Phenomenological Bordering and
Structural Hegemony: Challenging the
Contemporary Construction of
Vulnerability in the Common European
Asylum System and UNHCR’s Age, Gender
and Diversity Policy.
Using a queer and intersectional approach, how possible is it to improve the conceptualisation of vulnerability in international protection policy frameworks? By Richard Vyse December 2020 Supervised by Dr. Caitlin Ryan Department of International Relations and International Organization Faculty of Arts University of Groningen
This thesis is submitted for obtaining the Master’s Degree in International Humanitarian Action. By submitting the thesis, the author certifies that the text is from his/her hand, does
not include the work of someone else unless clearly indicated, and that the thesis has been produced in accordance with proper academic practices.
Dedication
For my partner, for standing by my side, for helping me achieve the things I have so far and for holding my hand as I try to achieve more. For my Grandmother, for loving me and always believing in me. I only wish you could have read this.Abstract
Vulnerability, the people who experience it, and the contexts that it is experienced in are inherently plural. Despite attempts in some determination mechanisms, both the Common European Asylum System and UNHCR’s AGD Policy fail to recognise this plurality. This paper challenges how vulnerability is discursively created by both systems and provides the basis for further research on how a conceptualisation of vulnerability, which recognises plurality, could be operationalised. Demonstrating how the Common European Asylum System is narrow and regulatory in nature, and how the AGD Policy reifies a social hegemony, this paper utilises the concept of the border to theorise a social space of vulnerability independent of indexing markers that current methods employ. Highlighting the importance of contextualised data for any method of determining vulnerability, this paper provides the theoretical space for the foundations of a conceptualisation of vulnerability which is centred on an individual and not deterministic social categories.Table of Contents
Dedication ... 2 Abstract ... 3 Abbreviations ... 5 1. Introduction. ... 6 2. Vulnerability and protection. ... 10 3. Queer and Intersectional Epistemology. ... 16 3.1 Queer theory, not queer studies ... 17 3.1.1 Why not queer studies? Academic allyship. ... 20 3.2 Queer international relations. ... 21 3.2.1 Queer theory and intersectionality. ... 25 3.3 Intersectionality ... 26 3.4 Gendered reorientation: research, analysis and methodology. ... 31 4. Queer Interstices ... 35 4.1 (De-)Constructing vulnerability in the Common European Asylum System ... 36 4.2 Contesting regulation in the Age, Gender and Diversity Approach ... 38 4.3 (De)construction and regulation: conceptualising queer spaces ... 41 5. Intersectional Occupation. ... 46 5.1 Categories and Bordering in the CEAS ... 47 5.1.1 Categorical determinations ... 47 5.1.2 Bordering Processes ... 49 5.2 Intersectionality, the AGD policy, and regulatory hegemony ... 52 5.2.1 The Situational Intersectionality of the European Hotspots ... 54 5.3 Phenomenological Bordering and Structural Hegemony: intersectional occupation of interstitial vulnerability ... 56 6. Queer Questions, Intersectional Answers: A Conclusion ... 63 Works Cited ... 65 Appendix I: Ethical Approval ... 74Abbreviations
AGD - Age, Gender, and Diversity CEAS - Common European Asylum System EU - European Union IO - International Organisation LGBT - Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgendered UN - United Nations UNGA - United Nations General Assembly UNHCR - United Nations High Commission for Refugees1. Introduction.
The conceptualisation of vulnerability in international policy and normativity, particularly that of international institutions like the European Union [EU] and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees [UNHCR] is predicated upon simplistic monolithic social categories and fails to recognise both the plural landscape that individuals find themselves in, and the increasing international recognition of plural and diverse identities and their lived experiences. In failing to acknowledge the plural nature of individuals, and vulnerability, these international norms and policies obscure the lived experience of vulnerability and are incapable of effectively and holistically addressing it. The aim of this research is to inform policy and practice interaction between international institutions, improving the recognition of the lived experience of vulnerability, and providing policy makers and practitioners with analysis to arrive at a conceptualisation of vulnerability that better recognises the individual, rather than their occupation of a particular social category. In challenging the categories and consequent assumptions that are made from them, this research draws upon the approaches of queer and intersectional theory sequentially. Firstly, deploying queer theory to challenge hierarchies and harmful classifications, the nature of structures of regulation, and the performativities that constitute and reiterate constructed notions of vulnerability. Exposing these structures of regulation in international normativity implies an interstitial landscape where vulnerability coalesces. Secondly, it is this conceptual space where intersectionality is engaged to theorise on an individual’s occupation of space, rather than socially constructed categorisation. The queer and intersectional academy has been in development for some time. However, it has only recently been focused upon the discipline of international relations, and beyond this the studies of humanitarian action and migration. This research intends to add to the academic discussion and the utility of queer and intersectional theory to the field, in challenging traditional constructions of power and regulation, and how these affect individuals. The research question posed centres on the possibility for the conceptualisations of vulnerability in the respective institutions to be improved, through the challenging of its construction with queer theory, and its reorientation with intersectionality. This research is important for policy makers, practitioners and persons of concern as adevelopment of understanding in how individuals experience the world around them, and how social, cultural and legal normativities affect their vulnerability to structures of regulation. The humanitarian field is inherently concerned with situations and populations that are both implicitly and explicitly vulnerable. Adding to how these situations are understood and approached at a theoretical level will lead to more nuanced interventions that thoroughly consider the nature of the context, and the individual who is found there. Vulnerability is understood as an inability to cope with a particular stress because of social, cultural, or legal processes or structures which subject an individual to harm. Thus, approaching a reconceptualization with the intent of encouraging an individual’s emancipation opportunities from systems of subjugation will enable the tools to be developed for an individual to be empowered to act, rather than regulated into a new social contract. Drawing upon the legislative documents of the EU, the substantive policy instruments of UNHCR, and the developing theoretical literature on queer and intersectional theory, this research will adopt a discourse theoretical analysis approach to provide a platform of qualitative analysis from which further research can be conducted on the operationalisation of a new paradigm. In approaching the conceptualisation of vulnerability at the theoretical level, this research is limited by non-inclusion of contextualised and disaggregated data and how a model of vulnerability might take account of plural identities in the field, much like the research’s critique offered in this research of models of vulnerability and how they are deployed to inform interventions. However, intended as a theoretical critique to enable future research on the operationalisation of its findings, the limitations of this analysis are inherent and do not preclude a conclusion for the research question posed. In applying queer and intersectional theory to the concept of vulnerability in the two respective international protection policy frameworks, this analysis will assist policy makers, practitioners and the academy in arriving at a conceptualisation that better recognises plural identities and the lived experience in humanitarian settings. Academic analysis has recognised the plural nature of identities for some time, with formal manifestations of equality through anti-discrimination frameworks. Understanding vulnerability has similarly tracked this development and progressed to a plural, intersectional conceptualisation which recognises multi-faceted individuals and the way they experience the world. However, these developments have failed to be
