Introduction
In 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court designated the ‘international LGBT movement’ as extremist, marking a new stage in the country’s geopolitical campaign to frame non-normativeFootnote 1 sexuality as a threat to national security and cultural sovereignty. Since 2025, the government of the USA has designated DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), so-called gender ideology, wokeness, and particularly trans people as threats to national security, US American culture, and the country’s military strength. Similar anti-queerFootnote 2 narratives appear across Europe (e.g., Hungary, Italy, UK), Africa (e.g., Ghana, Uganda, and in the African Union), Asia (e.g., China, Indonesia), and the Americas (e.g., Argentina, Paraguay), where queer people are targeted both domestically and as part of foreign policy projects. In this article, using Russia and the USA as illustrative cases whose lessons can be translatedFootnote 3 elsewhere, I argue that these are not isolated phenomena but part of an attempt at international ordering using sexual stigma. A focus on the ordering project of sexual stigma informs how we understand international politics, not just in the contemporary geopolitical moment where gender and sexuality have become hyper-politicised issues but also historically.
To make this argument, I draw on scholarship about shame and stigma by queer theorists and connect this to work on stigma and civilisationism by International Relations (IR) scholars. Connecting these literatures, which have hitherto largely talked past each other, enables a theorisation of international politics that accounts for the structuring role of sexual shame and stigma. Stigma and shame underpin moralising political projects. This can apply in several directions: shaming/stigmatising states’ homophobic policies (as many Western actors have done to Russia and various African states) or shaming/stigmatising states’ homophilicFootnote 4 policies (as Russia and several African states [e.g., Uganda and Ghana] have done to European and Western states). When these stigmatising projects meet, this is a stigmatic encounter, which I conceptualise as moments where competing normativities clash, producing hierarchical orderings of states and peoples through the mutual attribution of shame and taint.
Introducing sexual stigma and shame as a conceptual vocabulary for IR enables a clearer grasp of the geopoliticalFootnote 5 and ordering dimensions of homophobia/homophilia as well as how they function. As I argue below, homophobia and homophilia require some form of stigma, shame, and moralising discourses about what is appropriate or normal sexual behaviour/desire to do the work of securing, reproducing, and enforcing heterosexuality or particular forms of queerness as norm(al). In so doing, this article yet again demonstrates how sexuality, which, whilst situated in and governed by broader social institutions, is generally experienced individually at the level of the body, connects to international order, albeit highlighting a different ordering grammar through which this happens.
I argue that sexual shame and stigma are ordering across scales from the inter-personal to the inter-national. To be clear, I do not treat these scales as fixed and a priori analytical levels but as intertwined, co-constitutive, and performatively produced. Here, they are methodological and heuristic. My move in mobilising these scales is to extend queer theorists’ arguments about stigma and shame operating on the body and the individual to international order, where they sustain and (re)produce hierarchies and geopolitical discourses. That is to say, shame and stigma are ordering practices that link the intimate (micro), the state (meso), and the international (macro).Footnote 6 Given the current geopolitical moment, where discourses about ‘normal’ gender/sexuality, ‘gender ideology’, and ‘anti-woke’ agendas are prevalent globally, queer theorising about shame and stigma offers a way to understand not only identity construction but also status hierarchies and changing international orders. My main contribution therefore lies in addressing the question of how international order is constituted and cultivated through moralising (shaming, stigmatising) politics about ‘abnormal’, ‘immoral’, ‘dangerous’ gender and sexuality.
The article is structured as follows. First, and in broad strokes, I outline the current international context around non-normative sex, sexuality, and gender. Second, I turn to queer theorising both within and outwith IR. Third, I introduce sexual shame and stigma. Fourth, I demonstrate how inter-state relations take place through stigmatic encounters around sex, sexuality, and gender. This speaks particularly to debates in IR about the character of the international and how power is negotiated or sought between the various actors populating this ‘international’ space. Throughout, I draw on Russia as an illustrative case to demonstrate the utility of an analytical framework that is attentive to the politics of sexual shame and stigma. In the last part of the article, I turn to the USA to analyse how an established order where homophobia is stigmatised undergoes a fundamental shift – a stigma realignment – with implications for how the emergent international looks and, more importantly, the queer people whose bodies are the endpoints of foreign policy.Footnote 7
International context
In the current moment, there is a significant debate about ‘normal’ (sometimes called ‘traditional’, ‘moral’, ‘natural’, or the like) sexuality and gender taking place globally. Phillip Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl argue that this is characterised by a diverse, plural opposition engaged in ‘moral conservative advocacy’ and responding to pro-LGBT rights movements.Footnote 8 Judith Butler argues this is a fascist, restorative, and nostalgic ideological project that is focused on restoring a ‘patriarchal dream-order’ that ‘never quite existed in the form they seek to actualize in the present’.Footnote 9 Jess Gifkins and I conceptualise this as a strategically utilised transnational moral panic with various context-specific elements.Footnote 10 Emil Edenborg suggests that ‘resistance to LGBTI rights’ has become the ‘logical choice for states seeking to position themselves in opposition to the “liberal West”’.Footnote 11 And, building on Edenborg, Malte Breiding uses agonistic political theory to argue that ‘anti-queer politics is not just the weaponisation of anti-LGBT sentiment (strategic politicised homophobia)’ as many, myself included, have suggested, but that ‘the pro-LGBT consensuses partially make possible and condition the shape anti-LGBT dissensus and contestation might take’.Footnote 12 Just as Foucault argued that the explosion of discourse around sexuality in the 19th century created ‘deviant’ sexualities and the solutions for ‘fixing’ them, Breiding argues that pro-LGBT discourse has created the very frames and conditions of anti-queer discourse today.Footnote 13
Regardless of how these projects are conceptualised, they appear globally. In Uganda, with newly instituted anti-homosexuality legislation.Footnote 14 In the UK, where anti-trans politics has grown exponentially, often citing the ‘protection’ of women, and the Supreme Court made a ruling on how ‘sex’ should be interpreted as ‘biological sex’ in order to ‘protect’ those who were sexed female at birth under existing equalities legislation.Footnote 15 In Hungary, where a Russian-style ‘gay propaganda’ law has been passed alongside constitutional amendments banning public events that portray ‘divergence from self-identity corresponding to sex at birth, sex change or homosexuality’.Footnote 16 In Afghanistan, where the situation for queer people, who are subject to physical violence, widespread discrimination, familial and societal stigmatisation, and sexual violence, has become ever more fraught since the Taliban takeover.Footnote 17 In the USA, where Donald Trump’s administration, following the roadmap outlined in the Project 2025 document that is purportedly guiding his presidency, has launched a war on ‘woke’, on knowledge that does not fit his agenda, and on the ‘tyranny’ of DEI programmes at home and abroad.Footnote 18 In China, where groups established to support the LGBT+ community face state-directed targeting and censorship, and there has been a push to promote the idea that queerness is curable and a foreign import.Footnote 19 This list is but a drop in the ocean of the growing swathes of anti-queer politics globally. One need only look at the speaker lists and speech content of transnational right-wing conferences such as CPAC and NatCon, spaces where conservative ideologues congregate and develop a transnational nationalist agenda, to see that those invested in nurturing pro-tradition, anti-woke discourses come from all over.Footnote 20 The political projects nurtured in those conference spaces in particular are organised around transnational affinities rather than national ones. They affect and are affected by the current and shifting rules and norms of the international, as well as creating new moralistic fibres that are challenging existing international order and structuring emergent orders.
