I. Failure

Taking Butler seriously as a theorist of ‘practice’ opens space for a more rigorous assessment of the stakes of success and failure in ‘the practice turn’. In the practice turn literature in IR, success and failure usually revolve around questions of competency. Much of the key literature in the practice turn makes the issue of ‘competence’ central, even constitutive, of what a ‘practice’ is. Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot insist that ‘practices are competent performances’Footnote ²⁰ and that ‘practice is more or less competent in a socially meaningful and recognizable way’.Footnote ²¹ This is essential to how Adler and Pouliot understand practice because of the need for an audience to appraise the performance and its (in)competence. Similarly, Iver B. Neumann defines practices as ‘socially recognized forms of activity, done on the basis of what members learn from others, and capable of being done well or badly, correctly or incorrectly’.Footnote ²² Janice Gross Stein’s argument is that standards of competency can changed for communities of practice, such as aid communities in her example, when new problems arise that challenge existing knowledge.Footnote ²³

But what then, of embodied performances that fail to meet these standards of competence in the first place? Are these irrelevant or simply not interesting enough to take seriously in International Relations theory? Or rather, as I suggest, are ‘unsuccessful’ or ‘incompetent’ practices being systematically marginalised and under-theorised? Feminist and queer theory has a distinctive contribution to make to theorising the stakes of success and failure in embodied practices. Butler’s work is crucially instructive, for it insists that the norms that constitute ‘success’ in a practice necessarily also constitute failure. Certain practices – certain bodies – are excluded from ontologically ‘mattering’ through the process of subject formation, though they haunt the subject by becoming its ‘constitutive outside’.Footnote ²⁴ Furthermore, feminist and queer work such as Butler’s helps us understand the practices that all individuals must undertake to be subjects are governed by gendered and heteronormative standards of competence. Butler writes: ‘[t]he normative force of performativity – its power to establish what qualifies as ‘being’ – works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in the case of bodies, those exclusions haunt signification as its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unliveable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic.’Footnote ²⁵ Here, the consequences of failure, or of being an incompetent practitioner of gender are made clear: one will fail to be intelligible as a human subject deserving of the same regard as more ‘competent’ actors. This is not so much a matter of a subject performing gender poorly, but of certain subjects not being recognised at all. One ‘exists not only by virtue of being recognized, but in a prior sense, by being recognizable’.Footnote ²⁶ For Butler, the question of failure is a question of ontology: the abject beings who fail to count as subject.Footnote ²⁷ This is not quite the same as a subject who is already recognised as such whose actions are deemed to be ‘out of place’ as in the example Raymond Duvall and Arjun Chowdhury give of Nikita Khrushchev famously banging his shoe at the United Nations.Footnote ²⁸ Neither is it the same as the ‘stigmatisation’ Rebecca Adler-Nissen describes using both Goffman and Bourdieu’s approaches to beliefs that certain people should be avoided as they are regarded as polluted, and as a mark of relative social position.Footnote ²⁹ It is failure to be recognised as a subject at all.

‘Failure’ is a theme for other queer theorists as well: Judith Halberstam and Lee EdelmanFootnote ³⁰ have separately argued that success in heteronormative, capitalist societies too easily equates with particular forms of reproductive maturity, consumption, and wealth accumulation. Queer theory has, in recent years, turned to theorising ‘failure’, something, as Halberstam quips, ‘queers do and have always done exceptionally well’.Footnote ³¹ Queer failure, as Cynthia Weber notes, is a figuration rather than a literal strategy; as such queer failure exposes ‘the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of knowledge’.Footnote ³² Failure here suggests the limits of ‘practice turn’ theorising in IR to take feminist/queer theory seriously and as such, a failure to think its own terms of competency and success. This article’s epigraph, which has served as an inspiration for Halberstam’s work, links failure to bodily ‘styles’ or practices and, given Crisp’s status as queer icon, gender and sexual deviance. Same-sex desire and trans- embodiment are both associated with failure, impossibility, and loss.Footnote ³³ This is, in Butler’s terms, not only a loss, but also a form of melancholia, the loss that cannot be grieved because it was never recognised as a loss in the first place.Footnote ³⁴ And yet, ‘failure’ to live up to norms of success that discipline behaviour can be a source of pleasure, and a way of resisting disciplinary norms. The practice turn as it is currently constituted in IR equates intelligibility with success and therefore ‘incompetent’ practices remain unintelligible. While successful practices of gender may appear to be natural under the domain of the heterosexual matrix, lives and bodies whose practices of gender do not conform to these norms risk failing into the realm of unintelligibility and even inhumanity in their failures.

