‘What is told is always in the telling’: Reflections on Faking It in 21st Century IR/Global Politics

‘What is told is always in the telling’ ¹

Faking It ² inspires strong reactions. When I submitted a chapter of the developing manuscript to the feminist journal Signs, a reviewer described me as an ‘unconscionable feminist’. When I told my geography professor father about the book, he announced, ‘Sis, you’re my daughter, and I love you, but you’re a pervert, and you’re going to hell’. And when I met up with my PhD supervisor, Rick Ashley, at ISA the year Faking It was launched, he explained that the great and the good (and the bad) of ISA – of all genders – kept asking him what he thought of his protégé’s new work, as a way of inviting him to disown me intellectually. These sorts of responses to Faking It embedded themselves in the discipline of IR over the years, when on increasingly rare occasions IR scholars acknowledged the book’s existence.

To be fair, I did not write Faking It for IR, much less for ‘Disciplinary IRs’. ³ I had been counselled as a PhD student that Simulating Sovereignty, ⁴ my first book, needed to be discipline-facing in order to secure my career. But in my second single-authored book, the advice continued, I could do as I pleased. I had studied poststructuralist IR with Rick and queer theory with Thaïs Morgan as a PhD student. But I had yet to think them together. That changed when I met Diane Rubenstein at Purdue University, where I started my career. Diane’s work at the intersections of US presidential politics, poststructuralism, and feminist/gender/queer theory ⁵ was not only exemplary for me, as she challenged me to consider the possibilities of thinking foreign policy interventions queerly. Diane’s insistence that this work could be humorous, uncompromising, and confronting accounts for the form and much of the flair of Faking It.

At Purdue, Diane with Michael Weinstein nurtured my thinking about connections among political theory, queer theory, and IR, while my Head of Department, Lee Wilson, protected me from unsolicited tenure letters offered by my detractors. Outside of this pocket of institutional protection, though, things were largely different. What I was too young and insolated to appreciate at the time was that the homophobia and cis-sexism of many IR scholars doing Disciplinary, Critical, and/or even Feminist IRs meant I would be personally and professionally punished for this work. As this punishment became institutionalised in IR, an IR urban legend arose – that as the author of Faking It, I was somehow heroic. This was patently untrue. Rather than a heroic piece of work, Faking It was confronting because it was naïvely honest and bold. It was everything Disciplinary IRs praised Simulating Sovereignty and State Sovereignty as Social Construct ⁶ for being and everything Feminist IR (eventually) praised ‘Good Girls, Little Girls and Bad Girls’ ⁷ for being. Unlike those works, though, it was a piece of openly queer scholarship written by an openly queer scholar that came out in the discipline of IR at about the time I came out as queer. It hadn’t occurred to me that this combination of scholar and scholarship was beyond the acceptable bounds of what all forms of institutionalised IRs at the time understood as the political, the personal, the international, and their combination.

So the discipline of IR disavowed Faking It and its author, and then the discipline did its best to forget about this book, my queer work, and/or my connection to any queer work. IR’s amnesia about my queer IR scholarship (of which Faking It was just the best-known example ⁸ ) was so successful that a decade or so after the publication of Faking It when a famous feminist IR scholar was asked about queer theory in IR at a public lecture, her confident reply was, ‘No one in IR does queer theory’. Mission accomplished!

This does not mean that Faking It did not have its fans in IR. Anne Sisson Runyan managed to sneak a hilarious and generous review of the book into the American Political Science Review, ⁹ and Rick championed the book to the point of intellectually disowning those who had invited him to disown me. Faking It even had a cult following among US intercollegiate debaters who, during the year they debated a proposition about US trade with Cuba, consulted me about the finer points of my discussion of Castro’s Cuba to refine their Faking It evidence cards. But this is not how the book was generally received in IR. Coming some years after the publication of my ‘Bad Girls’ article, Faking It was used by many in IR as an(other) illustration of (my) scandalous scholarship and as confirmation that I was not a serious scholar.

