014:np; my brackets). Understanding Neuwirth/Wurst as either normal or perverse required Europeans to read Neuwirth/Wurst as a figure who is knowable and placable along an “either/or” axis – in relation to Europe and in relation to traditional European debates about European integration. And yet, while Neuwirth/Wurst certainly seems to be making a call for some kind of unity from a platform that has traditionally promoted European integration, Neuwirth/Wurst does so as a figure who defies traditional understandings of integration across multiple axes. These include (but are not necessarily confined to): sex, gender, sexuality, nationality, race, civilization and authority. For example, Neuwirth/Wurst’s and/or sexes, genders, and sexualities are evident in how this bearded drag queen is read through vast matrices of sexes, genders, and sexualities that minimally include either male or female, masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual, normal or perverse as well as simultaneously male and female, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual, normal and perverse. This figures Neuwirth/Wurst as queer, because he/she/they do not signify 27 monolithically around sexes, genders, or sexualities. Neuwirth/Wurst, then, is a performative embodiment of a plural logoi that functions as a deliberate static which confounds and confuses traditional understandings of sexes, genders, and sexualities (Barthes, 1974, 1976). Neuwirth “himself”, however, seems to signify (more) monolithically around sex, gender, and sexuality, identifying as a male “homosexual” who eschews descriptions of himself as trans* (Davis, 2014)12. This and his statements in support of gay marriage, for example, make him compatible with “the LGBT” Clinton describes (2011), whose “homosexuality” can be classified, domesticated, and homonormalized. At the same time, Neuwirth/Wurst embodies a pluralized and/or logic in international politics in the registers of nationality, race, civilization and authority that confound a simple understanding of Neuwirth/Wurst in “either/or” terms. This is evident in the various official biographies of Neuwirth and/as Wurst that appeared since Neuwirth/Wurst’s selection as Austria’s representative to Eurovision 2014.13 These bios state Neuwirth was born and raised in Austria, while Wurst was born “in the mountains of Colombia” to a Colombian mother and German father and “raised in Germany.” They position Neuwirth as a “natural” European citizen and Wurst as a diasporic Colombian and/or German subject who has relocated from the global South to the global North. This has implications for how Neuwirth/Wurst is read nationally, racially, civilizationally and as a “sovereign authority.” Nationally, Neuwirth/Wurst is Austrian (like Tom) and/or Colombian (like Conchita’s mother) and/or German (like Conchita’s father). Racially, Neuwirth/Wurst is white (presumptively like Tom and like Conchita’s father, because neither are marked as non-white) and/or mestiza (because Conchita’s Colombian mother who is from rural Colombia is likely to be indigenous or mestiza). Civilizationally, Neuwirth/Wurst is European (like Tom and like Conchita’s father) and/or indigenous and/or Hispanic (like Conchita’s mother). All of this puts Neuwirth/Wurst’s ability to function as a singular “sovereign man” for 12 As Sam Killermann explains, “Trans* is an umbrella term that refers to all of the identities within the gender identity spectrum.” See http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2012/05/what-does-the-asterisk-in-trans-standfor/. 13 Must of this information was on conchitawurst.com during the Eurovision Song Contest but has since been removed. 28 a new Europe in doubt – whether that Europe is normal or perverse. This is because Neuwirth/Wurst pluralizes by crossing and combining so many of “fortress Europe’s” boundaries territorially, racially, and civilizationally because of how Neuwirth/Wurst crafts his/her/their sexes, genders and sexualities through “the two hearts beating in [the one] chest”14 of Tom Neuwirth and/as Conchita Wurst. At the same time, Neuwirth/Wurst’s plurality – not just singularity – in all these sexualized international registers make this figure repulsive and/or attractive to statesleaders. This figures Neuwirth/Wurst as both a plurally anarchical force – 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 [and regional] self” (Fortier, 2008:60; my brackets) and as a singular “sovereign man” upon whom a normal or perverse European order might be founded and as a plural “sovereign man” upon whom a normal and/or perverse European order might be founded. This is because Neuwirth/Wurst is both one things or another (normal or perverse) while simultaneously being one thing and another (normal and perverse), with respect to European integration and with respect to integration more broadly. This makes Neuwirth/Wurst a potentially singular “sovereign man” in a traditional logic of statecraft as mancraft and a potentially plural and/or foundation of what I call queer logics of statecraft, whose call for unity from a European integration platform is far more complex than it might at first appear to be (Weber, 2016). This regional illustration of statecraft as mancraft suggests that statecraft as mancraft is less straightforward than Ashley suggests. Because the logos/logoi of the logocentric procedure can be plural as well as singular by being normal and/or perverse