Queer/Trans K’s

A2: State Necessary

Queerness produces better, practical institutions- not a total rejection

Weber 15 Cynthia Weber is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK. International Studies Quarterly, “Queer Intellectual Curiosity as International Relations Method: Developing Queer International Relations Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks,” 9-3, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12212

This is not to say that queer logics of statecraft do not give rise to “institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations” (Berlant and Warner 1995:548, footnote 2) that make “sovereign men,” “sovereign states,” and international orders appear to be singular, coherent, and privileged. In this respect, they can be akin to sexual organizing principles like heteronormativies and homonormativities (Berlant and Warner 1998:548; footnote 2; Duggan 2003:50). For, by “confusing the [singular] norm, normativity [or antinormativity]” (my brackets; Barthes 1976:109; Wiegman and Wilson, 2015:1-3), queer logics of statecraft can produce new institutions, new structures of understanding, and new practical orientations that are paradoxically founded upon a disorienting and/or reorienting plural. This can make them more alluring, more powerful, and more easily mobilized by both those who, for example, wish to resist hegemonic relations of power and those who wish to sustain them (Weber 1999, 2002; Puar and Rai 2002; Puar 2007). Unlike heteronormativities and homonormativities, though, we cannot name in advance what these institutions, structures of understanding, and practical (dis)/(re)orientations will be. We cannot know whether they will be politicizing or depoliticizing. To determine this, it is necessary to identify both the precise plural(s) each particular queer logic of statecraft employs to figure some particular “sovereign man,” “sovereign state,” or other “sovereign community” and international order, always asking, “For what constituency or constituencies does this plural operate?”

A2: Queer Studies Homonationalist

Queer studies are distinct from other studies in the LGBT spectrum

Stryker 4 (“Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin” Published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies – Published in 2004, article by Susan Stryker page 214)

Most disturbingly, “transgender” increasingly functions as the site in which to contain all gender trouble, thereby helping secure both homosexuality and heterosexuality as stable and normative categories of personhood. This has damaging, isolative political correlaries. It is the same developmental logic that transformed an antiassimilationist “queer” politics into a more palatable LGBT civil rights movement, with T reduced to merely another (easily detached) genre of sexual identity rather than perceived, like race or class, as something that cuts across existing sexualities, revealing in often unexpected ways the means through which all identities achieve their specificities. The field of transgender studies has taken shape over the past decade in the shadow of queer theory. Sometimes it has claimed its place in the queer family and offered an in-house critique, and sometimes it has angrily spurned its lineage and set out to make a home of its own. Either way, transgender studies is following its own trajectory and has the potential to address emerging problems in the critical study of gender and sexuality, identity, embodiment, and desire in ways that gay, lesbian, and queer studies have not always successfully managed. This seems particularly true of the ways that transgender studies resonate with disability studies and intersex studies, two other critical enterprises that investigate atypical forms of embodiment and subjectivity that do not readily reduce to heteronormativity, yet that largely fall outside the analytic framework of sexual identity that so dominates queer theory.

A2: IR Solves Queer Issues

We must rethink our western notions of what it means to be queer – queerness upon the backdrop of other inequalities and wartime crimes is important to ask important questions about how violence is legitimized through war

Mikdashi and Puar, 2016

(April, Maya, Mellon Postdoctoral Associate, Institute for Research on Women (IRW) Scholar, in conjunction with the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Ph.D. from Columbia University inAnthropology, Author of "Sex, Secularism and Sectarianism: Practicing Citizenship in Contemporary Lebanon," Co-Founder of Jadaliyya Ezine, Co-Director of the documentary “About Baghdad”, Professor at Rutgers, Jasbir K, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies, Author of “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times“, “Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization” (GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies)”, co-edited “Sexuality and Space” , “Interspecies” “Viral” (Women’s Studies Quaterly), Articles in Gender, Place, and Culture, Radical History Review, Socialist Review, Feminist Legal Studies, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography,Feminist Studies, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Author for The Guardian, Huffington Post, Art India,The Feminist Review, Bully Bloggers, Jadaliyya, and Oh! Industry., Won the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the Edward Said Chair of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, a Ford Foundation grant for ethnographic documentation work , the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award ,Advisory Board member of USACBI.  Director of the Graduate Program of the top-ranked Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University. “Queer Theory and Permanent War”, Published by Duke University Press, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/613189/pdf - KSA)

In such a context, what kinds of queer organizing, archives, theory, practices, visibilities, institutions, knowledge production projects emerge? The precarity of queer life is not exceptional in these sociopolitical spaces: it is additional precisely because war, genocide, occupation, oppression, dictatorship, terrorism, and killings are part of the everyday fabric of life for many people who live in the region. What kind of queer emerges in the face of revolutionary overthrow of the Mubarak regime, for example, or in the context of Lebanon, where one out of every three residents in 2015 was a refugee fleeing war in a different part of the Middle East? What animates the impulse to search for something to call or to theorize as queer? What must the queer body do, or be, to be recognized as such, and by whom? Do we want this recognition, and if so, how and for what purposes? How can we generate theory out of these locations, and if doing so, are these bodies of theory routed through area studies rather than recognized as queer theory? For example, perhaps the term most used to describe injury against samesex relations is homophobia. As a term, homophobia is an apt descriptor for discrimination against queers in several urban areas of the contemporary Middle East—and we have written about its circulations between the United States and the contemporary Middle East (Puar and Mikdashi 2012). However, homophobia is also a homogenizing and flattening discourse. In Beirut, the naming “homophobia” aggregates aggressions that might also be understood as gendered or racial or economic. For example, the sign “homophobia” is the marker most used to describe incidents where working-class or racialized migrant laborers engaging in male-male sexual behaviors are attacked or brutalized. Perhaps this is not surprising given the everydayness of violence (sexual, physical, psychological) directed against migrant labor (including “domestic labor”) or refugees. With the description of homophobia, the ordinariness of these assemblages of racial and classed violence are marked and are routed through LGBTQ rights groups and organizations and discourses that circulate transnationally. These organizations and discourses operate by universalizing particular injuries. Transnational LGBTQ rights discourse, meanwhile, is not only anchored in US-based queer histories and movements. It is also anchored in, and anchors, white, cisgendered, masculinist, and 220 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES middle-class queer histories that are elevated through the elision of race, sex, and class domination in the United States. Once emptied of located and ongoing histories of domination, the “global LGBTQ movement” can emerge as such. We are turning from the now obvious preoccupation with queer organizations, activism, and the naming of queer bodies, optics that are largely mobilized in queer theory as American studies as evidence of queer vitalism or “sexuality studies.” We note, rather, that an urgent issue for those who work in and from the perspective of transnational Middle East studies (those of us whose archives are located there) is: How can queer theory emerge and converse with the mass corporeal losses and debilities of war? Does queer theory (still) require a sexual or gendered body or a sexual or gendered injury—particularly if part of the project of homonationalism is to produce and stabilize transnational, imperial, and settler colonial forms of sexual and gendered injury? Perhaps, thinking from a location where war and colonization are quotidian contexts of life, we should rethink what sexual injury is, and the economic, political, and military work that designations of “sexual” or “gendered” injury and violence does in the first place. How do these designations affect which deaths or injuries are internationally nameable and mournable and which deaths are merely “collateral damage” in the contemporary Middle East? What gendered and racial archives are being invoked with every deployment of those now ubiquitous words, collateral damage?