Issue 58 / The study of International Relations from queer and trans-feminist perspectives

CALL FOR PAPERS

Issue 58 / The study of International Relations from queer and trans-feminist perspectives

Publication: February 2025

Cynthia Weber wrote a book in 1999 called Faking It: U.S. Hegemony in a “Post-Phallic” Era, within which humour and different queer, psychoanalytic and poststructural theories were used to study the foreign policy of the United States in the Caribbean region. That book was a watershed moment for reimagining International Relations (IR) from the study of sex, sexualities and genders. Its impact was such that its opening words became a reference to understand how creative and fun the study of the international could be from queer/cuir and trans/feminist perspectives: “This is the United States as I see it today —a white headless body of indecipherable sex and gender cloaked in the flag and daggered with a queer dildo harnessed to its midsection” (Weber 1999, 1). With the passing of time and despite attempts to dismiss them, queer/cuir and trans/feminist perspectives became a constant in the discipline of IR and started the development of ideas that were translated into national and international (public) policies. This special issue of Relaciones Internacionales takes as its objective the reimagining of what are and what could be queer/cuir and trans/feminist perspectives in Spanish, and explore what are and what could be its contributions to the study and practice of international relations. Thus, in this special issue we shall deliberately avoid giving a reduced definition of what queer/cuir and trans/feminist perspectives could be to open the way to a multiplicity of voices, interpretations, translations and methodologies that have been constructed or which can be constructed under these terms.

As in the case of Faking It, some of the contributions of queer/cuir and trans/feminist studies is their capacity to surprise us, to amuse or depress us upon revealing the amount of capitalist, cis-heterosexist, colonial and imperial power that is used to maintain the socio-economic structures of IR, and which we are usually taught in other schools of thought to be unquestionable, inevitable and universal. More still, the queer/cuir and trans-feminist analyses commonly go beyond the criticism of the normative to show places, objects, subjects, topics of study and unexpected temporalities that widen the notions of what is, or what could be, the international. This disruption of the normative not only refers to how the sexes, sexualities, gender identities and gender expressions create international politics, but also the understandings of the central topics of IR per se. These topics include questions like what is the State (whether it is cis-hetero-patriarchal, or friendly to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, travesti, transgender, intersexual, asexual and non-binary rights, LGBTTTIANB+), and what are their logics of action (contradictory, rational or plural with respect to these topics); how global political economies function (that usually discriminate and exclude people on the LGBTTTIANB+ spectrum, which sometimes they use to extract or exploit such populations, and that occasionally are used or constructed in dissident and more equitable ways); or where and how wars and armed conflicts start or end (where actors on the LGBTTTIANB+ spectrum participate in different roles).

How might authors surprise us in this special issue? What could we learn about the international and its relations? How might the ways in which we act, study and teach international relations change after reading the articles in this special issue? Some of the themes that contributions of this special issue could tackle are:

