Paper short abstract:

This paper uses Queer Theory to explore South-South Cooperation, focussing on its transgressive implications; but also the (re)inscription of racialised, gendered and sexualised imageries and identities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deploys queer theory as a way of approaching South-South

Development Cooperation (SSDC). SSDC is profoundly unsettling the

long-standing normative spatialities, imaginaries and identities

(re)produced through the mainstream international development regime.

The post-colonial order of who ‘does’ development to whom has been

transgressed by countries that refuse (discursively at least) co-option

into the hegemonic donor community and its long-standing taxonomies.

Southern development partners are not just up-ending this order, but

presenting themselves in fluid ways, enrolling different identities and

attributes in different places and to different audiences. However, a

queer perspective also reveals the (re)inscription of gendered,

sexualised and racialized solidarities and hierarchies through the

relationships, intimacies and practices of SSDC. Here, queer theory

provides novel insights into the fracturing Eurocentrism of

international development, while resisting an uncritical championing of

SSDC as a post-political and benign alignment of shared Southern

identities and interests. The paper concludes by examining the trend

towards more masculinist performances and ‘fixity’ amongst key Southern

development partners, with some diminishment of the fluid and collective

languages and identities of recent years.