Description
In IR studies, the traditional definitions of state sovereignty are made meaningful via the idealized binary logic, and the state can be seen as a masculine and heteronormative actor from a feminist lens. The binaries like men/women, masculinity/femininity, and heteronormative/homosexual which are expressed in mainly Western discourses, play a crucial role in creating a fixed gendered/gendering understanding of state sovereignty and how diplomats represent the state. Given that the understanding of what is considered 'femininity' and 'masculinity' can be very different across cultures in times and spaces, the gendered understanding of state sovereignty in China and India can be influenced by the Western imperialism, producing an orientalist reading and gendering of state's sovereignty. In order to tackle this challenge, this research uses the plural logic of and/neither to contest the either/or representational logics and to understand how diplomatic discourses from China and India respond to the ambiguity of the state sovereign subjectivity. By adopting a multi-method qualitative analysis, combining thematic and Foucauldian discourse analysis, this research seeks to answer the questions of how are state's sovereignty performed by diplomats in China and India? And how does this plural performativity of sexualized sovereignty challenge and/neither reproduce the modern Westernized diplomatic order and their embedded knowledge production? I argue that the performativity and reproduction of China's and India's body politic could be seen as a drag performance. Diplomacy as a deeply sexualized and racialized field, its discourse can help to produce the West as the knowledge-producer and the non-West as the knowledge-receiver and at the same time reproduce the West as the knowledge-received and the non-West as the knowledge-producer. Such an analysis of non-monolithic sovereignty would help to unmask the gendered, sexualized, and racialized performativity of state's sovereignty and contribute to decolonial thinking in (neo)imperial sexualized order of diplomacy in international studies.
