Symposium: Queer IR

[This is a post-publication review symposium] "Define your terms" is one of those seemingly-innocuous pieces of advice readily dispensed all the time by professors to their students, especially in introductory courses. Be clear and consistent in your use of words. Have a precise way of elaborating what each part of your argument means: when you say "state" or "war" or "woman," for instance, those signifiers ought to have clear and stable signifieds to which they correspond. After all, if we don't all agree on the meanings of our terms, how can we even communicate our claims, let alone assess them in pursuit of a progressive cumulation of knowledge? Cindy Weber's call for a "queer intellectual curiosity" (2016) makes this seemingly innocuous move appear not so innocent. By urging us to examine how the boundaries between the normal and the perverse break down and are incompletely reinscribed at a variety of "international" sites, including in the very writing of "IR scholarship" as an exercise in clearly stating what is and is not going on in the world, Weber raises some challenging questions about both the theories and the methodologies through which we generate knowledge. Normalization and domestication, she suggests, are at work all up and down the "levels of analysis" and at all stages of the research process, and hence -- much as Foucault suggested -- what appears to be liberation might in fact be a renewed and more subtle form of imprisonment. [...]