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Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to

Knowledge, written by Cynthia Weber

Article in Philippine Political Science Journal · December 2019

DOI: 10.1163/2165025X-12340019

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Book Reviews 299

Cynthia Weber, 2016, Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the
Will to Knowledge New York: Oxford University Press, 264 pp., £91.00 (hardcover);
£ 26.49 (paperback), isbn 978-0-19-979585-7 (hardcover); 978-0-19-979586-4
(paperback).

“The end of man,” as Foucault boldly announced in 1971, will be the end not
only of the dominance of men over other sexes but also of the foundations
of Western knowledge: individuality, consciousness, the ego. Looking at the
international queer liberation movements since the 1960s, the primacy of mas-
culinity surely has been challenged, confirming the observation that the figure
of man historically cemented by Western civilization and expansion is “in the
process of disappearing.” Cynthia Weber’s most recent contribution to inter-
national relations (IR) scholarship, Queer International Relations: Sovereignty,
Sexuality, and the Will to Knowledge, both believes in and inadvertently belies
this prophecy.
Weber’s book primarily argues that sovereignty and its sexualization play
a key role in domestic and international games of power (p. 5). Statecraft, she
surmises, equates to mancraft, or the “art of fixing a paradigmatic interpreta-
tion of sovereign man that the state can mirror and serve” (Ashley 1989, 203).
In tracing the rich scholarship of IR and global queer specialists from around
the world, Weber has not only produced a sweeping investigation of sexualiza-
tion strategies in foreign policymaking and interstate relations. By intuiting a
novel way of understanding the queer in global politics, she also exposes how
new logics of statecraft have appropriated the erstwhile radical movement of
the lgbtq+ community, revealing that the end of man is off the beaten path.
Nevertheless, the quintessentially queer episteme Weber proposes, embodied
in the logic of either/or, may shed much light on what other paths must be
taken towards queer liberation and, as Foucault once dreamt, the end of man.
Weber’s unsettling – that is queer – propositions are made even more radi-
cal by the very existence of the book. Fascinated less in interstate relations
and more on microlevel experiences of power, gendered approaches to inter-
national politics is still met by pockets of resistance in the field of IR. Queer, as
understood by pioneering queer theorist Eve Sedgwick, is “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).
Queerness embodies an invasion, an unsettling of fictional categories, such as
binarized sexes and genders, that have been frozen in history through exercises
of hegemonic state and institutional power. IR scholarship is generally articu-
lated through a masculinized parlance; it speaks of states, wars, weaponry, and

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/2165025X-12340019

300 Book Reviews

world leaders who are commonly bourgeois, white, heterosexual males. Queer
IR resists this occupation by introducing a “sexuality variable” into the equa-
tion, offering refreshed ways of mapping phenomena “as diverse as colonial-
ism, human rights, and the formation of states and international communities
that provide vastly different renderings of international politics” (Weber 2016,
23). Themes that would interest Filipino IR specialists such as gendered sov-
ereignty discourse, sex(ualized) tourism, and lgbtq+-allied policymaking, to
name a few, may be enriched through this novel lens.
The objective of the book is not unlike feminist IR scholarship spearheaded
by researchers such as Cynthia Enloe, V. Spike Peterson, Laura Sjoberg, and
Ann Tickner. Like feminist IR, queer IR “belongs to a group of critical perspec-
tives that remain marginalised [sic] within IR as a whole, particularly in the
American context” (Tickner 1997, 614). In a similar vein, queer IR views knowl-
edge, including that about genders and sexualities, as historically constructed
and hegemonically sustained instead of given. Thus, queer IR assumes a multi-
ontological, multi-epistemological and multi-methodological position within
IR. Instead of focusing solely on the macroscale of interstate relations, it mines
data on and interrogates citizenship, belonging, identity, order and power, and
gender splits, as does feminist IR (Hansen 2010, 26).
In Queer International Relations, Weber demonstrates this breadth of on-
tologies, epistemologies, and methodologies by juxtaposing theoretical posi-
tions from both queer studies and IR, which she explains early in the book.
She crafts two approaches that directs queer intellectual curiosity on IR. Her
first approach melds classical texts in queer theory (Foucault and Butler),
feminist technoscience studies (Haraway), and post-structuralist international
relations (Ashley) into a procedure that can reveal the construction of “ho-
mosexuality” and sexual ordering in domestic and foreign political discourse.
Rendering knowledge (and the beliefs, claims, and policies that emerge from
which) as discursively constructed, Weber posits that all political claims made
from the domestic to the international scale performs (in the Butlerian sense)
certain sexual categories that in turn figure other bodies, communities, and
institutions in the hierarchies that order such categories. She locates this pro-
cedure within IR by drawing from Richard Ashley’s suggestion that statecraft
– the imagination of the state and sovereignty – is mancraft. Weber’s assump-
tions about the queerness of IR thus reach full circle: If the crafting of sover-
eignty relies on the crafting of a sovereign authority, and since the sovereign
sign in patriarchal power relations is the heterosexual male, then the political
contestation of states must also enter sexual ordering. In other words, states, in
asserting sovereignty, must pathologize the other into categories dominated by