Russia
Perhaps most prominent, at least until recently, is Vladimir Putin’s near 15-year-long project institutionalising the reinvigoration and defence of ‘traditional family values’ as a core feature of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy.Footnote 21 Domestically, this has manifested in several legislative changes including a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, the introduction of a so-called ‘gay propaganda law’ prohibiting the depiction of non-heteronormativeFootnote 22 ways of life in all public information, and a Supreme Court classification of the ‘international LGBT movement’ as ‘extremist’. In terms of foreign policy, Putin has consistently represented ‘Western’ homosexuality as threatening Russian national security and cultural sovereignty.Footnote 23
He has also consistently advocated for exporting traditional family values outside Russia as part of a geopolitical project to save Europe from the sexually decadent abyss that it has apparently sunk into.Footnote 24 Here, Russia is constituted as Europe’s saviour and a defender of its supposed status as the world’s fount of civilisation. All of this is clear from Russia’s 2015 and 2021 National Security Strategies, its 2023 foreign policy priorities document in which traditional (religious, family) values and national security are discursively intertwined, and from Putin’s various speeches about the war in Ukraine where gender and sexuality as well as traditional values are repeatedly mentioned.
One of the many shades making up Russia’s current geopolitical project to reconfigure international order and undermine the existing rules-based order is this sexually normative and moralistic politics, signalling the significant role that ideas about sexuality play in shaping national identity, security policy, and international relations.Footnote 25 This sexually normative geopolitics – Russia’s project of state homophobia and stated desire to de-queer Europe – initially met considerable resistance internationally, particularly from those defending the liberal values around which international order was formed in the post-Cold War era. That resistance manifested in condemnation from state leaders, masses of opinion pieces and editorials, protests and demonstrations, as well as digital activism.Footnote 26
Today, however, that resistance has turned into admiration from other world leaders and broad-church conservative social and political movements. This includes the USA’s Donald Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who have both vocalised their desire to destroy the so-called ‘woke’ and ‘immoral’ sexual and gender order to restore ‘common sense’ and ‘greatness’ to the West. A variety of actors – from Putin to Trump, the Vatican to CitizenGo, and tech moguls like Elon Musk – frequently portray non-heteronormative sexuality, non-binary gender, trans-ness, and ‘woke ideology’ as threats to national security, cultural sovereignty, and traditional values.Footnote 27 Whilst these moralising projects manifest differently today, they are not a new phenomenon. European colonialism was replete with ideas about exporting European sexual and gender norms to Asia and Africa as part of so-called civilising missionsFootnote 28; Margaret Thatcher stoked a moral panic in Britain when Section 28, which prohibited local government from ‘promoting’ homosexuality, was introduced; and queer people, as part of a moral panic in the USA during the period of McCarthyism, were constituted as national security threats, communist sympathisers, and purged from local government and federal employment during what has been called the Lavender Scare.
All this is to say that non-normative sex has, historically and contemporaneously, been frequently constituted as dangerous by state and civil society actors with power to influence government.Footnote 29 In the current crisis of liberal international order, a hallmark of which has been the expansion and diffusion of human rights globally, the targeting of suspected/assumedFootnote 30 queer people and policing ‘appropriate’ sexuality/gender are clearly important for some states. This has started to inform civilisationist, moralising foreign policy agendas and geopolitical projects. Queerness is not an a priori threat. It is made to matter for the state.
Sex that deviates from normative scripts, or in many cases simply the idea or possibility of it, is part of international relations and its politicisation requires attention, not just empirically but theoretically. Scholars of Queer IR have argued this for some time. My contribution to this literature is to demonstrate how sexual shame and stigma, often theorised at the level of the interpersonal, scale up to international politics and can help us understand how states (e.g., Hungary, Poland, Russia, Uganda, USA, UK) and civil society actors (e.g., CPAC, CitizenGo, the International Organization of the Family, NatCon, Russian Orthodox Church) cultivate (moral) international hierarchies through shaming/stigmatising discourses about non-normative gender and sex.
Queer international relations
Writing about the relationship between Feminist and Queer IR, which are heterogeneous and diverse subfields in their own right, Darcy Leigh argues that ‘Queer IR may not exist without Feminist IR and is in part a product of Feminist IR.’Footnote 31 In Feminist IR, Cynthia Enloe famously asked ‘where are the women?’ and argued that the personal is political and international.Footnote 32 In doing so, she inspired many to bring in gender, the body, the personal, and the everyday to the study of international politics, as well as encouraging them to reimagine who and what count as conventional subjects and objects of study in IR. Since then, feminist work has largely focused on the ‘workings of power, gender and (some forms of) sexuality’.Footnote 33 Queer IR scholars have built on this, asking what Rahul RaoFootnote 34 calls queer questions: How does sex come into and structure international politics? How does the constitution of something or someone as queer interact with other marginalisations and oppressive discourses to produce/sustain power structures?
