Trans* America
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816659974 |
| Author | Laura Sjoberg |
| 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) 91 –97
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816659974
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1. Cynthia Weber, Faking It: US Hegemony in a ‘Post-Phallic’ Era (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), 1.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 2.
4. Ibid.
Trans* America
Laura Sjoberg
University of Florida, USA
Keywords
Sex, gender, sexuality, international relations, US-Cuba rapprochement, US Foreign Policy, Cuba
When Cynthia Weber described the United States as ‘daggered with a queer dildo
harnessed to its midsection’1 as it faced a Cuba newly under the control of Fidel
Castro, she was describing a United States struggling with its (lost) masculinity, given
its combined desire for and inability to impose its will on Cuba. As Weber explains,
in the Cuban Revolution ‘a masculinized United States “lost” its Caribbean reward …
the feminized Cuba, its symbolic object of desire’.2 Weber argues that Revolutionary
Cuba mixed Cuba’s ‘iconic femininity’ (its subject position in relation to the imperial
US) with Castro’s revolutionary ‘hypermasculinity’,3 (which challenged US imperial-
ism in Cuba and in the Caribbean more broadly). It was this mixed figure of
Revolutionary Cuba that the US – as a self-perceived, straight, hypermasculine
Western hemispheric hegemon – continued to woo, ‘even once its mistress had grown
a beard’.4
It is the conundrum of confused, crossed, and confounded national and international
codings of sex, gender, and sexuality in US-Cuba relations that Weber traces in Faking
It. Weber argues that it is only through a framework that takes into account what she calls
queer figures and queer performativities that US-Caribbean relations begin to make
sense.
Corresponding author:
Laura Sjoberg, University of Florida Political Science, 234 Anderson Hall, PO Box 117325, Gainesville,
FL 32611-7325, USA.
Email: sjoberg@ufl.edu
659974MIL0010.1177/0305829816659974MillenniumSjoberg
research-article2016
Forum: Faking It in 21st Century IR/Global Politics
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