Queer/Trans K’s

2NC Ballot Framer

Queer ethics is an impact framing issue- the boundaries between research and discipline enable state control over bodies, reproducing their impacts.

SHEPHERD '12 (Laura Shepherd, teaches international politics at the University of New South Wales, "Transdisciplinarity: The Politics and Practices of Knowledge Production," The Disorder of Things, 11/23/2012 [thedisorderofthings.com/2012/11/23/transdisciplinarity-the-politics-and-practices-of-knowledge-production/])

The idea of a discipline (noun), in the academic sense, clearly derives from the verb: both relate to establishing clear boundaries between what is right and good (behaviour/research) and what is wrong and bad (behaviour/research); both have ways to correct transgression when an uninitiated (or resistant) person strays. We are trained to recognize the boundaries of our discipline and to stay within them; historians don’t usually apply for jobs as social workers just as creative writing majors don’t generally win contracts for the redesign of shopping centres. The problem is that the boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviours are a fiction. I do not mean that there are no boundaries, or that there shouldn’t be any boundaries, but rather that we can always find the exception that confounds the rule. If we begin to unpick the rule, however, it becomes very difficult to defend or justify any point of principle at all, which generally makes people feel very uncomfortable. So when I say that the concept of discipline (in academia) is a fiction, I mean that it is something ‘held to be true because it is expedient to do so’. It suits us to believe in disciplinary boundaries, just as it suits us to believe that there are solid and unbreakable rules about what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (which is why we have laws and so on). These boundaries that we establish between little pockets of knowledge in the academy are a fiction. Transdisciplinarity, to my mind, is about challenging the fiction of disciplines, about recognizing that knowledge isn’t something that can be carved up into neatly bounded parcels that we then work either in (to produce disciplinary knowledge); at the intersection of (to produce interdisciplinary knowledge); or with (to produce multi- or cross-disciplinary knowledge). Transdisciplinary work subverts the very foundations of the concept of ‘the discipline’, resisting and transcending the always arbitrary and fictive boundaries between; borrowing from Foucault, I suggest that talk of disciplines and disciplinary boundaries bring into being the categories themselves and such categories are always normative. Michel Foucault’s work on discipline specifically leads me further away from the idea that disciplines are neutral and administrative categories. Foucault takes the OED idea one step further, implicating political economy in the concept of discipline. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience) As I understand it, Foucault argues that in order to be functional in contemporary society, one must be disciplined. Without discipline, we as subjects are of no use to the political elite, the institutions of governmentality with which he was also concerned. We are disciplined through primary education. In the Anglophone West, primary schools meet all of the requirements of a disciplinary site of power: They are enclosed spaces (usually situated in buildings with walls) and limited temporally (in that one doesn’t usually stay in primary school for ever); There is a hierarchy of observation (with the unruly brand-new students at the very bottom and the Principal [or equivalent] at the top. Everyone else fits somewhere in between: older students can be prefects or monitors, junior teachers gratefully follow the guidance of more senior colleagues and so on); There are clearly delineated assessment processes that act as a form of normalizing judgement (and so we see statements along the lines of the following: ‘By the end of Key Stage 4 a student should be able to…’); Schools exist to provide training (in social skills, writing skills, oral communication, numeracy, motor skills both gross and fine and a multitude of others). Crucial to Foucault’s analysis is the idea that without this basic training we do not learn to be functional (productive) members of society and if we are not functional and productive members of society then we are a net cost. Put simply: the more obedient we are, the more useful we are. Our utility is directly proportionate to the extent to which we are disciplined. Foucault was, of course, writing about Anglophone Western society as a whole, not about academia specifically. It’s clear from the above, however, that the disciplinary techniques evident in primary schools function in exactly the same way in the academy. We enroll students by the dozen and we teach them what it means to ‘be’ an IR scholar. Students stay with us for three years, maybe four, and during that time they have to submit hundreds of assessments that have clearly delineated standards that students must attain in order to pass. From the outset, we offer in our course guides clear indications of the normalizing judgement employed in our courses: ‘Upon successful completion of this course, you should be able