Whilst queer and feminist research have overlaps, it is a focus on the politics of sex, regimes of normalisation, and sexually normative sociality (e.g., heteronormativity, homonormativity) that distinguishes queer from feminist work.Footnote 35 The politics of sex, usually studied as LGBT+ rights and norms or as discourses about deviant/appropriate sexual behaviours and desires, is crucial to how we understand many of the fundamental issues and events that IR scholars are concerned with- both historical and contemporary. Queer scholars, within and outwith IR, have shown how ideas about in/appropriate sexuality and gender were/are intertwined with: colonialismFootnote 36; warFootnote 37; mass atrocityFootnote 38; terrorismFootnote 39; global healthFootnote 40; sovereigntyFootnote 41; securityFootnote 42; human rightsFootnote 43; homophobiaFootnote 44; foreign policyFootnote 45; nationalismFootnote 46; state formationFootnote 47; norm diffusionFootnote 48; regional integrationFootnote 49; geopoliticsFootnote 50; and peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention.Footnote 51
In this article, I build principally on Queer IR scholarship that has sought to understand international politics by adopting a similar strategy to poststructuralist and postcolonial IR feminisms: namely, demonstrating how IR’s key concepts (e.g., security, states, sovereignty, order) not only follow gendered and racialised but also sexualised logics. Such work has, for instance, shown how national identity and security politics are not only gendered in the sense that they are tied to ideas about masculinities and femininitiesFootnote 52 but also sexualised in the sense that they are embedded in questions about appropriate desire and sexual practices, including heteronormativities and homonormativities. This type of work adopts similar philosophical commitments to poststructuralists and feminists about the performativity of gender and subjectivity, and problematises the dichotomous constitutions of gender (masculine/feminine) and the power this binary holds. However, it shifts attention towards sexualities and how a homosexual/heterosexual (as deviant/normal) dichotomy functions in international politics, from disciplining people’s behaviours to stoking international rivalries and alliances.
I also build on the extensive Queer IR scholarship that has empirically focused on queer people’s human rights and norm diffusion/contestation, which has variously examined how queer activism and LGBT+ rights agendas go global, whether queer issues are on the agenda of international organisations, and which specific types of queer subjects are allowed to come into view and claim rights.Footnote 53 Particularly important in this regard is research on international conflicts around LGBT+ rights,Footnote 54 the use of LGBT+ protections as a geopolitical and civilisational tool (e.g., by the EU),Footnote 55 and work showing how norms around sexual and gender minorities diffuse and evolve over time.Footnote 56
To be clear about my mobilisation of queer theory: despite longstanding debates about whether queer theory should be organised around particular subject positions and limited to theorising sexuality,Footnote 57 I hold that sex and sexuality as well as gender are the fundamental foci in and the analytical engine of queer analysis in IR.Footnote 58 My intervention below emphasises how sexual stigma and shame function as structural mechanisms of normative enforcement in international politics. Sexual shame and stigma are central tools of disciplinary and geopolitical governance, positioning sexual and gender normativity as core parts of contemporary international hierarchy negotiation and geopolitical projects. Before getting to this, however, it is important to outline existing tools that we have for understanding how sex enters international politics.
Strategic mobilisations of sexuality in international politics
In Queer IR, many focus on how sex and sexuality intersect with other forms of marginalisation as well as on strategic homophobia and/or homophilia as a state practice. Scholars have shown how states frequently constitute themselves as queer-friendly or anti-queer in a variety of ways that often serve strategic purposes that bolster their (moral) position in the international hierarchy. For example, many Western states, particularly the USA and UK, have, until recently, strategically positioned themselves as defenders of LGBT+ people and rights at home and internationally in ways that give discursive legitimacy to neocolonial and civilisationist foreign policy projects.Footnote 59 Often this happens whilst they pursue policies that are homophobic and transphobic, such as demanding that asylum seekers prove their LGBT-nessFootnote 60 or promoting laws that prevent or make it extremely difficult for trans people to obtain legal gender recognition.Footnote 61 Queer IR scholars focusing on such phenomena have introduced various concepts for understanding foreign policies, international order, and status seeking/management into IR’s analytical toolbox. I outline these below.
Politicised homophobia
Politicised homophobia refers to the mobilisation of homophobia in service of some political end. Exactly which political objectives are not specified ex ante, and, as such, it is best to think of politicised homophobia as a modular phenomenonFootnote 62 or scavenger ideologyFootnote 63 that can be attached to almost any political project of vilification, making it particularly strategically useful. Dan Healey argues that ‘[t]he political trigger for most modern political homophobia campaigns is an economic or national security crisis’ where ‘[a]t stake is usually a contest over national identity construction, in which the nation is said to be under threat from an external, often Western (and previously colonial), ideology of gender and sexual difference’.Footnote 64 Applied to Russia, Healey demonstrates that politicised homophobia under Putin was mobilised in the face of dire economic crisis (post-2008), political challenges to rigged elections, corrupt institutions, and state-controlled media with a view to creating a ‘Gayropean’ bogeyman, uniting the country against a common enemy, and consolidating nationalist sentiment.Footnote 65
Whilst social, economic, and political crises create fertile conditions for politicised homophobia, Ashley Currier, as well as M.J. Bosia and Meredith Weiss, argue that politicised homophobia has no innate qualities, meaning it defies a strict typology for detection or prevention.Footnote 66 That said, politicised homophobia often accompanies or precedes other forms of identity-based grievance discourses and (mass) violence.Footnote 67 For example, as politicised homophobia and transphobia have grown across the Euro-Atlantic, so too have misogynistic and anti-feminist agendas that challenge hard-won reproductive rights and women’s equality policies.Footnote 68 Politicised homophobia can be used to bolster ‘moral and political authority, to weaken political opponents, to buttress narratives of national sovereignty, and/or to deflect from sociopolitical controversies’.Footnote 69 It is, therefore, an instrument of power, used purposively to gain or maintain authority, deployed across a range of political ends from electoral mobilisation to the anchoring of foreign policy projects.Footnote 70 Importantly, practices of politicised homophobia do not preclude simultaneous politicised homophilia.
Whilst the concepts of state or state-sponsored homophobia are analytically useful, politicised homophobia has the benefit of capturing more than state actors: religious leaders, civil society organisations, and social movements also use politicised homophobia strategically. As a concept, then, politicised homophobia is useful for ‘its ability to illuminate how political elites attach negative meanings to same-sex sexualities … [and] imbue this discourse with a policing function’.Footnote 71 Ashley Currier suggests politicised over political because it makes clear that homophobic discourses must be activated and that their use is always context-specific, rather than being a fixed and unchanging political discourse.
