Queer International Relations - Book Launch and Lecture by Cynthia Weber

Asked about queer work in international relations, most IR scholars would almost certainly answer that queer studies is a non-issue for the subdiscipline – a topic beyond the scope and understanding of international politics. Yet queer work tackles problems that IR scholars themselves believe are central to their discipline: questions about political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and the national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies, not to mention their implications for empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism.

In the agenda-setting book Queer International Relations, Weber asks how "sexuality" and "queer" are constituted as domains of international political practice and mobilized so that they bear on questions of state and nation formation, war and peace, and international political economy. How are sovereignty and sexuality entangled in contemporary international politics? What understandings of sovereignty and sexuality inform contemporary theories and foreign policies on development, immigration, terrorism, human rights, and regional integration? How specifically is "the homosexual" figured in these theories and policies to support or contest traditional understandings of sovereignty? Queer International Relations puts international relations scholarship and transnational/global queer studies scholarship in conversation to address these questions and their implications for contemporary international politics.

Cynthia Weber is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex and co-editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Prof. Weber is the author of several acclaimed books and journal articles on topics including IR theory, United States foreign policy, film, queer theory, feminist theory, poststructuralism, and state violence.

Discussants: Dr. Antke Engel (Institut für Queer Theorie, ICI); Dr. Tine Hanrieder, WZB (Abteilung Global Governance);

Presented by the Feminist and Critical Theory Working Group, WZB