Description
This paper is interested in the treatment of abstractions, understood as social categories that appear to us as empirically given, within critical IR scholarship. Focusing on three abstractions in particular — queer, trans, and subaltern — it identifies a propensity within ostensibly critical approaches to use these subordinated subject positions as allegories that can explicate the traditional concerns of IR: war, statecraft, migration, and so on. The allegorization of these subject positions treats oppressed people as mere rhetorical figures or methodological stepping-stones for academic theorizing. This move serves a mystifying function: It disables scholars from examining the complex social relations that give rise to these abstracted subject positions. In each of our three case studies (queer theory, trans studies, and subaltern studies) we find that the abstraction operates as a form of mystification within its relative literature, foreclosing scholars’ ability to address the specific and substantive issues of subaltern, queer, and trans people’s lives. In addition to elaborating a critique of this tendency, the paper outlines alternative approaches that demystify the terms queer, trans, and subaltern by attending to their concrete historical and social determinations. These methods of demystification, we argue, carry forward a founding commitment of critical theory that is all too often abandoned.
