Catherine Baker

The ‘gay Olympics’? The Eurovision Song Contest and the politics of LGBT/European belonging

The politics of gay and transgender visibility and representation at the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual televised popular music festival presented to viewers as a contest between European nations, show that processes of interest to Queer International Relations do not just involve states or even international institutions; national and transnational popular geopolitics over ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights’ and ‘Europeanness’ equally constitute the understandings of ‘the international’ with which Queer International Relations is concerned. Building on Cynthia Weber’s reading the persona of the 2014 Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst with ‘queer intellectual curiosity’, this article demonstrates that Eurovision shifted from, in the late 1990s, an emerging site of gay and trans visibility to, by 2008–2014, part of a larger discursive circuit taking in international mega-events like the Olympics, international human-rights advocacy, Europe–Russia relations and the politics of state homophobia and transphobia. Contest organisers thus had to take positions — ranging from detachment to celebration — about ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender’ politics in host states and the Eurovision region. The construction of spatio-temporal hierarchies around attitudes to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, however, revealed exclusions that corroborate other critical arguments on the reconfiguration of national and European identities around ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality’.

Encounters with the Military: TOWARD A FEMINIST ETHICS OF CRITIQUE?

This conversation developed from a panel titled “Interrogating the Militarized Masculine: Reflections on Research, Ethics and Access” held at the May 2013 International Feminist Journal of Politics conference at the University of Sussex, UK.

Writing about embodiment as an act of translation

Writing about embodiment is an act of compression: reducing the sensory complexity of someone else’s physical experience, or even one’s own, into written language that somebody else will understand through sight or sound. It is an act of abstraction, excerpting part of a narrative or a life and putting it to another purpose, where indeed one may – and possibly one always should – worry that it is overstepping into appropriation. It is also an act of translation, where recognizing the writer as an intermediary in the translator’s sense might help us be explicit about what it is we do when we write about bodies, and why writing about militarized embodiment might be so unnerving. Translation, for certain anthropologists and literary critics, can go on between more things than just languages: between forms of expression, for instance, or between cultures. Talal Asad wrote of the “cultural translation” that anthropological fieldworkers engaged in when they learned new languages simultaneously with learning other ways of life, so that they could write about them later in and for the metropole, where mastering the position of cultural translator gave them a claim to social authority that could not be challenged without superior knowledge of both codes (Asad [1986] 2010, 15–26); Homi Bhabha used it to describe the position of a foreign gaze looking back on a home country which he saw as characterizing exilic and diasporic literatures (Bhabha 1994, 164). However it is used, it has something to do with ambiguity, inequality, and structures of (post)colonial knowledge and power. Translation scholars are often not so sure about the metaphor of cultural translation. Maybe it supposes too simple a notion of what translators working between languages do in order to make meaning when they are mediating between them (Jordan 2002, 100; Tymoczko 2010, 110); maybe it reifies the “source cultures” and “target cultures” that are supposedly being translated out of and into, when we would be better off questioning how and why the symbolic boundaries between the cultures were formed (Chesterman 2010, 104). If translation can have value as a metaphor, suggests Mary Louise Pratt, it is not for what it says about the intermediary’s process, so much as what it says about the positions they inhabit when they do so:

Encounters with the Military

This conversation developed from a panel titled “Interrogating the Militarized Masculine: Reflections on Research, Ethics and Access” held at the May 2013 International Feminist Journal of Politics conference at the University of Sussex, UK.

Beyond the island story?: The opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games as public history

This paper evaluates the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games as an exercise in public history. Public events have been widely identified within the study of nationalism as festivals that attempt to reinforce national identity and belonging. Contemporary Olympic Games figure in this literature as a specific form of event where the nature and content of a host states identity is displayed for the global gaze of other nations. While opening ceremonies perform a rich display of national identity in any case, London 2012 is particularly significant for taking place at a time of major political contestation in the UK and has frequently been interpreted as an expression of radical patriotism. Traces of such patriotic thought associated particularly with England can be found in the opening ceremonys historical pageant and overall concept, showing resonances with the work of Raphael Samuel, who argued for a radical patriotism grounded in a multiplicity of accounts of the national past from many social positions. Depicting the nation through a multiplicity of biographical narratives produces a ‘mosaic’ mode of representation which can be seen in other documentary and public history projects and in the political context of British public multiculturalism in the 2000s. This responds to the need for any national narrative to be composed through compressing the lives of millions of people into one coherent story, but complicates attempts to read a text such as the opening ceremony for what they ‘really’ mean. A model for understanding narratives of the past as being produced in interaction between their initial creator(s) and their reader(s) is necessary for understanding not only the London 2012 opening ceremony in particular but also public history and narratives of the national past in general.

Critical pedagogy within the migration/security nexus : but who gets through the door?

This submission will reflect on how border control and visa regimes structure access to higher education by differentiating between potential students and funding recipients based on citizenship, and will suggest some implications for critical pedagogy in global politics. I write from the perspective of a former part-time instructor in an interdisciplinary East European studies department in the UK (a post I held in 2011–2012). In the UK system, the fee differential for students who are EU or non-EU citizens produces a stark inequality in access that cuts through East European regions depending on which states have become members of the European Economic Area; this anomaly makes the wider inequality particularly visible.