operationalised together in the humanitarian sector, by underpinning the concept of individual vulnerability to structures, processes or contexts to which they may be vulnerable from. By challenging the discursive construction of vulnerability in the respective instruments using the dual theoretical frameworks, this analysis provides the foundations for further research on how it is conceptualised by humanitarian actors and a platform for how it can then be addressed. Taking a sequential approach in disrupting the foundations of its construction, followed by illustrating the implicit suggestion of the phenomenological border and the reified hegemony, this analysis will lead policy makers and practitioners to a reconceptualisation of vulnerability that better represents the lived experience; situating plural identities in augmenting contexts. Adding to the theorising of vulnerability, by contesting the structures that it is said to stem from in diverse settings, this analysis continues to illustrate intersectional vulnerability, and highlight the importance of contextual analysis to a holistic understanding of vulnerability that brings together the individual and the social, legal and cultural processes which affect them. Similarly, this analysis adds to the understanding of the interface between the individual and public policy frameworks, and how regulatory and hegemonic structures can be deconstructed to explain their effects. In order to inform practitioners and policy makers this research takes a systematic approach, to break down regulatory constructs before suggesting the basis for a reconceptualisation. In ‘vulnerability and protection’, I sketch the nature of vulnerability and how it is constructed by the EU and UNHCR; ‘queer and intersectional epistemology’ serves as a literature review of the two theoretical lenses to be deployed and to detail the particular understanding of both approaches that will be used. In ‘queer interstices’, I deconstruct the conceptualisation vulnerability in the Common European Asylum System [CEAS] and challenge the regulating hegemony in the Age, Gender and Diversity [AGD] policy approach, arriving at the theoretical construction of a queer space between regulatory structures that is unable to recognise individual vulnerability. ‘Intersectional occupation’ builds upon the previous chapter to delineate the space that vulnerability occurs in and the hegemonic power relations that result in vulnerabilities crystalising there. I use the exemplar of the EU hotspot approach to demonstrate situational intersectionality, the meeting point between EU and UNHCR
norms, and the manifestation of phenomenological bordering. In analysing the intersectional nature of vulnerability in a delimited queer space, I suggest the opportunity to interpret vulnerability not as the result of a systematic or structural consequence of determination, but as the presence in the zone of theoretical space where systems of regulation and hegemony are unable to properly emancipate individuals. Concluding with ‘queer questions, intersectional answers’ I identify the need for intersectional assessment paradigms to be deployed utilising robust data sets which then inform programme responses by policy makers and practitioners in order to empower individuals to participate equitably in programming and enjoy their rights.
2. Vulnerability and protection.
Vulnerability is a plural phenomenon that is created, perpetuated, impacted, and compounded through a complex interaction of factors; it is inherently intersectional (Hilhorst & Bankoff, 2004, p. 2). As a point of conceptual nexus representing the interface between the individual and the eco-system they occupy, be it physical, social, legal or cultural (Oliver-Smith, 2004, p. 10), vulnerability crystalises at points of unmet needs (Brady, Liabo, Ingold, & Roberts, 2019, p. 533). In seeking to make aspects of vulnerability intelligible, state and organisational determination architecture circularly affects how an individual is able to interact with social, cultural, legal and political systems, structures and processes (Smith & Waite, 2019, p. 2289). Concerned with protecting individuals from harm, the humanitarian sector is fundamentally one which is always establishing, assessing and identifying vulnerability from diverse threats, in order to alleviate, mitigate or prevent harm. Conceptualising the humanitarian sector broadly as one which is focused upon survivors of disasters and conflicts in both secure and insecure contexts, vulnerability determinations take place in diverse settings and through various agencies and methods, with alternative latent intent. As perhaps polarised representations of the diversity of the sector, the European Union’s legislative framework for processing asylum seekers and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees’ Age, Gender and Diversity Policy both include references and approaches to vulnerability, which only superficially serve the same purpose. With vulnerabilities affecting an individual’s lived experience throughout the migration cycle (Kofman, 2019, p. 2186; Busetta, Mendola, Wilson, & Cetorelli, 2019, p. 2), the alternative approaches of the two organisations capture the breadth of the field of conceptualisation of vulnerability, and are representative of how alternative latent intent in their structures, result in diverse outcomes. In surveying the field of the treatment of vulnerability, and conversely the protection of individuals by the humanitarian sector, this analysis will identify the tools that the respective systems deploy for determination, and how they conceptualise vulnerability. The treatment of vulnerability by the respective structures and processes are based upon comparable ideas of what vulnerability is, and what protection means. However, their underlying intent and structural properties produce significantly different results. By approaching how the organisations conceptualise vulnerability, this analysis will perceive the theoretical gaps between them and where a more holistic paradigm will be situated.Like many other phenomena, vulnerability is socially constructed, and is largely regulated and constituted by the state (Albertson-Fineman, 2008, p. 6). However, Fineman also argues that vulnerability is an inherent, unavoidable part of the human condition, universal and constant, and distinct from the vulnerability that stems from formal equality in the form of anti-discrimination (2008, pp. 8, 1-2). As this research will explore, this is perhaps reflected in the differences between legal or technical determinations of vulnerability in law (European Parliament and of the Council, 2013, p. Article 21) and the broad contextual analyses that are undertaken in humanitarian settings to identify those at risk (Patel, King, Phelps, & Sanderson, 2016, p. 21). This difference is further illustrated by the resulting vulnerability from migration journeys in the EU, where people who had not previously been determined as vulnerable in law at the European external border, become vulnerable through their new status and context (Busetta, Mendola, Wilson, & Cetorelli, 2019, p. 1); and indeed have their entire journeys marked by vulnerability in one form or another, constructed by different actors, bodies or institutions, socially culturally, or legally, in a variety of ways and at different times (Öner & Genç, 2015, p. 253). The fluid and dynamic reality of vulnerability is one reason why policy makers and legislators alike attempt to normatively or discursively fix vulnerabilities in order to allow categorically compulsivist state and civil society machinery to respond. The concept of vulnerability is not, however limited to people (Albertson-Fineman, 2008, p. 12). The vulnerability of institutions, and states themselves, to threats (Kempton, 2018, p. 14), perceived or actual, undoubtedly also feeds public policy responses, especially as the media feeds specific narratives and refuses to take responsibility for the consequences (Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2017, p. 1169). The very notion of vulnerability is value laden. It places both those within and without the categorisation indexing process into a classificatory hierarchy where both occupants and observers are able to make judgements based upon where someone or something is situated within the hierarchy. However, the hierarchy that is created is only very loosely based upon reality, and is instead, simply a state or organisational manifestation of regulation, and one that is, unfortunately, represented broadly in society; whilst policy goals like those which AGD policies extoll are intended to be emancipatory, by binding themselves to regulatory social norms,
they only subjugate populations to these further and create the deserving beneficiary of protection. In order for the humanitarian sector to establish whose needs are greatest in terms of protection, actors deploy strategies to identify specific risks which people might be vulnerable to. Although vulnerability is able to be defined in a variety of ways dependent on context, legal, cultural, or social for example, the departure point in this discourse will be the regular meaning in English (O'Donnell, 2019, p. 574). Reorientated from negative to positive language, the humanitarian sector attempts to address vulnerability to risks using several tools and approaches, one of which is the AGD Approach (Global Protection Cluster, 2020). UNHCR included Putting People First in its strategic directions for 2017-21 (UNHCR, 2016, p. 13) and built on this in the latest manifestation of their AGD approach in 2018 (UNHCR, 2018). The AGD approach intends to enhance the protection of everyone by including multiple factors affecting their identity, and their specific needs (UNHCR and Integra Foundation, 2014). Whilst UNHCR and the global protection community took the opportunity to reappropriate the language of vulnerability and extoll the emancipatory opportunities of improved leverage (Global Protection Cluster, 2020), the EU normatively fixed vulnerabilities in the CEAS (European Parliament and of the Council, 2013, p. Article 21). The CEAS is a legal and policy framework across the Union which is intended to guarantee minimum standards for the arrival, reception, processing and qualification of people seeing asylum in the EU (EASO, 2020). Through a gendered lens, the dichotomy between the two is superficially stark: one is empowering, encouraging and platforming people to regain their rights, the other is fixing whole classes of people into a paternalistic paradigm and determining them in need of assistance, irrelevant of context. It is unsurprising that the two institutions take different approaches. Whilst UNHCR was legally established in international law by resolution of the United Nations General Assembly [UNGA] (UNGA, 1949) and similarly the EU was established with the Treaty of Rome (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany, 1957), they fulfil entirely different roles in the international institutional architecture. UNHCR is designated as provider of international protection for those falling under the auspices of the Convention (UNGA, 1950); whereas the EU is a supranational body that created a new legal order (van Gend en Loos v. Nederlandse Administratie der