to…’. We chose textbooks carefully, mindful of the student’s tendency to accept textbooks as the Source Of All Truth, and we teach the basics of our discipline. We set exams, we write learning outcomes, we teach students how to write evidence-based argument and to integrate theoretical discussion with empirical analysis. We grant credit points to students that meet our requirements; students eventually accrue enough credit points to graduate and they do so. At no point, usually, do we encourage students to question why they’re doing what they’re doing. Sometimes, in fact, such questioning is positively discouraged – seen as impertinent, troublesome, ill-disciplined. We perpetuate the narrative that they are in university to receive training in their discipline and that they will graduate as members of their discipline. Everything that we do as scholar-educators eases this progression. We teach first years the disciplinary basics (what is considered to be the appropriate object of study, what are the various theoretical perspectives common to work on those objects of study, how we can make claims ‘to know’ something about those objects) and we reaffirm those basics in every course thereafter. In IR, those disciplinary basics are usually (in order) as follows: the state and related but much less significant non-state actors; the theories of realism, liberalism and (maybe) the others (see also the structure of the discipline as organized by the ‘Great Debates’); we make claims to know on the basis of scientific enquiry. Truly transdisciplinary IR would, then, subvert these basic truths. As noted above, I have historically been quite ill-disciplined. I teach IR as a politics of the everyday; I ask students to locate themselves in the practices of global politics. I recount the discipline as a series of narratives and challenges to those narratives and my work is explicitly anti-positivist. Does this mean I have transcended IR? Along with others, in my research I have enacted methodologies drawn from other disciplines (Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Literature), engaged with the world from a situated and contextual perspective that I acknowledge and reflect upon, and made fundamentally different types of knowledge claim than those permissible within a scientistic framework. I don’t think, though, that these transgressions of disciplinary codes have enabled me to transcend IR. At the heart of every discipline is its knowledge. Knowledge, as we know, is power; at the heart of every discipline, then, is its politics of knowledge production. What counts as knowledge? How can we evaluate the credibility of a claim to know? In Dance, we can enact or perform and judge technique. In Mechanical Engineering, we can build a bridge from A to B and judge its structural integrity. In Medicine, we can diagnose a patient or carry out a surgery and judge accuracy of diagnosis or the success of the surgical intervention. We have no such markers in Social Science; we have only the strength of our arguments and we measure that strength by its evidence base. We may disagree over what counts as evidence (does a Presidential statement carry the same weight as an anonymous comment on a blog somewhere?); over whether claims to know are universal or particular; over whether knowledge is objective, subjective or constituted as knowledge through the specific discursive conditions of its emergence. We might frame our knowledge production as ‘hypothesis testing’ or ‘story telling’ and we might offer our conclusions as one possible interpretation among many or as The Proven Truth; whatever our framing, however, what we are framing is evidence-based. At the heart of the discipline of IR, there is a fetish for evidence, a fetishisation of evidence-based argument. On this, implicitly or explicitly, IR scholars agree. We want evidence in my own work, and we demand it from my students. ‘What is the basis of this claim?’, I scribble in margins. ‘You can’t just assume that this is the case. What’s your evidence?’. ‘Disciplines’ are constituted by their non-negotiables. They are fictive, but given meaning through our continued invocation of them as meaningful categories. They teach us how to behave in our intellectual pursuits and, while disciplines allow vigorous debate over ontological assumptions, epistemological positions and methodological choices, there are boundaries that cannot be transgressed without corrupting the notion of disciplinary belonging. Transdisciplinarity is a chimera. Once you are there, you are not-there, because to transcend a discipline illuminates the arbitrary nature of all disciplinary boundaries and the fiction that provides us with spaces between. Roland Bleiker wrote a profound and brilliant paper years ago exhorting the discipline to ‘forget IR theory’. Perhaps the only way to transcend the discipline is to forget IR. In IR, I think that means problematizing our fetish for evidence and investigating how else we might construct a contribution to knowledge, if not a claim to know: experiential accounts; art; fiction writing; poetry. Perhaps if International Studies Quarterly publishes a collection of poems and photographs that stand alone as a comment on practices of global politics, then we will know we have forgotten, have transcended IR.

