Sex Rule in Global Politics

• In Event: Queer Theorizing in Citizenship, Law, and Society

Abstract

As Cynthia Weber (2016, 1) pointed out, “international relations underappreciates how sexuality functions in international relations theory.” In response, Weber (2016, 4, 5, 6, 14, emphasis in original) told a story of “how the crafting of sovereign and sexualized figures is a tool in domestic and international games of power,” engaging “queer logics of statecraft” and figurations of “the homosexual” across the rules of global politics, producing “sexualized orders of international relation” which order and are ordered by “understandings of sex, of gender, and of sexuality.” As Richter-Montpetit (2018) explains, queer IR work has then used the concepts of homonormativity (citing Duggan 2003), homonationalism (citing Puar 2007), pinkwashing (citing Puar and Mikdashi 2012; Schotten and Maikey 2012), and homocolonialism (citing Rahman 2014) to demonstrate the ways that configurations of “sexual norms and normativities” can “shape national and transnational political and economic orders.”

This paper argues that a key part of those configurations of sexual norms and normativities is the existence of a variety of complex and interlocking sex rules – rules in global politics about what sex acts happen when, what they mean, and how they are related to the constitution, consolidation, population, and identity of the state, historically and in its continued form-shifting. Sex rules constituted how families and states chose dynastic marriage partners and negotiated territorial and monetary transfers, and the ways that dynasties’ subjects read and understood dynastic marriage and reproduction. State formal and informal sex rules do the work to constitute and control marriage and reproduction for the constitution and reproduction of the state. Sex rules surrounding national membership, migration, and national identity constitute and are constitutive of state membership and state identity. States use sex rules to position themselves relatively vis a vis other states in ways often injurious on racial and colonial axes.

Accordingly, this paper explores the concept of ‘sex rule’ in global politics, arguing that the sexual construction of the state manifests through a state of sex rule, built on a wide variety of networks of sex rules. The regulation of sex and sexuality exist and matter in global politics, and global politics affects the shape of regulation of sex and sexuality. With Rubin (1975, 204), I suggest that this state of sex rule is context-dependent but stable: “sex/gender systems are not ahistorical emanations of the human mind; they are products of historical human activity.” This paper presents four contexts where sex rules and the state are intimately intertwined: the practice and legacies of dynastic marriage (building the state), historical and contemporary multi-faceted control of citizen marriage and reproduction (consolidating the state), the weaponization of the performance of sex acts for partner/marriage migration and asylum cases (controlling entrance to the state), and the wielding of homonormativity as a condition of national membership (consolidating the identity of the state). From these contexts, the paper builds an initial plausibility case for what ‘sex rule’ is and how it works in global politics.

Author

• Laura Sjoberg, Royal Holloway, University of London