Queer International Relations: sovereignty, sexuality and the will to knowledge

Abstract

Questions of borders, boundaries and orders animate this ground-breaking book from Cynthia Weber; throughout, Weber draws attention to the ways in which knowledge is produced in, and about, both ‘international relations’ and ‘International Relations’ (IR), and the fidelity that is demanded (mostly implicitly) to conventional configurations of power, legitimacy and subjectivity. These rely on the shared fiction of meaningful boundaries and borders (conceptual, figurative and actual) that cannot—and should not—be transgressed. Weber proceeds from the recognition that ‘“queer” and “IR” have for too long been treated as separate (disciplinary) domains of enquiry, especially around issues of sovereignty and sexuality’ (p. 13). The book offers a compelling series of insights into the co-constitution of sexuality and sovereignty, woven together artfully to demonstrate ‘how “sovereign man” as “sexualised sovereign man” functions in existing and emerging sexualised understandings of intimate, national, regional, and international relations that both sustain and threaten to suspend traditional understandings of sovereignty’ (p. 198, emphasis in original).