jats:titleAbstract</jats:title>jats:pThis paper deploys queer theory as a way of approaching South–South Cooperation (SSC). It examines the ways in which Southern development partners are not simply up‐ending the long‐standing spatialities, imaginaries and identities (re)produced through the mainstream international development regime, but queering terminologies and definitions, while presenting themselves in fluid ways, enrolling different identities and attributes in different places and to different audiences. At the same time, a queer lens reveals the (re)inscription of gendered, sexualised and racialised identities and hierarchies through the relationships, intimacies and practices of SSC. The paper proposes that queer theory can offer productive insights into the complex and compelling phenomenon of SSC, and the transgressive challenges to the postcolonial hierarchies and binaries of “traditional” international development.</jats:p>