Most of the book’s fans were in Latin American Studies or American Studies or at the interdisciplinary edges of theory, politics, and feminist/gender/sexuality/queer studies, like Kathy Ferguson and Shane Phelan who praised the book on its back cover. Yet even in Gay and Lesbian Studies and in what was coming to be known then as Queer Studies, the book failed to find much of a readership. This is in spite of how the University of Minnesota – a press that had a significant Gay and Lesbian Studies/Queer Studies list – categorised the book as ‘Gay and Lesbian Studies/American Studies’.

I have long thought about what made these various (non)reactions to Faking It possible. The IR stories I’ve heard over the years go something like this: Faking It was too far beyond the bounds of IR (even though it is about US interventions in the Caribbean); it was too literary (even though it used foreign policy speeches and events to evidence its arguments); and it was too funny (even though it used humour for serious purposes and took pains to explain these mobilisations in its preface). For these reasons, it seems, Faking It was a book that was always destined to be disowned and/or deleted from all IR canons by many of IR’s biggest guns.

As for Gay and Lesbian Studies and Queer Studies, Faking It seems to have told the wrong story about ‘queer’ to tell the right story about critiquing US hegemonic foreign policy. For Faking It’s story of how the US state appropriated queer performativities to secure its power in the Caribbean was anathema to the predominant understanding of queer then (and, to some extent, still now) ¹⁰ as always resisting hegemonic power.

In light of this history, I was genuinely surprised when Millennium decided to publish a forum on ‘Faking It in 21^st Century IR/Global Politics’. ¹¹ I was even more surprised by some of the claims the forum’s contributors make about Faking It – that is it ‘one of the most important and un(der)appreciated IR…books of the 21st century’ that ‘helped to begin IR’s truculent, recalcitrant, belligerent move out of the last century’, ¹² that it provides ‘permission to narrate international relations [not only on US-Cuban relations but also on Australia and India, for example] in a mode…that would have been inconceivable, perhaps even impermissible, before its publication’, ¹³ and that it ‘helped enable radical pedagogy… exemplifying what bell hooks calls “teaching to transgress”’. ¹⁴

All of this makes me wonder: What makes these new stories – about Faking It’s place in (Queer) IR history and about Queer IR more generally – possible? And, as Roland Barthes would put it, what is in the telling of these new stories?

For me, some of these seemingly new stories about Faking It are not so new. What is new is the range of scholars telling these kinds of disciplinary-challenging stories about Faking It to (and possibly in the name of) institutionalised IRs. The contributors to this forum are exemplary of the kinds of people telling these alternative stories. Eric Selbin and Kevin Dunn occupy the interdisciplinary edges of IR and Latin American Studies or African Studies, work on revolutions or punk theory, and have been telling these kinds of stories about Faking It since it was first published. ¹⁵ Rahul Rao is part of a new generation of queer scholars working at the edges of IR and postcolonial theory who is producing some of the most vital contemporary interventions in transnational/global/international queer studies. ¹⁶ Anthony J. Langlois is a human rights theorist whose work has expanded into LGBT/Queer Studies in part because the field of human rights has expanded in that direction. ¹⁷ And the editor of this forum, Laura Sjoberg, was one of those intercollegiate debaters who used Faking It in her arguments about US-Cuban trade relations back in her undergraduate days. ¹⁸

Where these alternative stories about Faking It are being told is also not new or at all surprising to me. It makes sense that they would be told in a critical IR journal like Millennium and indeed in Millennium itself. For Millennium is the journal that has showcased my boldest feminist and queer challenges to IRs throughout my career by publishing ‘Bad Girls’, ‘Performative States’, ¹⁹ and ‘Flying Planes Can Be Dangerous’. ²⁰

Yet there is more to the ‘who’ and the ‘where’ of new stories about Faking It and about Queer IR than their support by old friends, new colleagues, and long sympathetic critical IR spaces. As Sjoberg notes in her introduction, the world of global politics and the field of IR have changed over time. These changes have allowed for a geopolitical rapprochement between the US and Cuban, as well as something of a disciplinary rapprochement between Disciplinary, Critical, and/or Feminist IRs and Queer work. IR in general is even coming to recognise that by ignoring queer international theory and practice, it risks undermining its own claimed expertise in its core areas of interest – state and nation formation, war and peace, and international political economy. ²¹ While this may not lead many IR scholars to embrace Faking It, it does lead some of them to be curious about Queer IR work more broadly.

