Queer/Trans K’s

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Queer IR Fails

Queer IR fails – Queer ethics and epistemology is incompatible with theories of international relations and realism

Jezzi 15 (Nathaniel, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom, specialist in philosophy, peer-reviewed by scholars, “Constructivism in Metaethics”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, non-profit organization, March 19, 2015, http://www.iep.utm.edu/con-ethi/)

The first supposed failing is that realism cannot accommodate our broader metaphysical and epistemological commitments. Here the concern is generally that realism about value, or morality, or reasons is incompatible with philosophical naturalism. Very roughly, this is the ontological thesis that the only kinds of facts and properties that exist are natural ones—that is, those facts and properties that (could) figure as the objects of investigation of our best scientific practices. The alleged problem is that ethical facts and properties could only satisfy condition (3) if naturalism were false. There are two (related) versions of this argument in the literature. For example, according to one popular version of the objection made famous by J.L. Mackie (1977), ethical facts and properties exhibit certain necessary connections with our motivational capacities. This view is sometimes referred to as motivational internalism. If these motivational connections are understood naturalistically (for example, as connections between ethical judgments and an agent’s desires or dispositions to choose), it is hard to see how ethical facts and properties could enjoy the independence described in condition (3). They would have to be stance-independent by nature yet necessarily connected with certain motivational stances. The worry is that this would suggest, in the words of Mackie, that ethical facts and properties were “utterly different from anything else in the universe” (1977: 38). The conclusion here is that realism commits one to a kind of metaphysical queerness. Mackie’s allegation of metaphysical queerness gives rise to a related concern about epistemological queerness. If ethical facts and properties are metaphysically different from anything else in the universe, why should we think that we could discover them in the same way we come to know natural facts and properties (that is, via observation and empirical theorizing)? Here the particular worry is that we could only come to know them via some mysterious faculty of intuition. Hence a queer metaphysics would require a queer epistemology. While Mackie was the first to present these objections, there are also more recent versions of this kind of naturalistic argument–ones that respond to Mackie’s worries about queerness with a constructivist solution. For example, Street (2006) claims that realism is incompatible with our best evolutionary account of how we came to make the ethical judgments we do. According to this argument, if realism were true we would have no good explanation of how our ethical judgments have succeeded in matching (or “tracking”) stance-independent ethical truths; rather, the truth of these judgments would have to be entirely a matter of unlikely coincidence. Constructivism, by contrast, is supposed to avoid these problems. By grounding ethical truths in features of intentional states, constructivists claim that their view makes use of only naturalistic materials, ones that can be accounted for by empirical psychology. These are features that may be appealed to in order to explain the apparent connection between ethical judgments and motivation. They might also help the constructivist avoid Street’s skeptical scenario. This is because the constructivist will argue that there is no serious gap between ethical judgment and truth that the skeptic may exploit. Of course, these types of naturalistic concern alone do little to distinguish the constructivist challenge from others, such as the challenge error-theorists and expressivists mount against realism. In fact, it would appear as if every major challenge to realism incorporates some version of this worry. But this is not the only motivation to which constructivists appeal. This first type of concern is usually coupled with a second type.

Incorporating Queer theory into consideration, organization, and conduct of international relations confuse figurations of statecraft and threatens to push Queer theory out of transnational thought

Weber 16 (Cynthia, Professor of International Relations at Sussex University, co-Director of the media company Pato Productions, films that critically engage with identity, citizenship, and human rights practices, Graduate Program in International Affairs and the Observatory for Latin America at the New School University, published several internationally recognized books on topics ranging from US foreign policy and international relations to theory and film, including Simulating Sovereignty, Cambridge University Press, “Queer International Relations”, Oxford University Press, January 25, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=TiHuCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=queer+%22international+relations%22+intersectionality&ots=a6qioU01He&sig=aCoU53h1_cMvGkS1yN2S8wqsuVQ#v=onepage&q=queer&f=false)

