Description
International Relations (IR) is a discipline that takes itself seriously. It deals with serious subject matters such as war, diplomacy, power, and violence, organising its disciplinary, empirical, and theoretical boundaries around events, objects, and subjects that are taken to be serious. This disciplinary seriousness does not only permeate what is studied but also how they are studied and who studies them. As noted by feminist and queer theorists (Enloe, 2013; Zalewski et al. 2015; Halberstam, 2011; Berlant, 1997), these disciplinary assumptions and performances often work for the exclusion of ways of knowing, understanding, and presenting politics that do not seem to easily fit the mould of seriousness taken as disciplinary common sense.
This paper, in questioning the disciplinary, ontological, epistemological, and methodological seriousness that pervade constructions of the “international”, calls for what Lauren Berlant names a “counterpolitics of the silly object”. Three sites of intervention emerge in this inquiry: ontological, epistemological, and methodological. Ontologically, what do we lose when we construct a world that is inherently serious? How does our perspective shift when we take account of a world that is contingent, unexpected, and non-sensical? Epistemologically, how does IR scholarship discipline boundaries of acceptance and rejection, of good scholarship and bad scholarship across gendered, raced, and heteronormative differentiations of the serious and the silly? Can we know the world from a perspective that does not yield to these differentiations? Methodologically, what do we gain from analyses, perspectives, and performances that look at the “waste materials” of everyday communication: jokes, memes, reality TV shows, children’s cartoons, and more?
