BUZZ
Urges political scientists to ‘queer’ their discipline by ‘undoing the cisheteronormative assumptions’
The University of Oxford Department of Politics & International Relations “rounded off” its celebration of LGBTQ+ History Month (February in the U.K.) by interviewing Aylon Cohen, a “departmental lecturer in feminist political theory who’s also written on “queer-feminist theory,” “affect studies,” and “non-human political theory.”
Cohen said he’s currently at work on two “interrelated projects,” one involving “how the criminalization of sodomy and the policing of men’s bodily relations shaped the emergence of fraternity as an political ideal of equality,” and the other on how alleged authoritarian governments “mobilize gender and sexuality as strategies to consolidate power.”
Cohen, who uses “they/them” pronouns, said President Donald Trump’s only-two-sexes executive order parallels Vladimir Putin declaring LGBTQ+ movements “extremist organizations,” and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán prohibiting lessons in “gender studies.”
Such ties into Cohen’s July 2025 article “Grooming Authoritarianism: Anti-Trans/Queer Panic as Pedagogy for Democratic Decline,” the summary of which claims measures such as Trump’s are “integral to the ascendance of authoritarian politics […] under the guise of child protection and moral order.”
Cohen and co-author Sam Galloway want political scientists to “‘queer’ political science by undoing the cisheteronormative assumptions that structure the discipline’s epistemology, research agendas, and normative imaginaries.”
My work builds directly on LGBTQ+ history and draws on its archival discoveries and insights to contribute to the nascent field of queer political theory. I am indebted to the work of historians, especially early gay and lesbian scholars who often worked outside the university, and whose recovery of early modern sexual worlds made it possible to see sex, sodomy, and erotic desire as public and political categories. For instance, my research draws on this historical work to develop an interpretive method that could be called queer intellectual history by rereading canonical texts of seventeenth and eighteenth century political thought through the histories of sex and sexual desire that have always underwritten them.
Regarding his current projects, Cohen said that “taken together, it could be said that these projects map the rise and the current fall of liberal democracy.”
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