This interview is a part of our LGBTQ+ Historical past Month particular characteristic. The interview speaks to the elemental goals of LGBTQ+ Historical past Month and discusses present analysis and tasks, in addition to recommendation for younger students.
Jamie J. Hagen is a Lecturer in worldwide relations at Queen’s College Belfast the place she is the founding co-director of the Centre for Gender in Politics. She is the Digital Media Editor for the Worldwide Feminist Journal of Politics; Chair-Elect for the ISA LGBTQA Caucus and Visiting Researcher with the Secrecy, Power and Ignorance research Network. Prior to now, she was additionally a Visiting Fellow on the Centre for Girls, Peace and Safety on the London College for Economics and Politics. She has written for Essential Research on Safety about Queering Women, Peace and Security in Columbia, and is a co-author with Megan Daige and Henri Myrttinen of the chapter Sexual Orientation and Gender Identification or Expression (SOGIE) in Violent Battle and Peacebuilding within the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research (forthcoming March 2021).
The place do you see probably the most thrilling analysis or debates taking place in your discipline?
I’m excited in regards to the problem to have interaction with abolitionist work as a part of requires social and transformative justice in peace and safety research. How can abolitionist considering be part of peacebuilding? What does abolitionist considering inform us about how greatest to answer gender-based violence? In what methods does Gender, Peace and Safety exacerbate carceral and white feminism and what does it appear like to refuse this? I’m excited to study from teams just like the jail abolitionist group Black and Pink within the US who help LGBTQ and HIV constructive prisoners, Unis Resist Border Control within the UK and different mutual aid initiatives, together with these working to seek out solidarity and safety exterior of the state.
Persevering with to concentrate to the politics of quotation is essential as we now have realized from Sara Ahmed and Claire Hemmings. I recognize David Duriesmith’s name for ‘strategic silence’ in citational follow, which additionally jogs my memory of Roland Bleiker’s name to ‘Forget IR Theory’.
I’m compelled by the analysis of those that proceed to insist on addressing race and racism in IR, for instance this piece in Overseas Coverage with insights from Gurminder Ok. Bhambra, Toni Haastrup, Yolande Bouka, Randolph B. Persaud, Olivia U. Rutazibwa, Vineet Thakur, Duncan Bell, Karen Smith and Seifudein Adem. Linking these requires anti-racist approaches to safety research with queer concept can be thrilling to see, as an illustration in Heike Schotten’s e book Queer Terror.
It’s particularly motivating to see extra scholarship connecting ‘queer’ with peace and battle analysis. I’m seeing this within the case of current analysis associated to sexual violence against men, within the transitional justice area, in relation to authoritarianism, and in analysis about how displacement is skilled by these with diverse sexual orientations and gender identity in work. Final month, I attended the launch occasion of a brief documentary film by MOSAIC about queer participation in the Lebanese revolution and extremely advocate a watch!
How has the way in which you perceive the world modified over time, and what (or who) prompted probably the most vital shifts in your considering?
Specializing in shifts in my interested by safety in IR, Annick Wibben, Laura Shepherd, and Laura Sjoberg have been the students who helped me to see conversations I could possibly be part of in IR via feminist and significant safety research. Cynthia Weber’s e book Queering International Relations offered an essential shift for me in understanding how queer concept issues to IR, as did Rahul Rao’s name for asking queer questions. Jasbir Puar’s work was in fact additionally foundational to my considering in a different way about safety as knowledgeable by queer concept.
My curiosity in IR is essentially knowledgeable by curiosities about how transnational organizing can help/remodel/form queer neighborhood as part of peace and safety – Ryan Thoreson’s work Transnational LGBT Activism helped me to see this in a different way. Paul Amar’s The Security Archipelago illuminated the relationships between a human safety strategy and the state, by centering an evaluation in regards to the relationship between sexuality and neoliberalism, which now informs how I take into consideration the Girls, Peace and Safety agenda. Analysis on decolonizing, particularly Meera Sabaratnam’s work, has additionally prompted adjustments in my considering, particularly in relation to educating college students about battle intervention and transformation. Queer critiques of development studies have been actually informative in serving to me assume via queer organizing and worldwide interventions.
What’s the significance of LGBTQ+ Historical past Month and what does it signify to you?
There’s a robust initiative to reclaim queer tales misplaced within the archive, erased, silenced. Actually, the LGBTIQ+ Historical past Month is a platform to do that. Spending time interested by queer historical past additionally presents a possibility to interrupt down silos between completely different actions and to acknowledge how interlinked LGBTIQ+ liberation is with different liberation struggles. For instance, historian Emily Ok. Hobson’s e book Lavender and Red hyperlinks sexual liberation with different actions in opposition to imperialism, warfare and racism. That is one thing I search to do in my very own work too, recognizing the position of queer organizers in gender, peace and safety work.
