In the second of our LGBTQ+ History Month reflections, our Tutorial Fellow in International Relations and a member of Department for Politics and International Relation’s Equality & Diversity Working Group, Professor Patricia Owens, considers how re-examining historical figures can help to challenge heterosexist norms in international thought.
Professor Patricia Owen
This LGBTQ+ History Month I’m reflecting on some of the figures in my own research who lived non-heteronormative lives. Few historical women, let alone people we might think of today as LGBTQ+, appear in international intellectual history. The intellectual history of my research field is almost entirely male-homosocial. Yet Cambridge Classicist F. Melian Stawell, who coined the English term ‘international thought’, shared the last fifteen years of her life with Clara Reynolds, and kindled Mary Parker Follett’s pioneering work on international organization. Follett was in a life-long relationship with Isobel L. Briggs. Maud Allen’s 1958 book, Sophy Sanger: A Pioneer of Internationalism, can be read as a labour of queer love for Sanger, her life-long companion.
It would be anachronistic to describe these women as queer, or as representing some timeless lesbian sexual identity. And their intimate/sexual life was not the most important thing about them. But the near-total erasure of all women and non-binary people from international intellectual history invites a recovery of these figures not just as women, but as figures who led non-heteronormative lives in partnerships with other women. They destabilize heterosexist, as well as homosocial norms, in international intellectual history.
Professor Patricia Owens is Principal Investigator of the multi-award winning Leverhulme Research Project on Women and the History of International Thought. Her most recent co-edited volume, Women’s International Thought: Toward a New Canon (Cambridge 2022) won the ISA Theory Section Prize for Best Edited Volume. She is also co-editor of the leading undergraduate textbook in IR, The Globalization of World Politics (Oxford, 2023), now in its 9th edition and translated into nine languages.