What of the bodies that ‘fail’ to practice gender? Butler locates the possibility of change within the possibility of discourse’s failure; that it might be taken received or taken up in ways that are unpredictable (as in the title of her 1997 book Excitable Speech). As regulatory regimes are sustained by reiteration, making claims on behalf of abjected or ‘unintelligible’ bodies is part of a way to contest the cultural unintelligibility of certain bodies.Footnote ³⁵ Abjected bodies make themselves felt in culture particularly by contesting and reshaping the terms of cultural intelligibility. The politics of Butler’s theory of performativity is a ‘politics of insurrection’ as Lisa Disch argues.Footnote ³⁶ It is precisely certain incompetent practices that fail to property embody the norms of gender that can call attention to the indeterminate or unstable nature of certain taken-for-granted practices that appear to be natural or self-evident.

Drawing on James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State,Footnote ³⁷ Halberstam notes that unintelligibility – failing to be recognised by prevailing power structures – can be a source of political autonomy. Failure to be recognisable or classifiable can be a source of resisting the discipline and hegemonic discourses, as any number of anti-capitalist and subaltern movements can attest to.Footnote ³⁸ In literature associated with ‘the practice turn’, Friedrich Kratochwil’s mention of the potential subversion of technically competent practices may ironically be the closest example of this concept. Kratochwil notes that working ‘by the rule book’ can be an effective means of sabotage, as practices that are technically competent according to strict rules can nonetheless be practised with the intention of failure if ‘unwritten’ rules are not followed. Similarly, following ‘best practices’ can be an effective way of avoiding criticism even if the intended goal remains unachieved or the strategies deployed are counterproductive.Footnote ³⁹ These are both types of practices that complicate the relationship between competence and incompetence, success and failure speak to practices of gender embodied by some trans- and gender non-conforming people. However, before I elaborate on this last point, it is necessary to describe precisely what a feminist/queer perspective on embodied practices can contribute to the politics of success and failure in terms of the intelligibility of the subject.

II. Practices of gender

What is at stake in considering gender a practice, particularly a practice one can fail at? Feminist/queer theory provides us with conceptual tools that can both help us to better theorise the stakes of success and failure as well as to rethink the ways in which practices are conceptualised in IR more broadly. First, if gender is considered a practice, it is a practice in which the ‘participants’ are understood not as a select few who have been taught or initiated into a field of practice, such as diplomacy, but can be said to constitute all of humanity. The norms for gender differ across time, space, and social location, but it is a consistent feature of social life around the world and is also deeply connected to questions of embodiment. Butler’s famous concept of performativity describes the construction of identity as a practice. Butler writes, ‘[g]ender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Practice turn theorists similarly emphasise the body as the site through which practices are performed. Adler and Pouliot, for example, argue that practice is form of embodied action that ‘rests on background knowledge, which it embodies, enacts, and reifies all at once’.Footnote ⁴¹ Christian Bueger and Frank Gadinger insist that a core commitment of practice theorists is ‘bodies are the main carrier of practices’.Footnote ⁴² Gender as a ‘repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts’ certainly would appear to align Butler’s theory of gender with much of the work of the practice turn in its emphasis on habituated practices of the body. However, to understand the different dynamics between inside and outside that are (re)produced through practice between Butler’s theory and the way practice is generally theorised in IR requires greater explication of gender practice in terms of intelligibility and repetition.

