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Gender, Sexuality and International Politics in Troubled Times: A Conversation with Laura Sjoberg in Brazil

Laura Sjoberg is one of the most prolific gender theorists in IR and an almost inescapable reference for those who research international politics through the lenses of gender and sexuality. One of her more celebrated books is Mothers, Monsters, Whores (2007), written with Caron Gentry, in which they discuss stereotypes of femininity in global politics while looking at women who commit violence. She has more recently published ‘Trans*America’ (2016), in which she discusses Cynthia Weber’s Faking It (1999) and reads aspects of gender and sexuality involved in the USA’s foreign policy. She was in Rio de Janeiro for an event held by the International Relations Institute of PUC-Rio, where she composed a panel called ‘Rethinking the Borders between Gender and Sexuality’ alongside Marysia Zalewski, Elisabeth Prügl and Henry Myrttinen. Her talk was a critique of the dichotomy between war and non-war violence, which proves to be inadequate in many instances, especially regarding sexual forms of violence, which take place identically inside homes and in war scenes, while the former happens more often. The event took place about one week before the second term of presidential elections in Brazil, and later that same day, she was also part of the panel ‘The Rise of Conservatisms and the Challenges to the Women, Gender and Sexuality Agendas.’ We talked for about 50 minutes the next day in a semi-structured interview seeking to touch on the topics mobilized in the talks and in her academic work. Many of the questions are situated in the political context in which the event took place (in Brazil, during elections), but also in reference to broader global movements of conservatism: Viktor Orbán had recently banned gender studies in Hungary, and the New York Times had recently published a piece stating that the Trump administration was trying to ‘define transgender out of existence’ (Green et al 2018). What could be the impact of those moves