Queering Home Kritik

WELCOME TO THE HOME BASE IN THE REVOLUTION! WE ARE THE NOMADS, AND WE
ARE ALL THAT IS GOOD AND SAFE AND VALUABLE IN THE WORLD. WE FIGHT AGAINST
THE CAPITALISTS, WHO ARE EVERYTHING THAT IS BAD AND VIOLENT AND
DANGEROUS. DONT WORRY ABOUT HATING THEM THEIR SLAUGHTER IS ALWAYS
JUSTIFIED BECAUSE THEIR ACTION IS ALWAYS VIOLENT AND OURS IS ALWAYS GOOD.
WE DONT ALWAYS KNOW WHO THEY ARE OR WHAT THEY DO, BUT:
WE ARE NEVER THEM.
THEY ARE NEVER US.
WELCOME TO HOME BASE. THE WAR STARTS NOW.
Sjoberg and Chessman in 2013. [Laura, founder of feminist security studies and Christian, Juris
Doctor Candidate at the University of Florida] Who Says You Cant Go Home? Queering the
Homeland . Version of the paper presented at APSA in August 2013. Available on request to
cchessman@ufl.edu
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. We 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 to 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.
The 1NC sees the metaphor of home and its relation to homeland security as an
apt metaphor to describe the politics of the 1AC. The 1AC identifies a series of rigid
categories with unbreakable normative associations (the state can never be good!
The nomad can never be bad!) and no mutual overlap. The nomad is home base,
an ontological category from which revolution against the (capitalist) state is
waged.
We see that epistemology as reductionist and violent. All stable ontological
categories including the stable ontologies capitalist and nomad rely on a
constitutive-other against whom violence is permissible. Every in-group
requires an out-group. This constitutive other always already exists as the
subject of limitless unethical violence.
Sjoberg and Chessman in 2013. [Laura, founder of feminist security studies and Christian, Juris
Doctor Candidate at the University of Florida] Who Says You Cant Go Home? Queering the
Homeland . Version of the paper presented at APSA in August 2013. Available on request to
cchessman@ufl.edu
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.

The violence to the queer other-within maps onto the broader concept of
sovereignty settled us and them, home and away become the
domestic Self state and international Other at scale.
Sjoberg and Chessman in 2013. [Laura, founder of feminist security studies and Christian, Juris
Doctor Candidate at the University of Florida] Who Says You Cant Go Home? Queering the
Homeland . Version of the paper presented at APSA in August 2013. Available on request to
cchessman@ufl.edu1
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 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
1 Theorists solve is policy debate slipping out into the real world.

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 sovereign 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.

The stable ontological categories established by the 1AC are anything but
stable. They are liminal, fluid, messy, and unstable. Nobody is just a
capitalist or just a nomad and the 1ACs own evidence is replete with
examples of messy, liminal participation in both smooth and striated space.
Sjoberg and Chessman in 2013. [Laura, founder of feminist security studies and Christian, Juris
Doctor Candidate at the University of Florida] Who Says You Cant Go Home? Queering the
Homeland . Version of the paper presented at APSA in August 2013. Available on request to
cchessman@ufl.edu
At the same time, these critiques of sovereignty have focused on critiquing the
institution of the state and its claims to sovereignty, in our minds 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 the heteronormative constitution of the state as an institution (e.g., Peterson
2013) are important, it seems 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.

The rigidity of the 1ACs politics amounts to nothing more than blackmail and a
protection racket run from the big capitalists and come be a nomad or else! This
gendered ideology is the condition of possibility for the operational abstractions of
terror, militarism, and war criticized by the 1AC.
Sjoberg and Chessman in 2013. [Laura, founder of feminist security studies and Christian, Juris
Doctor Candidate at the University of Florida] Who Says You Cant Go Home? Queering the
Homeland . Version of the paper presented at APSA in August 2013. Available on request to
cchessman@ufl.edu

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 heteronormative privileging of home
as an idea and because of the violent enforcement of the straight-ness of the
concept.