• Affects and international politics. International politics produces and is the result of affects of love, hate, disgust, pain, excitement and pleasure, which is what some queer/cuir and trans/feminist studies teach us. In this line of research, it is explored how affects mediate decision-making in international politics with contradictory, homophobic, irrational, racist, biased, sexist or transphobic results in topics like the support for international development, humanitarian aid, military intervention or processes of truth and justice. When carrying out analysis through these lenses, it is possible to understand the relations between affects and the culture that is produced or result from them, the heterogeneous distribution of the affects towards non normative bodies, the relationship between intangible affects and materialist ones, and the power of affects to form or transform international institutions.
• Alternatives to homophobic and transphobic international structures. Given the prevalence of homophobia and transphobia in the daily lives of people with sexualities and gender identities outside of the cis-hetero-norm, it is often difficult to imagine realities where the conditions of life are less violent and fairer, where love is possible and not only hate. It is facing this complication that some of the internationalists study life alternatives constructed from, with and for communities with sexualities and gender identities that cannot be read within the spectrum of heterosexuality and of cisgenderism. They have shown how mutual aid networks, care webs among friends, community economies, diverse support families, radical interdependence and transnational solidarity are generated in a way that disrupt humanitarian aid and support frameworks, capitalism, charity, dependence on the State or the market, the interdependence among sovereign entities, the cis-hetero-patriarchal white family or militarized or martial responses.
• Im/possible inclusion/exclusion. A school of queer/cuir and trans/feminist studies has been dedicated to ask empirical and methodological questions on the impossibility and possibility of excluding or including populations that live outside the cis-hetero-norm. Despite efforts to exclude these populations from formal or informal institutional arrangements, studies have revealed, nonetheless, the queer/cuir or trans/feminist character of the institutions or the populations that want to exclude them. It has also been explored how attempts to include non-heterosexual or non-cisgender people to institutional arrangements without changing the (cis-hetero-sexist, white, colonial or imperial) conditions that generated the exclusion in the first place produce regimes of violence and exclusion. In both cases, the potential for creating and studying global markets, international institutions, and regimes of (in)security that maintain uncertainty and tension between inclusion and exclusion and between possibility and impossibility are shown.
• Global South sexualities and gender identities. Queer/cuir and trans/feminist studies have also shown how in many parts of the world different international actors have used ideas of sodomy or binary understandings of the experiences of people (men/women) as weapons of conquest, exploitation, genocide and appropriation of land. Therefore, they study the plurality of what today we would call sexualities and gender identities that are present in the experiences of populations that participate in the construction and transformation of international institutions, negotiations, policies and systems. These experiences are usually hidden by the Eurocentric academy, which considers that no theory of international reach can emerge from the Global South. While, on many occasions, queer/cuir and trans/feminist perspectives concentrate on how these experiences allow us to think of less violent horizons of meaning, some of these studies choose to represent contexts that do not assume innocence nor peace. These last studies show how it is possible that in the Global South social and political identities are formed which are as violent as their white colonial and imperial counterparts, which are more violent or which exist in liminal spaces of both more and less violence. Another important line of analysis has been the study of the onto-epistemological difference between the representations and the experiences of populations with sexualities and gender identities outside the cis-hetero-norm. This is relevant because such tension has political implications once these populations enter into an internationalist discourse or participate in different international institutions.
• State and international market responses to sexualities and gender identities outside the cis-hetero-norm. With this, we refer to the diverse responses that states and the international markets have made to understand, govern, or value the sexualities and gender identities that cannot be read within the heterosexual and cisgender spectrum. In some cases, these responses were openly homophobic and transphobic, creating laws, markets and social practices of discrimination, persecution, torture and political assassination. In the past decades, more and more cases of tolerance, acceptance, or celebration of these sexualities and gender identities have been seen. The coexistence of both types of response has generated contradictory decisions, tactics and policies at the local, national and international levels on the governance and the de/regulation of the new and existing markets which tend to attend to, benefit from and establish rules for the lives of people with sexualities and gender identities outside of the cis-hetero-norm. At the same time, strategic and unexpected uses of the state and global market responses have been generated, which had served to guarantee the life, security or pleasure of these people.
• Gender and sexual identities in transnational mobility. The research on migration, diasporas and transnationalism harshly criticizes the closed and static categories of nation, ethnicity, community, place and state which are abundant in the social sciences. In this sense, some studies maintain that queer migrants constitute in many ways “impossible subjects,” with non-representable histories that exceed existing categories. As a result, researchers question the regimes of power and knowledge that generate structures of impossibility in relation to certain political identities, as well as examine how people negotiate political and subjective im/possibilities in a creative way. Other research on queer migrations evidences how the dominion of sexuality and gender of migratory flows is going to contribute to or undo normative definitions of the nation, national citizenship and family. Both in the studies on queer and trans migration and in LGBT activism, what is at stake is the mandate of challenging and transforming power relations that operate through migratory regimes to generate multiple-scale inequalities of life and death. From this theme, we encourage a continuation of exploring queer epistemologies and policies on the area of migration, as well as propel studies on the somewhat neglected dimension of the migratory flows of trans-people.

