ABSTRACT
“Queering” international relations (IR) is a combination of attention to “‘the intimate’ of sex/affective relations, marriage, kinship, and family/household formations” and the ways in which that intimate is “troubled, made strange, destabilized”. As Lauren Wilcox describes, “projects of queering IR are not about making IR queer as if it weren’t already, but they are about how sexualities, affiliations, and affects are produced and regulated within existing practices of IR.” Wilcox explains “the ‘queer’ of queer theory is necessarily an inter-pellation that is open-ended toward constant self-critique and different political projects.” Queer IR is concerned with the role of sex and sexuality in constructing both social and political life and knowledge of it. The role of sex and sexuality the inherent queerness of global politics, both straightforwardly and metaphorically, underlie the proposition that the social be thought of as seductive. In Nick Onuf’s “Constructivism: A User’s Manual,” he suggests, “Constructivism is a way of studying social relations–any kind of social relations”.