around sexes, genders, and sexualities and around numerous important registers of international politics, sometimes statecraft as mancraft is (also) a queer activity that results in unusual sexualized orders of international politics. We cannot account for these queer instances of statecraft simply by adding the singular “homosexual” – as either sovereign man or his foil – to our analyses. Rather, tracing how plural logics of the and/or function in global politics – as queer logics of statecraft – is to appreciate how the normal and/or perverse plural sometimes scripts sovereign figures and/as their adversaries as well as the unusual orders these mixed figures produce and are productive of. 14 Conchitawurst.com 29 Queer logics of statecraft are evident in those moments in domestic and international relations when actors or orders rely upon a queerly conceptualized Barthesian and/or – an and that is at the same time an or in relation to sexes, genders, and sexualities – to perfomatively figure sovereign man, the sovereign state or another political community, or some combined version of the order/anarchy and normal/perverse binaries as normal and/or perverse. Analyzing international relations through a lens of queer logics of statecraft directs us, following and then extending Ashley’s arguments, to categories that connect and/or break apart foundational binaries like order/anarchy and normal/perverse, by understanding the stabilizing “slash(es)” in these binaries as multiplying and complicating connections, figures, orders and anarchies rather than reducing and simplifying them. It leads us to ask how “the plural” as “a deliberate static” (Barthes, 1976:5, 9) is introduced into these binaries to both establish and confound their meanings and the meanings of “men,” “states,” “orders,” and “anarchies” as well as the meanings of “sexes,” “genders,” and “sexualities” which are foundational to them. In a Butlerian vein, queer logics of statecraft require us to take seriously how the plural is performatively enacted, enabling a plethora of national and international figurations and logics that can be (queerly) inhabited. Following Sedgwick, queer logics of statecraft are attentive to how sexes, genders, and sexualities that fail or refuse to signify monolithically are productive of and are produced by unexpectedly normal and/or perverse “sovereign men,” “sovereign communities,” and sovereignly-ordained orders and anarchies. Queer logics of statecraft, then, do not just describe those moments when the performatively perverse creates the appearance of the performatively normal. Nor do they describe only the opposite, when the performatively normal creates the appearance of the performatively perverse, although those can be among their effects. Rather, queer logics of statecraft describe those moments in domestic and international politics when the logos/logoi as a subjectivity or the logos/logoi as a logic is plurally normal and/or perverse in ways that “confound the norm, normativity” [and anti-normativity] (my brackets; Barthes 1976:109; Wiegman and Wilson, 2015:1-3) of individually or collectively singularly inscribed notions of sovereign man, sovereign communities or sexualized orders of international relations. This is not to say that queer logics of statecraft do not give rise to “institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations” (Berlant and Warner, 1995:548, footnote 2) that make “sovereign men,” “sovereign states,” and 30 international orders appear to be singular, coherent and privileged. In this respect, they can be akin to sexual organizing principles like heteronormativies and homonormativities (Berlant and Warner, 1995:548, footnote 2; Duggan, 2003:50). For, by “confusing the [singular] norm, normativity [or antinormativity]” (Barthes, 1976:109; Wiegman and Wilson, 2015:1-3), queer logics of statecraft can produce new institutions, new structures of understanding, new practical orientations that are paradoxically founded upon a disorienting and/or reorienting plural. This can make them more alluring, more powerful, and more easily mobilized by both those who, for example, wish to resist hegemonic relations of power and by those who wish to sustain them (Weber, 1999, 2002; Puar and Rai, 2002; Puar, 2007). Unlike heteronormativities and homonormativities, though, we cannot name in advance what these institutions, structures of understanding and practical (dis)/(re)orientations will be. We cannot know if they will be politicizing or depoliticizing. To determine this, it is necessary to both identify the precise plural(s) each particular queer logic of statecraft employs to figure some particular “sovereign man,” “sovereign state,” or other “sovereign community” and international order, always asking, “For what constituency or constituencies does this plural operate?” The case of Neuwirth/Wurst is striking, then, because it illustrates how Europeans leaders debated – albeit very briefly – a plural logoi as a possible ground for contemporary Europe, whether they recognized Neuwirth/Wurst as a plural logoi or not. In discussions about the “new Europe”, both sides in this debate employed Neuwirth/Wurst to construct and authorize their Euro-visioned hierarchies of order vs. anarchy, as if they were true. In this way, Neuwirth/Wurst generated not only competing sexualized orders of contemporary Europe; he/she/they also practically (dis)/(re)oriented and (de)/(re)railed