ABSTRACT
Mainstream studies of international relations (IR) dismiss the Amazon as irrelevant to political modernity. Yet lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) perspectives reveal a vibrant cosmopolitanism at the peripheries of world politics. Informed by empirical research in Amazonia, this chapter explores the contributions of LGBT approaches for thinking IR critically. The evidence of sexual diversity in Amazonia challenges assumptions about modernity. LGBT lenses are part of various critical approaches that have been radically transforming the study of IR. The chapter also explores celebration of sexual identity in the Amazon, from gay prides to drag queen contests. It posits sexual diversity as a site of Amazonian modernity, dismissing imaginaries of the region as detached from Western understandings of cosmopolitanism. The chapter examines whether LGBT perspectives contribute new gazes or whether they are merely an expansion of the critical perspectives developed by feminist research in IR.
