Queer and Feminist International Relations: Knowledge, Norm Travel, and Resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

This panel advances feminist and queer International Relations by centring Latin American and Caribbean debates on coloniality, norm contestation, and the politics of knowledge. It treats gender and sexuality not as peripheral ‘issues’ but as constitutive of world politics: shaping how bodies are governed, how security is defined, and whose experiences become theory. The panel foregrounds the epistemic and methodological challenges of studying sexual politics marked by colonial rule, especially in relation to Indigenous cosmologies and the risks of importing categories that reproduce hierarchies of knowledge. It also engages scholarship on norm diffusion and resilience by examining how feminist agendas endure and mutate under anti-gender backlash, and how global policy scripts can be strategically reworked ‘from below’ through grassroots–state entanglements. Across these themes, the panel argues for a more plural, context-sensitive IR that takes situated queer and feminist perspectives as analytical resources, and that understands resistance, coalition-building, and territorialised practices as central to the making of international politics.

Title	Details
Indigenous Sexual Politics: theoretical-analytical challenges in International Relations	View Paper Details
Resisting Backlash: Feminist Counter-Movements and the Survival of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Colombia	View Paper Details
“Foreign or From Below? Negotiating Norms and Hierarchies of Feminist Foreign Policy in Colombia”	View Paper Details
Queering International Politics from Latin America	View Paper Details