What scholarship on politicised homophobia tends not to elaborate on is how homophobia has the power to socially and politically order. (Politicised) Homophobia demands stigma, shame, and moralising discourses about what is appropriate or normal sexual behaviour or desire in order to be able to do the work of securing, reproducing, and enforcing heterosexuality-as-norm(al).Footnote 72
Politicised homophilia
Where politicised homophobia is the strategic mobilisation of homophobia for some political end, politicised homophilia is the strategic mobilisation of queer-friendliness to serve a political project. It follows a similar conceptualisation as laid out above for politicised homophobia with the exception of crisis as occasion for invocation: it is modular and can be attached to almost any political project (including those vilifying ex ante specified Others); it has no innate qualities and defies strict typology; it can accompany or precede other identity-based grievance discourses and violence (e.g., Islamophobia); it is an instrument of power deployed across a range of political ends; it does not preclude simultaneous politicised homophobia; and it captures more than just state actors, including religious leaders, civil society organisations, and social movements. Under the politicised homophilia umbrella, there are more specific concepts, including homonationalism, pinkwashing, homocolonialism, and homocapitalism.
Jasbir Puar introduced homonationalism to capture changes in how ‘queer subjects relate to nation-states’.Footnote 73 Introducing the concept to understand US politics post-9/11, Puar argued that certain gay and lesbian subjects were incorporated into nationalist projects where LGBT+ tolerance became a marker of civilisational superiority, and queer-friendliness was used to legitimise violence against Other populations. Homonationalism thus describes how hierarchical ideas of ‘progressive’, ‘tolerant’, and ‘gay friendly’ were being mobilised to demarcate ‘civilised’ states against ‘backwards’, ‘intolerant’, and ‘uncivilised’ homophobic Others, with queer-friendliness serving simultaneously to legitimise violence against stigmatised populations.Footnote 74 Naming one particular practice of homonationalism, Sarah Schulman popularised the concept of pinkwashing, defining it as ‘a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life’.Footnote 75 Pinkwashing thus names the co-opting of certain queer subjects to serve political ends, most commonly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim agendas.
For Momin Rahman, homocolonialism names practices of Western statecraft whereby the dichotomy between homophilic and homophobic societies orders the international.Footnote 76 Focusing specifically on ‘the opposition between Muslim cultures and LGBTIQ politics’, Rahman argues that ‘the extant evidence of Muslim homophobia becomes a key part of the discourse of a uniform Islamic homophobia and this ideological positioning dialectically places queer politics on the side of modernity’.Footnote 77 This produces a colonial logic whereby non-Western states and cultures are positioned as inherently ‘pre-modern’ or ‘backwards’ by virtue of their (perceived or actual) homophobia, and Western intervention – be it diplomatic, cultural, military – is legitimised as a civilising or modernising project. Homocolonialism thus names the mechanism by which sexual diversity is implicated in imperial and colonial power relations, casting the West as the universal standard of sexual modernity against which Others are found lacking. Homophilia is, therefore, a marker of modernity: ‘sexual diversity – as the “shell” for Western exceptionalism – is deployed in the space of international/internal relations and operates dialectically and definitionally towards the “traditional” space of the East but also towards the originating space of the West’.Footnote 78
For Rahul Rao, the ‘political economy logic’ of homocapitalism supplements ‘the civilisationist logic of homonationalism’.Footnote 79 Homocapitalism names the process by which LGBT+ rights become incorporated into capitalist and development frameworks. It describes the political and ordering power of ‘the prospect of a rosy future redolent with growth and productivity should a state embrace LGBT rights’ and ‘names a strategy of persuasion operative in a moment in which the postcolonial nation has not “yet” or has only ambivalently accepted the case for queer inclusion in the face of the overwhelming pressure of a modernity represented by the homonationalist hegemon’.Footnote 80 Homocapitalism thus captures how LGBT+ friendliness gets tied to powerful ideas about economic modernisation and market liberalisation, often deployed by international financial institutions in interactions with non-Western states.
What unites all of these so-called ‘homo-isms’Footnote 81 is their focus on how queer-friendliness is used politically to carve out hierarchies and to legitimise certain policies, often drawing on civilisational arguments about superiority and backwardness. Whilst not always explicitly articulated in work about politicised homophobia and homophilia, shame and stigma are always lurking in the background as the mechanisms through which homophobia and homophilia are able to discipline, order, and hierarchise social and political life. There is an element of shaming/stigmatising states for having homophobic policies – as illustrated by Western states’ ‘[f]inger-pointing at neighboring countries’ “homophobia”, and chauvinistic boasting about eradicating it at home’, which Healey calls a homonationalist ‘form of chest-thumping self-congratulation that is less concerned with extending LGBT rights and much more to do with stoking international rivalries’.Footnote 82 And there is an element of shaming/stigmatising states for having homophilic policies – as illustrated by Russia and several African states’ invocation of ‘the specter of a dangerous LGBT minority said to be in the grips of Western or colonial influence’.Footnote 83
The politics of sex: shame, stigma, and moralising discourses
How, then, do politicised homophilia and homophobia gain currency internationally? As shown above, there is a well-established literature showing what politicised homophobia and politicised homophilia do in terms of political ordering and Othering. However, how they work and why they are so powerful ordering forces in international politics are under-theorised. This is what I offer below.
Explaining how moralising discourses about sexual practice and desire operate in society, Michael Warner wrote that ‘[s]ex has a politics of its own. Hierarchies of sex sometimes serve no real purpose except to prevent sexual variance. They create victimless crimes, imaginary threats, and moralities of cruelty’.Footnote 84 Building on Gayle Rubin and Erving Goffman, he argued that hierarchies, threats, and moral orders are created and policed through shame and stigma: ‘The stigma that we call homophobia…can descend on people for a lot of different reasons, and many of them are not exactly the same as being gay or homosexual’.Footnote 85 In this sense, heteronormativity works through shame and stigma by building and policing the boundaries of ‘normal’ sex and eros as heterosexual, reproductive, monogamous, and confined to the private sphere, casting everything outside these boundaries as deviant, dangerous, or inferior. The invention of the figure of the homosexual was also the invention of an identity marked by abnormality and worthy of stigma, the bearers of which were to internalise and feel shame for their difference.Footnote 86 Similarly, we can think of homonormativity as building and policing the boundaries of acceptable queerness and homonationalism/homocolonialism/homocapitalism as building and policing the boundaries of acceptable, civilised state behaviours in the international system.
