The Everyday Production of Diplomatic Subjectivities

Abstract This article interrogates how diplomats produce diplomatic subjectivities in the German Federal Foreign Office and how this is gendered, raced and classed. It enriches an understanding of diplomatic subjectivities as unstable and plural subject positions (Towns 2022) by examining German diplomats’ everyday practices. Through an institutional ethnography (Smith 2005), it traces material and discursive factors that shape how German diplomats continually contest and reproduce diplomatic subjectivities. This makes it possible to account for the ways in which diplomatic subjectivities are not only gendered but raced and classed. While a relatively stable ruling diplomatic subjectivity emerges – the diplomat as a white man in a heteronormative relationship, who is a generalist and elite because he is the best at what he does – this subjectivity is contested, and its embodiment is fraught and complex.