Belastingen, 1963). The legal foundations of the two organisations resulted in two very different legal creations. UNHCR with, at least in theory, rights at its very core, and the EU as a legal conciliatory mechanism for previously violent states. The individual/state interest dichotomy between the two organisations will be informative for this research, and how vulnerability is conceptualised on the international plain. The juxtaposition here, of the different approaches of the two International Organisations [IO]s, illustrates how, even within similar contexts, in similar organisational constructs, and on identical subject matter, interpretations and methods of implementation can vary. However, it must be highlighted that the intent behind the two measures, one to be an over-arching policy goal and the other to provide legal definition for those claiming their right to asylum, are very different. Nevertheless, the variation in how vulnerability is conceptualised, manifested and operationalised in international policy and normativity is representative of the field as a whole. Vulnerability is multidimensional, relational and dynamic: is coalesces from a multiplicity of sources, is context dependent and can change over time (Busetta, Mendola, Wilson, & Cetorelli, 2019, p. 2). Humanitarian vulnerability assessments recognise this plural nature of vulnerability in their methodology in order to identify targeted assistance to enable people to cope (Patel, King, Phelps, & Sanderson, 2016, p. 21). However, with the EU fixing their conceptualisation of vulnerability normatively, admittedly in response to their technocratic and legal foundations, their assessments of it are far less holistic. Despite positing for many years that the CEAS had crystalised (Pollett, 2016, p. 74), the European Commission recently announced the New Pact on Migration and Asylum (2020). The proposals keep in place the previous normative fix of vulnerability in Union law (Peers, 2020), despite how this has played out on the islands in the Aegean Sea (Greek Council for Refugees, 2020). The inflexible nature of law as a gendered construction (Law & Hennessey, 1993), a system designed by men for men (Schulhofer, 1994-1995, pp. 2154-5), means that it is incapable of robustly approaching or understanding a phenomena as plural and contextually subjective as vulnerability. Whereas international policy has the opportunity to incorporate changing ideas and understandings, and operationalise these in flexible ways when responding to contemporary situations: once international legal normativity is attached, it becomes much more rigid. This is not to make an attempt here to position international policy
and Union law as gendered binaries. However, this undoubtedly has real-world consequences for the gendered bodies that law seeks to regulate, but policy would seek to understand. Although the prima facie intent of both the AGD policy (UNHCR, 2018), and the EU’s Reception Conditions Directive element of the CEAS (European Parliament and of the Council, 2013), is protection, it is possible to interrogate them and question who or what the object of that protection is, or at least who benefits from it. Normative classification of people, by states and international bodies, into a regulatory framework (Butler, Critically Queer, 1993, p. 23) predetermines and ascribes capital (Van Hear, 2003, p. 6) and dictates the terms that they are able to interface with nation state and social eco-systems. Far from addressing the needs of the vulnerable, or even reifying their rights, normative fixation institutionalises helplessness, perpetuates social hierarchies, and fails to situate vulnerability contextually (Ni Aoláin, 2011, p. 8). Within the EU’s legal framework, the placing of vulnerability into a legislative matrix subjugates people to the mass of nation state power, when in humanitarian contexts they are often fleeing the excesses of it. The impotence of rights-based international public policy against operationalised nation state machinery is a tacit recognition that whatever progress has been made in the human-security/nation state security debate, when the two are brought into direct contact, the latter prevails. In approaching vulnerability contextually, extra-territorially, but in strict, presumptive terms of categorisation for jurisdictional aliens; it is implied that the ‘domestic’ EU context is safe and liberal, where rights are protected, (Kymlicka, 2010, p. 73) and that vulnerability is the exception rather than the norm. However, in practice it is also a reminder that European law is for Europeans (Spijkerboer, 2018, p. 232) and that those people subjugating themselves to the EU supranational order must be manageable in the ordered, liberal democratic way. For this inquiry the interfacing between the international policy forum and the EU’s legal order will be informative. Where international policy seeks to promote and foster a positive environment for rights holders to claim their rights, leverage their situation, and for duty bearers to act in a way to facilitate this; the EUs legislative framework, presumptively the operationalisation of international policy and law (Consolidated Version of the Treaty on European Union, 2008, p. Articles 3(5) and 21), is to engender those already at a
structural disadvantage, into a normative system that separates and distinguishes people simply by their occupation of a particular social category designating some to be more deserving than others. This is not only presumptive for those under its determinations, but also paternalistic in outlook, ignorant of context, proscribes capital to those determined to be deserving, and creates new social and cultural hierarchies within the target population itself.
3. Queer and Intersectional Epistemology.
The elasticity of queer theory, its fundamental indeterminacy, is, perhaps, what makes it most attractive for its proponents. (Jagose, 1996, p. 96). Queer theory is a post-structural, critical gender theory (Oswin, 2008, p. 89) which challenges the assumed normative hierarchy predicated on gender binaries and heteronormativity (Seidman, 1995, p. 134). This is the basis of queer epistemology. A disruption of the presumed, constructed, social order; a rejection of the essentialised and naturalised presumptive classificatory system; a protestation against the assumed framework that stems from sexual politics. Intersectionality and queer theory alike emerged from second wave feminism (Shields, 2008, p. 302) and are both on a continuum of analyses from category rejection, to their inclusion in order to conceptualise and interpret relationships between social groups (McCall, 2005, p. 1773) analogous to the differences between liberal and radical feminist thought. Intersectionality can be conceptualised as oppositional to queer, conceiving the same spaces but in an alternative way; rather than the contesting of the existence of social classifications, and the presumptions that result from them. As in queer theory, intersectionality recognises the axes of social stratification and how these interact. These alternative schemas, or credos which lay the foundations of thought, are fundamental tenets of this inquiry; visualised and understood as developments from the architects who laid the groundwork from which the theoretical frameworks emerged. In surveying the field of queer theory, distinguishing it from queer studies, and positioning this conceptualisation within international relations; this review intends to identify the pertinent literature and how it will be reified and operationalised in this research. The latter part of this research will utilise intersectionality, to reformat the interstices that queer contestations expose into places of individual occupation, in contrast to group classification. The following will, therefore, also consider the field of intersectionality. Applying these theoretical lenses, to the understanding of vulnerability in international policy normativity and architecture, this review will deploy discursive-theoretical analysis as a methodological approach in order to identify the constitutive discursive practices which create vulnerability in international policy approaches: later enabling a repositioning of vulnerability and establishing a new foundational credo. Discourse theoretical analysis will enable the identification of points at which the meanings of vulnerability become crystalised, and using dual theoretical lenses will enable this analysis to understand theconstitutive elements of vulnerability at these points, and how they are created discursively. Breaking down the conceptualisations of vulnerability in law and policy will encourage interdisciplinary dialogue, and promote a conceptualisation that moves beyond rigid, restrictive and ultimately harmful interpretations.