For Goffman, who was not explicitly writing about sex/sexuality but does variously reference homosexuality, shame is phenomenological: it is one’s self-perception, experience, and feeling of one’s abnormality – the blemish(es), pollution(s), and negatively constituted attribute(s) one embodies when measured against ‘the normals’.Footnote 87 For Warner, shame is something targeted at specific acts, something that classifies specific practices as abhorrent, beyond the pale, abnormal, unusual, uncouth. Shame, therefore, has a dual quality of being a classification and something intersubjective in the sense that an actor can be expected to feel ashamed from acting in a certain way that is constituted ‘abnormal’ and utterly Other. Yet, this expectation can go unmet: as I develop below, the ordering force of shaming does not necessarily depend on the attempted shamed party actually feeling ashamed, but on an audience affirming that a practice, behaviour, and/or policy is shameful and that the intended party of shaming ought to be ashamed even if they are not. Not feeling or not performing shame – perhaps by refusing to repent for one’s actions, for example – may cause, entrench, or accelerate stigmatisation.
Where shame is primarily about acts or behaviours, stigma attaches to subjects, constituting the individual (or the group) engaged in certain practices as somehow tainted, dangerous, in need of correction or elimination. Warner elaborates that ‘[o]rdinary shame … passes. One might do a perverse thing and bring scorn or loathing to oneself … This kind of shame affects one’s biographical identity. The shame of a true pervert – stigma – is less delible; it is a social identity that befalls one like fate … It attaches not to doing, but to being; not to conduct, but to status’.Footnote 88 Compared to shame, stigma is a durable and sticky mark on the body.
Although they are distinct concepts and phenomena, shame and stigma are intimately linked as part of a quartet of tools of moral enforcement and boundary (re)production: ‘naming signals (non)compliance with shared standards; blaming assigns responsibility for violations; shaming mobilizes moral emotions to enforce conformity; and stigmatization cements outsider status’.Footnote 89 Whilst ‘naming identifies a norm breach and blaming assigns responsibility, possibly followed by shaming to induce corrective action, stigmatization imposes a lasting identity shift’, which Elise Rousseau contends ‘eradicates the target’s claim to normative membership, setting the stage for permanent exclusion’.Footnote 90 A feeling or sense of (national) shame can emerge from stigmatisation.Footnote 91 Both Warner and Rousseau present stigma as near-permanent and fate-like, yet its durability is performatively constituted: that is, it is sustained by reiteration and subsides when reiteration stops. This means that both the content of shame and the targets of stigmatisation can shift such that what was once shameful can become normal and those once stigmatised can become destigmatised and even successful stigmatisers.
It is through processes of shaming and stigmatisation that Warner argues a moral economy underpins the politics of sex: there is no a priori or natural moral hierarchy of sexual desires and practices beyond that which is socially constituted, and those who advocate and advance a moralising politics around sexual desire and behaviour do so with violent ramifications. Shame and stigma can therefore be conceptualised as ‘political resources’ used to ‘silence or isolate others’ and ‘to restrict the sexual autonomy of others’ such that ‘if you are on the wrong side of the hierarchy you will be stigmatized in a way that could entail real damage’.Footnote 92 It is this hierarchical element, and the association of non-normative sex with immorality and decadence, that gives sex a politics. Yet, this hierarchy can cut another way: just as non-normative sex can be stigmatised as immoral and decadent, it can equally be valorised as a marker of tolerance, modernity, and civilisational progress. It is this positive valuation that gives politicised homophilia its own politics, operating through shame and stigma as well. For these reasons, Warner and other queer theorists have taken shame and stigma as the focus of their analyses, foregrounding how stigmatisation of certain groups and shaming of certain sexual practices or desires function as practices of control and hierarchisation: they order societies.Footnote 93
Shame and stigma in the international
We already have a well-established conceptual and theoretical apparatus in IR for thinking about stigma as part of international politics – specifically in the ordering of the international.Footnote 94 However, there has been relatively little development of this from a queer theoretic perspective. Bringing these literatures together can help explain how sexual and gender normativities structure international society and how, particularly today, they have become the basis of civilisationist geopolitical projects.Footnote 95 One such example, described above, is that of Russia, where a Western/EuropeanFootnote 96 civilisational Other has been constituted as a sexually decadent, national-security-and-cultural-sovereignty-threatening space labelled ‘Gayropa’.Footnote 97
Scholars working on stigma have argued that stigmatisation has a distinct and important role in constituting an ‘out-group’ in international society and that stigma can sometimes be positively and advantageously mobilised by those actors who are stigmatised or the target of attempted shaming.Footnote 98 I have argued elsewhere that ‘stigmatisation is always about discursively constituting conditions that bring about respect for particular beliefs, traditions, practices’.Footnote 99 And Frédéric Mégret argues that ‘stigma is both an expression of the inherent moral blameworthiness assigned to the perpetrators of certain heinous acts and a way of constituting the society that assigns this blameworthiness’.Footnote 100 If stigma delineates un/acceptable behaviours and, through this, constitutes Others who do not adhere to the established rules of the game, the established norms, then it is also productive and ontologically necessary for shaping Selves and Others in a hierarchical relationship. Those who are successfully stigmatised sit on a lower rung compared to the stigmatising actor, making sexual shaming/stigmatisation an excellent geopolitical resource.
Shame and stigma thus theorised are mechanisms of social control and sexual/gender norm enforcement that structure societies, regardless of the scale at which society-ness is formed and sustained.Footnote 101 They order relations between individuals within a group, relations between groups, and relations between groups of groups. We can, therefore, speak of the ordering function of sexual shame and stigma. To conceptualise sexual shame and stigma as key elements in the ordering of international society is to acknowledge that sexual shame and stigma operate across multiple levels of analysis, from the systemic, geopolitical, and state-based down to personal and individual-focused.
To theorise an international politics of sexual shame and stigma should not be understood as stabilising the state as international relations’ central actor (as in more classic, orthodox theories of IR) but as situating the individual and personal as always already implicated in the international (as in critical IR). This is especially clear when it comes to geopolitical projects that seek to govern and moralise about how people use their bodies. In Russia, there has been a clear and successful shaming of non-normative sexuality and gender as ‘abnormal’ that has progressed to a stigmatised identity. This has involved stigmatising: (a) the individuals who engage in non-normative sex or perform their gender in non-normative ways; and (b) the Western states that either actively defend those individuals’ right to exist or do not outright condemn them or subscribe wholesale to a ‘traditional’ values-based politics.