The 1AC speech act cannot be separated from its the violent ontological
constitutions it deploys no running, no severing, no thats not our
interpretation.
Sjoberg and Chessman in 2013. [Laura, founder of feminist security studies and Christian, Juris
Doctor Candidate at the University of Florida] Who Says You Cant Go Home? Queering the
Homeland . Version of the paper presented at APSA in August 2013. Available on request to
cchessman@ufl.edu
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/homedness 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.

The resolved colon hails all affirmative debaters to respond, and each debater is
responsible for the relationship established by their response to it. The 1ACs
relationship to the resolution violently constructs the omnipresent, irredeemable
threat of the state despite being unable to connect the striation of ocean
space to violence. Flag this argument.

Shanahan in 2004 [Bill, inventor of the kritik and former debate coach @ Ft. Hays]
Twilight of the Topical Idols: Kritik-ing in the Age of Imperialism September 2004.
Contemporary Argumentation and Debate. Vol. 25. p7-8
Due to editorial constraints, this essay limits itself to drawing a narrow strand out of and across
contemporary debate theory and practice, in order to illustrate and lay to rest the controversy.
The strategy on which second-generation kritik-ing pivoted was exposing interpretation at the
heart of topicality. While of course much energy over the decades has been poured into
interpreting the topic, most of that energy was spent on ways of effectively limiting the topic by
delimiting the boundaries around it and creating itself through a constitutive outside. Little
effort was devoted previously to examining the relationship involved in affirming the topic. The
activity of affirmation was engaged unproblematically because the realities imbedded in it were
so long habituated. Topical relationships are, by no means, the extent and limit of this critical
movement. Nonetheless, tracing the contours of how this relationship changed so dramatically
over the last seven or eight years should help us to better understand why debate desperately
needed kritiks and how kritik-ing so handily became such an integral, inseparable part of
debate.[continues 2 paragraphs later] One important theoretical consideration emerged from
the discernment of a previously unnoticed topical function (that the topic might be considered
to have particular functions at all was itself the result of the gradual influx of discourse theory).
Every year and before every debate, the resolved-colon hails or interpellates debaters as
affirmative subjects. Lacanian Marxist Louis Althusser, while discussing the mirror-structure of
bourgeois capitalist ideology, argues that it ensures the interpellation of individuals as
subjects and their mutual recognition of each other and themselves.2 For debate, the topic hails
affirmative debaters and their 1acs answer that hail, either explicitly or implicitly. Too often,
debaters presume that if they do not debate something then it does not matter. The second
generation exposed this sentiment as fallacious and sought to argumentatively contradict it in
debate rounds. An unacknowledged topical hail no less hails affirmative debaters. The
implications are obvious and legion: Whether or not debaters accept the topical hail, they still
are interpellated by it and can be defeated by it, if their opponents respond more effectively to it.
The topics relationship to everyone in the debate was exposed and debatable.
The impact of performing stable ontological identities is forming the precondition
for violence against feminized and queer bodies. The alternative solves by
performatively queering the heterosexualized space of the 1AC.
Sjoberg and Chessman in 2013. [Laura, founder of feminist security studies and Christian, Juris
Doctor Candidate at the University of Florida] Who Says You Cant Go Home? Queering the
Homeland . Version of the paper presented at APSA in August 2013. Available on request to
cchessman@ufl.edu
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? We 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).
Well isolate several specific links to the affs politics
1. Becoming. The 1ACs understanding of becoming is violent in particular
deluzian conceptions of becoming-woman serve as the core of the broader
process and assume a male starting point.
Thanem and Wallenberg in 2010. [Torkild, Professor @ Stockholm University and Louise,
Scholar at the Center for Fashion Studies @ Stockholm University] Buggering Freud and
Deleuze: toward a queer theory of masochism. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture. Vol. 2, 2010.
DOI: 10.3402/jac.v2i0.4642 p8