On the disciplinary front, these changes did not happen on their own. They are the result in no small part of how those who occupy power in and/or in relation to these IRs have used their power to enable queer work. My case is exemplary in this respect. When J. Ann Tickner and Laura Sjoberg approached me to write a book for their series, Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations, I pitched them a book on queer international relations. They embraced the idea and gave me free rein on how I would write it. My editor at Oxford, Angela Chnapko, not only nurtured this project; she became increasingly enthusiastic about it as it got bolder. ²² And Spike Peterson, who has been critiquing global heteronormativities for longer than I have, ²³ put her institutional power behind the book with her generous comment on its jacket. Editors in top IR discipline-facing journals also supported this work. The editors of the European Journal of International Relations published my analysis of the ways in which Disciplinary IRs function to make it appear as if there is no queer international theory. ²⁴ The editors of International Studies Quarterly published my queer methods piece ²⁵ as well as a forum discussion of the piece on their blog. ²⁶ And the editors of International Studies Review published the ‘Forum on Queer International Relations’ which I co-edited with Laura Sjoberg. ²⁷ What helped these various editors support queer work in IR was how queer IR scholars and their allies were institutionalising and/or making claims to existing ISA spaces through which queer communities and some queer work could be supported. Primary among these are the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans Queer Allies Caucus and an increasingly queer-friendly Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section.

ISA and IR more generally had to make room for queer work and queer scholars, largely because there is a new generation of scholars doing cutting edge queer, international,and queer transnational/global/international work who claim IR as among their disciplinary homes. ²⁸ These scholars have either rejected or refused to internalise disciplinary boundaries that separate ‘queer’ from ‘IR’. Whether this is the case because they found queer work in IR or in (transnational/global) Queer Studies or because their activist politics and policy interventions never respected such boundaries doesn’t matter. What matters is that their bottom-up work is as vital to making new stories about Queer IR possible as is the top-down work of legitimation undertaken by the disciplinarily powerful.

What is in the telling of these new stories about Faking It and about Queer IR?

When Faking It was published, it seems to have been an impossible book in IR and for IR. This is because it interrupted stories that Disciplinary, Critical, and/or Feminist IR scholars were telling at the time. What is in Faking It’s telling to and for IR is that impossible work matters. Interruptive work matters. Writing with abandon matters. And not waiting for Disciplinary IRs to be ready to receive new work (because they are rarely ready) matters. But what is also in this telling is that scholars doing impossible work need mentors, disciplinary champions, and communities of intellectual, institutional, and personal support if they are going to do and to survive doing impossible work.

When I wrote Faking It, my supportive communities were small but significant. I was lucky to have a number of mentors who excelled in making impossible work possible. ²⁹ Rick Ashley, for example, didn’t just teach me about poststructuralism and sovereignty. He taught me that a PhD supervisor’s job is not to produce acolytes but to think with and be out thought by one’s students, while instilling in one’s students a confidence that their voices matter. Once accomplished, then it is the supervisor’s job to make opportunities for their students to be heard. Tim Luke made it possible for me to shift my temporal horizons. His mantra to me was ‘write for the future’, and he reminded me of this time and again as the negative reviews of my queer work accumulated. And even though Eric Selbin generously described Faking It as like the Velvet Underground’s first album – in that it didn’t sell well but everyone who bought it started a band ³⁰ – it is Diane Rubenstein who was my Lou Reed.

