The Diplomat and the Domestic: Or, Homage to Faking It
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816659979 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Forum: Faking It in 21st Century IR/Global Politics |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 45(1) 105 –112
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816659979
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1. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
2. Cynthia Weber, Faking It: US Hegemony in a ‘Post-Phallic’ Era (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), xiii.
The Diplomat and the
Domestic: Or, Homage to
Faking It
Rahul Rao
SOAS, University of London, UK
Keywords
sex, gender, sexuality, international relations, foreign policy, nationalism, US-India
That states have sex should not have come as a surprise to IR scholars. The colonial
archive is saturated with gender talk conceptualising the colonial encounter around a
homology between sexual and political dominance, in which a virile and masculinised
Occident penetrates a subservient and feminised Orient.1 Yet until the publication of
Cynthia Weber’s Faking It, most IR scholars thought, wrote, and spoke as if sex, gender,
and sexuality were irrelevant or marginal to understanding relations between states. Or
perhaps more accurately, IR scholarship was suffused with an implicit heteronormativity
that barely acknowledged itself, let alone the possibility that states could be queer.
Weber structures Faking It around readings of moments of crisis in US-Caribbean
relations, arguing that queer practices tend to be more noticeable during these periods.2 I
agree and, in a similar vein, offer a reading here of a moment of crisis in US-India rela-
tions. I argue that only by paying attention to the queer logics of this moment is it pos-
sible to understand why an apparently minor provocation erupted into a full-blown crisis.
My reading of this crisis is indebted to Faking It in ways that are at once general and
profound: general, because rather than appropriating specific concepts or theoretical
influences, I take its central insight – that state identity and foreign policy are shaped by
Corresponding author:
Rahul Rao, SOAS, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG, UK.
Email: rr18@soas.ac.uk
659979MIL0010.1177/0305829816659979MillenniumRao
research-article2016
Forum: Faking It in 21st Century IR/Global Politics
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