The issue will include an introduction by the editors. At least four types of contributions are expected. One is research articles. Another possibility is book reviews, and essays based on book reviews called Diálogos. In addition, this special issue will contain two types of content that will comprise a special section called Ventana social. This section will have its own introduction. One of these possibilities is creative interventions like story-telling, sculptures, photographs, illustrations, narratives, theatre plays, and poems, among other things, which will enable the engendering of other queer/cuir and trans/feminist views on International Relations. One final option is the communal register of dialogues and transnational political activities with queer/cuir and transfeminist collectives, organisations and activists.

Issue 58 of Relaciones Internacionales will be published in February 2025. The Editorial Team of the journal and the Coordination of the issue have established the following time-frames:

 

DUE DATE

SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES

The full text of the article should be sent by the authors to the coordinators up until 31st August, 2024. The article must be adjusted rigorously to the Style Manual of the journal. You can obtain our template for authors by clicking here (in Spanish).

The submission of the article will be made on the web-page of the journal through the management platform OJS (Open Journal System). It is essential that the authors —all of them in the event that there is more than one— are registered by completing the requested data on the platform registration page with the most up-to-date information:

https://revistas.uam.es/relacionesinternacionales

EVALUATION process

Once the article is submitted correctly through the website the double-blind evaluation process begins. The decision process will take between three and six months, depending on the case: this may include the return of the text to its author(s) for the revision or correction of changes and suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers. During the evaluation process, the reviewers will be responsible for certifying the quality of the work of the authors, as well as the appropriateness of the final texts for the topics proposed in the call for papers.

• PLEASE NOTE: suggestions by the authors of possible reviewers for the evaluation of their texts are permitted. With the text of your proposal, you can send us by email the names of academics with extensive knowledge of the aspects dealt with in your work so that- if the coordination considers it appropriate- these people can be contacted as blind reviewers.

DEFINITIVE ACCEPTANCE

Throughout the evaluation process (between September, 2024 – December, 2024), those authors whose text receives the complete approval of the assigned reviewers will be notified of the definitive acceptance of their article, at which time they can have the absolute certainty that the paper will be published in the journal. That the article is published in Issue 58 as planned – and not in a later issue – is subject to the complete conformity of the text to the instructions indicated in the Style Manual of the journal, or other contingencies that will be duly communicated to the authors.

EDITING process

During the month of January, 2025, the journal will proceed to the definitive editing of the text before its publication in February. It is emphasized again to the authors that it is obligatory to fulfil scrupulously the Style Manual of the journal in order to avoid delays that could hold back the publication of the text to a later issue.

PUBLICATION OF THE VOLUME

Throughout the month of February, 2025, Issue 58 of the journal Relaciones Internacionales, which has the title “The study of International Relations from queer and trans-feminist perspectives”, will be published digitally, online, open-access and free. All of the articles that have satisfactorily fulfilled the requirements of the stages indicated above will be included.

LANGUAGESProposals in Spanish, English, and Portuguese will be accepted. Nonetheless, the articles will be translated to Spanish for publication in the journal. It will be the authors themselves who send the translated articles in Spanish.

OTHER INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS:

It is fundamental that the authors consult the Style Manual to get to know in detail the editing and evaluation requirements for publication in the journal. Moreover, the OJS system of the journal website allows for online tracking of all the administration processes and the state of the text.

Notification of copyright: the authors who publish in Relaciones Internacionales accept the following terms:

• The authors retain copyright and guarantee the right of first publication of the work to the journal, which will be simultaneously subject to the Creative Commons License Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 4.0 Internacional (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
• The authors will be able to make other non-exclusive licence agreements for the distribution of the published version of the work (e.g., deposited in an electronic institutional archive or published in a monographic volume) provided that the initial publication in this journal is indicated.
• It is permitted and recommended that the authors circulate their work through the internet (e.g., in electronic institutional archives or on their webpage) before and during the submission process, which can produce interesting exchanges and increase the citations of the published work.
• The authors are responsible for obtaining the appropriate permissions to reproduce material (text, images or graphs) from other publications and for citing their origins correctly.
• Relaciones Internacionales does not charge the authors any fees for the presentation, submission, or publication of the articles.

COORDINATION OF THE ISSUE

Julio César DÍAZ CALDERÓN – julio_dc94@hotmail.com
Gloria CUESTA NOGUERALES – gloriacuestan@hotmail.com