Hauptinhalt

Sex, Nation, Other: Queering the Boundaries of Nationalist Politics

Ringvorlesung 2026: Anti/Feminism & Nationalism

Veranstaltungsdaten

Abstract

Nationalism has long been understood as a masculine enterprise — but whose masculinity, deployed how, and against whom? This lecture queers the nationalist imaginary by tracing how sexuality and desire are not merely by-products of nationalist politics but constitutive technologies of national boundary-making. At the ethno-sexual frontier, the charged and policed borderland where ethnicity and sexuality intersect, sexual desire is racialised and racialisation is sexualised, producing national subjects whose intimate lives are shaped by the imperatives of belonging. Homophobia, understood not as individual prejudice but as a political technology of Othering, plays a central role in this process — used to exclude internal dissidents, demasculinise external enemies, and position other nations as backward or barbaric. Crucially, this logic does not disappear when nations embrace sexual tolerance; homonationalism deploys the same masculine technologies of Othering, simply relocating homophobia onto the racialised Other rather than eliminating it. These dynamics are not merely discursive. In the intimate spaces where nationalism governs desire, where class, ethnicity, and sexuality converge in the bodies of men navigating a homophobic and nationalist order, the costs of the nation's sexual scripts are viscerally real. Scaling up to the international arena, sexual norms become instruments of geopolitical ordering, as states deploy the politics of sex to claim civilisational superiority, discipline populations, and reproduce global hierarchies. Nationalism, this lecture argues, is always already a sexual politics, and queering it reveals not just who is excluded from the nation, but how that exclusion structures the international order itself.

 Bio

Koen Slootmaeckers is Reader in International Politics at City St George's, University of London, where he is also Associate Dean for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. His research sits at the intersection of queer theory, political sociology, and EU politics, with a particular focus on the Western Balkans. He is the author of Coming In: Sexual Politics and EU Accession in Serbia (Manchester University Press, 2023), winner of the 2025 EUSA Best Book Award, and co-editor of EU Enlargement and Gay Politics (Palgrave, 2016). His theoretical work develops frameworks including nationalism as competing masculinities, progress as a technology of power, and relational Europeanisation to interrogate how the politics of sexuality reproduce and contest geopolitical hierarchies.