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1. Introduction: The Co-optation of Diversity
- Vanderbilt University Press
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1 Chapter 1 Introduction: The Co-optation of Diversity Everybody wants diversity. Progressive activists know that diversity is the lifeblood of struggles for democracy and justice, and that making room for difference is the foundation of social change. Business leaders know that embracing race and gender diversity “makes sense”—it’s good for a corporation ’s public image, it helps to expand consumer markets, and it ushers in a broader range of business practices that give companies a competitive edge. Politicians, media representatives, universities, and various state institutions know the value of diversity too; they know that respect for diversity has become a centerpiece of American culture and citizenship, and that those who do not respect diversity are the new villains in the morality tale of equality and difference in the United States. As Walter Benn Michaels explains it in his polemical book The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, “If there’s one thing Americans can agree on, it’s the value of diversity.”1 Many writers have revealed the ways that mainstream approaches to diversity make strides toward racial and gender inclusion while doing little to challenge global capitalism or correct for longstanding socioeconomic inequalities . They have traced the rise of probusiness liberalism, or neoliberalism , in the 1990s, including the formation of media, corporate, and state interests in identity and diversity.2 These studies have shown that neoliberalism is characterized not only by the expansion of corporate control into all realms of economic, political, and social life, but also by the co-optation of social justice concepts—such as freedom, equality, and diversity—which are now invoked by corporate elites in an effort to protect their own financial interests.3 This book builds upon these crucial efforts to understand the evolving relationship between diversity, social justice, and political economic processes. Yet its focus is on the more micro side of neoliberal identity 2 Respectably Queer politics: how the meaning of diversity is constructed and contested in daily interaction, and put to both personal and institutional use. To undertake this project, I turn to a perhaps unlikely site: the struggle over the meaning and ownership of diversity among queer activists in Los Angeles. I take queer politics as my point of departure not only to show how neoliberal, or market-driven, ideas about difference are becoming embedded in the daily life of a progressive movement that has long been concerned with diversity, but also to illustrate what happens when mainstream and “respectable” diversity politics come into conflict with a movement rooted in efforts to defy respectability. How do queer proponents of diversity respond when diversity is anything but unusual, defiant, or “queer”? Although celebrating diversity and making demands for racial, gender, and socioeconomic equality are now commonplace within lesbian and gay organizing, some queer activists are growing aware that these changes have done little to transform either the LGBT movement’s white and middle-class culture or its more general investments in normalcy and assimilation. To understand these developments requires not only consideration of whether LGBT projects are diverse or oriented towards multi-issue politics, but also attention to the complex relationship between diversity practices and normativity , or “conventional forms of association, belonging, and identification.”4 To make my case, I will show how lesbian and gay activists embrace racial, gender, socioeconomic, and sexual differences when they see them as predictable , profitable, rational, or respectable, and yet suppress these very same differences when they are unpredictable, unprofessional, messy, or defiant. Even progressive activists are compelled to revert to instrumental conceptualizations of difference, privileging those forms of difference that have the most currency in a neoliberal world and stifling differences that can’t be easily represented, professionalized, or commodified. Though the misuses of diversity are outlined here in detail, an equally important goal of this book is to illustrate some of the hopeful and unexpected effects of mainstream diversity politics. LGBT projects have witnessed a new wave of challenges to the co-optation of diversity, including the emergence of promising efforts to remake diversity into a more substantive form of resistance and to disavow the concept’s mainstream roots. This study offers a window into how activists are interrogating the normative logics that have become embedded in the concept of diversity and its deployment as an institutional device. In each of the three organizations examined here, some activists dare to challenge the ways that their differences are being put to institutional use—challenges that...