A Queer Eye for Capitalism

A Queer Eye for Capitalism
Author: Yarma Velázquez Vargas
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2010-06-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443823015
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This study uses critical discourse analysis to conduct an examination of the reality television program Queer Eye. The goal is to help understand the manner in which the representations of queer culture in the show reinforce the binaries of sex, gender and sexuality. By investigating the evolution of Queer Eye this study provides insights into American popular culture’s understanding and depiction of sexual difference and evidences the strong link between these representations and the commercial interests of the producers. In the show Queer Eye, the male guests sell access to their lives for a makeover and in the process they are indoctrinated into new patterns of consumption. The identity of both the five main characters and the guest character is represented as a reflection of their aesthetic choices, and audiences are exposed to numerous product placements and advertising messages. In encouraging materialism, the show transforms the term queer into a commodity sign and redefines masculinity as represented through wealth and accumulation. Moreover, consistent with the stereotypical representation of gay males in American culture the queerness of the Fab is depicted as asexual and a form of aestheticism.

Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism

Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism
Author: Peter Drucker
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2015-02-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9004288112
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Recent victories for LGBT rights, especially the spread of same-sex marriage, have gone faster than most people imagined possible. Yet the accompanying rise of gay 'normality' has been disconcerting for activists with radical sympathies. Global in scope and drawing on a wide range of feminist, anti-racist and queer scholarship and analysis, Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism shows how the successive 'same-sex formations' of the past century and a half, corresponding to different phases of capitalist development, have led both to the emergence of today's 'homonormativity' and 'homonationalism' and to ongoing queer resistance. The book's second half summarises different sexual rebellions and the queer dimension of multifarious movements for social justice and transformation, seeing in them harbingers of a unified and powerful queer anti-capitalism.

Homo Economics

Homo Economics
Author: Amy Gluckman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136045104
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Homo Economics is the first honest account of the tense relationship between gay people and the economy. This groundbreaking collection brings together a variety of voices from the worlds of journalism, activism, academia, the arts, and public policy to address issues including the recent economic history of the gay community, the community's response to its changing economic circumstances, and the risks inherent in a narrow definition of liberation.

Capitalisms and Gay Identities

Capitalisms and Gay Identities
Author: Stephen Valocchi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2019-09-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351036610
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In this important text, Stephen Valocchi brings capitalism back into the study of the gay and lesbian movement. He argues that to understand the collective identity, structure, strategies and goals of the movement, we need to understand the role that capitalism and the state have played. While capitalism and the state have figured centrally in earlier analyses of social movements, these important institutions and their social processes are no longer central concerns of the theory and research of social movements in the United States. Capitalisms and Gay Identities examines how the class-based inequalities and changing class structures of capitalism interact with and indeed help shape the dynamics of other types of inequalities, such as gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. These inequalities and structures, in turn, shape the specific grievances of, and affect the nature of, stigma levied against individuals with sexual and gender nonconformity. Valocchi shows that capitalism is a dynamic system, and as it changes, the nature of the movement and the collective identity created by the movement also changes. A vital text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, social movements, LGBTQ politics and American studies, Capitalisms and Gay Identities challenges our understanding of many aspects of the gay and lesbian movement when viewed through the lens of capitalism, particularly its ability to advance the cause of sexual freedom and gender justice.

The Work of Queer

The Work of Queer
Author: Melanie A. Maltry
Publisher:
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2006
Genre: Queer theory
ISBN:
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Abstract: Drawing from visual cultural texts produced in the 1 990s and beyond, this project aims to make explicit the relationships between contemporary queer theorizing and political practice--especially as it relates to spatial conceptualizations of subjectivity--and the racialized logics of late capitalism. Investigating both the 1996 film Bound (Wachowski Brothers) and its treatment in scholarship, I illuminate the ways in which in which the methodology of queer theory isolates sexuality from important material and cultural networks. Mobilizing both a racially informed psychoanalytic theory and materialist analysis, I suggest that the performative status of white, upper-class queer sexuality relies upon the invisibilized labor and interiorization of working-class, racially coded subjectivity. Challenging the film's scholarly narration as subversive, I instead suggest that it promotes a neoliberal discourse invisibilizing racialized labor and celebrating consumption in a mode that buttresses whiteness. Situating the exteriorized subjectivity that queer theory celebrates within late capitalist logics and operations, I cite the 2003 television program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to interrogate the queer theoretical assertion that exteriorization is necessarily politically disruptive in its destabilizing capacities. In an economic context in which the polyvalence of sexualities has diminished (though certainly not entirely done away with) the moral regulations of nonheteronormativity, queer sexuality is put to use to animate consumption and promote whiteness while reifying heterosexuality. Finally, through an analysis of the 1994 film Fresh Kill (Shu Lea Cheang), I explore models of sexual and racial representation which, while invested in a politics of exteriorization, more fully account for its relationships to the conditions of production and consumption. By rendering legible the networked relations between the flows of transnational capitalism, the subjectivities it produces, and the labor that sustains it, I illuminate the ways in which emergent communications technologies offer possibilities for relinking struggles.

