Who Says You Cant Go Home?

Queering the Homeland

Laura Sjoberg
University of Florida
The Department of Homeland Security is currently responsible, in
theory, for the protection of citizens of the United States from (foreign)
terrorism and other major (if unidentified) threats to American security.
When soldiers in the US military are on foreign tours of duty in Iraq and
Afghanistan (or even elsewhere), they strive to protect the way of life
back home and the people back home pray for their safe return to
that home. When Americans fight wars, they fight them overseas and
they also fight the war at home, a characterization of war support
efforts. In these terms, home is both a prize to be fought for/protected
in war(s) and a securitized location where war(s) are fought. Though
those war(s) and how they are fought are often politicized, the concept
of home as family and/or state/nation remains oddly depoliticized.
Home seems synonymous with all that is good and safe in a
dangerous world, even in the most bellicose of security discourses.
Even as home is used to exclude and commit violence towards some
Americans (e.g., Rick Santorums argument that limiting marriage to
heterosexual couples is the ultimate homeland security), it is always
the content, not the concept, of home which is contested. Home itself
holds a sort of purity in twenty-first century United States security
discourses: it is that which is to be protected, and that which is to be
desired.
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I argue that this pure, exalted place of home in contemporary

American security discourses is itself violent, regardless of the
particular political content assigned to that idea of home. Yet the
violences of discourses of home remain invisible because the idea of
home is naturalized as safe, and must be denaturalized in order to
reveal the dangerousness of home and the desire for it. In a recent
article, Spike Peterson (2013: 58) looked use queer theorizing to
denaturalize identities, ideologies, and institutional practices which
were stabilized in the formation of states in the international arena and
continue to discipline our being, thinking, and doing in and in
response to contemporary local, national, and global politics.
Characterizing nation-states as heteropatriarchal, and tracing their
problematic politics to that heteronormativity, Peterson (2013: 64)
suggests that only by revealing the queering states/nations can the
reproduction of inequality in global politics be fully recognized. This
short piece suggests that only by denaturalizing the
home/safety/security nexus can the (in)security of the 21st-century
United States be fully recognized. It does so first by reviewing some of
the work in (global) queer studies which might contribute to
understanding the problems of home, and then by pushing that
analysis forward to see home dangerous as heteronormativized, but
simultaneously always and already queer. It suggests that homed
security practices interacting with queer bodies demonstrates in

experience what queer theory suggests that home is a source on

insecurity. It concludes with a discussion of the potential benefits of
queering the homeland both for theorizing American security and for
practicing it.
Queer Theorizing and Homing
Gender theorists have been questioning the role of home in the
discipline of International Relations (IR) for quite some time. For
example, Christine Sylvester (2002) looked at IR to understand who
(personally and theoretically) is homeless in the discipline, and
looked to redress that homelessness practically (through inclusion)
and politically (through disciplinary transformation). In this
understanding, home is a place of safety for those included and
exclusion from homing is a source of marginality, danger, and
singularity. Still, queer theorizing has come to ask for whom inclusion is
a positive development, and for whom inclusion is itself violent
(Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 2013). Inclusion in a home which
requires conformity to particular norms or qualification by particular
traits is itself a sort of exclusion combined with and bound up in
violence (Sjoberg 2012). This is because, while there are dangers in
being homeless, it is equally dangerous to be assigned membership
in a home to which one does not [feel like one] belong[s]. This logic
suggests that the syllogism that equates home and homing to safety
and security is at best an imperfect map, because home for some is a

place and source of danger and constraint rather than safety and
freedom.
Jasbir Puars (2006) critique of queer liberalism adds another
layer to this argument. Puar (2006, 77) contends that the inclusion of
gay and queer subjectivities that are encouraged through liberal
discourses of multiculturalism and diversity are produced through
racial and national difference. Judith Butler (2009, 105) agrees,
suggesting that the freedom of expression and association for lesbian
and gay people is invoked instrumentally to wage a cultural assault on
Islam that reaffirms US sovereignty. Given that, as Naeem Inayatullah
and David Blaney (2004) suggest, identity always owes a debt to
alterity, the existence and honorary position of home relies on the
existence and marginalization of a constitutive other who does not
belong. For each person safe at home, then, there are others from
whom they must be protected, whether or not an actual threat is
posed. As such, queer theorizing has suggested that the inclusiveness
of home itself has been weaponized to differentiate home from other
or away and excuse (discursive and material) violence toward that
other.
In this way, Puar (2006) argues that even as the idea of home
expands to include the queer other-within, the content of nationalism
(be it heteronationalist or homonationalist) remains exclusive and
violent towards its constitutive other(s). That violence is (at least in
part) the violent reproduction of naturalized, bounded identities when

