Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity’, 2002

Lisa Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’, in Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (eds.), Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, 2002, Duke University Press, pp 175- 194

Abstract

(Written by Dr Antke Engel https://bit.ly/2Zc2gHq)

During the past decade, organized gay politics in the U.S. and Europe have moved rightward. Diverging from its varied roots in progressive to left social movements, mainstream gay rights politics now constitute, not a resistance, but an arm of neoliberalism–one of the centers for the production of neoliberal “equality” politics. This is especially apparent as the pressures to dismantle post World War II welfare states build–and gay rights organizations climb onto the privatization band wagon rather than press a critique in the realm of political economy. In the realm of culture and “lifestyle” politics, the organized gay movements have begun to promote a new homonormativity–a public image of prosperous monogamous couples devoted to domestic consumerism. A critical queer politics exists alongside this neoliberal homonormative front, but its social forms are currently mostly localized and relatively isolated. Much of academic queer theory meanwhile continues to rework abstract theorizations unconnected to the current conjuncture, but some new work is emerging to theorize the new homonormativity, and the political economy of corporate globalization in which it is embedded.