Global Justice and Desire

Global Justice and Desire
Author: Nikita Dhawan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2015-05-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 113466124X
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Employing feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives, Global Justice and Desire addresses economy as a key ingredient in the dynamic interplay between modes of subjectivity, signification and governance. Bringing together a range of international contributors, the book proposes that both analyzing justice through the lens of desire, and considering desire through the lens of justice, are vital for exploring economic processes. A variety of approaches for capturing the complex and dynamic interplay of justice and desire in socioeconomic processes are taken up. But, acknowledging a complexity of forces and relations of power, domination, and violence – sometimes cohering and sometimes contradictory – it is the relationship between hierarchical gender arrangements, relations of exploitation, and their colonial histories that is stressed. Therefore, queer, feminist, and postcolonial perspectives intersect as Global Justice and Desire explores their capacity to contribute to more just, and more desirable, economies.

Queer Studies and the Crises of Capitalism

Queer Studies and the Crises of Capitalism
Author: Jordana Rosenberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2011-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780822367574
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Extending the recent rapprochement among queer studies, Marxist theory, and political economics, this timely issue responds to the current crisis of capitalism. Contributors consider how methodologies of queer studies are specially poised to reveal the global, historical, and social dimensions of capitalist economic relations. Using queer hermeneutical tools in combination with globalization studies, secularization studies, and queer-of-color critique, contributors examine global economic history and the ideological collusion of capitalist production and biological reproduction. With a special emphasis on the regulation and policing of sexuality, the issue explores the assertion that capitalism is only made possible by systems of racial, sexual, and national exploitation, and recuperation from periods of crisis depends on the increasingly violent reassertion of those forms of exploitation. Queer studies has, from the outset, engaged vigorously with the question of how cultures metabolize social and economic developments. Several contributors explore the shared queer and Marxist fascination with concepts of utopia and their mutual reliance on theories of totality with respect to the intersecting forces of sexuality, desire, and economic value. Providing an expansive theoretical perspective on current and historical economic patterns, the queer methodologies at work in this collection illuminate and advance our understanding of the complex structures of global capitalism. Jordana Rosenberg is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Amy Villarejo is Professor in the Department of Theater, Film, and Dance at Cornell University. She is the author of Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire, also published by Duke University Press. Contributors: Lisa Marie Cacho, Christina Crosby, Lisa Duggan, Roderick Ferguson, Kevin Floyd, Carla Freccero, Grace Hong, Janet Jakobsen, Heather Love, Robert McRuer, Fred Moten, Tavia Nyong'o, Jasbir Puar, Lisa Rofel, Jordana Rosenberg, Gayle Salamon, Dean Spade, Amy Villarejo, Meg Wesling

Capitalism and Disability

Capitalism and Disability
Author: Marta Russell
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2019-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1608467163
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Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.

Identity Capitalists

Identity Capitalists
Author: Nancy Leong
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1503614271
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Nancy Leong reveals how powerful people and institutions use diversity to their own advantage and how the rest of us can respond—and do better. Why do people accused of racism defend themselves by pointing to their black friends? Why do men accused of sexism inevitably talk about how they love their wife and daughters? Why do colleges and corporations alike photoshop people of color into their websites and promotional materials? And why do companies selling everything from cereal to sneakers go out of their way to include a token woman or person of color in their advertisements? In this groundbreaking book, Nancy Leong coins the term "identity capitalist" to label the powerful insiders who eke out social and economic value from people of color, women, LGBTQ people, the poor, and other outgroups. Leong deftly uncovers the rules that govern a system in which all Americans must survive: the identity marketplace. She contends that the national preoccupation with diversity has, counterintuitively, allowed identity capitalists to infiltrate the legal system, educational institutions, the workplace, and the media. Using examples from law to literature, from politics to pop culture, Leong takes readers on a journey through the hidden agendas and surprising incentives of various ingroup actors. She also uncovers a dire dilemma for outgroup members: do they play along and let their identity be used by others, or do they protest and risk the wrath of the powerful? Arming readers with the tools to recognize and mitigate the harms of exploitation, Identity Capitalists reveals what happens when we prioritize diversity over equality.

New Intimacies, Old Desires

New Intimacies, Old Desires
Author: Oishik Sircar
Publisher: Zubaan
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2017-06-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9385932365
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In the last 15 years, queer movements in many parts of the world have helped secure the rights of queer people. These moments have been accompanied by the brutal rise of crony capitalism, the violent consequences of the ‘war on terror’, the hyper-juridification of politics, the financialization/ managerialization of social movements and the medicalization of non-heteronormative identities/ practices. How do we critically read the celebratory global proliferation of queer rights in these neoliberal times? This volume responds to the complicated moment in the history of queer struggles by analysing laws, state policies and cultures of activism, to show how new intimacies between queer sexuality and neoliberalism that celebrate modernity and the birth of the liberated sexual citizen, are in fact, reproducing the old colonial desire of civilizing the native. By paying particular attention to the problematics of race, religion and class, this volume engages in a rigorous, self-reflexive critique of global queer politics and its engagements, confrontations, and negotiations with modernity and its investments in liberalism, legalism and militarism, with the objective of queering the ethics of our queer politics. Published by Zubaan.