Queering International Politics from Latin America

International Relations (IR) scholarship has long treated sex, gender, and sexuality as peripheral concerns, leaving them largely marginal to mainstream theoretical debates. Yet insights emerging from queer theory and LGBTQIA+ studies have begun to challenge this disciplinary gap. This paper explores how queer perspectives can contribute to rethinking international politics, focusing particularly on how they unsettle the cis-heteronormative assumptions that shape the field. By emphasising contributions from Latin America and the Caribbean, the paper highlights how local experiences of dissident bodies and other marginalised groups can shed light on alternative ways of understanding global dynamics. The argument advanced here is more modest than a complete reframing of IR: it proposes that closer dialogue between queer approaches, decolonial thought, and Latin American epistemologies can enrich existing debates on sexuality and politics without assuming universal applicability. Intersectionality is used as a key analytical tool to address the intertwined dynamics of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality that characterise post-colonial societies across the region. Methodologically, the paper draws on qualitative material, including preliminary insights from focus groups with queer participants in São Paulo. These observations help illustrate how everyday experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean reveal forms of resistance, political imagination, and social organisation that remain insufficiently addressed in dominant IR narratives. Rather than offering a comprehensive theoretical alternative, the aim is to identify points of entry through which Latin queer perspectives can dialogue with, expand, or complicate established frameworks in IR. The paper argues that incorporating these situated perspectives may contribute to a more plural and context-sensitive discipline, while opening space for Latin American and Caribbean contributions to global queer debates.