Stigmatic encounters: sexual stigma in Russian geopolitics
As outlined above, stigmatic encounters are the moments where competing normativities – in this case sexual normativities – collide in the international system, producing hierarchical orderings of states and peoples through the mutual attribution of shame and taint. They are not merely rhetorical strategies: they structure alliances, legitimise force, and shape the terms on which international order is contested. To see this, it is worth examining not just what Russia says about queerness but what its anti-queer discourse does: how it constitutes subjects, positions states, and generates the conditions for an alternative international order organised around sexual normativity rather than liberal human rights. This is most readily identifiable through politicised homophobia, outlined above.
Politicised homophobia involves the shaming of specific acts as somehow morally deplorable but also the stigmatisation of those individuals or collectives who engage in those practices. This often entails their securitisation as threatening. States have always regulated which forms of consensual sex and desire are permitted among their populations, setting boundaries around who can be legitimately desired. This regulatory effort is not limited to domestic affairs. In some instances – an increasingly common trend – certain sexual behaviours are framed as ‘immoral’, ‘unnatural’, or ‘non-traditional’ and used to shape foreign policy. These narratives have become central to a moral geopolitics grounded in the promotion of so-called traditional values and the defence of the family. Russia, as aforementioned, has consistently used politicised homophobia as part of its foreign policy since 2012, engaging in an internationalist political project partly legitimised by defending ‘traditional values’ and the ‘natural’ heteronormative order at home and abroad.
Russia’s anti-queer geopolitical project is most legible in the alignment of its domestic legislation and its international ambitions. The constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, the ‘gay propaganda’ law, and the Supreme Court’s designation of the ‘international LGBT movement’ as extremist are not simply domestic policy instruments. They are, simultaneously, declarative acts in an international stigmatic encounter: they position Russia as a state that is purging itself of sexual deviance and is now offering that model to others. The shame directed at non-normative individuals within Russia is the domestic face of a shaming and attempted stigmatisation of the West that is simultaneously directed outward at those Western/Gayropean states that permit, protect, and, in Russia’s framing, export queerness. Shame attaches to acts; stigma attaches to actors. In Russia’s sexual geopolitics, non-normative sex is shamed as deviant behaviour, and the states that sanction it are targeted for stigmatisation as morally compromised, culturally decadent, and, crucially, as security threats.
Illustrating the long-enduring connection between sexuality and Russian national identity-building, Laurie Essig writes:
In the same way that sexuality employs a language of gender, it also speaks in the idiom of nation … Nationness is not only different among nations, but it also performs differently within a nation. ‘Being’ Russian, like ‘being’ a man, depends not only upon geographical and cultural boundaries, but lines of class, gender, ethnicity, education, and of course, sexuality.Footnote 102
If being Russian is constituted partly through heterosexuality, then queerness is not simply undesirable: it is ontologically threatening to Russianness itself. The stigmatisation of queer individuals is therefore simultaneously a nation-building practice and a foreign policy resource: to be queer is to be un-Russian, and to be un-Russian is, in Putin’s framing, to be Western. The individual body that deviates from sexual norms becomes the site at which the international is reproduced. This is what I mean when I say shame and stigma operate across scales. Shame operates on the body; stigma attaches to the identity; and that stigmatised identity is then mapped onto geography – onto Europe/‘Gayropa’ – such that the international hierarchy is structured around the same normative grammar that disciplines individuals.
There is thus a clear connection between (reproductive) heterosexuality and nationalism.Footnote 103 This also has an externally facing component and extends quite explicitly into Russia’s foreign policy today. In such policies there is a process of shaming the practices of individuals/groups engaged in non-normative sexual desire and behaviour as well as a simultaneous stigmatisation of those states protecting, supporting, harbouring, or enabling those individuals/groups. By discursively constituting the West as a space of sexual decadence, Russian geopolitics carves the world up into spaces of (sexual and gender) morality and immorality, thereby attempting to generate a hierarchical ordering of international society that, whilst not entirely, but at least in part, involves an element of sexual shame and stigmatisation.
Whilst the connection to politicised homophobia is clear and obvious, politicised homophilia enters the picture in a different way. Until recently, European and North American states had consistently tried to position themselves as norm entrepreneurs and defenders of LGBT+ rights globally.Footnote 104 In the opposite fashion to Russia’s stigmatisation of the West’s enabling and sanctioning of queerness, European and North American states had consistently condemned Russia’s policies towards its queer populations, stigmatising Russia for its resistance to international human rights norms. I understand this as a stigmatic encounter in which several parties are engaged in attempts at stigmatisation of the other for their treatment and moralising politics around non-normative sexualities in a manner that constructs a hierarchical international society structured partly around non-normative sex, sexuality, and gender.
Here, Breiding’s work on the ‘homo-isms’ and agonistic political theory is instructive. Breiding has conceptualised homocapitalism, homocolonialism, and homonationalism as agonistic practices, making the argument that LGBT equality is framed in a particular way and that this framing shapes its rejection.Footnote 105 In the Russian case, all three of these are in play. Russia has framed LGBT+ identities and politics as Western and colonial (homocolonialism). It has framed LGBT+ identities and politics as a symbol of the liberal, capitalist, globalist, corrupt elite threat (homocapitalism). And in response to homonationalist mobilisations of LGBT rights as human rights and Western states’ constituting themselves as defenders of LGBT+ people and rights internationally, Russia has embraced stigma as a homophobic actor and reversed that stigma back onto homophilic states. It is shameful and worthy of stigma, in the Russian discourse, to be homophilic, whereas being homophobic is a source of pride and a symbol of cultural sovereignty and national security.
