| Sumario: | This article harnesses a queer lens to explore the intimate and relational infrastructure of French members of Islamic State (IS) through first-hand interviews conducted in France. It calls for an empirically grounded queer scholarship in International Relations that challenges heteronormative framings of armed actors, demonstrating the potential of queer theory to study non-sexual orientation and gender identity-diverse populations. Against the drawbacks of the literature on masculinities and femininities in jihadist groups, as well as the scholarship on bonding and brotherhood in this milieu, the article draws from four years of online ethnography and extensive life-story interviews with nine French men and women who had pledged allegiance to IS in the previous ten years, to introduce two queer-inspired concepts: chosen family and queer friendships. This queer framework offers a novel understanding of jihadist intimacy and community-making, in the context of working with subjects who do not self-identify as LGBTQ+. The article reveals how intimate bonds serve as sites of solidarity-making, personal agency towards healing and caretaking at the margins, entangled with and challenging heteronormative understandings of gender and bonds in jihadist militancy. The article foregrounds seeing voluntary ties in armed groups as spaces of fluid and affective gender roles that align with as well as challenge traditional understandings of gender and armed conflict, interrogating how war can emerge from peoples' attempts to live and love well.
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