Diplomacy in drag and queer IR art: Reflections on the performance, ‘Sipping Toffee with Hamas in Brussels’

Abstract

This article presents drag performance as a queer method of critique in the field of IR, which contributes to a longstanding move in IR to engage with aesthetics, and a more recent move to engage with performance art. The article discusses the author’s making of a performance piece that revisited the EU’s response to Hamas’s success in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Soft, camp, feminine, and childlike voices; a female body in men’s clothing; and the translocation of bodies in spaces are used in the performance piece to disrupt the coherency of normalised diplomacy. Queer IR theory emphasises the imperative to dismantle logics of normality that prevent creativity in response to political issues. Performative drag practices disrupt anxious attachments to a ritualised discourse of strategic interests that shapes political initiatives. This article comments on other drag moments in politics, such as the anxiety around Jeremy Corbyn’s dress, Barack Obama’s anger translator, and Janelle Monáe’s androgynous articulation of community. The form that research dissemination takes implicates the kind of knowledge that is produced. This article reviews three methodological provocations of drag, an alternative departure point of the ‘what if’, performing a politics of refusal, and a Brechtian technique of estrangement.

Knowing Through Needlework: curating the difficult knowledge of conflict textiles

“…Aradau 2010;Bleiker 2015Bleiker , 2018Hutchinson 2016). Specifically, art (Danchev 2009), comics (Redwood and Wedderburn 2019), film (Shapiro 2009), performance (Charrett 2019), memoirs (Dyvik 2016a), and music (Hast 2016) have all been employed to reflect on and rethink ways of knowing war and militarized violence. These approaches explore the ways in which political violences are felt, sensed and embodied through locating their multiple 'entanglements' (Dyvik 2016b, 63).…”