Description
This paper sets out from the idea that the Good Friday Agreement created a unique form of sovereign and imaginary space in Northern Ireland at odds with a social order and recognisable borders based on territorial and identity integrity. This is a space marked by simultaneity: Northern Irish citizens could hold Irish or British citizenship (or both) and change these at will. By foregrounding a shared sense of EU-ness, particularly the principle of Freedom of Movement, the topography of Northern Ireland could be thought of as being simultaneously in the UK and Ireland, but always in the EU. The space and identities of Northern Ireland cannot be sorted into, or assimilated by, acceptable categories because they straddle (both/and) or fall outside the binary (neither/nor). NI is an unsortable category: it is queer. In this paper, I propose two things: (a) that the Good Friday Agreement produced a queer Northern Ireland; and (b) that Brexit tries to re-allocate NI into established sovereign categories, thus ridding it of its queerness. This paper grapples with the complexities of heteronormative bordering as Brexit unfolds and combines queer IR with new materialism to open a provocative new crack in the Anthropocentric cliff face to reveal the violence rendered possible by Brexit bordering. Like every heteronormative intervention, Brexit proposes that the movement of people, the management of its farm animals and the governance of the space can be straightened, if only sovereign binary logic can be applied.