Most recently, as Leandra BiasFootnote 106 and Emil EdenborgFootnote 107 note, by connecting the defence of traditional family values and Russian national security to the war in Ukraine, Putin is no longer simply challenging the (human rights) norms that have characterised the international to date. He is using force against Ukraine to resist capitalist, imperial Western LGBT ‘extremism’ as part of an illiberal world-building geopolitical project. Here, Breiding’s argument that ‘[w]hen LGBT equality is promoted as a matter of European identity, one might expect counterreactions emerging that mobilise the rejection of LGBT equality as the proper conception of European identity … In such instances, the we/them distinction is not rejected but appropriated and weaponised, whereby the pro-LGBT consensuses come to function as fulcrums of political contestation’ can be connected to work on stigma.Footnote 108
Stigmatisation involves labelling and the attempted exclusion of actors for their perceived identity and carrying out of ‘abnormal’ and thus abhorrent actions/policies, which is often met with resistance and attempts to reshape that stigma.Footnote 109 For example, Xymena Kurowska and Anatoly Reshetnikov argue that Russia has productively embraced rather than rejected its stigmatisation by the West to gain power by offering something different from the West and liberal order.Footnote 110 When it comes to its current geopolitical project, of which sex is clearly an important part, stigmatic encounters (i.e., competing attempts at shaming and stigmatisation) are shaping whatever international order emerges out of the current moment. What this means for IR is that there is an international politics of sexual shame and stigma that inflects geopolitical projects and is taking place through inter-state stigmatisation that simultaneously shames and stigmatises individuals. In this sense, it is impossible to disaggregate the international from the individual when dealing with and studying the effects of the international politics of sex. At the system level, then, when it comes to sexuality and moralising policy efforts in this arena, there is a dual operation of stigma and shame.
Changing constitutions of ab/normal in international politics
Conflicting attempts at shaming and stigmatisation between (groups of) homophilic versus (groups of) homophobic states raise important theoretical questions about shame and stigma when located empirically. In the above example of a Russia–West encounter, which predates Trump 2.0 and the solidification of an anti-woke politics, neither seems very ashamed of its position. Nevertheless, the encounter between the states is still ordering: it marks the deviant/normal, and it distributes positions in a hierarchy. When theorised as performative and relational, one can speak of successful stigmatisation of a particular actor and shaming of particular practices when a specified ‘audience of normals’ (i.e., those actors constituted as being in the in-group and ‘normal’ because of their position towards non-normative sex in this case, or ‘the group of states that attempts to impose stigma’Footnote 111) widely affirms that the stigmatised actor’s place is in the out-group or that a shameful practice ought to bring about shame in a ‘normal’ moral value system. Shaming, in other words, does not always require that the shamed feel ashamed: shaming and stigmatisation are performances addressed as much to the audience of normals as to deviants and their ordering force lies in the audience’s affirmation.Footnote 112
A stigmatisation and its affirmation must thus be continually reiterated such that if the audience of normals withdraws from a shaming or stigmatisation then the existing stigmatic order shifts. When and where this shifts, so follows international order. It is this shift that I handle in this section by focusing on the USA under Trump 2.0. I call this a stigma realignment: the reconfiguration of a stigmatic encounter that occurs when an anchoring stigmatiser (here, the USA) abandons its position and takes up the constitutive terms of the discourse it previously stigmatised (Russia and the other homophobic states), redirecting stigma onto members of its former like-minded in-group (in this case, Europe). It is important to note, here, that how states impose, manage, and redeploy stigma is shaped by domestic politics and audiences as much as international ones.Footnote 113
The stigmatic encounter between a homophilic West – headed especially by Barack Obama’s administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – and a homophobic Russia that structured international politics about sexual normativity for the last 15 years has undergone a significant transformation. One of the anchoring actors (USA) of the liberal order, in which homophobia had become stigmatised and discursively constituted as abhorrent and abnormal, has abandoned its role of homophilic policer and adopted a geopolitical imaginary and heteronormative discourse similar to those of the Russian state it once stigmatised. What has emerged during this shift is an overlapping constitution of Europe from both East and West as a continent in civilisational free fall and in need of rescue from itself.
Since 2012, Moscow has constituted itself as Europe’s civilisational saviour, tying national security to the defence of traditional gender and sexual norms from Western liberal influence. Europe’s tolerance of non-normative sexuality and gender is not merely a cultural difference but a security threat: proof of moral bankruptcy and civilisational decay. Since the escalation of aggression against Ukraine, Putin has repeatedly attacked Western countries for denying moral, religious, and family values, inventing genders, and surgically reassigning children’s sexes, framing Russian military action as civilisational defence.Footnote 114 The script has had a fairly consistent plot line: constitute Europe as morally bankrupt, frame Russian action as the defence of true European values, and position Moscow as the guardian of tradition against liberal decay.
Since January 2025, the Trump administration has published over four hundred official documents targeting DEI projects, ‘gender ideology’, and ‘wokeness’ through a master frame of national restoration and renewal. These documents form what might be called a populist-authoritarian discursive architecture in which the nation is constituted as requiring renewal against a domestic security threat from woke infiltration. Institutionally, this has led to the legitimisation of dismantling DEI offices, defunding LGBT+ programmes, and restructuring federal hiring around what the administration refers to as competence and merit criteria. The USA’s 2025 National Security Strategy formalises this at the level of foreign policy. It celebrates removing ‘radical gender ideology’ from the armed forces, frames strong traditional families as foundational to American power, and, in a formulation that bears extraordinary resonance with a decade and a half of Kremlin discourse, states that the USA wants Europe to remain European and to regain its civilisational self-confidence.
This language of civilisational rescue echoes Russian foreign policy to such a degree that Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov received the strategy warmly, stating that the adjustments correspond in many ways to Russia’s vision. For both Putin’s Russia and Trump’s USA, Europe’s so-called wokeness has been recast as an international security issue; one that justifies external intervention to correct Europe’s trajectory to civilisational demise. The specific language of ‘gayropa’ may not be used, but the Russian discourse is now supported by the USA – if implicitly – with the effect that Russia becomes destigmatised, (state) homophobia is no longer a source of shame, and new ideas of both (sexual and gender) ab/normal and what it means to be a ‘good state’ in international politics emerge.
The implications for the stigmatic framework developed in this article are significant. Stigma constitutes out-groups and orders international hierarchies by marking certain actors as deviant and threatening. The liberal international order was in part constituted by homophilic Western states stigmatising homophobic ones and vice versa. As the USA withdraws from the homophilic normals, the stigmatic hierarchy fractures and realigns/is realigning around a new normal. This reflects the degree to which Russia’s stigmatic project has gained traction to restructure the terms of international debate and, thus, potentially the emergent international order. Kurowska and ReshetnikovFootnote 115 argued that Russia productively embraced its stigmatisation by the West as a source of alternative legitimacy and a mark of pride. The USA’s stigma realignment suggests that the stigma directed at Russia is dissolving as the primary stigmatising actor is withdrawing from the field.