3.1 Queer theory, not queer studies
Judith Butler is an American philosopher who has made notable contributions to the fields of gender and sexuality studies, and to critical theory (UC Berkeley, 2020). Butler’s progressive work on gender built upon the ideas of performativity (Butler, 1988, p. 519), the compulsive hetero-sexist matrix (Butler, 1990) and regulatory discourses (Foucault, 1979, p. 154). In her work Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive Limits of Sex (Butler, 1993), Butler builds upon her earlier ideas on performativity (Butler, 1993, p. 2) and gender construction (Butler, 1993, p. 10), which allows her to build a more operational and tangible idea of gender manifestation, rather than just critique of gendered structures. This lays the bedrock for future developments in her own scholarship, evolving her position and enabling the analogous application of her notions to, at least superficially, non-sexed bodies and objects (Butler, 2004). The application of Butler’s frameworks, or matrices, to ostensibly non-sexed objects, or perhaps objects which become sexed through their binarisation and regulation (Waites, 2009, p. 138) is how this inquiry interprets her treatise. Furthermore, Butler’s elaboration, identification and repetition of her ideas on performativity, alongside those of others (Butler, 1990, p. 151), themselves performative and constitutive discursive acts by repeatedly defining and fixing meanings, are instructive for the analyses of the discursive construction of vulnerability later in this research. The repetitive, reiterative and constitutive nature of vulnerability in law can be typified by Butler’s own reiterative approach to her work and will be demonstrated later. The evolution of Butler’s work on queer theory, and her both theoretically and disciplinary transgressive developments, is indicative of the evolution of understanding of queer disciplinarity and its potential application to contemporary subjects. However, Butler and others appear to be particularly drawn to limiting the application of the field to discussion of directly sexed bodies, obviously gendered, sexed or sexualised social phenomena, and gender in subject areas: as opposed to how genderedness manifests as a regulatory framework in more nuanced ways. An attempt will be made here to distinguish this more limited
analysis, which shall be referred to as ‘queer studies’, that is the application of queer theory to directly sexed bodies and socially gendered phenomena, from queer theory, considered here to be a more abstract, or perhaps purer, or potentially more operationalisable theoretical framework. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, writing both before and after Butler, until her death from metastatic breast cancer in 2009 (Sedgewick H. , 2020), was one of the founders of queer theory. Sedgewick, like Butler, builds upon the idea of performativity, reifying and constituting the premise of both queer and that of performativity itself (Sedgewick E. K., 1993, p. 2). Sedgewick’s earlier works, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), starts with the sociological neologism ‘homosocial’ to denote male-male bonds which are usually accompanied by homophobia (Yaeger, 1985, p. 1141) and placing this on a continuum with homosexual desire and love at its opposite end (Sedgewick E. K., 1985, p. 2). Sedgewick goes on, in The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), to develop her conceptualisation of sexual delimitations and definitions as inherently incoherent. The first incoherency, she says, is the conceptualisation of homosexuality as both a minoritizing and universalising phenomena simultaneously, and the second, is the similar dual construction of homosexuality as transivity between genders, whilst also encompassing an impulse of separatism (Sedgewick E. K., 1985, pp. 1-2). Without ever defining her work as queer, Sedgwick lays down the foundations of what it would become, not trying to solve these incoherencies but to expose them to analysis. In Queer Performativity (Sedgewick E. K., 1993) she clarifies performativity as constitutive utterances and acts (p. 2), as opposed to just the theatrical, which emanated from Butler’s earlier work on drag queens and performativity. In the continuing development of the queer academy, both Butler and Sedgewick discursively constitute queer theory as if it were the performativity they write about. Sedgwick’s discussion of the spectacle of the closet, and the performativity of the act of leaving it (Sedgewick E. K., 1990, p. 231), creates the idea of the interstices that which the closet occupies, how queer theory creates both the viewed and the occupied space, the crystallisation from the description of what it is not (Brown, Roelvink, Carnegie, & Anderson, 2011, p. 122). Where even Sedgewick recognises the work of Butler as ‘dense and imposing’ (Sedgewick E. K., 1993, p. 1), the more abstract nature of Sedgwick’s own writing, and its application to
literature in ordered to reconceptualise the canon (Sedgewick E. K., 1985, p. 49), illustrates that whilst her work is important in scoping and establishing the field, the more operationalizable nature of Butler’s positions it well for the present inquiry. Although an elaborate, and expansive reiteration of queer ideas, the inclusion here is important as part of that reiterative and constitutive process, performative of trans-disciplinarity, and encouraging queer ideas into regulated spaces. In sketching the outlines of structure by interstices, success by failure, and definition of what is present by what is not, this work is intended to be representative of the theoretical frameworks it deploys. Butler and Sedgewick take subtly different approaches to formulating queer as a theoretical framework. Sedgewick developed queer theory as independent from the feminist axis of gender (Garcia, 2017, p. 42), whereas Butler extends Foucault’s theory of discursive reproduction of sexuality to gender (Spargo, 1999, p. 53). Butler’s operationalizability stems from her conceptualisation of queer as a Foucauldian extension, including both Rubin and Wittig in Gender Trouble (Butler, Reformulating Prohibition as Power, 1990, p. 92; Butler, Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex, 1990), and broadening the applicability of her construction. However, although both are clearly queer theorists, it is perhaps notable that a large part of their scholarship falls within queer studies which, as has been noted for some time, is distinct from queer theory (Branch, 2020). As will become clear, this distinction is significant for this inquiry. Although stemming from similar traditions, one conceptualisation of queer theory is post-structuralism applied to genders and sexualities, juxtaposed with queer studies which emphasises the social stability of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered [LGBT] identities (Lovaas PhD, Elia PhD, & Yep PhD, 2006, pp. 5,6); the very antithesis of queer disruption, and a minoritizing view in Sedgewick’s framework (1985, pp. 1-2). It is also possible to summarise that LGBT/Queer studies emerged in the 1980s, focusing on the lesbian and gay rights movements, and relying on scientific research methodology (Carlson D. L., 2014, pp. 95-96), whereas queer theory emerged later in the 1990s and is primarily inspired by the post-structural movement (Richter-Montpetit, 2018, p. 224). Considering the linguistic repetition, it is not surprising that they are often conflated or understood as hermeneutically similar but the differences, and intradisciplinary struggles, should be recognised (Hall D. E., 2009, p. 2). The
seeming intolerance of queer studies towards queer theory is fundamentally about passing, conforming, and difference (Sagle PhD, 2006, p. 318); coupled with appropriation and assimilation into the regular (p. 323), scholarship and academia that simply adds the word queer, should be identified as not theoretically queer at all. As seen in this analysis so far, the application of queer theory to unsexed bodies, is not new and in fact can be done to expose conflict within systems of regulation and order, particularly where power and structural oppression are also present. In moving the queer theory towards the subject of this inquiry, that is international regimes of vulnerability and protection, and into the discipline of international relations, it becomes clear that relationships between states and nation state institutional infrastructure and individuals, as structures predicated on regulation and hegemony, is ripe for this theoretical analysis.
