Seducing territory

This project explores the co-constitution of the state and sexual relations in global politics on a number of axes. Suggesting that state borders, the people who inhabit state borders, and the international status of states cannot be fully understood without reference to sexual acts and sexual relationships. Looking across time and space, it examines the ways that sex acts have been independent significant and part of key webs of signification in the establishment, evolution, and status of states, of the ‘international system’ as such, and of the laws that govern their relations. Building on feminist and queer theorizing in global politics that has highlighted the importance of gender, sexuality, and perceptions about those things in global politics, this course takes Spike Peterson’s claim that ‘making states is making sex’ literally, and explores a number of dimensions of making states/making sex.