Description
Queer theory is arguably at its most compelling and potent as a critique of identitarian politics. Queer theory’s exposure of the exclusions through which governing norms of intelligibility and ostensibly stable identity formations are constituted was inspired by and inspired the attempts by groups like Queer Nation to envision new forms of collectivity that blur lines of difference. Here were insights that promised to create possibilities for new practices of transnational solidarity. However, queer theoretical insights are few and far between within (feminist) International Relations scholarship on transnational solidarities and social movements.
This paper aims to put queer theory in conversation with the literature on transnational solidarity practices by exploring a fundamental tension at the heart of queer praxis: in order for queer scholars and activists to critique stable identity categories, they are required to launch that critique from the position of a subject that is intelligible within the very structures of identity they opposed. In short, they want to subvert identity but also to have it. It appears that the popular feminist, queer, and poststructuralist repertoire of deconstruction, resignification, and subversion promises more than it is able to offer.
Where do we go from here? This paper returns to the internationalism of the Third World Gays, the Pink Panthers, and other groups of the 1970s. It poses the question: What orientations toward questions of solidarity, borders, and the international might we find in the undertheorized histories of lesbian and gay liberationists? What new forms of collectivity and political subjectivity might they enable?