identities are liminal and messy when not policed. The violent
reproduction of bounded identities shows stability, hiding liminality;
shows certainty, hiding doubt, and shows stickiness, hiding mobility.
Queer theorizing of the liminality involved in unstable sex/gender
identities shows that even that which is presumed to be the most
primordial (in sex identity) is really liminality hiding under supposed
definition. Translated to thinking about homing, this theorizing
suggests that even the apparent ultimate safety of homing hides
liminality and uncertainty, and perhaps danger under its supposed
(empirical and normative) clarity.
If queer theorizing so far has provided tools to suggest that
home is violent/dangerous, this piece suggests that a closer
theoretical and empirical look leaves no doubt. If a securitized home is
both the locus of the provision of protection and that which must by
definition be protected, home becomes a vicious circle of an inclusive
protection racket (Peterson 1977), where home is endangered for
the ostensible purpose of providing it the necessary protection. If the
same said securitized home is (by definition) normative good and
therefore (by definition) to be protect at all costs, the costs to the
alterized other of enforcing both the identity and security of the home
(from within and without; internal diversity and external threats) can
be limitless, given that they are not factored into home. Home
defense, homeland security, and the war at home, then, become not
only prized but ultimate security values, both because of the
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heteronormative privileging of home as an idea and because of the

violent enforcement of the straight-ness of the concept.
The Violences of Homing
Examples of the violence of homing for queer(ed)
experiences/queer(ed) lives/queer(ed) sexualities abound in the
existing literature. A number of scholars (e.g., Shepherd and Sjoberg
2012; Currah and Mulqueen 2011; Magnet and Rodger 2012) have
recognized the violence committed by the United States Department
of Homeland Security and its peers abroad towards queer bodies in
the name of protecting the homeland. Jasbir Puar (2006) talks about
the role of U.S. sexual exceptionalism in prison abuse in Iraq, analysis
which could be framed as using sexuality as a way to draw the line
between (sacred) home and (violable) other. Several scholars have
suggested that the new inclusive U. S. military has not either
transformed its norms of genders and/or sexualities or eliminated its
violent enforcement of them (Braswell and Kushner 2012; Enloe 2000).
While sequester paralyzes many of the services that the U. S.
government provides to its most marginalized citizens, the
Department of Homeland Security budget for fiscal year 2014 is just
under $45 billion US dollars, more than 80% of which is discretionary
spending. A number of queer theorists have identified the singling out
of and (gendered) discrimination against people of deviant genders,
especially in Islamic cultures, in war and counterterrorism efforts (Puar
2006). Rhetorical inclusion in a number of signifiers of home (be they
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Santorums idea of marriage, a particular religious organization, or the

military) often trades of with both rhetorical and actual exclusion of
gay/queer bodies. The war at home is being fought with the currency
of troop support, family readiness and the like, ideas and practices
which (often violently) rely on and enforce the heteronormative family.
These are but a couple of many examples of the empirical
violences of the (presumed) natural identification of home as a safe
space of personal security and normative good. While feminist work
has long problematized both being homeless and the potential
violences that go on behind closed doors in the private sphere of
homes (e.g., Schneider 1990; Mackinnon 1989), Security Studies thus
far has paid little attention to the violence inflicted both on those who
are homed and on those who fill the role of the constitutive other of the
home. As Zizek (2002) explained, happiness/homed-ness requires an
Other who is to be blamed for everything that went wrong, so that
done did not feel truly responsibility but who is in many if not most
ways similar to the self seen to inhabit the home. Rather than
assuming home to be (purely) a normative good and a source of (the
need for) protection, then, it is important to understand the privileging
of home as a source of unrest and violence.
Queering the Homeland
Certainly, this is not the first time that queer theorizing has
questioned either the sovereignty of the state or the naturalness of the
concept of sovereignty. In Cynthia Webers words, sovereignty
performs as a referent for statehood where the norm of state
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sovereignty heralds and reinforces (a false sense of) stable identity and
existence for states (Weber 1995, 1). It is in this sense that Weber
(1995, 123) suggests that the state is a sign without a referent,
given that the sovereignty that serves as the basis for the states
stability is self-referential, and therefore cannot be the referent of the
state (Weber 1995, 123). In this way, in Baudrillards terms, truth
appears as a simulacrum (a truth effect) but not as a referent or
signified (Weber 1995, 125). The truth effect of the concept of
sovereignty is to produce the appearance of the stability of
state/identity in IR without any underlying basis for it. In other words
theorists solve (however temporarily) the problem of state
sovereignty by proceeding as if the meaning of sovereignty were stable
because a solution to this problem seems to be a prerequisite for
getting on with the business of international relations, which leads to
the treating of sovereignty as an already-settled, uncontested
concept (Weber 1995, 2-3). this settles a sovereignty order despite
the possibility/(probability) of global politics lack of capacity to be
settled in such an orderly way. This is at least in part because states
and their sovereignty are constantly contested and unstable.
At the same time, these critiques of sovereignty have focused on
critiquing the institution of the state and its claims to sovereignty, in
my mind levying an important but necessarily incomplete critique.
While queer engagements with the false sense of stable identity and
existence that sovereignty provides for states (e.g., Weber 1995) and
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the heteronormative constitution of the state as an institution (e.g.,