3.1.1 Why not queer studies? Academic allyship.
In disrupting the expected, questioning the normative, and contesting the performativity and reification of statecraft, queer international relations seeks to reconfigure the conceptual framework that has been established to make sense of international relationships. In an increasingly gender variant and sexuality diverse world, this questioning of heteronormative presumptions has value not just for the furtherance of enlightenment, but for progressive political change. Where this analysis of the field will make a distinction between queer studies and queer theory, and recognise both the queer nature of the disciplinary border (Nayak, 2014, p. 618) and Weber’s transgressive approach towards it (Weber, 2015, p. 44), it becomes clear that there is space in the academy for allyship and interdisciplinary activism. Creating academic alliances through shared otherness (Calafell, 2018, p. 39) is an opportunity not only to question the discipline of international relations, but also to raise questions over the stability of the system and the world in which we live (Nayak, 2014, p. 617), from the perspective of those who experience it from outside hegemonic structures. Where allyship is documented socially as members of a privileged group advocating for the rights of the marginalised (Ueno, 2020, p. 159), there is a queer academic seduction in promoting the proliferation of this across transient academic borders, and encouraging engagement with queer international relations, without gentrification. The potential for allyship to transgress into appropriation or the perpetuation of inequality
by allies through propagation is clearly present (Carlson, Leek, Casey, Tolman, & Allen, 2019, p. 2), particularly when understood in the light of gentrification; however, the opportunity to include broader elements of critical theories, as Weber considers (Richter-Montpetit & Weber, 2017, pp. 2-3), is an opportunity to be included as intersecting allies with broader disciplinary cover (Nayak, 2014, p. 618) especially from other emancipatory groups. The prospect of academic allyship will undoubtely raise questions over the increasingly ethereal boundary between queer studies and queer theory. Nevertheless, as queer theory increasingly encourages engagement with peripheral international relations subject matter (Nayak, 2014, p. 617), a theoretical proposition that includes a variety of otherness can pose as a more useful paradigm, and importantly for this inquiry: entice intersectionality.
3.2 Queer international relations.
Although queer theory has pervaded critical discourse for some time, there is still some ambiguity over whether a queer international theory has emerged and, considering the aforementioned, whether this lies more in the domain of queer studies (Weber, 2015, p. 29). This ambiguity and indeterminacy is a manifestation of the nature of queer itself, along with its contestation of the regulatory nature of gendered objects. In terms of classic disciplinary international relations, Weber initially investigates whether both the conceptualisation of international theory as a homology, and queer as inherently boundary transitory, results in the failed crystallisation of a queer international relations theory (2015, p. 35). In moving her queer thinking forward, Weber places Butler’s performativity, with Haraway’s figuration, into classic disciplinary international relations theory, to solve the equation and create theoretical success (2015, p. 36). In creating success in this conformist, linear and essentialising manner, Weber highlights a missed opportunity to conceptualise a queer international relations theory beyond the theoretical normativity that has gone before, even when flirting with new frameworks that might suggest a theoretical interstitial outline (2015, p. 38). In one of her first forays into the field in Why is there no Queer International Theory (2015), Weber highlights the threat of gentrification to a queer international relations discipline (p. 44) and concludes with a return to Butler and a rejection of the regulatory regime of disciplinary international relations theory as a useful investigatory framework (pp. 46-47). As an initial survey of the queer international relations field,
Weber’s article (2015) skilfully illustrates tensions in the field and the application of the queer theoretical model to the discipline. International relations is an inherently ordered and regulated field, being that it is the study of the relationships between states: a strictly socially, culturally and legally enforced landscape. It is no surprise that the theoretical understanding of this landscape is similarly constructed. Weber’s overview here, of problematising the international relations landscape in queer terms, lays the foundations for the disruption of the discourse to provoke new responses to formulaic questions, and perhaps reorienting the questions themselves. This re-positionality is fundamental to this analysis, which seeks to reconfigure the discursive fabric of vulnerability. In disrupting both the questions, and the assumed answers, the theoretical lenses deployed will expose both how vulnerability is constituted, reiterated and reified, and how a reorientation will reconstitute the individual who is at risk, rather than a prescriptive teleological determination to regulate a ‘body’ into an ordered system. Problematising LGBT positionality in the queer international relations discourse is one point where the demarcation between queer studies and queer theory becomes more indistinct. Conceptualising the non-conforming as LGBT is a manifestation of cultural imperialism (Rao, 2010, p. 4) and essentialises binaries into the discourse (Richter-Montpetit & Weber, 2017, p. 3). Whilst Weber starts with queer deconstruction, challenging normative hierarchies in international relations, she appears to become more focused upon queer bodies, and therefore queer studies, in later work. This is not to say that LGBT and queer bodies do not have a place in queer discourse, but this perhaps strays into the advocacy and political rights basis of queer studies; naturalising bodies where queer theory would suggest that these classifications can be presumptive and harmful (Richter-Montpetit & Weber, 2017, p. 9; Weed, 1997, p. 1). However, Weber challenges the premise of a disciplinary border in discussing queer sexualities and objects which have been co-opted, appropriated, erased, and gentrified (2015, p. 44) by hegemonic normativities (Richter-Montpetit & Weber, 2017, p. 4) to support heteropatriarchal state architecture (p. 11) and therefore challenging the assumed heterosexist presumption with which queer theory is concerned with. The transgressive nature of LGBT subject matter in queer theory discourse, and how Weber challenges the disciplinary boundary which should lie between them, is demonstrative
of the essentialised and naturalised nature of the systems that this analysis seeks to contest. The nature of discursively constituted vulnerability, within hegemonic systems designed to regulate bodies into a system of order, lies firmly within her understanding of queer theory in international relations. This disciplinary disruption that Weber undertakes is the embodiment of queer theorising (Sjoberg, 2014, p. 608). Weber’s inclusion of queer identities into queer international relations encourages a more robust inquiry and will enable this discourse to take a more inclusive approach in challenging constructions of vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, the goal of queer theory is not to advocate for queer and LGBT rights, but to disrupt heteronormative hegemony; this contestation will be central in rebutting international policy presumptions, as will be further analysed. Weber’s recognition that queer studies and queer international relations could mutually benefit from theoretical exchange and interaction (Weber, 2016, p. 2) is an objection to the epistemological imperialism of disciplinary international relations and the development of an inclusive theoretical paradigm which seeks to meet the demands of a queer ontology. In developing queer international relations into the Barthesian plural, Weber is able to illustrate the duality of the queer object and subject (2016, p. 4), a queer representation of minoritizing and universalising subject matter (Sedgewick E. K., 1985, pp. 1-2) and space defined by its borders (Brown, Roelvink, Carnegie, & Anderson, 2011, p. 122). The plural reality that she perceives is indicative of the nature of vulnerability, and indeed its theorisation and manifestation in discourse. Vulnerability must be understood as inherently plural in order to be applicable or accessible to plural bodies. Weber’s inclusive paradigm takes Butler’s and Sedgwick’s work progressively further, makes it fit for contemporary discourse analysis, and responds to some critique of queer theory’s alleged inadequacies of addressing other disciplinary concerns (Lovaas PhD, Elia PhD, & Yep PhD, 2006, p. 7). Weber’s extensive groundwork for queer international relations not only threatens to make the transient boundary with queer studies more porous but has the potential to develop an intersectional matrix of analysis. In rejecting the proposition that ‘everything is already queer’, Weber explicitly extends her usage of queer to a nearly intangible, ethereal concept or ordering that encompasses both normative and perverse understandings onto the same plane or axis and a disconnection from monolithic social constructions (2016, p. 12). In separating