Annica Kronsell. Gender, Sex, and the Postnational Defense: Militarism and Peacekeeping

The books reviewed in this section explore feminist politics in a global frame. We aim not just to include writings in feminist international relations, but also to feature multi-disciplinary scholarship pertaining to global gender relations. The section is usually made up of a combination of several distinct elements: Rethinking the Canon, Feminist Classics/Many Voices, review essays and book reviews. ‘Rethinking the Canon’ gives space for an individual to reflect on one text that they feel ought to be essential reading for feminists working on global issues, but which is likely to be marginalized by existing disciplinary boundaries: they are invited to bring the text to our attention and to explain why it is essential reading. ‘Feminist Classics/Many Voices’, by contrast, includes several short appraisals of a book already widely considered a classic for feminists working on global issues. Reviewers draw on their distinct disciplinary, geographical and personal locations to offer diverse readings of the classic text. Review essays survey several texts on a single theme, aiming either to explore a recent debate that has generated a range of new publications or to survey the best of the literature covering a more established area of research. The book reviews provide brief introductions to, and evaluations of, as broad a range of new publications as space allows. Anyone with suggestions for texts to be reviewed, or requests to contribute to the section, is encouraged to contact the Reviews Editor, Suzanne Bergeron, at sbergero@umich.edu, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan Dearborn, Dearborn, MI 48380, USA.

‘A Different Kind of Power’?: identification, stardom and embodiments of the military in Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman is a warrior, not a soldier. Those archetypes, so often fused in concepts such as ‘warrior masculinity’ (the traditional combat-oriented military masculinity that Claire Duncanson (2009, 65) has argued became complemented by peacekeeping and counter-insurgency masculinities after the Cold War), are opposed instead in Wonder Woman (2017), where the Amazon princess Diana confronts Ares, the kin-slaying god of war, across a Belgian battlefield during World War I. The film constructs its gendered binary of ‘virtuous’ (Der Derian 2009) and ‘excessive’ violence by contrasting two homosocial spaces: Themyscira, where the all-female Amazons train to protect humanity against Ares’s rage; and the twentieth century’s emblematic zone of total war, the Western Front, the symbol of the exclusively masculine, industrialised, endless warfare that Ares has imposed on the world and that Diana fights to overcome. Diana and her US pilot sidekick Steve Trevor suspect that Ares has embodied himself as General Erich Ludendorff, historically Germany’s strategist of ‘total war’ (Strachan 2000, 348), who has recruited the masked and ethnically ambiguous female chemist ‘Doctor Poison’ to create a terrible new weapon: to stop Ares and stop Ludendorff, Diana and Trevor believe, will end the war. Wonder Woman’s constructions of gender, violence and legitimacy, and its silences of coloniality, are irresistible to feminist scholars of security. But why, besides giving feminists something to do, would the producers of a film about a superhero whose character has so much to say about today’s gender politics choose to set the narrative in World War I? Partly because the rival Marvel Cinematic Universe has World War II. In 2011, Captain America: the First Avenger merged superhero cinema and the historical war film: heroic but once-frail Steve Rogers, transformed through ‘super-soldier serum’ into the finest physical specimen of the USA’s ‘greatest generation’ and its imagined military masculinity, leads a squad of Allied commandos to defeat the alliance of a Nazi officer (the disfigured ‘Red Skull’) and another rogue chemist, only to sacrificially crash-land, where his body is cryogenically preserved in Arctic ice. His discovery in 2011 binds popular geopolitics’ paradigmatic ‘nationalist superhero’ (Dittmer 2012), nostalgia for Rogers’s ‘moral purity’ (Brown 2017, 105) and the myth of America’s ‘good war’ into Marvel’s cinematic present (Vernon 2016), as it did in comics when the character, first published in December 1940, was revived in 1964. The masculinities of Captain America divide along axes of civilian–military and of perfection–monstrosity: the same transformation that aligns Rogers’s physicality

Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania

more bureaucrats as entirely reasonable. Deak concludes with a fascinating account of the Commission for the Promotion of Administrative Reform (1911–14), which collected, and published, a vast compendium of data on how the imperial bureaucracy actually worked, and how it might be made more efficient. The Commission’s findings were shelved on the outbreak of the First World War, but predictably the one thing the bureaucrats never suggested was fewer bureaucrats. Deak takes all this Vielschreiberei as evidence of statebuilding: ‘This was hardly a weak, decrepit state’ (p. 273). This reviewer is not so sure. Granted, had the Monarchy’s leaders not gone to war in 1914, who knows how much stronger and more modern the state might have been made? But the fact remains that the Monarchy did go to war, and under the hammer blows of a conflict that tested the loyalty of multiple nationalities to the limit, everything in the end fell apart. Deak acknowledges (p. 274) that ‘states are fragile things’; despite the growing size of its bureaucracy, the Monarchy was clearly more fragile than most. On the technical side, although Deak’s style is engaging, it seems none of Stanford’s editors has the skills to spot neologisms like ‘knightage’ (p. 150), ‘councilmen’ (p. 154) and ‘dismantlement’ (p. 113). Map 4 (p. 168) contains an egregious error regarding the Sanjak of Novi Pazar. Most annoying, however, is the absence of a bibliography. This is a false economy in any academic publication; if this rewarding book goes into a subsequent edition, the author should insist on inclusion of this essential scholarly courtesy.

The filter is so much more fragile when you are queer

June, 2016: We are gathered round a cenotaph in hundreds, a rainbow Union flag crossed over with a rainbow Stars and Stripes, standing in a vigil like queers in a dozen other UK cities remembering the 49 mainly Latino and mainly queer dead, everyone from brighthaired teenagers to merchant-navy queens and weathered dykes. A thought occurs to me: this is more queers together than I’ve ever seen in Hull.