Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

7 Consuming Lifestyle: Commodity Capitalism and Transformations in Gay Identity

7 Consuming Lifestyle Commodity Capitalism and Transformations in Gay Identity Ann Pellegrini We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping. —Queer Nation I want to begin with some of the usual, but not for that reason any less sincere, disclaimers as to the provisional status of the claims—a series of hunches, really— unfolded here. In what follows, I am interested in tracing two narratives of transformation : (1) from industrial capitalism to postindustrial or commodity capitalism ; (2) from homosexuality as minority identity to homosexuality as “alternative lifestyle.” Much of my argument depends on, even as it criticizes, John D’Emilio’s much-reprinted “Capitalism and Gay Identity”and Donald M. Lowe’s The Body in Late-Capitalist USA. Both D’Emilio and Lowe offer historical accounts that emplot the relations between homosexuality and capitalism. Indeed, though in different ways and with somewhat different emphases, both men seem to narrate capitalism as the very emplotment of homosexual identity. It will be clear that I find much that is persuasive and helpful in both D’Emilio’s and Lowe’s studies. Yet, in setting the word “narrative” up front—as in “narratives of transformation”—I mean also to mark my own skepticism about the adequacy (as theory or history) of their accounts, even as I retell them.1 I hope, however, that I will be repeating with a difference. With a lesbian difference , perhaps? 134 The Story So Far One way of writing the history of gay identity and gay liberation in the twentieth century is to say, with Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed, in their introduction to Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life, that “social and economic policies [e.g., antidiscrimination statutes, domestic partner benefits provided by major corporations and universities, targeting of lesbian and gay consumers by corporate America] are following cultural shifts and beginning to accommodate lesbian and gay life.”2 Of course, economic relations have also been productive of “lesbian and gay life” and of growing, if still uneasy, social tolerance of homosexuality. The point I mean to stress here is that economic policies have not simply followed on developments in lesbian and gay identity, but have been also in some way generative. So the accommodation—between market and identity, and between economic openings and social tolerance—goes both ways. Yet it remains an open question, one I cannot settle here but one on which I want to provoke discussion, what the relationship is between legal and social rights, on the one hand, and economic recognition and consumptuary opportunities, on the other. That is, what is the relationship between being addressed as consuming subjects (and gay men and lesbians are being so addressed, openly addressed as gay men and lesbians for the first time) and becoming full social subjects , subjects, that is, of rights? To the extent that the discourse of rights was, at its emergence, marked by property relations (rights as a kind of private property ), perhaps this form of social address—in which capitalism reaches out to queer consuming subjects—is the very fulfillment of rights and, thus, a fulfillment that can only disappoint. Yet might these consuming subjects also queer capitalism? In his important essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” historian John D’Emilio argues for the implicature of modern gay identities in the evolution of industrial capitalism from the eighteenth century forward.3 D’Emilio points out how the expansion of capital and rise of wage labor (in which the laborer owns his/her ability to work and can sell his/her labor power, his/her use value) radically transformed (1) the structure and functions of the family, (2) the ideology of family life, and (3) the meaning of “heterosexual relations” (469). “Heterosexual relations ” is D’Emilio’s term (469), and it is an unfortunately mystifying one, smuggling in a set of claims we might want to open up rather than decide in advance. By it, however, he means that technology of sex that results in natal reproduction, CONSUMING LIFESTYLE 135 a technology we misrecognize as nature when we refer to it, simply, as “sexual intercourse ” or, still more simply, as just “sex.” Here I am thinking with Henry Abelove’s marvelous arguments regarding the invention of foreplay in the long eighteenth century.4 This was not an invention of a heretofore unknown set of practices and pleasures so much as the reorganization and reconstruction of a...