queerness from monolithic axes, and suggesting the indeterminate nature of the queer subject matter, sketching the boundaries of the occupied and the occupier. Weber creates the theoretical queer interstices that will coalesce later in this analysis (Fontanari, 2019, p. 126), sketching the space for the reassembling of vulnerability. Deliberate spaces, actively created by the protagonists, to allow for a novel understanding of the relationships between states, institutions and, increasingly, the individual (Richter-Montpetit, 2018, p. 232). Weber’s significant broadening of the field in some places, and returning the discourse to queer objects and bodies in others, is a circular homology, akin to that referenced in her 2015 work (Weber, 2015), which embodies her understanding of queer as a Barthesian plural (Weber, 2016). To be broad, and narrow, delimited, and indeterminate, axial, and interstitial; is entirely commensurate with the tenets of queer theory and surely sets the standard of a queer international theory, despite protestations to the contrary. Although approaching intersectionality, Weber’s conceptualisation falls short of a characterisation that holistically encompasses emancipatory groups’ concerns. In approaching this analysis using a dual theoretical lens, synergies between the two will emerge and will enable a more accurate representation of the lived experience, and therefore more useful to the practitioner. Nevertheless, queer international relations is being applied to a breadth of subject matter which exposes power structures and dynamics which are then useful for other emancipatory groups and for critical scholarship. This builds on the notions of academic allyship, without permitting gentrification. The utility of queer in understanding the duality of states and non-state actors (Wilcox, 2014, p. 615), or the discursive and naturalising nature of the border (Sjoberg, 2014, p. 610), are both relatively safe characterisations of prevalent phenomena. Bringing queer theory to bare on more contested ground such as the suicide bomber (Puar, 2005, p. 121), the migrant (Weber, 2016, p. 1), or even the suicidal soldier (Wool, 2015, p. 31) are more challenging and will necessarily have to include considerations of class, race and gender, if they are to be robust. Weber’s inclusive paradigm, extending to queer bodies and objects, lends itself more readily to critique of these figures in international relations issues, and understanding and breaking down normativities, whether they appear in expected socially constructed formats or not. Furthermore, in opening up queer international relations to queer
emancipatory issues, Weber firmly pushes a doctrinally restrictive discipline to seek more innovative questions and answers, on both sexed and unsexed bodies, and on frameworks of regulation (Colebrook, 2008, p. 19). As queer international relations theory appears to have, so far, resisted the expected gentrification that has been suggested (Weber, 2015, p. 44) or its assimilation into mainstream international relations (Sjoberg, 2014, p. 608), the field is ripe for exploration in new thematic areas and disrupting notions which are considered as settled for both the theory and the subject of inquiry.
3.2.1 Queer theory and intersectionality.
Intersectionality, like queer theory, finds its roots in critical gender theory, and more specifically second wave feminism (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 152). In her originary work, Crenshaw observes that the addition of sexism and racism does not equal black women’s marginalisation (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140). Working from the deconstruction that queer theory permits, intersectionality promotes the potential for a recognition of plural identities, and for the importance of subjectivity, context and individuality in vulnerability as a concept. Since Crenshaw’s work, intersectionality has grown as an analytical lens to view far more than issues surrounding black feminism, or perhaps matured to the point where the realisation has occurred that far more issues intersect with it, just as queer theory grew from contestations on heteronormativity. Intersectionality as a theoretical framework can be used to deconstruct monolithic social axes (Davis A. N., 2015, p. 206) whilst maintaining considerations of social context and relationality (Hopkins, 2019, p. 942), and bares striking resemblance to queer theory in highlighting naturalised hegemonic power structures such as hetero-masculinism (Hopkins, 2019, p. 939), transient masculinity and borders (Agathangelou, 2004, p. 518), and heteronormativity itself (Henry, 2017, p. 188). Proponents of intersectionality highlight the mutually constitutive nature of social categories (Patil, 2013, p. 848) and the constitutive force of power relations in forming spaces (Cho, Williams-Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013, p. 789). Where queer theory had Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011, pp. 2-3) and queer interstices (Butler, 1993, p. 51), outlining what is by what it is not, intersectionality constitutes spaces by establishing borders and axes; ostensibly fixing hetero-normativities and perpetuating socially and culturally constructed imperialism. Intersectionality does, however, challenge the typical
framework as monolithic, deconstructs the dominant archetype, and attempts to create a new ecosystem for the coexistence of plural identities (Davis A. N., 2015, pp. 207-208). By reading intersectionality with a post-structuralist theory like queer theory, it is possible to challenge the presumptions that come from classificatory systems and propose a reassembling of these factors which centres an individual affected by factors rather than factors determining the individual. Despite the potential for queer critique of intersectionality, which is not the focus of this discourse, there is a symbiosis in the two frameworks which this inquiry will seek to reify: queering the space that vulnerabilities occur in, and constituting new intersections of transient borders. 3.3 Intersectionality Intersectionality emerged as a theoretical acknowledgement of the diversity and plurality of the world, and the plural bodies which inhabit it. Intersectionality perceives lived realities and social constructs, defined by power imbalances and oppressive hierarchies; from the points of confluence between social axes and their interaction with each other, rather than the simple dichotomy between bifurcated groups or those either side of a single distinction, intersectionality understands these points of confluence as the intersections of monolithic vulnerability markers (Hill-Collins & Birge, 2016, p. 13). Rather than just the theoretical lens from which it started, intersectionality is an operationalizable method to understand multiplicity in a complex world and can lead to altered perceptions when compared with single social categorisations (Canan & Foroutan, 2016, p. 1906). The utility of a theoretical lens beyond the academy, for people to make sense of their social relationships, is an attractive proposition for the practice-led academic who wishes to see their work affect policy or practice. To comprehend intersectionality is to accede to the paradigm of a variegated lived experience which is constituted of more than that which we are socially conditioned to consider (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140). This direct translation from the theoretical to the tangible goes further than comprehension in scholarship, but understanding of social relationships for outside of academia. Intersectionality was developed to understand converging social stratifications which exacerbate or compound other factors to create a unique understanding of the vulnerability at a particular nodal point. As an inherently plural paradigm, it provides both a lens and a set of tools to ascertain both the effects of the context upon the axis of stratification, and
how that axis intersects with others. The plural nature of intersectionality lends itself to interdisciplinarity and acknowledging influences from a broader, and less restricted or regulated, frame of reference. In developing an inclusive model like intersectionality, the ground is laid for a rigorous system of analyses which this inquiry hopes will result in new answers. Intersectionality is understood in alternative ways on a continuum. McCall (McCall, 2005, p. 1773) explains this continuum on the basis of methodological approach to categories with anti-categorical complexity at one end and inter-categorical complexity at the other. Having emerged from second wave feminism (Shields, 2008, p. 302) it is unsurprising that this continuum bares similarity to dyads such as liberal and radical feminism or a post-structuralist approach like queer theory. Where the continuum rejects (p. 1777), disrupts (p. 1782), and then works with (p. 1784) analytical categories, anti-, intra-, and inter-categorical complexity respectively, this gives rise to take a variety of viewpoints on how individuals interface with each other, how they are in fact constituted (Cho, Williams-Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013, p. 789) and how multiple identities might be understood. Intersectionality arose as a construct as academics and individuals with variant, and perhaps non-conforming, lived experiences, began to challenge the assumptions made about them because of their identity in a particular category, or perhaps to their socialised subjugation to it. As intersectional disciplinarity has matured, the questions it provokes are becoming more pronounced, and in an increasingly recognised diverse world, arguably more important. Furthermore, along with the growth in the development of understanding of plural identities, intersectionality offers a tool for the reinterpretation of our surroundings and interactions; how people occupy physical and metaphysical spaces, how people understand their occupation of those spaces, and what tools they, the academy, and policy makers need to do so (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020). The transgressive nature of intersectionality, coupled with its duality homologous to that of Weber’s Barthesisan plural (2016, p. 4), is as intersectional as the analysis it purports to perform. In considering alternative manifestations of its analytical framework, intersectionality is self-constituting and reiteratively performative, and replete with opportunities to mutate in as many dynamic and inventive ways as the diverse world it can be applied to.
