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ABOUT

Dr. Alexander Stoffel is a Lecturer in International Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. He was previously a Fellow in Qualitative Methodology at the London School of Economics and holds degrees from the University of Oxford (BA History and Politics, 2014-17), the London School of Economics (MSc International Relations Theory, 2017-18), and Queen Mary University of London (PhD Political Science, 2019-23). His research takes up critical questions regarding the intersections of sexuality, race, and desire within capitalist expansion. He has published in, among other journals, International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, and Salvage and is an editor of the journal Historical Materialism, where he co-convenes the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Struggles Stream.

His first monograph, Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States (SUP 2025), reconsiders US-based struggles for sexual freedom since the 1960s, centering their transnational relations, practices, and infrastructures, and derives from this history new perspectives on contemporary debates about queerness, capital accumulation, and empire.

BOOK

The history of queer politics in the United States since 1968 is commonly narrated as either a progressive campaign for state recognition or as a subcultural rejection of prevailing gender norms. But these accounts miss the true scale of queer politics in the post-war era. By centering transnational relations, practices, and infrastructures in the history of sexual rebellion, Eros and Empire provides an alternative view of US-based struggles for sexual freedom.

Alexander Stoffel analyzes three prominent US-based social movements—gay liberationism, Black lesbian feminism, and AIDS activism—to argue that they were fundamentally shaped by their transnational entanglements. Departing from popular domestic framings of these movements, Stoffel recasts the history of radical queer thought and action as a project of erotic worldmaking. This project mobilized queer affects of pleasure, desire, and eroticism in the fight for revolutionary transformation on a world scale. The transnational perceptions, activities, and consciousness of queer radicals, Stoffel argues, not only conditioned the trajectory of queer history, but also radicalized wider anti-imperialist, socialist, and abolitionist struggles past and present.

In this ambitious and interdisciplinary work, Stoffel reconsiders the United States' revolutionary sexual past and creates new opportunities for the study of sexual formations in relation to questions of capital accumulation, empire, and resistance.

Praise

"Through rich historical detail and theoretical sophistication, this book shows how queer struggles have engaged the question of the national and the transnational as a major site of disagreement, contestation, and emergence. Attending to the histories of gay liberation, black lesbian feminism, and HIV/AIDS activism, Stoffel argues that we cannot fully appreciate those movements without understanding their deep engagements with radical internationalism. The argument is one that should never be retired."

—Roderick Ferguson, Yale University

"In this groundbreaking book Stoffel illuminates how the erotic worldmaking of radical sexual politics in the United States was shaped by successive regimes of capitalist accumulation. By scaling up the concerns of queer Marxism to the level of the transnational while also offering a social history of queer theory, Eros and Empire revolutionizes our understanding of the relationship between the intimate and the imperial."

—Rahul Rao, University of St. Andrew's

"Stoffel reveals the dynamic interplay of Marxism and erotic worldmaking in queer thought, offering insight into movement contexts from gay liberation through AIDS activism. This is an important contribution to queer and trans studies, political theory, and United States and transnational history that will inspire readers to imagine new ways of changing the world."

—Emily Hobson, University of Nevada, Reno



"Eros and Empire situates the erotic worldmaking of American gay liberationists, Black lesbians, and AIDS activists beyond the nation-state frame, toward a critical engagement with post-war capitalism and American empire as both conditions of possibility and sites of struggle. Stoffel's work reorients queer theory and LGBTQ+ studies toward a transnational scale to build political projects on the radical possibilities of the 'ungovernability of desire'."

—Lauren B. Wilcox, University of Cambridge

Reviews

  • Colin Wilson. 2025. “Review | Eros and Empire.” rs21, 30 April.

SELECTED WRITING

Book

  • ​Stoffel, Alexander. 2025. Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States. Stanford University Press.

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Journal articles

  • Stoffel, Alexander and Ida Roland Birkvad. 2023. “Abstractions in International Relations: On the Mystification of Trans, Queer, and Subaltern Life in Critical Knowledge Production.” European Journal of International Relations 29 (4), 852-876.

  • Stoffel, Alexander. 2022. “The Dialectic of the International: Elaborating the Historical Materialism of the Gay Liberationists.” International Studies Quarterly 66 (3), 0-12.

  • Stoffel, Alexander. 2021. “‘Homocapitalism’: Analytical Precursors and Future Directions.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 23 (1), 173-178.

  • Stoffel, Alexander. 2018. “The Challenge of Unintelligible Life: Critical Security Studies’ Failure to Account for Violence Against Queer People.” Politikon: The IAPSS Journal of Political Science 38, 48-63.

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Book chapters

  • ​(Forthcoming) Stoffel, Alexander. "Materialist Analyses of Sexuality." In: The SAGE Handbook of LGBTQ Studies. Sage Publications.

  • ​Audrey, Alejandro and Alexander Stoffel. 2024. “Reflexivity for Qualitative Research Quality and the Quality of Reflexivity.” In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Quality, edited by Uwe Flick. Sage Publications, 331-345.

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Other writing

  • ​Stoffel, Alexander. 2025. “Empire Unmasked: Struggles for Gender and Sexual Freedom in an Era of US Imperial Decline.” Historical Materialism Online, 25 March.