Butler’s concept of performativity is regularly misread in two contradictory, yet telling, ways that are useful for explicating its uniqueness as well as its usefulness in practice theory. Butler’s performative theory of gender has frequently been critiqued as overly individualist and agentic by those who read her as if she is suggesting practising gender is no more difficult than changing clothes,Footnote ⁴³ while at the same time is also considered by others to be too structural and determinist. For Butler, the concept of performativity encompasses both the norms that structure intelligible genders as well as the bodily practices that enact gender in ways that are inseparable: ‘performativity describes both the processes of being acted on and the conditions and possibilities for acting and that we cannot understand its operation without both of these dimensions’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The concept of intelligibility is crucial for understanding how Butler’s work departs from an individualist or voluntarist frame. The performativity of gender in Butler’s work has always been situated within ‘a highly rigid regulatory frame’.Footnote ⁴⁵ ‘[Gender] is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint.’Footnote ⁴⁶ For Butler, what appears to be a self-authored practice of gender can only be practised in reference to social norms and meanings that have no single author. While practices of gender are diverse, Butler emphasises the role of intelligibility for denoting a gender practice as a success or failure, with the stakes being one’s ability to be recognised as a subject. ‘Gender … figures as a precondition for the production and maintenance of legible humanity.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Because one’s intelligibility as a subject requires a certain kind of performance, it is less a choice than a compulsory practice and citation of a norm.Footnote ⁴⁸

The terms of intelligibility, especially in Butler’s early work, are norms of sex and gender, particularly of heterosexuality. Norms of heterosexuality stabilise the apparent naturalness of sex, gender, and sexuality through a ‘grid of intelligibility’ that creates the limits of which ‘practitioners’ are to appear as proper ‘practitioners’, that is, subjects. Butler writes, ‘Intelligible genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire.’Footnote ⁴⁹ What Butler described as the ‘heterosexual matrix’ is premised on the belief that those designated males are supposed to act masculine and desire females, and those designated as females are supposed to act feminine and desire men. Any such ‘break’ between sexed embodiment, gender performance, and desire is foreclosed as non-normative and ‘unreal’. Certain ways of being cannot exist if gender doesn’t follow from sex or desire from sex or gender.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, practising gender in some relationship to these norms of sex and gender is unavoidable, because we do not create the normative context in which we find ourselves.

Gendering, for Butler, is a process of becoming a body that is signifiable to others. Norms of sex and gender matter, because they foreclose, often violently, the kinds of lives that are liveable. Butler refers to the violence of foreclosing possibilities for liveable lives as ‘normative violence’. ‘To the extent that gender norms … establish what will and will not be intelligibly human, what will and will not be considered to be “real”, they establish the ontological field in which bodies may be given legitimate expression’.Footnote ⁵¹ This is the key point at which Butler’s work can be read as not only about practices of gender and sexuality, but also, as she clarifies in her 1999 preface to Gender Trouble, as a political intervention aimed questioning the terms of liveability in a context in which so many lives have been deemed unreal, and, in the face of their violent demise, ungrieveable.Footnote ⁵² Butler argues that before a subject can lead a ‘liveable life’ they have to be recognised as viable subject. Norms of sex, gender, and sexuality define which bodies will be ‘culturally intelligible’; lives that do conform to these norms will be unrecognisable, illegitimate, and unreal; they will not ‘matter’. Butler makes the point that this critique does not only extend to norms of sex and gender, but to ‘all kinds of bodies whose lives are not considered to be “lives” and whose materiality is not understood to “matter”’.Footnote ⁵³

Thus, a key distinction between practice theory as it has been discussed in IR and Butler’s feminist theorisation of gender as a practice is that gender is not practised by a pre-given subject, rather, gender constitutes subjects. Butler asks, ‘to what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of gender?’Footnote ⁵⁴ The distinction between performance and performativity, for Butler, is that performances are actions undertaken by a pre-given subject, while the performative contests the notion of a subject outside of the practice itself. One becomes a subject through literally becoming embodied, that is, inhabiting a body that is recognisable according to some normative standards. Gender, for Butler is less about embodying a practice, than a practice of embodiment; that is, becoming a body that is recognisable.

Because of the role of gender in constituting subjects qua subjects, gender is a practice that is differentiated from much of the work of the practice turn in IR that focuses on limited groups or communities with specialised knowledge. The emphasis of many ‘practice turn’ works on the practices of diplomats and/or bureaucrats in international organisationsFootnote ⁵⁵ emphasises the relative autonomy of different ‘communities of practice’, as well as reinforcing existing definitions about the proper objects of IR theorising. Adler writes, ‘Membership in communities of practice also constitutes identity ‘through the forms of competence it entails’ where competence refers to practice performance’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Another example is Morten Skumsrud Andersen and Iver B. Neumann’s model of practices consists of ‘letting the participants in a practice specify what the practice consists of’Footnote ⁵⁷ including the use of the participant’s own concepts. The use of the term ‘participants’ here suggests that there are also non-participants in this particular practice. Gender is thus a different kind of practice: while there are certainly specific ‘communities of practice’ in which the norms for practices related to gender and sexuality differ, the practice of gender more generally is not confined to specific groups. Gender is a ‘constitutive constraint’ of being a subject, as ‘bodies only appear, only live within the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regularly schemas’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Whether or not one is recognisably practising a gender or not, for Butler, bodily life entails a relationship with norms, particularly norms of gender and sexuality.

