Queer realities: how our identities are used in politics and under capitalism

The successes of Western LGBT+ rights movements, AIDS activism, and the fight for marriage equality, meeting the modern era of marketisation of the everyday, have had profound consequences for how queer people (used here as a broad umbrella term) interact with politics and the economy. 

While these movements have undoubtedly changed laws and minds and improved the lives of LGBT+ people, they have fallen prey to both political actors and corporations, which co-opt queer symbols, queer communities, and queer bodies for political and economic capital.

There is nothing new in the way that queer issues are used in politics for political capital: Homophobia and transphobia have always been employed as motivators for right-wing voters and, somewhat more recently, support for queer issues acts as a shorthand for progressivism on the left. The responses, however, have changed somewhat. Where before there was community and activism to continue to push for those issues ignored in the mainstream debate (AIDS activism or anti-work discrimination campaigns, for example), LGBT+ communities are no longer as coherent as they once were. 

More acceptance has meant less need to form strong activist communities and the rise of the internet has led both to a new form of disconnected and individual activism and the fragmentation of more traditional LGBT+ organisations. 

Other changes, such as a growing class consciousness among queer people, mean making political decisions based less on queer issues, and more on social or economic ones. Similarly, fissures among queer people have changed debates within communities towards questions of racism, misogyny, and transphobia within LGBT+ spaces.

I do not mean to say that those conversations and decisions are unimportant, but instead to indicate how much queer issues and discussions have become influenced by and obscured in political discourse. Mainstream queer politics is no longer about civil rights, but about identity. Economic inequality, racism, and misogyny are not discussed as queer issues, despite very clearly impacting most queer people. Politicians discuss transgender access to bathrooms, children’s books, and marriage, rather than anti-queer violence, the exploitation of queer workers, or the prevalence of transphobia across society. 

Queer politics becomes responding endlessly to bigotry and myths, instead of pushing for solutions to the problems faced by queer people every day: homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, racism, violence, and economic instability. And that is not to say that contradicting bigoted and homo- and transphobic narratives in public discourse is not an important part of queer politics; it always has been. It is instead to indicate that this becoming the primary focus of queer issues is not something chosen by LGBT+ people or movements; it is a result of the co-optation of queer issues by various political actors, on the left and the right, for their own ends.

With increasing success has also come an increasing integration of people with queer identities into the neoliberalised political economy. Queer scholars call the result of this process “homonormativity”, the fitting of queer people into a new type of consumer (explored excellently in Warped: Gay normality and queer anti-capitalism by Peter Drucker): middle-class, usually white, cisgender and monogamous same-sex couples who, instead of challenging heteronormative values and structures, anchored particularly in consumerism, support them. 

Queer people encounter this ‘acceptable’ queerness in everyday consumerist actions. An anecdotal example is the ad for a shopping centre pictured below, which I saw in December at a Frankfurt underground station. The caption reads “Real X-Mases start with diversity: Look forward to a celebration of brands.”