The International Politics of Sex: Bodies, Images, and Russian State Homophobia

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.