While Butler’s theory of gender as performative emphasises the normative background that shapes what kinds of gender practices are intelligible, her concept of performativity also cannot be reduced to habituation or to a role that constrains action, a problem that haunts some practice theory in IR (especially that influenced by Bourdieu).Footnote ⁵⁹ For Butler, gender is something one becomes, but never fully is; as gender only exists through a repetition of acts, one can never fully or completely embody this norm. Here, we can also see echoes of Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Butler refers to gender as ‘a corporeal style’ and gendered bodies as ‘styles of the flesh’.Footnote ⁶¹ Bodies come to be intelligible through the embodying of norms, through literally ‘acting them out’ in the body through repetitive practices. Such a bodily style refers not to a single foundational act, but crucially, the repetition of such acts, and Butler also elides any distinction between the performativity of language and of bodily acts. Butler writes, ‘performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration.”Footnote ⁶²

The issue of repetition is so important to performativity because practices are not sovereign in their ability to create or reproduce meanings. This is why Roxanne Doty’s frequently cited point about the indeterminacy of the ‘play of practice’ is so crucial, yet so often misunderstood by practice theorists who cite it.Footnote ⁶³ In her piece that locates practices as key to agent/structure debates in IR, Doty insists upon the cultivation of ‘an appreciation of the intrinsically ambiguous and open-ended nature of practice’ and ‘eschew[ing] attempts to locate the source and meaning of practices in some determinable center, e.g. an unproblematically given subject or generative structural principles’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The indeterminacy of practices is not merely one of a list of disparate commitments that a flattened-out group of ‘practice theorists’ hold,Footnote ⁶⁵ nor is it at all clear this commitment is held by all or most self-identified practice theorists, especially given that this relates to the performativity of practices in the constitution of subjects, that there is ‘no doer before the deed’. However, this point is central to the very possibility of change, which has been a sticking point for practice theorists in IR, and a point of criticism for feminist scholars of Bourdieu as well.Footnote ⁶⁶ For Adler and Pouliot, while there may be some ‘wiggle room’ for agency, ‘the performance of practice goes with, and constitutes, the flow of history’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Neumann and Pouliot, Pouliot, and Schindler and Wille locate the possibility of change in hysteresis in which the habits and dispositions acquired in one habitus become ill-suited for the present conditions, as they are viewed by the actors themselves, denoting both a change in circumstances and/or a realisation of the limitations of particular practices.Footnote ⁶⁸

Butler’s concept of performativity has a distinctive approach to how change might be possible; a possibility itself related to failure. For Butler, drawing on Derrida, the possibility of subversion is embedded within language itself, and similarly, within the nature of meaning-making practices be they linguistic or otherwise bodily.Footnote ⁶⁹ It is precisely within the speech-act itself (and as Butler has been quite clear on, other performatives such as bodily actions) that possesses the potential for speech acts to fail and thus expose the indeterminacy, instability, and contingency of naturalised bodies.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is not precisely ‘patterned’ which implies a copy of an original or at least a great deal of regularity. This is similar to Duvall and Chowdhury’s argument that ‘the possibility of polysemy is a structural necessity of practice’, since practice always take place within multiple and differentiated systems of meaning.Footnote ⁷¹ Butler writes,

As there are many ways in which gender might be practised, the meaning of what a ‘competent’ practice entails is subject to revision and change.

