Description
Scholars of Global Political Economy (GPE) have been relatively slow to draw on queer theory, in part due to perceived tensions between materialist and postmodernist approaches. Some of these tensions have been resolved over the past two decades through an emerging body of research that seeks to harness queer insights for the study of diverse political economic phenomena. While this literature has usefully centralised matters of sexuality in GPE—and specifically documented how (queer) sexual and gender power relations are constitutive of the global economy—it largely conceives of queer as a theoretical toolbox to be used in ad hoc and topic-specific ways. The relationship between queer theory and methodology in GPE research is scarcely discussed. This paper addresses this gap by identifying two key ways through which the praxis of GPE research can be ‘queered’: firstly, by conceiving queer as a mode of inquiry in GPE; and secondly, by deploying queer as a method for GPE. This combination of mode and method offers an alternative way of thinking-doing research in GPE that unsettles taken-for-granted categories, norms, and meanings and parses the power relations that undergird them. It further spotlights how processes of inclusion/exclusion work to (re)produce the field of GPE and offers fresh critical insights into what GPE scholars know and how they come to know it.