Although a progression from the same theoretical underpinnings, anti-categorical complexity and queer theory can be read together to understand how normative regulation can be counter-productive (Butler, 1993, p. 23), rather than just deconstructed as an emancipatory method (Thiel, 2017, p. 101). Queer theory discourse can support the anti-categorical complexity of intersectionality approach by advocating the deconstruction of structures of regulation (Oswin, 2008, p. 90), which produce harmful results (Stroumsa M.D., M.P.H, Roberts Ph.D, Kinnear B.A., & Harris M.D., Ph.D, 2019), and create false behaviours (Freedman, 2018, p. 2). However, as much as the two may seem to marry well, McCall’s characterisation is not the only one. Hancock (2007) appears to somewhat reify some of McCall’s characterisations in her own intersectional typology which she identifies as addressing multiple, equally weighted, fluid and mutually constituting categories (p. 67). Hancock’s typology permits categories, akin to one end of McCall’s continuum, but also permits their transcendence (Walby, Armstrong, & Strid, 2012, p. 228). The portrayal of categorical fluidity is analogous to McCall’s category rejection (2005, p. 1777), but also as a holistic interpretation of the continuum as a whole, and perhaps more representative of contemporary understandings and conceptualisations of social constructions, transitions, and plural identities. Hancock develops McCall’s ideas on categories to build a transcendent social plain where categories and status are permeable and fluid, providing a flexible framework applicable to a recognisable intersectional reality. The utility of Hancock’s typology to this analysis, is its ability to recognise that particular social phenomena are not fixed, and rely on complex social and cultural contexts, such as class, where an individual may only sometimes be part of a particular category, or may be part of that category in varying degrees of totality (Hancock, 2007, p. 72). The ability for Hancock’s model to enable empirical data sets to be utilised (pp. 66, 72) gives it significant value in informing policy targeted at those at the cross roads of vulnerabilities and, ergo, improving the emancipatory credentials of intersectionality as a research paradigm (Manuel, 2006, pp. 186-189). Informing, or even leading, public policy choices is an opportunity of operationalisation that should not be missed, in order to not just understand, but to end structural and political intersections of inequalities (Crenshaw-Williams, 1991, p. 1245), which perpetuate marginalisation and create new vulnerabilities. Intersectionality as a post structuralist framework, or one founded on anti/inter/intra-categorical complexity, or a fluidic category recognition, which
acknowledges variance, diversity, and categorical mobility in social architecture, is a tool that should be incorporated to reach inclusive decisions in plural social and political eco-systems for the benefit of policy makers, practitioners and individuals alike. Recognising intersectional space entails understanding its geography, its inhabitants, and where someone or thing may be found in or on the terrain. In mapping out this terrain, from an early point it was recognised in international policy that over inclusion of marginalised identity markers in a broader group has the potential to erase the circumstances which cause the marginalisation to occur in the first place, and under inclusion of a shared experience by a minority of a particular group, who fail to see the intersection of their own category with the minorities’ experience, can also be erasing (UN Division for the Advancement of Women, 2000). Using a dual theoretical lens allows the deconstruction of the normative hierarchies which result in marginalisation, and the reconfiguration of intersectional space precludes over representation by structurally centring the individual, rather than the categorisations. Similarly, intersectionality can occur both horizontally and vertically, within and between groups (Jedwab & Donaldson, 2003), creating intersecting marginalisations at a variety of nodal points. Understanding intersectionality is not just the comprehension of the social axes where marginalisation and vulnerabilities occur, but also where these occur within intersectional space and how this interacts with a nodal point. The conceptualisation of intersectional geography allows policy makers and practitioners to perceive unacknowledged bias and structural power relationships which may affect research or programming (Manning, Johnson, & Acker-Verney, 2016, p. 292). In distinguishing both the terrain, and the dominant structural architecture which affects marginalisation within intersectional space (Hunt, Morimoto, Zajicek, & Lisnic, 2012, pp. 268-269), the operationalisation of the theoretical paradigm to policy and practice is a valuable opportunity to expose power imbalances, and to achieve better results, from contextualised categorical recognition, uncovering unacknowledged prejudice or the permeation of marginalisation through failure to recognise plural bodies or identities. In surveying the field of intersectionality, the significant tenet that coalesces is the importance of interlocking oppressions and the sometimes cumulative, but at least
distinct, effect that this has. Whilst not always identifying an approach as intersectional, but as alluding or inferring it by process, there are interdisciplinary contributions that can be drawn upon to develop a more robust, and more broadly applicable taxonomy of what intersectionality is and does. Kerner directly argues that post-colonial feminism and intersectionality should be read as complementary (2017, p. 844), she says that feminists widely agree that they are concerned with a multiplicity of intersecting differences and that where intersectionality is concerned with a contemporary methodological localism; post-colonial feminism is embedded with transnational history. However, this is a reductionist and deterministic explanation, further simplified here. Although the position will be taken in this discourse that they are certainly complementary: transnationalism, for example, as has been argued elsewhere (Hearn & Blagović, 2013, p. 8), is an intersection, incorporating intersections, and nation states are inherently composed of various genders, classes, and other typical social constructions. Being between or across nations will multiply these possibilities significantly, just as plural identities in plural contexts does. It is not the intent of this discourse to delineate where intersectionality ends and other critical theories start, but instead to highlight that intersectionality as a paradigm is able to draw from these as disciplinary interlocutors in their own right and build an interdisciplinary frame with which to view vulnerability and its manifestations. Again in post-colonial feminism, Kuokkanen (2008) uses an intersectional framework to link colonisation, patriarchy and capitalism (pp. 216-219), all systems of power which create and reify normative and harmful oppressive hierarchies. Breaking down the effect that globalisation has on indigenous women and persuasively concluding that indigenous women are in fact survivors of globalisation, just as they are years of violence and abuse (p. 230). In feminist critical military studies Henry (2017) problematises the use of intersectionality and suggests that intersectionality is politicised, and should not be detached from its emancipatory origins, even if its subject is not poor, black women; at the mercy of patriarchal economic, cultural and social power (Henry, 2017, p. 186). Returning the discourse to the possibility of activism and rights, akin to where the ethereal line between queer theory and queer studies might lie (Carlson D. L., 2014, pp. 95-96), intersectionality should resist ‘gentrification’ (Weber, 2015, p. 44) and being brought into the centre of disciplinarity where it is not brought to bear directly on emancipation and marginalisation. As well as a framework in its own right, intersectionality lends
itself to allyship (Calafell, 2018, p. 39) and emancipatory activism in the interdisciplinary academy. This analysis will constitutively and reiteratively remain true to the emancipatory origins of intersectionality, whilst performatively and reiteratively disrupting normativities, challenging binarized assumptions, and rejecting naturalised and essentialised notions of vulnerability and protection.