Creating a body without organs involves becoming-other. Becomingwoman is the prime trajectory through which they explore becomingother. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize becoming-woman for three
main reasons: it explicitly challenges the dominance of the
rationalized male subject in philosophy, science, and society; it involves destructing
one's molar identity by connecting to--without imitating-stereotypes of womanhood; and it involves
expanding and changing both the assemblages by which one is constituted and the
assemblages of which one is a part. Unfortunately, Deleuze and Guattari pursue this without
problematizing their own manhood or the male perspective
presumed,21 and this is why they have become22 the target23 of much feminist critique.24 According to Elizabeth Grosz,
"the metaphor of 'becoming-woman' is a male appropriation of
women's politics, struggles, theories, knowledges" .24 As she points out, however, the
problem with these critiques is that they can be raised against "virtually any male philosopher" and against many female
philosophers too. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattrari's malecentrism can resolved, for example, by relating the body without organs to

becoming-woman is a pseudo-woman implying a

male starting point (a man becoming-woman), becoming-man may decenter the male and
a notion of "becoming-man." Whereas

undermine the fixed essentiality of masculinity by departing from a female position (a woman becoming-man). 25

2. Sovereignty, Ontology and Alterity. The 1ACs conception of sovereignty, ontology,

and alterity are violent to the queer nonwhite constitutive others.
Robinson and Tormey in 2010 [Andrew and Simon as youve never seen them before]. Living in Smooth
Space: Deleuze, Postcolonialism and the Subaltern. Chapter 1.
Spivak's critique of Deleuze can be broken down into five distinct claims, which we explore one
at a time. The first of these is that Deleuze and Foucault covertly reintroduce the transcendent

European subject by making their own position 'transparent' and by means of overly
general conceptions of the subject of power and the subject of oppression. The second is that
they lack a theory of ideology and, consequently, a theory of interest. The third is that they
foreclose the need for counter-hegemonic ideological production and dialogue with the
other, by assuming the other can speak for itself. The fourth is that their points of reference,
the problems they seek to solve and the texts they refer to are entirely caught within a selfcontained West or Europe. The fifth is that their refusal of constitutive contradiction
reintroduces an undivided subject and is essentialist. In sum, Deleuze is guilty of erecting a
'global-local' in which a distinct form of subj ectivity and logic of being in the world is rendered invisible
or 'unmarked', whilst other terms are 'marked' as local or subordinate to them.

3. Threat Construction. The constitutive other-within is apparent in several

parts of the 1ACs analysis:
The Enemy the 1AC identifies the state, the capitalists, development and the
paranoid as stable ontologies which are always already striated. But cross is telling
when pressed, the 1AC struggled to articulate precisely
who those people were,
what made them part of their particular ontological category (see
especially the discussion of paranoia),
why the criticized ontologies were always striated,
whether or not they had the potential to transcend striation.
o Capitalism is more than a leftist swear word its signifies material (and
immaterial) referents whose potential cannot be dismissively and normatively
predetermined.
o Even the 1ACs authors disagree with the 1ACs (threat) construction of the state
as an always-already striated entity Cooper is on point noting that even
commercial capitalist cruises have the potential for nomadism. The aff forecloses
this potential with a simplistic dismissal: any use of the state is an attempt to striate
space.
The Self - the affirmative operates from a transparent2 imagined community of
preconceived ontological categories. The aff has an unabashedly normative definition of
what counts as the ocean(s), development, and the ontological self which the 1AC
defends as biologically predetermined in cases of queerness 3.
The Brown Other we explain this portion of the 1ACs constitutive violence to Brown
Others in the card discussing Spivaks critique of the 1AC but we briefly outline here the
overdetermination necessarily involved in the conclusory declaration that sovereignty
across the globe is ontologically defined by the West. Ridiculous.

2 See the Robinson and Tormey card for the meaning of transparent in this
context.
3 Reverse pit of doom, sorry. [edit apparently the 1AC decided nvm, so
nevermind.]

The alternative is queering home. We recognize identitys status as always already

luminal, unstable and indeterminate. Do not be nomadic or capitalist,
striated or smooth simply be this is a pre-requisite to re-territorializing the
space occupied by the aff.
Sjoberg and Chessman in 2013. [Laura, founder of feminist security studies and Christian, Juris
Doctor Candidate at the University of Florida] Who Says You Cant Go Home? Queering the
Homeland . Version of the paper presented at APSA in August 2013. Available on request to
cchessman@ufl.edu
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-ashome 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
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 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.