LGBTIQ+ Historical past Month represents a time for me to make myself much more seen to college students as somebody doing queer analysis. To this finish, I’ve participated in occasions organized by the Queen’s Students’ Union about conducting and supporting queer analysis these previous two years throughout LGBTIQ+ Historical past Month.
Your work attracts on and combines insights from safety research, queer concept and a gender perspective. What does this strategy deliver to the research of worldwide relations and significantly safety?
My work is constructed on the unifying understanding that everybody has a sexual orientation and gender id and this issues to politics on the non-public in addition to worldwide stage. For me, probably the most thrilling factor queer concept brings to safety research is seeing IR in a different way by prioritizing sexuality as a lens of understanding energy and politics. Bringing a gender perspective knowledgeable by feminism to queer safety research additionally means going past work that sees queer individuals as merely a violently oppressed group, and as a substitute understands queers as having our personal communities, individuals with a future, and folks with completely different visions for this future past progress in direction of heteronormativity. Bringing such an strategy to learning safety requires a reframing of what we truly see as IR, as Cynthia Enloe prompts us to do.
Queer concept additionally pushes a gender perspective past binary interested by intercourse and gender by mentioning that cisgender individuals have a gender id too. The framing of ‘white heterosexuality as norm’ is actively upheld within the on a regular basis via the politics of racism, sexism and patriarchy which everybody is part of, even members of LGBTIQ+ communities. There are all types of vibrant theoretical contributions from queer concept within the self-discipline of IR. I view having queer lives, queer neighborhood and queer work for social justice taken critically as probably the most helpful contribution to the self-discipline and to rethinking safety extra broadly.
A major a part of your analysis focuses on the way to higher embrace LGBTIQ+ views within the Girls, Peace and Safety agenda and broader peace and safety initiatives. How can we queer the Girls, Peace and Safety agenda, and why is that this essential?
Consideration to LGBTIQ+ people in battle is lengthy overdue in peace and safety scholarship. Even the sturdy scholarship that research how gender issues to peace and safety usually neglects to contemplate how that is skilled in a different way by ladies who’re bisexual, lesbian and transgender. This neglect quantities to an missed space of analysis concerning transphobic and homophobic violence as gendered violence, but in addition fails to take up the methods queer ladies have at all times formed and infrequently led this feminist peacebuilding work.
At a time when anti-gender backlash has led to growing assaults on abortion entry and LGBT rights, areas like Girls, Peace and Safety programming and gender mainstreaming should proceed to insist that gender will not be one other phrase for girls and that lesbian, bisexual and trans ladies are ladies too. These usually are not separate tasks, however deeply associated. There are those that have been making these connections in peacebuilding work, feminist organizing and gender evaluation in Nepal, in Northern Eire, and in Colombia for a while, nevertheless it’s essential that this evaluation turns into central to interested by Girls, Peace and Safety if the agenda is to be transformative.
Relatedly, queer considering challenges what safety seems to be like, particularly if dedicated to decolonial, anti-militaristic practices. This strikes us past the harmful narratives of rescuing queers by sticking with the extra structural dilemmas in world politics that have to be addressed for gender justice.
In a just lately revealed chapter in New Directions in Women, Peace and Security you and Toni Haastrup contend that the Girls, Peace and Safety agenda “is steeped in racialized hierarchies manifested in whiteness” as a result of Nationwide Motion Plans from the World North have a tendency to strengthen racialised narratives and practices. Are you able to briefly clarify your argument?
Nationwide Motion Plans proceed to garner intensive resourcing as a software to advertise and guarantee implementation of the Girls, Peace and Safety agenda. As we clarify in our blog post in regards to the chapter, we determine three websites the place racial hierarchies are bolstered by the Nationwide Motion Plans of World North international locations: who will get funded; who’s the topic of international coverage; and what imageries outline nation priorities and notion of ‘the Different’.
There’s a want for rather more consideration to what it means to deliver a ‘native’ perspective to Girls, Peace and Safety efforts that proceed to be funded by, directed in direction of and are generally outright written by World North actors. An intersectional anti-racist strategy to gender justice work requires accounting for slavery, racism, and occupation, together with confronting how individuals within the World South face violent policing, inside the worldwide system of which this agenda is a component.
You might be at present researching feminist and LGBTIQ+ activism within the context of political crises reminiscent of Brexit and Covid-19 (with Maria-Adriana Deiana and Danielle Roberts). Which particular challenges do LGBTIQ+ people and girls at present face in Northern Eire, and the way are they responding to them?
The analysis has been cathartic for plenty of contributors. As people who’re concerned in social justice motion work know, it’s usually difficult to seek out any time to replicate on the work, particularly in instances of disaster like we live in now. Recognizing how exhausted so most of the feminist organizers we have been talking with could be, we opted to host the interviews as small conversations. With this strategy, two or three activists have been capable of replicate collectively in regards to the work they’ve been doing and make connections in essential methods. This served as an efficient solution to study throughout organizations and join about probably the most urgent points for these we interviewed.