Peterson 2013) are important, it seems to me that a queer gaze
towards the violences of home suggests that it is not just the state and
its sovereignty, but the very notion of home which is a condition of
possibility for the existence of both, need to be interrogated.
In other words, what if it were necessary to denaturalize not only
the rhetorical home of the sovereign state, but the notion of home
itself, as signified, as spaced, and as material? I see the work of queer
theory in critical geography as providing a roadmap on this point.
Queer theory in geography has suggested that spaces do not have
pre-existing sexual identities (Oswin 2008, 90), and are not naturally
authentically straight but rather actively produced and
(hetero)sexualized (Binnie 1997, 223). Such space is portrayed as
straight, organized, and clearly identifiable when in fact it is often a
location deeply scarred by myriad battles fought over the social,
political, and cultural meanings associated with (presumed)
sexual(ized) identity/ies (Nash 2006, 2). In order to successfully queer
such space, then, it is not enough to answer with a politics that does
not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions,
but upholds and sustains them (Duggan 2003, 50). Instead, queering
space produced as heteronormative requires operating beyond
powers and controls that enforce normativity with radical
(re)thinkings, (re)drawings, (re) conceptualizations, (re)mappings

(Browne 2006, 889, 888). Queering then constitutes a

reterritorialization of heterosexual space (Oswin 2008, 90).
Geographers interested in queer theorizing and queer practice
have, indeed, interrogated the heterosexism (and supposed safety) of
the home as a traditional(ized) space (e.g., Valentine 2002). These
scholars have questioned the public/private dichotomy, detailed a
variety of ways members of the GLBT community live in insecure
accommodations, and discussed home as subject to surveillant gaze
and regulation (Valentine 2002). Reading the state-as-home as a space
through queer lenses, it is possible to view it as, in Binnies (1997)
terms, not naturally straight but actively produced as heterosexualized
space. Two implications for the meaning of state-as-home arise from
such a characterization. First, it is not naturally the heterosexualized
space that it is presented and practiced as. Second, its appearance as
heterosexualized is produced and enforced. It is produced and enforced
from, in Nashs (2006) terms, a space which is actually liminal,
conflictual, indeterminate, confused, and queer, marked by myriad
battles over identity. If this reading is correct, the home in homeland
was and is always and already queer, but is produced as straight
through violent enforcement. This violent enforcement erases itself as
it constitutes home as normatively pure and the cornerstone of
national identity/ies.
Queering home, in these terms, then, is not an original act of
queering because it is something which was always and already

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queer, obscured violently and then the violence of obfuscation also

obscured. It is really, then, in Brownes (2006) terms radical
(re)thinkings that involve making the queerness of home visible and
the exposing the violence involved in constituting and enforcing that
home as a source of security. That revealing would create space for,
in Oswins (2008) terms, reterritorialization of home in security
discourses.
Reterritorializing Home in Security Studies
If home has become both an icon of security and a source of
danger in 21st-century US security politics, the project of
reterritorializing it would look to both denaturalize the concept of home
and distance it from its violent implications. Such a project, of course,
is anything but straightforward. Still, queer theorizing suggests some
potential directions to take in order to rethink the concept and its place
in security. First, it is important both to identify home as queer, and
violently heterosexualized. In Butlers (2004, 7) words, more
important than any presupposition about the plasticity of identity or its
indeed retrograde status is queer theorys claim to be opposed to the
unwanted legislation of identity. The purification of home and the
securitization of its nationalism and its protection is (and should be
called) just such an unwanted legislation of identity.
Recognizing the violence of, and violent enforcement of, home
could/should be followed by critically embracing homelessness and/or
disrupting homing. As Christine Sylvester once noted, liminality

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suggests borderlands that defy fixed homeplaces in feminist

epistemology, places of mobility around policed boundaries, places
where ones bag disappears and reappears before moving on
(Sylvester 2002, 255). This suggests a rethinking that blurs the lines
between homed and homeless both in practice (where the homed
are re-homed with the homeless for solidarity) and it theory (effectively
questioning and deconstructing the [apparently secure] home).
Sylvester (1994) suggests an ontology of homelessness as an
alternative to the dangers (and false securities of) home.
Perhaps an ontology of homelessness in queer security studies is
a path to reterritorializing home. Such an ontology would reject both
the notion of being homed (with the identities it polices and the
others it constitutes) and the enforcement of homing. As such,
entities like the Department of Homeland Security and ideas like the
war at home, along with other defense-of-home ideas would be
rendered problematic conceptually as well as empirically. Recognizing
the queerness of home, then, renders it unstable, unenforceable, and
uncertain all renderings which might actually enhance the security
potential of the concept, and the security of the United States and the
constitutive others that it threatens.
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