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132 Chapter 6 Defying “Diversity as Usual”: Queering Intersectionality As noted in the preceding chapters, scholars of neoliberalism have demonstrated that promoting racial, gender, and ­­ sexual diversity is no longer inconsistent with the political-economic aspirations of corporations and the state. In fact, emphasizing diversity has, in many cases, been reframed as a necessary path to corporate profits. Understanding and representing racial, gender, and ­­ sexual diversity has helped corporations expand their consumer base, enhance consumer and employee loyalty, and demonstrate to investors that they are keeping up with emergent business trends (i.e., diversity management , targeted marketing, etc.). Yet throughout this book I have shown that such instrumental approaches to diversity are not isolated to institutions , like corporations, that we typically associate with power and injustice . Even queer activist organizations have been subject to the influences of diversity culture, especially those organizations that have recruited leaders from the corporate sector or otherwise set their sights on professionalizing and commodifying queer diversity. In the preceding chapters, I have pointed to expanding efforts within queer organizations to leverage racial and gender diversity in order to garner funding and legitimacy, or to get a competitive edge in an increasingly diversity-interested, neoliberal world. My central assertion in this book has been that diversity projects are ultimately at odds with social justice efforts when they are aimed toward instrumental outcomes. Though each of the case studies has told a different story about how queer diversity is articulated and by whom, each has also revealed that formally celebrating the race, class, and gender diversity of “the queer community” can function to stifle forms of difference that are not easily professionalized, funded, or used for other institutional or financial gains. This development is certainly racialized, classed, and gendered, yet not Defying “Diversity as Usual” 133 in clearly predictable ways. As I have attempted to make clear, the instrumentalism embedded in diversity politics is the source of the danger, and not necessarily the race, class, or gender identities of the people who promote or benefit from the focus on diversity in a given local context. In fact, diversity is powerful as an institutional device because it has been so widely embraced by people across political and demographic lines. This may be precisely because the language of diversity can be used to garner both moral and professional/financial authority at the same time. From major corporations to queer community organizations, the emphasis on diversity has helped conservatives and liberals alike make movement toward greater acceptance on multiple fronts, yet without changing the way Americans think about diversity’s bottom line. But what is the bottom line? As I have argued, diversity culture reinscribes the fundamental importance of professionalism, attention to public image/respectability, and the pursuit of financial prosperity—end goals that justify, and exceed the value of, diversity itself. This is accomplished by emphasizing the way that dominant business practices and cultural values are upheld, rather than challenged, by diversification. Each of the case studies in this book has illustrated this convergence of diversity values with normative , professional, and upper-middle-class forms of political organization. At Christopher Street West, the pride organization, a racially diverse group of lesbian and gay professionals asserted their professional diversity skills and diverse connections in order to “rescue” the organization from an equally racially diverse, but working-class, group of activists they perceived as unprofessional , unconnected, and incompetent. At the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, the organization’s formal and public emphasis on race and gender diversity was praised by many activists (both people of color and whites, women and men), while others argued that the Center’s overly discursive focus on its own diversity was one of the greatest indicators of its white corporate culture and its lack of sincere commitment to employees of color. And, at Bienestar, gay Latino men drew on ideas about diversity, fluidity, and intersectionality to describe the importance of programs for gay Latinos but also used these concepts to explain why Latina lesbian programs were less urgent and more difficult to fund than those for gay men. Leaders in each of these organizations drew on the language of difference , equality, multiplicity, and even intersectionality to keep racialized, gendered, and (especially) classed forms of normativity intact. As I have shown, even as the organizations diversified and engaged in multi-identity activism, their emphasis on the institutional functions of diversity helped to preserve middle-class, male-centered, or white-normative ways of “doing [3.17.75.227...

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