‘What is told is always in the telling’: Reflections on Faking It in 21st Century IR/Global Politics
| Author | Cynthia Weber |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0305829816659981 |
| Subject Matter | Forum: Faking It in 21st Century IR/Global Politics |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 45(1) 119 –130
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816659981
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1. Roland Barthes, ‘S/Z’, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 76. This is the
quote that structures the conclusion to Faking It.
2. Cynthia Weber, Faking It: US Hegemony in a ‘Post-Phallic’ Era (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999).
‘What is told is always in the
telling’: Reflections on Faking
It in 21st Century IR/Global
Politics
Cynthia Weber
University of Sussex, UK
Keywords
Queer International Relations, queer studies, IR theory, global politics, queer global politics, sex,
gender, sexuality
‘What is told is always in the telling’1
Faking It2 inspires strong reactions. When I submitted a chapter of the developing manu-
script to the feminist journal Signs, a reviewer described me as an ‘unconscionable femi-
nist’. When I told my geography professor father about the book, he announced, ‘Sis,
you’re my daughter, and I love you, but you’re a pervert, and you’re going to hell’. And
when I met up with my PhD supervisor, Rick Ashley, at ISA the year Faking It was
launched, he explained that the great and the good (and the bad) of ISA – of all genders
– kept asking him what he thought of his protégé’s new work, as a way of inviting him
to disown me intellectually. These sorts of responses to Faking It embedded themselves
in the discipline of IR over the years, when on increasingly rare occasions IR scholars
acknowledged the book’s existence.
Corresponding author:
Cynthia Weber, Department of International Relations, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Arts
B380, Brighton BN1 9SJ, UK.
Email: c.weber@sussex.ac.uk
659981MIL0010.1177/0305829816659981MillenniumWeber
research-article2016
Forum: Faking It in 21st Century IR/Global Politics
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