The possibility of change exists because the body does not just ‘enact the past’, it is not simply the ‘sedimentation of speech acts by which it has been constituted’.Footnote ⁷³ The body is in excess to the social demands placed upon it. Butler locates this excess, the way the body ‘remains uncontained by any of its acts of speech’Footnote ⁷⁴ as what is missing from Bourdieu’s account of the bodily habitus. This is a key distinction between Butler’s work, and Bourdieu’s, who is more commonly cited as an influence among IR practice theorists, yet is recognised as quite structuralist, as his work mainly concerns the reproduction of social power through practices.Footnote ⁷⁵ Bodies, as the site of the performance of practices, ‘never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is compelled’.Footnote ⁷⁶ This is precisely what opens the door to what can be called ‘queer’ in the sense that acts that may seem to comply with norms can have unintended consequences.Footnote ⁷⁷ Butler writes, capturing the dual sense of performativity, that ‘although gender norms precede us and act upon us (that is one sense of their enactment), we are obligated to reproduce them, and when we do begin, always unwittingly, to reproduce them, something may always go awry (and this is a second sense of their enactment)’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The fact that practices never fully embody norms presents us with the possibility that norms may be practised and embodied with variation, rather than being fully reproduced.

This is closest to what Lene Hansen identifies as a poststructuralist approach to practices that seeks to build a project around the question of whether a specific practice (perhaps this is similar to what Butler means by ‘performance’) mobilises ‘general practices’, which are perhaps akin to the way in which Butler speaks of norms. This gap can be understood in terms broader than practices of gender: ‘Even uncontested specific “routine” practices are crucial to the reproduction of general practice and we should therefore keep the relationship between specific and general practice open and examine the (potential) gap between them.’Footnote ⁷⁹ This gap between the specific and general is particularly important when considered gender from an intersectional standpoint: not only is gender practice that can be ‘failed’ at, but it also is never practised in isolation of other embodied norms and practices.

Summarising Butler’s theory of gender performativity in relation to ‘the practice turn’ in IR provides us with several insights into theorising practices. First, practices of gender are unavoidable; everyone is practising gender in a way that will be intelligible or not according to prevailing norms of sex and gender. This is directly related to the second point; that gender practices are not only given meaning by prior norms, but serve to create the basis for intelligible ‘liveable lives’. The third point follows: gender only has meaning through its repeated practice, but it is not practised the same way in every instance. Gender as a practice is ‘queer’; that is, it is unstable, with gaps and tensions between individual performances and the broader norm. The very instability of gender requires its reiteration through practice: this also implies the creation of ‘constitutive others’: those whose gender practices are unintelligible who also hold open the possibility for subversion and change in ways in which gender practices can be made intelligible.

III. Trans- bodies as failures?

An example of bodies that ‘fail’ to be recognised as subjects in IR are trans- and gender non-conforming bodies within biometric practices of security at borders. I discuss the experiences of trans- and gender non-conforming bodies as bodies that not only demonstrate the stakes of ‘failure’ to practise gender, but also as potentially subversive bodies that demonstrate the instability of dichotomies between ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in the first place. In the last decade or so, many scholars of International Relations, political geography, and related fields have drawn attention to the politics of ‘biometric borders’Footnote ⁸⁰ and the ways in which technological assemblages are used to categorised different bodies at state borders as a means of governing mobility and practising security against terrorism.Footnote ⁸¹ In the contemporary post-September 11th security milieu, trans-, genderqueerFootnote ⁸² and people whose gender presentation fails to conform to expectations, may be considered ‘suspicious bodies’, their ‘failure’ resulting in risks to personal safety and ‘outing’ but may also be considered a source of resistance to the imperative of regimes of securitisation.Footnote ⁸³ As such, airport security practices become a crucial site for revealing the stakes of ‘competence’ in practising gender. Airport security practices order bodies according to a normative sex/gender regime that casts trans-, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming people as threats and unruly bodies. These practices for sorting out ‘safe’ from ‘risky’ or ‘suspicious’ bodies depend upon gender being practised according to certain standards of ‘competence’ in order for its practitioners to remain on the ‘safe’ side. If gender is a kind of bodily practice that creates the illusion of the naturalness of bodily practice, as Butler argues, we are only really made aware of the functioning of gender at the margins, or when gender fails: that is, fails to be convincing. As opposed to failure in many other human endeavours, failure to ‘do’ gender competently does not just make one ‘incompetent’ in some sense, but other or less than human. The violence that trans- and genderqueer people regularly suffer (as well as others who may be perceived to trans-, genderqueer, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or otherwise not conforming to the dictates of the ‘heterosexual matrix’) is a consequence of failing to ‘do’ gender competently. A US Department of Homeland Security memo connected gender presentations that did not ‘match’ one’s bodily morphology based on heteronormative assumptions: “Terrorists will employ novel methods to artfully conceal suicide devices. Male bombers may dress as females in order to discourage scrutiny.’Footnote ⁸⁴ Airport security assemblages are a site at which a ‘competent’ gender performance renders one as ‘safe’ and an illegible or ‘incompetent’ gender performance can lead to the perception of one as a threat and thus subject to harassment, humiliation, and detention.

