Envisioning Economic and Sexual Justice Spatially
Opening Remarks
How can we square sexual justice with economic justice? How can we
integrate a concern for sexual and economic justice in our work when
sexuality and economics so often appear incompatible or unrelated in
academic discussions? Material and economic concerns often appear highly
marginal within sexual politics; as Richard Goldstein (2002: 19) in his
polemic against the Gay Right has contentiously and provocatively
claimed, "poverty is the only dirty secret left in our community." More
surprisingly, this marginality of the economic has often been reproduced
in academic research on the transnational politics of sexuality, as
Geeta Patel (2006: 25) has argued: "Too often the literature on
transnational sexualities portrays sexuality as being constituted
outside capital, outside political economies, outside transnational or
global finance." While Patel is right to highlight this concern, it is
critical that we simultaneously recognise the almost complete absence of
sexuality within political economic accounts of globalization (Binnie,
2004). Particularly given the current state of economic, social, and
political affairs, it is important to think through the interconnections
between sexuality and economics, and to acknowledge the dangers of easy
moralising in producing well-meaning explanatory accounts of
inequality.
Guy Hocquenghem (1993: 93) has argued that, "the anti-capitalist
movement can often be pro-family, and indeed anti-homosexual."
Erotophobia and homophobia on the Left is widespread. It may be less
explicit and more understated nowadays, but it has not gone away
completely. This legacy has meant that some political economic accounts
of gay male consumption and the pink economy have been problematic and
even harmful. For instance, in his pioneering book on the material basis
of sexual citizenship, David Evans produced a highly voyeuristic
depiction of what he terms the "virilisation" of gay male consumption,
with a particular emphasis on the paraphernalia associated with leather
and sadomasochism (Evans, 1993). Despite these concerns about the way
erotics and sexual politics have been integrated within some political
economic analyses, there are studies in which economics and sexuality
are integrated more productively. Lee Badgett (1997: 70) has powerfully
critiqued dominant discourses about the pink economy, de-bunking myths
of gay and lesbian affluence by arguing that, "the real economic
difference [of lesbians, bisexuals and gay men] comes from the harmful
effects of employment discrimination against lesbian, gay and bisexual
people."
Beyond the Gay Affluence Stereotype
While economics and sexuality may sometimes seem difficult to
reconcile within academic debates, they appear prominently within media
discourses around the pink economy that have constructed (lesbians and)
gay men as an affluent niche market in late capitalism. In an essay I
wrote over a decade ago on the intersection between sexuality,
citizenship and the market in the UK and the Netherlands, I noted the
growth of media visibility of gay men and lesbians as model consumers
(Binnie, 1995). I argued that as this pink economic discourse emerged
during a period of economic recession, it produced a potentially harmful
stereotype that fed into a growing resentment over the representation of
gay men and lesbians as an economically privileged group in society.
Writing this article nearly a year after the Barnard colloquium, it
would appear that Naomi Klein's discussion of "precariousness" in
relation to neoliberalism and the global economy seems ever more
relevant in th e current global financial crisis.
Other writers have argued that the myth of lesbian and gay affluence
is dangerous in playing into the hands of the Christian Right. As
Hardisty and Gluckman (1997: 218) have noted: "Recently, a new
stereotype has crept into the antihomosexual literature of the right. In
addition to being portrayed as immoral, disease-ridden child molestors,
gay men and lesbians are now described as superwealthy, highly-educated
free spenders." Stereotypes of affluence therefore fuel notions that gay
rights are "special" or additional rights, and that lesbians and gay men
are a privileged minority in no need of legal protection against
discrimination on the basis of homophobia. These stereotypes are firmly
established within the media and also get reproduced in academic
discussions of sexual politics and citizenship. Consider Brenda
Cossman's (2007) highly stimulating and thought-provoking book Sexual
Citizens, which moves beyond a narrow focus on the rights of
lesbians and gay men to examine the racialised and gendered politics of
poverty and welfare reform in the United States. Cossman's attempts to
broaden debates on sexual citizenship to bring poverty into the equation
are of course welcome and necessary, and build on the work of Anna Marie
Smith (2007) in this area. However, there are aspects of Cossman's book
that make me a bit uneasy. Cossman argues that in some media discourses
and legal cases, lesbians and gay men have now become configured as
model citizens, a far cry from representations portraying them as sexual
outlaws: "Not unlike the Fab Five of Queer Eye for the Straight
Guy, gay and lesbian subjects are the new model citizens, the heroic
citizens, standing for all that is valued in American citizenship. In an
extraordinary reversal of the more traditional terms of heterosexual
sexual citizenship, gay men and lesbians are here becoming the most
becoming of citizens" (177). I think it is easy to overstate the extent
to which lesbians and gay men have become full citizens within the
United States (see for instance the passing of Proposition 8 in
California). I feel particularly uneasy when reading the discussion of
gay affluence and model consumer-based citizenship in Queer Eye
alongside CossmanŐs exploration of poverty within the heterosexual
family—principally because the question of queer poverty is rarely
addressed explicitly.
Given the problematic representation of queer poverty and the way the
pink economy discourse became visible in the UK during the last
recession, what can we look forward to in the current global financial
crisis? In my essay from 1995, I noted how the growth in media
visibility of a pink niche market in the UK at the start of the 1990s
coincided with the recession. There was much discussion in the British
media of how this particular niche market appeared to be thriving during
an economic downturn and how it appeared to be resilient and
recession-proof. In the UK, we can already ascertain a reaction in the
media against the forms of lifestyle consumption that have proliferated
in the past decade. Lifestyle consumption practices associated with
aspiration and class mobility are now denigrated as vulgar,
unsophisticated and unethical, thereby reproducing a class-based
discourse.
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