The geopolitics of queer solidarity

Abstract

Responding to the parallel that Tucker draws between the divergent geopolitical accounts of the decline of British power from the late-nineteenth century and the focus he proposes for sexuality in accounts of the current decline of US power, this commentary reconsiders the geopolitics of the solidarities around sexuality that Tucker highlights. I find the geopolitics of aid too colonial in their intent and effects to be called a solidarity. I extend Tucker's focus on homonationalism to consider how conservative sexualities are complicit in the modern rise of autocracy and incipient fascism.

I have been instructed by Andy Tucker's scholarly practice since supervising the research for Queer Visibilities (2009). After this, I learned from his pioneering project in South Africa's townships training local men to train others to raise both understanding of safe-sex and HIV-treatment compliance among men having sex with other men (Tucker et al., 2013a). Listening to these men, Andy documented the short steps from stigma to low self-esteem, and from there to a failure of self-care (Tucker et al., 2013b). The virtuous circle here was evident. Theory informed policy. The policy was applied. Its local practitioners then shared their insights, helping formulate the research that interrogated their own work. From this, the return to theory was direct, with a series of critical responses to the ethnocentrism of much writing from the Global North about sexuality in the Global South (Tucker, 2020; 2022). From these, I have learned much about the geopolitics of HIV/AIDS programmes and continue to debate these issues with Andy (Tucker and Kearns, 2022).

Tucker's (2025) article, ‘A Sexuality Pivot’, considers the geographies of sexuality through three forms of solidarity: the existing solidarities between Northern governments and Southern states to whom they promote Christian or liberal practices; emerging solidarities between Northern agencies and Southern clients to whom they give aid on the basis, again, of Northern values; and, finally, emerging solidarities across the South developing autonomously of Northern agendas. The paternalism of the first two weakens with the waning economic hegemony of the Global North. Tucker urges geographers to acknowledge that understandings of this transition will be produced either in collusion with the waning North, or in cooperation with its insurgent rivals. Tucker proposes that there is a parallel with the choices geographers made just over a century ago when the decline of British imperial power prompted divergent understandings of geopolitics (Kearns, 2009), but this time, he suggests, sexuality is central to the crisis and to the insurgency. In this commentary, I want to join together the sexuality and geopolitics that Tucker has treated separately.

Tucker proposes that Puar's (2007) work on homonationalism can be read as a ‘corollary’ of Harvey's (2003) economistic account of a New Imperialism, but the logical or necessary connection is not developed. Instead, they are offered as alternative or supplementary ways to explain the US use of ‘military force abroad’. I don’t want to argue that these specific connections between geopolitics and sexuality are necessary, but some such links are.

Liberal colonialism

We might begin with the paternalist, liberal concern for the rights of persons in poor countries. Colonial interference has long been justified by the declaration that certain peoples are currently without effective rights, and that external force is needed to change the regimes currently depriving them of their fundamental rights. Recent examples include the way that spreading ‘democracy’ justified the Cold War (Westad, 2007) and Barnett's (2004) argument for the Pentagon that the US could legitimately intervene to change any regimes that rejected the blessings of globalisation.

In similar vein, following a rebellion in Ireland, the English king, James I, justified dispossessing the rebels by observing that it was their ‘condition and profession, to thinke… mariage of no use’ (James I, 1607), by which he meant that these Gaelic lords yet cleaved to their Brehon law with its ready recognition of divorce and of the property rights of women during and after marriage (Ó Corráin, 1985). Similarly, Victorian British horror at what it understood of the custom of widow sacrifice in India sustained popular support for colonial rule because, as Spivak shows (1988: 296), there is no cause as seemingly legitimate as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’. In the United States, repeated attacks on foreign communism or domestic socialism likewise defended women, and the claim that, in the Soviet Union, there had been a ‘“nationalization of women” was central to the Red Scare’ (Dawley, 1991: 246). For Ireland, India, and the Soviet Union as well as more recent cases such as Afghanistan (Cooke, 2002), protecting the subaltern gender provides liberal grounds for projecting force. This liberal colonialism goes well beyond what Tucker (2025) identifies as the ‘unintended consequences of the ways in which Global North actors impact those in the Global South’.

Straight subjectivation

If ‘diplomatic transnational solidarities’ secure new markets for US products, be they for guns or drugs, and if these transfers also create dependencies and sustain client regimes, then, there must be a point where such asymmetries embarrass claims to solidarity. It is certainly significant that several aid programmes focus upon gender and sexuality—from campaigns for sterilisation (Cockburn, 1994) to the abstinence focus of some US HIV programmes (Buse et al., 2016). Promoting sexual continence imposes norms as a distinct ‘coloniality of gender’ (Lugones, 2007: 193). In this respect, the decline in ‘sexuality-based equality’ that Tucker notes as a prompt for his second series of solidarities suggests the need for other solidarities unconstrained by homonormativity (Duggan, 2002). The heteropatriarchy of capitalist social reproduction not only sustains a workforce and inculcates a respect for authority (Reich, 1942), it also blocks communal alternatives to family-based care (Lewis, 2022). We have been here before. The current tendency to autocracy recalls a similar challenge to democracy in the 1930s (Loewenstein, 1935), and we have much to learn from the parallels, particularly with respect to the geopolitics of solidarity (Kearns, 2013). The challenges are at least two-fold.