To understand how success and competence are calibrated requires an understanding of what a ‘successful’ gender practice entails vis-à-vis airport security practices, in particular the identification requirements. These state practices of requiring different forms of identification can be said to be a kind of sovereign statecraft, particularly as a way of practising security through securing the documentary gender, gender presentation, and sexed embodiment of the traveller to fit the dictates of the ‘heterosexual matrix’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet, as Doty reminded us, practices are not sovereign at securing meanings; they are structurally indeterminate, and contain excesses or surpluses.Footnote ⁸⁶ Practices of state sovereignty that attempt to secure air travel from terrorism by securing the gender of passengers are not, despite state’s efforts, wholly successful at producing subjects whose practices of gender align with these norms, due largely to the multiple different practices of determining ‘gender’ that are not always aligned in real-world practices of gender. For one example, trans- and gender non-conforming people often do not identify or are not necessarily perceived to be the same gender as the gender markers on their official identification documents. Yet, travelling, particularly across international borders, requires identity documentation that almost always involves a gender marker. Procedures for changing the gender marker on one’s identity documents vary around the world and are non-existent in some places. The US passed the REAL ID law in 2005 that enabled comparing identification data across agencies and jurisdictions in an effort to weed out invalid IDs or those obtained under false pretenses, which has led to considerable problems for trans- people whose official identification documents are likely to be in more than one gender, say on a passport, birth certificate, or driver’s license.Footnote ⁸⁷ Security agents also use gender markers to check the identity of the passenger being inspected. The inclusion of ‘M’ and ‘F’ as information about a passenger assumes that this is a permanent feature of the body, as well as that there is an uncomplicated relationship between the sex one is assigned at birth, one’s gender identity, how one’s gender is perceived by others, and the gender classification on identity documents.Footnote ⁸⁸ All these elements combine to establish what a ‘competent’ practice of gender entails.Footnote ⁸⁹ One’s ability to travel, particularly across borders, requires ‘match’ between one’s gender presentation and the sex on one’s official documents, which is by no means an easy or uncomplicated process. The bureaucratic procedures to change one’s gender marker can be quite complex, expensive, and even impossible, as different jurisdictions and state agencies often have different procedures or requirements. Trans- people are usually required to have surgical interventions or medical treatment of some kind and to be certified by a doctor in order to change their gender marker on official documents.Footnote ⁹⁰

In addition to the identification document requirements for travel, the ability to move across borders increasingly requires being subject to biometric technologies are that are not only aimed at ‘securing’ borders but also are also political technologies that draw distinctions between friend/enemyFootnote ⁹¹ or draw boundaries between the recognisable from the unrecognisable.Footnote ⁹² The use of biometric screening practices is another practice that effectively ‘screens’ for one’s competent practice of gender according to a norm of alignment between gender presentation and bodily morphology. One must present one’s body at the border, at which points parts of the body or visualisation or data from the body are made to stand in for whole of an identity, whether from photographs on a passport, to fingerprints and iris scanners.Footnote ⁹³ Such technologies often screen trans- and gender non-conforming people as ‘anomalous’ or ‘suspicious’, reinforcing the unintelligibility of gender practices outside of a ‘heterosexual matrix’. Biometrics technologies rely upon human programming of attributes: what counts as ‘normal’ embodiment is inscribed in devices, algorithms, and the practices that surround their use.Footnote ⁹⁴ Of particular interest is the use of ‘full-body’ scanners, used throughout airports in the US as well as in the UK, Australia, Thailand, Canada, Europe and Japan, among other places. While the algorithms used in biometric technologies such as facial recognition are proprietary, the underlying science uses human perceptions of the racial/gender identities of persons to teach computers about differences, including the use of such traits as hairstyle and clothing to indicate gender.Footnote ⁹⁵ The full-body scanners used to produce images of the human body, akin to a hospital x-ray, that was screened by trained personnel in a separate room from the space where travellers were screened. Following controversy over the explicit nature of the images produced and privacy concerns, software known as ‘ProVision ATD’ (for ‘automatic threat detection’) was developed to ‘read’ the images for signs of anomaly, presenting to the human security agents an image of the outline of an un-sexed human form. However, the practice of screening individuals relies upon a security agent pressing a pink or a blue button, signifying whether they believe the person about to be screened presents as a woman or a man. This indicates that the software is set to define bodily anomalies differently for men and women based on pre-programmed parameters for bodily morphology that assumes a coherence between the gender a person is perceived as and how the software algorithm will interpret an image of their body as belonging to either a man or a woman.