I also benefited from some exceptionally open-minded disciplinary champions, especially J. Ann Tickner, Tom Biersteker, and Hayward Alker. If I recall correctly, these three movers and shakers were the only people in US IR who invited me to speak about Faking It at their universities. ³¹ Tom also regularly valorised this work by acting as a friendly (if puzzled) discussant on my ISA panels. And I will never forget one of those all-too frequent ISA panels where I was ignored by a different discussant, by all my fellow panelists and by all audience members. Hayward was sitting in the audience and – in that classic Hayward fashion – he put his hand up, rolled his head back, closed his eyes, and pointedly asked every member of the panel how my analysis challenged their work. They all got this very public message, and so did I.

This is not to say that I had an easy time of it in the discipline. Nor is it true (as some praised me for recently) that I courageously stuck around and took the extreme shunning to which I was subjected. I needed a break from IR, as much as IR seemed to need a break from me. So I studied filmmaking and embarked upon a film project about post-9/11 US citizenship that did not announce itself as IR (although it, too, was all about sovereignty and intervention). ³² This time it was IR that interrupted me by deciding this work counted as International Relations. ³³ It was through this avenue more than any other that I eased my way back into IR conversations. ³⁴

It was weird to be ‘back’. It was weird to be taken seriously again. It was weird to encounter new generations of IR scholars who knew me only through my films and my film-based textbook. ³⁵ It was weird, in other words, to be ‘legitimate’. And it was deeply troubling to know that I was ‘legitimate’ because my queer work had been forgotten or had never been discovered.

At the same time, transnational/global queer work was blossoming in Queer Studies. ³⁶ Critical engagements with development, ³⁷ migration, ³⁸ terrorism, ³⁹ human rights, ⁴⁰ and (or in the context of) neoliberalism ⁴¹ – all areas IR scholars study – were among the hallmarks of this scholarship. Not surprisingly, some of the best and the brightest working in and at the edges of IR were drawing upon this queer work to inform their IR scholarship. The vast majority of them were PhD students or adjunct professors or assistant professors with little or no disciplinary capital behind them. I found them to be hugely inspiring and terribly vulnerable. And I believe Faking It made them more vulnerable.

This is because – contrary to the uniformly positive new stories being told about it in this forum – Faking It did a lot of (inter)disciplinary harm. Because of how it read IR and because of how it read queer, it did more to push IR and Queer Studies scholars apart than it did to bring them together. When it was published, it played into the fears of the always already paranoid discipline of IR that not just feminists ⁴² but now queer scholars were out to get them. ⁴³ And it made it harder rather than easier for queer work in IR to be heard, much less supported. All these years later, Faking It could also be used to support homonormativising personal, political, and institutional agendas in and around IRs. Taking Faking It as their example of ‘bad queer work’ by a ‘bad queer’, these agendas might accept ‘queer work’ so long as it is produced by and productive of ‘good queers’, ‘good (queer) institutions’, and ‘good (not-so-queer) epistemologies and methodologies’, ⁴⁴ all of which are understood as supporting the status quo in IRs rather than challenging them beyond the demand for a place at IRs’ tables. ⁴⁵

It was not long after this that I decided to write new queer stories in and in relation to IRs and Queer Studies. The result was a series of articles and my book, Queer International Relations. This new work is in a different register than Faking It. If Faking It was interruptive of disciplines, my new work is explanatory toward disciplines. If Faking It is a book IR and Queer Studies scholars didn’t know what to do with, Queer International Relations is a (but certainly not the) primer on how to consider core issues in IR (like sovereignty) and core issues in Queer Studies (like sexuality) together. If Faking It was an impossible book for IRs and Queer Studies because it was said to be too literary, too funny, and too abject, Queer International Relations is an affirmation of the important and necessary critical theoretical, empirical, and policy work made possible by thinking international relations and queer together.

What is in my retelling of these new kinds of Queer IR stories to the disciplines of IR and Queer Studies?

Interrupting disciplines is vital to refreshing thinking within and across fields of inquiry. ⁴⁶ But so, too, are explanations that address disciplines directly. Doing the difficult work of making ideas accessible to those who identify with disciplines is not ‘selling out’ to disciplines. It is doing the disciplinary labor that makes otherwise impossible intellectual labour possible.