In the first place, we need to attend to the ideological work of subjectification completed by heteronormativity and by its younger sibling homonormativity. There is much to learn from the conjunction of Marxism and psychoanalysis that the opponents of fascism developed in the 1930s (Reich, 1942; Adorno, 1951). Schulman's (1990) novel, People in Trouble, describes people facing the existential crisis of the AIDS pandemic but with their survival further imperilled by the dismembering of local solidarities. Gentrification was making it impossible for their community to continue living together. The title was borrowed from an earlier book by Wilhelm Reich (1953) in which he described how the patriarchal family so enervated Germans that, cowed by its intolerable demands, they bowed to the führer father figure who promised an abjection of their filthy desires into an orgy of domestic eugenics and foreign conquests. In a society where politicians and televangelists were responding to AIDS with the injunction to foreswear what the Old Testament vilifies as sodomy and to just say no to all forms of extra-marital sex, Schulman drew upon Reich to explain how sanctimonious straight people abandoned to destruction so many neighbours. Although Tucker separates economy from sexuality, Harvey from Puar, Schulman shows how solidarities are undermined most emphatically by their intersection. Cultivating solidarities means addressing both their economic and their ideological conditions of existence.

Agonistic solidarities

Alongside showing how heteropatriarchy dissolves solidarity across sexualities, the fascist moment of the 1930s also carries a further lesson for solidarities, domestic and international. In country after country, Popular Fronts established a clear majority against fascism and in some cases used the law effectively against the criminality of fascist thugs. In country after country, the erosion of this bulwark against authoritarian reaction followed Popular Front failures in power: they did not introduce structural reforms to address the crisis of contemporary capitalism; nor did they use ‘the resources of the state to the full in defence of their own interests’ (Graham and Preston, 1987: 4–5). One resolvent of the Popular Front was the insistence by the USSR that communist parties under its direction lead the Left in each country and that until this was achieved the primary target for communist parties should be Leftist rivals, postponing fatally the confrontation with the Right. This suggests the urgency of ‘agonistic pluralism’ (Mouffe, 1999) in all solidarity projects; that solidaristic movements focus upon identifying at least some common aims, even while recognising that other matters remain divisive. Mouffe (2013, 133) urges attention to a ‘chain of equivalences’ that may link cognate struggles. This might be as broad as the common interest of neighbours in living with dignity, as when Harvey Milk recruited gay men in the Castro to support local labour disputes, and in return trades unions became ‘tactical allies’ (Shilts, 1982: 97) in Milk's election in 1978. Leslie Feinberg (1996) describes a related solidarity experience in her own experience as a transgender communist within the labour movement. This is what homonationalism corrodes; inviting some gays and lesbians to abandon other queers in pursuit of a respectable purity.

The strength of Popular Front movements was always international, and it was these bonds that the authority claimed by the Soviet Union severed, making all such links bilateral and hierarchical rather than multilateral and horizontal. In the case of solidarities of sexualities, these international bonds emerge as a queer geopolitics. First, from 2003 the massive US support for wider access to AIDS medicines was in part a response to the shaming of ‘big pharma’ by international queer solidarity over the preceding decade (Nauta, 2011). Second, within any movements of international solidarity, it is always possible to promote inclusivity on grounds of gender and sexuality, as when Schulman (2012) raised with the Palestinian leadership of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement its rhetoric and stance on queer rights, ultimately gaining allies for an explicit inclusion of sexuality equality within its platform. Finally, while there are international agencies such as Amnesty International and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that protect some queer folk from discrimination and that seek harbour for them when their lives are made intolerable by prejudiced states, there is a wealth of work done by local groups that take up individual cases advocating on behalf of queer refugees and imprisoned queers.

Tucker challenges sexualities scholars to study solidarities from the perspective of sexualities in the Global South as a way to understand some aspects of the current erosion of Northern hegemony. In this commentary, I have expressed reservations about some forms of Northern paternalism as effectively a liberal colonialism. I have noted that the straight subjectivation within such policies serves Northern clientelist interests in the Global South while also advancing fascist authoritarianism. Finally, I would like to broaden Tucker's critique of homonationalism to claim a space for solidarities that accept dissensus within collectivism and that engage critically with the agencies of liberal colonialism, pressing them to meet the lofty aims they too often affirm without conviction, while pushing them towards a mutual recognition that only in a broad strategy of abolitionism, of prisons and borders, can they really meet those aims.