Description
This paper examines the moral economy around sex as a constitutive force in contemporary geopolitics. It argues that ideas about “normal” sexuality—particularly heterosexuality, monogamy, and binary gender—have long structured international order and continue to shape global politics today. Historically, European colonial powers exported sexual norms as markers of “civilisation,” displacing local gender and sexual systems. In the twenty-first century, similar dynamics underpin emergent moral geopolitics. More contemporarily, Russia’s opposition to so-called “Gayropa” exemplifies how moralising discourses around sexuality and “traditional values” are mobilised to challenge Liberal International Order. Parallel discourses are parroted transnationally by far-right leaders who frame the defence of “traditional values” as a global struggle against “wokeness.” To make sense of this convergence, the paper proposes a queer-realist framework that bridges realist and queer International Relations theory. Rather than privileging material, institutional, or ideational power alone, a queer-realist lens explores how the regulation of sexuality and gender intersects with other forms of power in the making of geopolitical projects and international orders. This approach recentres the political in IR theory and provides new tools for analysing how sex and sexuality shape the evolving post-liberal international landscape.
