Queering the “Territorial Peace”? Queer Theory Conversing With Mainstream International Relations

With others in this forum, I see queer theorizing as having multiple logics – both within each approach to queer theorizing and across queer approaches (see Weber, this volume). In this view, queer is unsettlable, intersectional, uncaging, multiple (and multiplied), both/and (e.g., Weber, 1999), and engaged in projects of (the productivity of) failure and maybe even destruction (e.g., Halberstam, 2011; Edelman, 2004). Many of instantiations of queer might (appropriately) reject conversations with ‘mainstream’. I contend queer theorizing can be fruitfully applied, not only as rejection and/or transformation, but in conversation with the research agendas of ‘mainstream’ IR (e.g., Sjoberg, 2013, 2012). Along those lines, this piece uses a brief example of engaging the logics of the materiality of sex in Judith Butler’s (1993) Bodies that Matter with the ‘mainstream’ IR research agenda addressing the “territorial peace” (Gibler 2007; 2012; Gibler and Tir, 2010; Gibler and Braithwaite, 2013). Rather than being representative or totalizing, this engagement is meant to pair one queer theory work with one IR research endeavor to suggest the potential productivity of such engagements.