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? This book puts international relations scholarship and transnational/global queer studies scholarship in conversation to address these questions and their implications for contemporary internation ... More

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? This book puts international relations scholarship and transnational/global queer studies scholarship in conversation to address these questions and their implications for contemporary international politics. It traces how the ‘homosexual’ is conventionally figured—as either a perverse creature whom sovereign nation-states must secure themselves against or as a normal human being whom sovereign nation-states should embrace—to wield sexuality in support of conventional understandings of state sovereignty. It also traces how unconventional figurations of the ‘homosexual’ as both normal and/or perverse so defy either/or logics of sovereignty and of sexuality that these ‘normal and/or perverse homosexuals’ begin to unravel modern understandings of state sovereignty itself. By analyzing figurations of the ‘homosexual’ as the ‘underdeveloped’, the ‘undevelopable’, the ‘unwanted im/migrant’, the ‘terrorist’, the ‘gay rights holder’, the ‘gay patriot’ and Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst’s ‘bearded lady’, this book shows how the will to knowledge about the ‘homosexual’ is fundamental to contemporary international theories of sovereignty and of contemporary foreign policy.