The combination of state-agency-regulated gender markers on identification documents and ‘body scanners’ present well-documented difficulties for trans- and gender non-conforming people, showing the stakes of practising gender ‘incompetently’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Cary Gabriel Costello, for example, has written about his repeated detentions, invasive searches, and missed flights despite assurances of the US Transport Security Administration that their procedures are trans- friendly. He has been singled out on the basis of ‘anomalies’ that appear on scanners due to his wearing a chest binder.Footnote ⁹⁷ Writer Shadi Petosky, a trans-woman, live-tweeted her harassment and detention when she was flagged for an ‘anomaly’ in the body scanners, even after she explained she was transgender. ‘I’m in trouble if they push a button that doesn’t fit.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Furthermore, competently practising gender in airports also has a racialised component: black women are subjected to higher level security screenings at nine times the rate of white women, despite being half as likely to be caught with contraband, while women with ‘natural’ or ‘Afro’ style hair are frequently subjected to having their hair ‘patted down’ despite not having set off any alarms or displaying any other signs of ‘suspiciousness’ in US airport security screening procedures.Footnote ⁹⁹ The competent practice of gender in airport security practices therefore also means conforming to ideals of whiteness, class privilege, and heterosexuality.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The experiences of trans- and gender-nonconforming people in airport security practices show the perils of theorising practices in terms of ‘competence’. If we only recognised ‘competent’ practices, we are only recognising those who are already intelligible, already considered competent actors. We are looking only at the general version of ‘trusted travellers’Footnote ¹⁰¹ in International Relations or at least those who are deemed ‘competent’ actors at the expense of reifying existing relations of exclusion and marginality of which normative gender embodiment is only one. The ‘mismatch’ between embodiment and gender presentation presents a form of failure in airport security practices, one that demonstrates possible consequences of incompetent practices: being branded as a threat, harassment, humiliation and detention. If, in terms of IR theory, we only consider practices to be constitutively competent, we erase and in fact make unintelligible a multitude of practices defined as incompetent, practices that may turn out to be quite subversive.

As a final point about the stakes of competence in terms of gender practices, even the subject of ‘trans-’ can be complicated as matter of success or failure in light of queer theory and queer gender practices. ‘Trans-’ can itself become a category with its own standard of success and failure. As Meghana Nayak notes in relation to US asylum law, there is an expectation that trans- people are either anatomically male with a stereotypical female identity and gender expression in terms of behaviour, appearance, and dress, or they are anatomically female with stereotypically male identity and gender expression.Footnote ¹⁰² Similar arguments have also been made about Turkish and British asylum law.Footnote ¹⁰³ A gender performance of a self-identified trans- person that is ‘competent’ according to the gender regulations of the state and the heterosexual matrix (a person whose gender marker has been legally changed, who has had medical and surgical interventions, and whose bodily performances are regularly ‘read’ as those of a particular sex/gender) would in all likelihood be considered normatively gendered rather than ambiguous or trans-, regardless of how he or she identifies, and therefore such a person may be considered a ‘trusted traveller’. Such trans- people include those considered to ‘pass’ as members of the gender they identify with. The US-based National Transgender Advocacy Coalition advocates a strategy Toby Beauchamp has labelled ‘strategic visibility’, which includes carrying paperwork, documenting one’s surgeries, and disclosing to security agents one’s status as trans-.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The category of trans- in this situation serves as a regulatory category, a status that one must conform to in order to access certain rights and services. Failure to be a ‘good trans-’ subject, as most trans- and genderqueer people ‘fail’ to be (most people who identify as trans- do not pursue surgical modifications) results in becoming aligned with terrorists and other suspicious or monstrous bodies. Not all people who identify as trans- or genderqueer may be as much of a ‘failure’ according to these gender norms as others. As Beauchamp notes, ‘The dangerously mobile body may well be not that which abides by medicolegal regulations [of trans- subjects] but that which exceeds or eludes them.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Some ‘trans-’ bodies may thus be more ‘successful’ at practising gender according to state and societal dictates of competence than others.