One particular problem our contributors in Northern Eire are going through is that there’s multiple disaster – the crises are cascading. There may be the disaster of lastly making abortion accessible now that it is legal. There may be the disaster of coping with an absence of entry to childcare additional exacerbated by COVID-19. There may be the disaster of Brexit, particularly as skilled by those that are racialized and face threats of deportation. There may be the disaster of the near total lack of access to transgender healthcare within the area. There may be the disaster of how the inexperienced/orange divide in post-conflict Northern Eire continues for use as an excuse for suspending significant work to handle race, class and gender inequalities. An essential manner that activists are addressing that is by working to handle these crises collectively, intersectionally, throughout organizations. A strong instance of that is the Feminist Recovery Plan developed by the Girls’s Coverage Group Northern Eire.
Along with José Fernando Serrano Amaya and Samuel Ritholz, you might be engaged on a chapter on educating LGBTIQ+ points within the classroom. How are LGBTIQ+ points taught globally, and what could possibly be accomplished higher?
Although we’re within the early phases of this chapter, our conversations to this point have allowed us to replicate on the experiences of being within the classroom as queer students educating about LGBTIQ+ points. A central part of this is considering how educating about LGBTQ lives and bringing queer inquiries to world politics is inherently political whether or not that is taking place in Belfast the place I’m located, in Bogota the place Fernando is educating or in Oxford the place Sam is situated. To this finish, the classroom can be very a lot a spot of battle when taking up feminist and queer pedagogies.
There are additionally implications for the way we strategy ‘LGBTQA points within the classroom’. It’s problematic to look primarily at violence and marginalization confronted by LGBTQA populations as stigmatized beneath patriarchy, slightly than centering the transformative feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial dimensions of LGBTQA research. One thing we’re all very a lot eager about considering via with this chapter can be what/the place is taken into account worldwide in worldwide research. Queer communities exist all over the place, but the concept that the West has formalized LGBTQ identities and is the situation of data about LGBTQ organizing, rights, and futures persists.
Matt Brim’s e book Poor Queer Studies, confronting the elitism of the college, additionally informs how I take into consideration queer pedagogy. We’re all very a lot dedicated to queer concept and LGBTQ research as one thing that’s related and must be accessible to all college students. There may be extra work to be accomplished to refuse queer as one thing that so many view as being out of contact for people who find themselves poor, not related exterior of the academy and indifferent from activism. No! Queering opens up thrilling new methods of interested by what data issues in IR, what data is centered in IR, how sexuality informs on a regular basis life and what future we consider we deserve.
What’s a very powerful recommendation you may give to younger students of Worldwide Relations, significantly LGBTIQ+ people?
Discover and prioritize queer and feminist neighborhood. I’m Chair-Elect for the ISA LGBTQA Caucus. This yr the caucus launched a mentoring program, largely led by the work of Member-at-Massive Alex Edney-Browne. The Caucus will likely be internet hosting a panel discussion on the job market this month recognizing the difficulties of the job market with specific consideration to LGBTIQ+ experiences. Earlier to being energetic within the ISA LGBTQA caucus I used to be energetic within the ISA Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section (FTGS) and am actually grateful for the mentoring and networking obtained on this area as effectively.
However once I say discover queer and feminist neighborhood, I don’t essentially imply within the self-discipline. One thing I actually love doing is co-hosting Feminist & Queer Completely happy Hours. Internet hosting and attending these occasions was particularly essential for me whereas I used to be ending up my PhD, which may be an isolating expertise even in one of the best of circumstances. These month-to-month occasions allowed me to attach with neighborhood whereas studying in regards to the numerous tasks’ people have been as much as in the neighborhood, like organizing drag reveals, advocating for LGBTQ well being care, fundraising for queer asylum seekers and facilitating free bicycle restore workshops. I bought to know so many queer and feminist members of the Windfall and Boston communities which jogged my memory why I’m motivated to do the work and see this work in follow. Individuals actually confirmed up! A couple of queer couple met at our occasions too, by the way in which. We even had a go to from Ayanna Presley to considered one of our occasions which we co-organized with the improbable annual Boston Movie Competition Wicked Queer. I’ve additionally hosted these occasions alongside conferences as a result of I do know that large tutorial conferences are overwhelming and never the simplest areas to attach. For instance, through the 2019 ISA in Toronto I hosted a Feminist and Queer Completely happy Hour on the Glad Day Bookshop, the oldest queer bookstore worldwide. That was actually enjoyable! I look ahead to co-hosting these occasions in Belfast post-pandemic. Oh, and two fast issues: 1) As Sarah Jaffe’s e book reminds us, Work Won’t Love You Back; 2) Be part of a union.
Additional Studying on E-Worldwide Relations