any idealized contemporary European-wide vision of an already united Europe. It is not surprising that in their mobilizations of Neuwirth/Wurst, European leaders attempted to claim him/her/them as either normal or perverse, for this is how traditional logics of statecraft as mancraft operate. Because European leaders failed to consider Neuwirth/Wurst through the lens of queer logics of statecraft, they generally failed to appreciate what plural(s) constituted him/her/them and how the plural and/or logic he/she/they embodies is what made their attempts to claim or disown – to normalize or to pervert – this normal and/or perverse figure both possible and impossible. Yet it is this very failure on the part of European leaders to read 31 Neuwirth/Wurst through the plural(s) that constitute(s) him/her/them that suggests an additional set of research questions for international theory and practice, including: • Can a paradigm of sovereign man be effective without being – as Ashley claims the ideal type of sovereign man must be – “regarded as originary, unproblematic, given for all time, and, hence, beyond criticism and independent of politics” (Ashley, 1989:271)? • What happens when a political community like a state or the EU considers grounding itself upon a pluralized and/or logoi? • Under what conditions might this be desirable or even necessary, and what might it make possible or preclude? • How might queer logics of statecraft effect the organization, regulation, and conduct of international politics? Conclusion By placing queer intellectual curiosity about figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” at its methodological core, my proposed Queer IR methods refuse to take for granted personal-to-international institutional arrangements, figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual”, attachments (and detachments) of these figurations to/from material bodies, and the mobilization of sexualized bodies in international politics. This article makes three key points. It demonstrates the historical instability of figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” by illustrating how discourses of power/knowledge/pleasure put sex into discourse to figure “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” as perverse (for Victorians), normal (for the Obama Administration) and normal and/or perverse (for Neuwirth and/as Wurst). It show how figurations of “the homosexual” (might) function as both a singular logos and a plural logoi of statecraft as mancraft. And it makes clear how figurations of “the homosexual” participate in both the deconstruction and construction of political communities and international orders. Because figurations of “the homosexual” and other potentially plural logoi – from the variously normalized (Towns, 2010) to the variously stigmatized (AdlerNissen, 2014; Zarakol, 2011) – affect the organization and regulation of international politics, they constitute important objects/subjects of study in IR. Rather than 32 detracting from the serious business of analyzing international practice and producing IR theory, investigating these figurations furthers understandings of core IR concerns. For example, Adler-Nissen’s insightful analysis of Austria’s rejection of stigma is complicated by the Austrian state’s embrace of the pluralized normal and/or perverse figure of Neuwirth and/as Wurst. This plural figure calls schemata of stigmatization themselves into question. It thereby erodes and displaces how “stigmatization helps clarify the boundaries of acceptable behavior and identity and the consequences of nonconformity” for states (Adler-Nissen, 2014:149). Additionally, understandings of human rights that equate “the norm” and “the normal” with “the good” and “the beneficial” (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998) are complicated by Queer IR analyses of “homonormative” foreign policies—such as those of the Obama administration. For these analyses expose the (potential) violence of not just excluding plural subjects but also including plural subjects as singular subjects. These practical, empirical concerns deepen IR understandings of state and nation formation, human rights policy and diplomacy more generally. Yet they cannot be interrogated if IR excludes from its consideration plural logoi and logics, or if IR reduces them to a singular logos or logic. 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Note: This article has benefited from the invaluable input of several individuals and groups, including (in no particular order) Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Anne-Marie Fortier, Rahul Rao, Mary Hawkesworth, Ilan Kapoor, Amy Lind, Momin Rahman, Lene Hansen, Mark Hoffman, Cristina Masters, Laura McLeod, Maureen McNeil, Veronique PinFat, Andreja Zevnik, Louiza Odysseus, Melanie Richter-Montpetit, Darcy Leigh, Andrew Neil, Xavier Guillaume, Halit Mustafa Tagma, Angela Chnapko, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Laura Sjoberg, three anonymous reviewers, the editors of ISQ, and audiences at the LSE, the University of Manchester, Edinburgh University, the Sussex/Copenhagen Research Network and the 2015 International Studies Association Conference in New Orleans. Preliminary research assistance was provided by Aristea Fotopoulou, and administrative support was provided by Joanna Wood. Thanks to all for your insights and assistance.

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