International Politics of Sex
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Product details
- ISBN 9780197792506
- Weight: 621g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 03 Feb 2026
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Integrating queer theory into visual international relations scholarship, The International Politics of Sex examines the ways in which sex, sexual shame, and stigma play into international power games. Using Russian state homophobia and the international response as a case study, Dean Cooper-Cunningham illustrates the dynamics through which sex comes to matter geopolitically: namely, through moralising policies that carve out international hierarchies. In recent decades, Russia has consistently constructed Europe and the West as "Gayropa" in its foreign policy discourse, arguing that this Gayropean space and its values threaten Russian national security and cultural sovereignty. Indeed, Putin's speeches have legitimised the war in Ukraine as a mission to save the country from decadent Europeanisation. To understand this, Cooper-Cunningham introduces the concept of heteronormative internationalism.
To contest Russia's heteronormative geopolitical project, non-state actors have used words, images, and bodies to depict queerness as a part of everyday life, as Cooper-Cunningham demonstrates through an analysis of news media coverage, memes, and body-based activism in Russia. By elucidating the ways sex becomes entangled with international politics, this book shows that strategies using images and bodies must be taken seriously as avenues through which geopolitical projects are resisted by non-state actors.
Dean Cooper-Cunningham is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on gender, sexuality, visual politics, and international security. He is particularly interested in how global political actors strategically mobilise pro- or anti-queer agendas in domestic and foreign policy. Some of his more recent work focuses on atrocity prevention. Dean was part of a pioneering project with Jess Gifkins and the NGO Protection Approaches, which focused on integrating queer experiences and perspectives into atrocity prevention frameworks in order to better prevent mass atrocity and violence.