Reconsidered through the lens of queer logics of statecraft—a lens that contests those exclusively binary expressions of 'difference' that demand that all subjectivities can be and can be known as singularly signifying subjectivities across every potentially plural register they occupy or engage— the persistence of 'modern man' as 'sovereign man' is put into doubt. This is for two reasons. First, queer logics of statecraft direct us to an appre- ciation of those queer figures who cannot or will not signify monolithically around sex, around gender and/or around sexuality. This is a point queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick make (1993). More than this, though, queer logics of statecraft enable us to appreciate how queerly plural figures might order, reorder, or disorder national, regional, and international politics and the singular understanding of sovereignty upon which these orders have depended at least since the Treaty of Westphalia. This is the story Tom Neuwirth and/as Conchita Wurst tells in relation to contemporary 'Europe', as recounted in chapter 6. Neuwirth/Wurst's story is the same story many other figurations of or opposed to 'sovereign man' have been telling for a very long time—be they 'the revolutionary state and citizen' (Lind and Keating 2013) or 'the hegemonic state' (Weber 1999). For none of these figures can be captured or contained by an either/or logic of traditional statecraft as mancraft. This is because their subjectivities are formed through and expressed by a pluralized logic of the and/or a logic that understands these figures as both either one thing or another or possibly another while it simultaneously understands them as one thing and another and possibly another. As these queerly plural figurations of the 'homosexual' of/in relation to 'sovereign man' come into focus, what also often comes into focus with them is the concerted effort required to attempt to present not just these figurations but any figurations of 'sovereign man' as if he were singular, as if he preexisted attempts to constitute him as such, as if he had no history. This is the second way in which queer logics of statecraft put the persistence of the 'singular modern man' Foucault describes in doubt. For rather than evidencing the existence much less persistence of this 'modern man', what they evidence is the endless reworkings—the desperate, constant refigurations of, in this case, the 'homosexual' as/in relation to 'sovereign man' that underscore the fragility of both 'modern man' and 'modern sovereignty'. These endless reworkings of 'modern man' as 'sovereign man' expose the endless games of power these refigurations require, hinting that these particular modern games of sovereign statecraft as sovereign mancraft are unlikely to work forever. Put in Foucault's terms, what comes into relief through queer logics of statecraft is how the attempted figuration of the 'homosexual' as singular 'sovereign man' and the singular understanding of sovereignty upon which it depends are 'in the process of disappearing' (1971). By neglecting to take queer logics of statecraft as mancraft into account, opportunities are lost to better understand how a variety of political games of power function in relation to the 'homosexual'. On the one hand, because the vast majority of IR scholarship insists that any incorporation of sexuality into IR (if it is to be incorporated at all) must be (presumably) knowable and always codable in either/or terms, consideration of how queer and/or modalities of queerly pluralized and/or subjectivities and their effects on the organization, regulation, and conduct of intimate, national, regional, and international relations threaten to fall out of IR theory and practice. On the other hand, consideration of how singular figurations of the 'homosexual' in traditional either/or logics of statecraft as mancraft are confronted and confused by and/or figurations of these same 'homosexuals' threatens to fall out of transnational/global queer same 'homosexuals' threatens to fall out of transnational/global queer studies. For example, Puar's and Puar and Rai's accounts of the 'al-Qaeda terrorist' allow for multiple incarnations of this figure (as the monster, the terrorist, and the fag who is also the dangerous Muslim or the dangerous Arab or the dangerous Sikh, for example; see Puar and Rai 2002; Puar 2007). Yet because Puar and Rai only read this figure through the either/ or logics Of statecraft as mancraft that Western governments employed to incite, stabilize, and regiment this figure in their domestic and foreign policies, Puar and Rai overlook how the 'al-Qaeda terrorist' functions through queer logics of statecraft, which employ and/or logics to con- fuse and confound Western domestic and foreign policies (Weber 2002).