  • ​Stoffel, Alexander. 2024. “What's Left of the Bourgeois Family? On Family Abolition.” rs21, 22 December.

  • ​Stoffel, Alexander. 2024. “Seductions of the Nation-State: On Anti-Trans Feminism and Other Sexual Nationalisms.” Salvage, Issue 14 (Spring/Summer), 139-149.

  • ​Stoffel, Alexander and Ida Roland Birkvad. 2023. “Against Mystification, or What Went Wrong with Critical IR.” E-International Relations, 25 August.

  • ​​Stoffel, Alexander. 2018. “International Relations Theory Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be… Better.” E-International Relations, 31 July.

INVITED SPEAKING

​Public talks

  • “Queer, Trans, and Intersex Liberation History” (with Juliana Gleeson)

    Historical Materialism, YouTube Live, May 2025

  • “Infrastructures of Erotic Worldmaking”
    Infrastructure Humanities Group, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, May 2025

  • Book launch event (with Ayça Çubukçu, Nivi Manchanda, and Abeera Khan)
    Queen Mary University, London, March 2025

  • “Queer Marxism: The Making of the Queer Radical Tradition?”

    Columbia University, NYC, March 2025

  • “Transnational Struggle and the Bourgeois State Form”
    Sex and the State, London, March 2024

  • “Who's our Enemy: Antagonism, Normativity, and Radicality in Queer Theory”
    Beyond Radical: Queer Theory and the UK, Brighton, October 2023

  • “Queer Worldmaking”
    Sexuality and Political Economy Network (Historical Materialism), March 2023

  • “Queer New Times”
    Liberation Conference, Warwick University Student Union, February 2023

  • “Politicizing Eros: Queerness, Pleasure, and the Modern Capitalist State”
    Eross Public Webinar Series, Dublin City University, September 2022

  • “The Dialectic of the International: Elaborating the Historical Materialism of the Gay Liberationists”
    Queer Space Research Forum, University College London, February 2021

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Podcast appearances

  • “Eros and Empire: A Marxist Theory of Desire, Queer Liberation, and the Limits of the Nation”
    Acid     Horizon, May 2025

  • “Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States”

    New Books Network, April 2025

  • “Questioning Ideas of Criticality”

    Politics and Pedagogy, November 2023

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Guest lectures

  • “Black Feminist Worldmaking: Difference, the Erotic, and the Question of Empire”
    University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, October 2023

  • “Queer Theory, Gender Diversity, and International Politics”
    Gender/ed/ing International Politics, LSE, March 2023

  • “The Roots of Global Inequality”
    Sciences Po Le Havre, February 2021

  • “G for Gender”
    Sciences Po Le Havre, November 2020

  • “Queer (International Relations) Theory”
    University of Brasilia, May 2019

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Workshops

  • “A Marxist Theory of Sexuality and Desire”
    Queer Materialism Winter Symposium, Oslo, February 2025

  • “Anti-imperial Feminist Architectures of Resistance”
    BISA CPD Workshop, University of Westminster, December 2024

  • “Postcolonial Historical Methods”
    University of Sheffield, May 2024

  • “The Fundamentals of Dissertation Writing”
    University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, October 2023

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Roundtables​​

  • “Why Critiques of Gay Imperialism Still Matter”
    TORCH: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, University of Oxford, Oxford, May 2025

  • “Provincializing Cisness: Transnational Scholars on the Diversity of Sex/Gender Systems”
    New York University, NYC, March 2025

  • “Queering/Querying International Political Economy”
    ISA Annual Convention, Chicago, March 2025

  • “Naked Empire: Learning, Imagining, and Struggling for Different Futures”
    ISA Annual Convention, Chicago, March 2025

  • “What’s the Point of Queer Theory? Critical Reflections on the Homonormative Turn in Queer IR”
    ISA Annual Convention, Chicago, March 2025

  • “Dialogues between International Political Economy and Postcolonial Theory”
    European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy, Bilbao, September 2024

  • “Whose Queer Political Economy? Conversations Within and Beyond IPE”
    BISA Annual Conference, Birmingham, June 2024

  • “The Global Politics of Barbie”
    Global Politics Unbound, London March 2024

  • “Queer IR in a Smaller World: Politicizing Economies of Desire”
    ISA Annual Convention, Nashville, March 2022​​

TEACHING

Queen Mary University​

  • POL3003 Gender, Sexuality and Capitalism (third-year undergraduate) -- Convenor

  • POL271 Qualitative Methods for Social Science Research (second-year undergraduate) -- Convenor

  • POL274 Gender and Feminisms in World Politics (second-year undergraduate) -- Lecturer

  • POLM017 Dissertation (postgraduate)

  • POL318 Dissertation (third-year undergraduate)

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  • POL336 Race and Anti-Racism in World Politics (third-year undergraduate)

  • POL251 International Relations Theory (second-year undergraduate)

  • POL255 Colonialism, Capitalism, and Development (second-year undergraduate)

  • POL106 Introduction to International Relations (first-year undergraduate)

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LSE

  • MY499 Dissertation in Social Research Methods (postgraduate)

  • MY428 Qualitative Text and Discourse Analysis (postgraduate)

  • MY4IR Research Design for International Relations (postgraduate)​

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Sciences Po Paris

  • Critical International Relations Theories (third-year undergraduate)