This has far-reaching consequences for international order. Politicised homophilia has functioned, within the liberal international order, as one axis along which hierarchy was organised and legitimacy distributed, with homophilic states occupying the upper rungs by virtue of their alignment with human rights norms. As this shifts, the ordering grammar of the international is shifting with it. The politics of sexual shame and stigma are not tangential to the emergence of this order, but fundamentally constitutive of it. The liberal order was partly organised around a sexual normative grammar in which homophilia indexed civilisational progress and homophobia indexed backwardness. Stigma realignment inverts and contests that grammar simultaneously. As the content of shame changes, the way stigma works to order the social changes. There is a rewriting, by the USA, of what acts should be shamed and therefore which actors are stigmatised such that previously shameful homophobic policies (under liberal international order) become normal and permissible. The effect is a shift in the stigmas underpinning international order. The new terms of legitimacy and power are now up for grabs.
Conclusion
In this article, I account for the mechanisms of shaming and stigmatisation through which the structuring of international order is attempted. I argue that engagement with stigma and shame opens space for a queer theorisation of international relations and international order that bridges more constructivist-leaning IR literature on norms and stigma with queer theoretic insights into the ordering function of sexual shame and stigma. Queer theories of sexual shame and stigma, when scaled to the system level, can help us to understand how shame and stigma shape international society, not as background noise to geopolitics but as constitutive of it. By centring sexual shame and stigma, this article offers a framework for studying how normative sexual structures shape, and are shaped by, the international, and how the intimate and the international are always already bound together through the same disciplinary grammar.
The argument developed here moves across three registers. At the theoretical level, it connects queer theorising about shame and stigma, hitherto largely confined to the interpersonal and the domestic, to IR scholarship on stigma and civilisationism, demonstrating that sexual shame and stigma function as structural mechanisms of norm enforcement and hierarchy-making in international society. At the conceptual level, it shows that existing Queer IR frameworks – namely politicised homophobia and politicised homophilia – share a common underlying grammar of shaming and stigmatisation that has not been sufficiently theorised as such.Footnote 116 Naming this grammar clarifies how these phenomena order the international. At the empirical level, it traces this ordering project through the illustrative case of Russia’s 15-year-long sexual geopolitical project and the recent convergence of US foreign policy under Trump with the Russian project, arguing that what is now taking place is a stigma realignment. This stigma realignment is characterised by one of its central anchoring actors defecting with profound consequences. Taken together, these three registers produce a framework that is attentive to how the intimate and the international are bound together, and how geopolitical contests over international order are fought, in significant part, through the bodies and identities of those who deviate from sexual and gender norms.
To continue the metaphor of translation, my argument can translate beyond the Russian and US cases. A scholar working on Uganda, Indonesia, China, or Brazil would ask the same questions I do here: Which acts are shamed? Which are stigmatised? Before which audience(s)? And within which stigmatic encounter? All whilst explicitly taking into account colonial power relations and racialised hierarchies. The grammar of sexual shame and stigma does not operate independently of racialisation: colonial and civilisational discourses marked racialised bodies as sexually excessive, deviant, or primitive. Any translation of the above framework to postcolonial contexts must therefore treat race not as an intersecting variable but as constitutive of who can be shamed, who is stigmatisable, and who gets to occupy the position of ‘normal’. None of this is an easy task, especially because in some postcolonial societies some of the ‘traditional’ sexual norms that some seek to defend are colonial impositions that resulted from processes of stigmatisation and shaming. Anti-queer politics articulated as anti-colonial resistance effectively (re)entrenches the very colonial sexual norms it claims to refuse. Furthermore, the stigma realignment that I outline raises harder questions about whether and how the homocolonial stigmatisation of Global South actors as ‘backward’ persists once its principal stigmatiser has realigned to broadly share the same discourse about normal sex/gender as those actors, as well as what that means for how we theorise and understand the ordering of the emergent international. Several of the concepts discussed in Rogstad, Adler-Nissen, and Koschut’s field-mapping articleFootnote 117 will be useful for unpacking how sexual shame and stigma are strategically mobilised by Global South actors in ways that mimic, but are not reducible to, Russia’s practice to date.
The stakes of my argument extend beyond theory. In my work with the government of the UK and various civil society organisations about gender, sexuality, and security, various special advisers (‘spads’) are repeatedly quoted as saying, ‘You have to deal with the world as it is, not as you want it to be’ when it comes to issues such as human rights, atrocity prevention, or anything ‘soft’ like gender, sexuality, and other identity-related issues. The implication is that these are luxuries of idealism; concerns to be set aside in favour of realpolitik. This phrase was repeated by then UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper in an interview for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine.Footnote 118 There is a glaring problem with this position. Russia and other powerful actors, the USA included, are developing anti-woke, illiberal, pro-tradition, and pro-family foreign policies and geopolitical visions where they imagine the world as they want it to be, not as it is. They are actively constructing the world as they want it to be, and the world they are constructing is organised, in significant part, around sexual shame and stigma. They are deploying moralising discourses about gender and sexuality to delegitimise liberal international norms, cultivate identity-based grievances within democratic societies, and build an alternative international order in which traditional values function as both the justification and the currency of power. The shame directed at queer bodies and the stigma attached to homophilic states are not incidental to this project. They are its instruments. The world and the future international order are being imagined into existence through sexual shame and stigma. IR cannot afford to discount this.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102290.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Lene Hansen and Rebecca Adler-Nissen for providing a frank, supportive, and genuinely inspiring space to present and discuss this article in its earliest stages. Our monthly workshops are a highlight of my calendar, and I appreciate the intellectual community that you have both built over the years. Thank you to those from our ‘Wednesday Group’ (even though we do not meet on Wednesdays anymore) for their comments and subsequent conversations about this article: Kristin Anabel Eggeling, Johannes Nissen Feldt, Yevgeniy Golovchenko, Matilde Bro Hansen, Frederik Burhøj Jerris, August Ølsgaard Larsen, Alice Massari, and Frederik Carl Windfeld. Thanks especially to Matilde and Frederik J, my corridor neighbours, for thinking with me as I pulled the final parts of the conceptual apparatus together. The three anonymous reviewers and the RIS editors were exceptionally sharp and generous with this article. Thank you for your genuinely incredible comments and for sticking with this manuscript whilst it found its feet.