Had it not been for Rick Ashley and Rob Walker explaining poststructuralism to Disciplinary IRs, I would not have had a career. Thinking about it now, their work served as my unconscious model for my discipline-facing queer scholarship. Just as Rick’s ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’ ⁴⁷ and Rob’s Inside/Outside ⁴⁸ explain the limits and political investments of the field to Disciplinary IRs, so too does my ‘Why is there no queer international theory?’ ⁴⁹ Just as Rick’s ‘Living on Borderlines’ ⁵⁰ offers new theoretical and methodological frameworks to study international politics, so too does my ‘Queer Intellectual Curiosity as International Relations Method’. ⁵¹ And just as Rick and Rob’s special issue ‘Speaking the Language of Exile’ ⁵² empirically grounds their arguments, so too does my book Queer International Relations. ⁵³

I am fully aware that my new Queer IR stories might be co-opted by Disciplinary IRs ⁵⁴ and that this work can be read as cruelly optimistic. ⁵⁵ So why not just ignore Disciplinary IRs and continue to write in the register of Faking It? Because scholars who claim IR as among their disciplinary homes often do so before they recognise how Disciplinary IRs restrict their intellectual horizons, influence their economic and emotional stability, and link career success with intellectual narrowness. Too often this means excited, intellectually-awake, game-changing Queer IR scholars must kill off their ‘(bad) queer’ in order to become ‘IR’. Certainly, the neoliberalisation of universities sustains and encourages this state of affairs, and needs to be continually resisted. But IR’s intellectual horizons did not suddenly narrow with the rise of neoliberalism; they have long been this way. If addressing Disciplinary IRs directly in any way interrupts and/or disables their purging of (‘bad’) queer scholarship and (‘bad’) queer scholars from IR and/or their broader tendency to insulate what Disciplinary IRs code as ‘important IR work’ from ‘trivial non-IR concerns’, then to me at least these new stories are worth the telling.

By way of conclusion, I want to say something about the content of Faking It and Queer International Relations. Despite the praise it has received from the contributors to this forum, some of Faking It’s passages are cringe-worthy for me to read. At times, Faking It confuses queer with antinormativity, ⁵⁶ even as it demonstrates how hegemonically normative subjectivities enact queer performativities so they may appear to be hegemonically normative. At other times, it discusses transvestism, transgender, and transsexuality through political and cultural stereotypes that appal me now, even though these readings were meant to embrace a transgressive politics. Yet this move, too, betrays my own naïve appropriation and disavowal of trans* and trans*people when I wrote Faking It. By equating transvestism, transgender, and transsexuality with all manner of wholly positive transgressions, I repeated the problematic way trans*, gender-variant, and gender non-conforming bodies are appropriated by some queer theory to stand in for (and be celebrated as) transgressing gender norms. At the same time, I erased how trans*, gender-variant, and gender non-conforming people were and continue to be casualties in the on-going political, social, economic, and cultural wars around sex, gender, and sexuality.

Yet looking back at Faking It, I can appreciate how it contributed in its own way to conversations about intervention and sexuality in global politics. I can appreciate how it critically interrogated sexualised sovereignties, even if it failed to be explicit about this. And I can appreciate how it struggled to evidence something I couldn’t quite articulate at the time and have come to call ‘queer logics of statecraft’ in Queer International Relations. This new book is, of course, also limited. Directed primarily to the discipline of IR, it underplays Barthes’ powerful work on ‘the neuter’ (which is Faking It’s primary theoretical debt) so it can illustrate for IR scholars how Barthes’ rule of the and/or functions in contemporary international politics. To get a fuller appreciation of queer logics of statecraft, the trick is to read both books together.

Undoubtedly, Queer IR and/or transnational/global Queer Studies scholars will contest, correct, and abandon my contributions to queer international theorising, as they tell their own stories that interrupt disciplinary formations and explain global politics far better than I ever could. Nothing would make me happier than if Faking It and Queer International Relations in any way assisted them in their efforts.