3.4 Gendered reorientation: research, analysis and methodology. This discourse will seek to answer the principal research question: Using a queer and intersectional approach, how possible is it to improve the conceptualisation of vulnerability in UNHCR’s AGD policy, and the EU’s asylum system? This research originally began as a critique of UNHCR’s AGD policy. However, during the research process it became clear that whilst UNHCR’s policy is based upon monolithic social axes which can be critiqued, the AGD policy encourages that data should be as contextual as possible, and that UNHCR’s mandate is often strictly controlled by host states. However, the EU’s vulnerability matrix, namely in the CEAS, has no such contextualisation and is therefore much more open to analysis to inform practice. A queer challenge to these frameworks, followed by an intersectional response, will expose protection gaps and inform a policy dialogue between the two international organisations to promote inter-institutional cooperation and understanding, and to improve human security for asylum seekers. This inquiry will proceed by first conducting a queer deconstruction of the conceptualisations of vulnerability, and then an intersectional reconstruction, of both UNHCR’s AGD approach and the EU’s CEAS. By approaching vulnerability from an intersectional perspective, this research will reconstitute boundaries for consideration in vulnerability determinations, recentring the individual in the process and avoiding determinations based upon assumptions stemming from membership of a particular category. By following a discourse theoretical analysis in this research, this approach will enable the conceptualisation of vulnerability in both policy and norms, and to seek
congruences which might better inform practice. This methodology, deployed here, will understand that the delineation between political and social as neither permanent, nor objective (Wullweber, 2019, p. 151), and that the concept of vulnerability is created discursively (Hall S. , 1997, p. 39). In the gendered terms of the theoretical frameworks of queer and intersectional theory, this is both reiterative and constitutive in the employment of the paradigm (Butler, 1990, p. 151). Using discursive theoretical analysis provides a framework within which queer and intersectional theory are able to challenge the discursive practices which maintain, construct, legitimise, resist and suspend the meaning of vulnerability (Shepherd, 2008, p. 21). Furthermore, it is possible to use discourse theoretical analysis as a hermeneutic device to conceptualise the EU’s construction of vulnerability as strategic action, juxtaposed with UNHCR’s AGD approach as communicative action (Ceva & Fracasso, 2010, pp. 469,468). Whilst a broad set of analytical tools are available, discourse-theoretical analysis offers an opportunity to bring the complex and interlocking plurality of international policy, law and gendered theories within the same frame; methodologically performative of the theoretical framework that it purports to demonstrate. With its leanings towards post-structuralism (Carpentier, 2017, p. 375) discourse-theoretical analysis lends itself to theoretical frameworks which deconstruct, contradict and challenge a normative order. A methodological synthesis of seeking congruences at nodal points in a social fabric and rebutting reified boundaries, resisting, challenging and suspending meanings which create those nodal points and boundaries, is exemplary of the narrative and discursive approach that this inquiry will develop as a typology. In order to reassemble the boundaries within a space, it is necessary and even preferable to deconstruct the axes which form the interstices where they can be rebuilt. In interpreting the AGD approach and the EU’s legislative conception of vulnerability, through queer and intersectional lenses and using discourse-theoretical analysis to conceptualise the material, this research will be able to perceive the social hegemony that is constituted in and by discourse (Jacobs, 2018, p. 296). The EU’s legislative framework establishes essentialised notions and reifies a hegemonic and conflictual normative social order (Wullweber, 2019, p. 148); similarly, the AGD approach establishes nodal points where meanings become fixed and create moments in a self-constituting and reiterative (Butler, 1990, p. 151) scripted framework
(Shepherd, 2008, p. 28). Where one’s hegemonic scripting is pursuant to the particular goal of legislative fixing, in order to bestow specific groups of individuals with status for the purposes of the EU law (European Parliament and of the Council, 2013, p. Article 21); the other creates hegemony by regular dispersions or nodal points which become continuous iterations (Jacobs, 2018, p. 298) across the fabric of discourse on the subject of vulnerability (Shepherd, 2008, p. 24). Discourse theoretical analysis provides a specialised lexicon which can be used to bring gender, international policy and supra-national legislation into the same frame of reference for the practitioner (Jacobs, 2018, p. 298) and establishes a schema of analysis where seemingly disparate materials can be systematically approached to identify points of synthesis and learning to inform practice. This research will enable the operationalisation of queer and intersectional theory using discourse theoretical analysis as a vector. Challenging and contending the nature of the nodal points, deconstructing and contesting the truths that fix meaning across the discursive fabric (Shepherd, 2008, p. 33), will allow space for discursive analysis and to conceptualise the boundaries of individual vulnerabilities which affect interaction across the social plain. Discourse theoretical analysis, as a method of ontological investigation, appears to match both the theoretical approach and the subject matter under investigation; this allows the inquiry to be theoretically and methodologically robust, whilst maintaining its disruptive and categorically resistant credentials, and permitting interdisciplinarity and trans-boundary conceptualisations. By conceptualising discourse theoretical analysis as post structural (Shepherd, 2008, p. 20), or something at least close to it (Carpentier, 2017, p. 375), this research benefits by being able to determine its methodological and theoretical approaches symbiotically, and adopt an approach that seeks to adhere to a notion of academic allyship (Calafell, 2018, p. 39) and the emancipatory base of intersectionality (Henry, 2017, p. 186). That is, using approaches which are foundationally similar, and within the same academic tradition, allows this research to not only disrupt and challenge the subject of this inquiry, but dynamically interpret the methods and theories in play in order to be reiteratively performative of them. This is not to say that this inquiry will not be methodologically robust, but, that considering the above, it would appear that best way for this research to proceed given the theories and methods in play is to do so in a radically disruptive way; concretising queer and intersectional approaches as allies,
