Sex Rules State Rules Sex Rule

• In Event: Queer Interrogations: State Sovereignty, Precarity, and Reproductive Rights

Abstract

Queer work has, recently, paid significant attention to the ways in which sexual relationships are constitutive of (both literally and figuratively) and constituted by state citizenship practices. Work on gay marriage suggests that the sexual relationships that states recognize matter for who states recognize as citizens, how citizenship is distributed, and the ways that the state legitimates sexuality. Recent work on pinkwashing also suggests that states’ claims about how they treat their queers are a part of state status-seeking in global politics: states examine, and use as examples, particular instantiations of sexual relationships. What is less explored is the direct relationship between sexual relations and their citizenship implications.

This paper looks to understand the contours, deployments, and significations of sex-based migration and citizenship rules in the 21st century. The quantitative portion of this paper will code sex-related rules for migration and citizenship, using the data to ask questions about state diversity, migration patterns, citizenship patterns, and interstate conflict. This work will be supplemented by case study work about the sex-based migration and citizenship laws in three countries (tentatively, the United States, Egypt, and Malaysia). This case study work will include legal analysis, interviews of people affected by sex-based migration and citizenship patterns, and discourse analysis of government statements about sex, sexuality, and nation related to sex-based migration and citizenship laws.

Building on feminist and queer theorizing in global politics that has highlighted the importance of gender, sexuality, and perceptions about those things have in the structure and function of the global political arena, this project takes sex as both significatory and embodied. Expanding on Spike Peterson’s argument that ‘making states is making sex’, it argues that states and sex are inextricably co-constituted in contemporary global politics, not only in the production of the state, but in its constant reproduction. Through its empirical work, this project makes links between sex, sexuality, motherhood, and state territorial security and citizenship rules.

Author

• Laura Sjoberg, Royal Holloway, University of London