We should queer US diplomatic history – centralizing the question of how power shapes and works through sex, intimacy, and affective life is key to accurate studies of the process of diplomatic engagement

Capo, et. al., 2016(Julio Capó, Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Commonwealth Honors College. Shanon Fitzpatrick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. Melani McAlister is Associate Professor of American Studies, International Affairs, and Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University. David Minto is the Fund for Reunion-Cotsen Fellow in LGBT Studies at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. They are co-authors of the colloquy “Queering America and the World" from Diplomatic History,” Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World. February 12th 2016.http://blog.oup.com/2016/02/queer-diplomatic-history/#sthash.qgEdrOJN.dpuf) // JRW

“We had him down as a rent boy,” remarked a bartender in Brussels about Salah Abdeslam, one of the suspected jihadists in the recent Paris attacks. Several reports noted that Abdeslam frequented gay bars and flirted with other men. These revelations were difficult to slot into existing media narratives and stood in uneasy relation to his posited allegiance with the group best known in the United States as ISIS. After all, there have been numerous credible reports of ISIS’s violent condemnation and abuse of queer people. In many instances, the penalty for homosexuality has been death. Meanwhile, a select number of those who have fled war-torn Syria to seek resettlement in the United States have identified as LGBTQ. Their fears are many: the violence of a state takeover by ISIS, the oppressive regime of President Bashar Assad, being “found out” as queer, and becoming stateless, among others. But the process for resettlement is long, tenuous, and mired with red tape meant to keep them from entering the United States, where expressions of populist anti-Islamic sentiment (and pushback against gay marriage) are mainstream news. Furthermore, refugee policies in North America favor heteronormative families, while popular culture often pathologizes both migrant sexualities and foreign regimes of LGBTQ oppression. A few months ago, we were invited to contribute to colloquy in the journal Diplomatic History on the topic of “Queering America and the World.” With all of these realities so pressing, it seems like queering US diplomatic history in its various expansive manifestations shouldn’t be particularly hard. But it is. Although the reasons are many, one is particularly significant: What do we mean by queer and queering? The field of queer studies has tackled this question for over two decades. We are not reinventing the wheel, but rather emphasizing what the United States and the World field has to contribute to this conversation, and how it may be implicated in it. Of course we mean to insist on a focus on queer people—the soldiers, state department officials, transnational activists, aid workers, merchants, artists, and those, like Ugandans targeted by Christian leaders, who find themselves under the shadow of US influence. At times, this includes those who identify, or are identified, as queer, as well as those whose lives and work are shaped by that reality. Perhaps they are vulnerable to attack: roughed up, tortured, or fired from work and harassed at home. Perhaps, even at the same time, they are involved in sexual rights movements, protests, and the creation of new domestic and international politics. All the while, queer perspectives also acknowledge the kinships, passions, and playful and sexy encounters—oftentimes jumbled together—that lead to new understandings in the United States and across borders. When satirists send dildos to Oregon militias or use Photoshop to superimpose them on terrorist or GOP-wielded AK-47s we are treated to a different vision of US militancy. But beyond such mockery, imperialist and foreign affairs have long been loaded with tropes and practices of seduction, intimacy, dominance, and penetration, as well as binary models of gendered power. Whether we’re talking about the secrets shared by spies, the partnerships between statesmen and women, or the transnational bonds linking gay activists, we aim to take the relationships part of special relationships seriously. In the end, we also want queering the United States in the World to mean asking hard questions about the archive, about how stories are told and meanings are stabilized. It isn’t enough to talk about sex, although we want that too. We imagine also asking about what kinds of narratives the archives allow us to tell, and what is gained by viewing them askew, newly, or in a way that is off the straight and narrow path. The richness of queer life, after all, rarely finds reflection in official records, even when they speak strongly to its probing and regulation. Reversing that dynamic and queerly interrogating our source base aligns us to the important work of many others unwilling to be shaped by the priorities and orientations of history’s victors. Some might fear that moves to queer the field of the United States and the World may trivialize its work, but we think the opposite: queerness is and should be everywhere, including queer people, and sexual politics, and methods of thinking queerly. It’s urgent to examine how power, including manifestations such as settler colonialism and consumer capitalism, both shapes and works through sex, intimacy, and affective life. But queering, while informed by political needs in the present, also helps us understand many historical events and processes that continue to exert tremendous effects in the world. Recent stories from Europe and the Middle East only remind us of that longer history. Like earlier revelations about US torture, they reveal sexuality’s complex imbrication with transnational circulations and geopolitical affairs, including US-sponsored wars and their aftermaths. Like any intervention in a scholarly field, the practices of queering the history of US foreign relations will evolve as they are tested and reoriented. And we have to remain vigilant to ensure that in queering the study of the United States and the World we don’t court ahistorical thinking about what queerness means or looks like, or encourage forms of US exceptionalism. Yet it is exciting to imagine how US diplomatic historians’ skills and strengths—including their attention to international relations, creative use of multi-sited archives, and interest in changing power relations between people and nations—might enhance ongoing processes of queering happening in other subfields and disciplines. Our colloquy points to keywords, research questions, and methodologies through which queering promises to provide fresh impetus and complexity, even as it acknowledges that the bounds and definitions of the term “queer,” much like the fates of many LGBTQ refugees and activist projects, remain in flux.