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Sex rule and state borders in global politics
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This talk explores the concept of ‘sex rule’ in state security, 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 Gayle Rubin (1975, 204), Sjoberg suggests 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 talk presents four contexts where sex rules and the state are intimately intertwined: 1) the practice and legacies of dynastic marriage (building the state); 2) the historical and contemporary multi-faceted control of citizen marriage and reproduction (consolidating the state); 3) the weaponization of the performance of sex acts for partner/marriage migration and asylum cases (controlling entrance to the state); 4) and the wielding of homonormativity as a condition of national membership (consolidating the identity of the state).
From these contexts, the talk builds an initial plausibility case for what ‘sex rule’ is and how it works in global politics and international security.
Speakers
Laura Sjoberg is British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London and Director of the Gender Institute. She specializes in gender, international relations, and international security, with work on war theory and women’s political violence. Her work has been published in more than four dozen journals of politics, international relations, gender studies, geography, and law. She is author or editor of fifteen books, including, most recently, with Jessica Peet, Gender and Civilian Victimization (Routledge, 2019) and with J. Samuel Barkin, International Relations' Last Synthesis (Oxford, 2019).
Atreyee Sen is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She is a political anthropologist of urban South Asia. She completed her PhD in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (2003), University of London. Between 2004-2015, she held prominent academic positions at the University of Sussex and the University of Manchester in the UK. Her research and publications focuses on large-scale militant political movements in the city that create cultures of violence. She has conducted projects on right-wing activism, communal conflict and guerrilla movements in Indian cities, and explored the impact of these movements on slums, refugee colonies and prisons. She is the author of Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (2007) and co-editor of Global Vigilantes (2008) and Who’s Cashing in? Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness (2020).
Matthias Humer is a Research Assistant at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. He researches and teaches at the intersections of international relations, gender, and visual politics. He holds an MA in International Security from Sciences Po Paris. In his recently submitted PhD dissertation, Matthias has studied the complex gendered politics of the Iraq war. His research is devoted to widening the sites from which we study war and the implications of who is considered to be vulnerable in them.
Robin May Schott is a Senior Researcher at Danish Institute for International Studies.
Programme
13.00-13.05 Introduction, Robin May Schott
13.05-13.50 Sex Rule and State Borders in Global Politics, Laura Sjoberg
13.50-14.00 Comment, Atreyee Sen
14.00-14.10 Comment, Matthias Humer
14.10-14.45 Q&A
Practical information
The seminar is organised in collaboration with MOBILE, research center at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen.
The seminar was held and recorded at DIIS Auditorium on 30 March 2023, 13.00-14.45.
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