The development of trans- as potentially a regulatory category of which one can measure success or failure at is not only a matter of controversy within trans- communities,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ but speaks to broader questions of queer theory’s place in International Relations. Eve Kosofky Sedgwick influentially suggested that the designation ‘queer’ could apply to ‘[t]he … excesses of meaning when the constituent element of anyone’s gender, or anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Moving from a singular ‘either/or’ to a multiple ‘and/or’ frame can help us understand the pluralities of sex, gender and sexuality that can be described as ‘queer’. Rather than being either a man or a woman, or, I might add, a success or a failure, in a binary way, one can be read as man and a woman in terms of different categorisations of documents, the ways one is read by others, one’s self-identity, how one’s body is interpreted by technological algorithms, and more, as well as being either/or a man or a woman at the same time. For Weber, the plural ‘and/or’ framework ‘can require us to appreciate how a person or a thing is constituted by and simultaneously embodies multiple, seemingly contradictory meanings that may confuse and confound a simple either/or dichotomy’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Furthermore, while Weber’s more recent workFootnote ¹⁰⁹ focuses on Barthes’s ‘and/or’ theorisation of indeterminacy and multiplicity of sex and gender, Weber’s earlier work also relies on Barthes’s ‘neither/nor’ figuration of the neuter, which is symbolically neither male nor female, in which any perceived gender or sexuality is a mask for plurality and undecidability.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The figure of the neuter is unclassifiable under binary schemes and is therefore excluded from schemes of intelligibility in the way that trans- and gender non-conforming people are often excluded from being ‘trusted travellers’ and from the terms of ‘intelligible life’ more broadly. However, to be in this space of ‘neither/nor’ is to reveal that it is not only trans- and gender non-conforming people who are, at some level, ‘failing’ at gender. Rather, it demonstrates that practices of gender always, at some level, ‘fail’ in that they fail to be fully determinative of gendered subjects.

Depending on the combination of one’s gender identity, sexual orientation, gender presentation, gender markers on various documents, and bodily morphology, in the airport security practices, trans- and gender non-conforming people may be read as men or women, or as both men and women. They might also be read as neither men nor women; as the embodiment of the refusal or the impossibility to ‘signify monolithically’ in terms of gender. Certain trans- practices of embodiment could be considered, on one hand, either a success or a failure: their gender could be seen as an ‘incompetent’ practice of gender that marked them as a security threat, even if they are ‘competently’ practising ‘trans-’ embodiment in terms of making themselves ‘strategically visible’, that is, identifying themselves as trans- to security personnel, and carrying doctor’s notes about surgical procedures or hormone treatments. According to the practices of airport security, being a trans-, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming person can mean embodying gender/sexuality in a way that is successful (as in one conforming to normative standards around embodying ‘trans-’) or a failure (one’s embodiment confounds the gender norms of security personnel and ‘body scanners’, leading one to be treated as a terrorist threat) but could also be read as both a success and a failure: a failure to practise racialised, heteronormative gender norms, but possibly contributing to the successful exposure and undermining of those very norms that govern the intelligibility of bodies. The existence of ‘trans-’ as a category, embodied by trans- people demanding their own intelligibility as subjects, thus brings with it the possibilities for disturbing assumptions about what it means to practise gender apart from the heteronormative norms of sex, gender, and desire contained within strictly ‘competent’ practices of gender. Sandy Stone articulates this sense of trans- embodiment as disruptive or subversive of dominant norms of what it means to practise gender, in an essay considered to be a foundational work of transgender studies. Stone draws upon Butler’s work to articulate the genre of the transsexual (not necessarily any individual person) as possessing ‘a potential for the productive disruption of structures of sexuality and spectra of desire [that] has yet to be explored’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Feminist/queer approaches to practising gender thus highlight the inherent potentiality of change and subversion within embodied practices. Queer approaches in particular highlight the interderminacy of gender as a practice; here, the coherence of the distinction between success and failure could itself be undermined in practices that fail to be either wholly ‘successes’ or ‘failures’ according to the normative standards for gendered embodiment.