PHILIPPINE POLITICAL SCIENCE JOURNAL 40 (2019) 289–302

Book Reviews 301

masculinity, such as femininity and queerness. This she firmly demonstrates in

action by exploring political discourses enunciated and/or performed by mas-
culine and queer figures around the globe. A recent case Weber asserts is none
other than Obama’s administration whose discourse on human rights, she be-
lieves, interprets the “human” as a civilized white masculine bourgeois man – a
patriot – to use the former president’s term.
As a second approach, in a meta-theoretical move, Weber lobbies an extend-
ed critique of the procedure she outlined as part of queer IR methodologies.
Weber expresses her discontent towards the binary sexualization assumed by
the “homosexual,” which is figured between male and female heterosexuali-
ties. The logic she explicates fails “because it demands that ‘sovereign man’
and ‘sovereign communities’ be reduced to and known in singular terms – as
either one thing or another” (141). In other words, this analytical trope emerges
from the logic of either/or. To the contrary, queer subjectivities exceed binary
logics. Hence, Weber brings to the fore Roland Barthes’ plural logic of the and/
or (1974) in which subjectivities signify as either one thing or another (or yet
another) while simultaneously signifying as one thing and another (and yet
another) (Weber 3). Queerness is being both and either sexual categories, ig-
niting a frustration towards the impossibility of knowing for sure.
Weber dovetails her emphasis on what may be seen as an already alterna-
tive politics with a questioning of such politics’ efficacy by introducing a far
more unsettled approach. Interrogation is the cornerstone of academic work,
and Weber did not fail us in that department. Moreover, her sweeping survey
of transnational and global queer studies render visible the difference between
them and what she is attempting towards: a queer IR (Weber 2014, 596). Such
a frame becomes all the more necessary in light of both successful and strug-
gling lgbtq+ movements around the globe. Which interstate collaborations
and conflicts invoke queerness? Which states figure its allies/enemies as ho-
mosexual? In view of the death of Filipina trans woman Jennifer Laude, we
must ask, how are genders, sexualities, and violence mediated by the Visiting
Forces Agreement and Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement between
the U.S. and the Philippines? Weber’s innovative and at times tricky proto-
type of queer IR can serve as a compass in navigating these less-charted ter-
rains. Some might find her focus on figurations and discursivity unwieldy. But
such is her very objective in writing the book: To unsettle hitherto frozen and
ahistoricized assumptions on political knowledge. What Queer International
Relations clearly offers, as Weber seems to submit in her final concluding chap-
ter, is a presaging of the future different from that of Foucault’s. Instead of the
end of man, Weber wickedly prophesizes the (queered) end of sovereignty.

PHILIPPINE POLITICAL SCIENCE JOURNAL 40 (2019) 289–302

 302 Book Reviews

Jose Monfred C. Sy
University of the Philippines Diliman
jcsy3@up.edu.ph

References

Ashley, Richard K. 1989. ‘Living on Borderlines’. In International/Intertextual Relations,

edited by James Derian and Michael J. Shapiro, 259–321. Lexington: Lexington.
Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. Translated by R Miller. New York: Hill and Wang.
Foucault, Michel. 1971. ‘The Lost Interview’. http://www.critical-theory.com/watch-the
-foucault-interview-that-was-lost-for-nearly-30-years/.
Hansen , Lene. 2010. “Ontologies, Epistemologies, Methodologies.” In Gender Matters
in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations, edited by
Laura Shepherd, 17–27. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium: FemaleMan_Meets_
OncoMouse. New York: Routledge.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. London: Penguin.
Tickner, J. A. 1997. “You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements Between
Feminists and IR Theorists.” International Studies Quarterly 41: 611–32.
Weber, Cynthia. 2014. “Queer International Relations: From Queer to Queer IR.”
International Studies Review 16, no. 1: 596–522.
Weber, Cynthia. 2016. Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality and the
Will to Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.

PHILIPPINE POLITICAL SCIENCE JOURNAL 40 (2019) 289–302

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