Pink capitalism

Pink capitalism is a term used to describe, from a critical perspective, the incorporation of the discourses of the LGBTQ movement and sexual diversity to capitalism and the market economy, especially including the gay, cisgender, western, white, and upper middle class man standard.

It consists of obtaining greater profits by incorporating to consumption traditionally discriminated sectors of the population, who have acquired sufficient purchasing power, the so-called pink money, so that it is possible to generate a specific market focused on the gay community, such as bars and nightclubs, LGBT tourism, or specialized culture consumption.

While the configuration of spaces for LGBTI consumption could be seen as an opportunity for homosocialization, the fact of defining consumption patterns drives to a normalization of sexual diversity towards socially accepted sexual standards, such as monogamy, interest in the dominant fashion, or the definition of body aesthetics set by advertising canons.

Historical Context

See also: LGBT history and Timeline of LGBT history

According to some authors, in global terms, the evolution of pink capitalism has been somehow parallel to the development of modern capitalism itself in the Western world. Although there have always existed diversity of sexualities, different periods can be distinguished in the market and in businesses development targeted at the LGBTI community, which contributed to the construction of the diverse sexual identities:

Underground Phase

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1983-0121-500, Berlin, Bar "Eldorado".jpg

LGBT Club Eldorado in Berlin during the 1920s.

Since the last decades of the 19th century, bars, cabarets, or clandestine brothels targeted especially at the gay community already existed in some cities in Europe and the United States. LGBTI people were often persecuted, but it was beginning the first fighting wave for LGBT rights which even managed to print some gay-themed magazines. However, this first LGBT movement was disintegrated by the First and Second World War and the rise of fascism in Europe.

Community-building Phase

After the Second World War, it broadly begins a transition time in Western societies, tremendously influenced by the homophobia of fascisms. Although LGBTI places and consumption remain marginal, during this time various associations are created, included within the homophile movement, which seek positive assessment of homosexuality by society through meetings, publications or charity parties, opposing behaviors considered marginal and perverted of most homosexuals as promiscuity, cruising, prostitution, saunas, and erotic magazines.

Integration in Media Culture Phase

Stonewall Inn in 1969.

The Stonewall riots of 1969 marked the beginning of LGBT liberation movement, characterized by public visibility and the aims of decriminalization of homosexuality besides social and political integration, but with a response marked by the HIV/AIDS pandemic and a homophobic and puritanic society that later led to the development of queer movement by the discriminated groups.

From the 90s, through the progressive achievement of rights and social acceptance, the discrimination suffered by openly LGBT people diminished, broadening the access chance to traditionally heteronormative jobs, which resulted in increased purchasing power of LGBT community, mainly of gays; closely related to the trend of dinkies, couples with two incomes and no children. These processes are especially evident in the dynamics that have suffered the gay neighborhoods which, having begun as marginal and degraded, attracted LGBT people by their low prices and certain security provided by living with other sexual minorities. These neighborhoods, after being rehabilitated thanks largely to the LGBT community and becoming trendy, have gradually undergone gentrification processes, rising prices and expelling the LGBT population that cannot afford the new expenses.

Parallel to these processes, an increasingly specialized market has been developed around LGBTI community, specifically serving their needs by selling exclusive services and products . Finally, the social trend generates that also different companies and firms end up by incorporating the defense of LGBT rights to their company policies and codes of conduct, and even financing LGBT events.

In Spain, neither virile redefinition of homosexuality, nor gay model spreading, were made from the active homosexual movement of the time. [...] The penetration of the new model is carried out through private channels: by entrepreneurs who mimetically reproduce gay institutions already present in other countries [...] Institutionalization of homosexual universe "implies a search for efficiency and economy which involves, at the same time, maximizing efficiency (expressed quantitatively in number of partners and orgasms) and minimizing costs (waste of time and rejection of proposals)". This kind of sociosexual relations appraisement is characteristic of gay model, and has its origin in the formation of a concentrated sexual market.

— The gay model. Pink society. p. 82-84

Mechanisms

Although it is likely that, without the legitimacy given by the capitalist model of consumption, some civil and political rights in certain parts of the Western world would not have been achieved, the acquisition of those has been at the expense of the integration of LGBT people in a heteronormative vital and consumerist framework. In this sense, pink capitalism is not very different to the patriarchal postfordist capitalism, from which the integration of women into productive labour has been promoted while at the same time being ignored to stimulate the incorporation of men to reproductive labor.

From sexual liberation to the gay man ideal

From a historical perspective, there is a parallelism in the process of sexual liberation and the transition from an economic system that needed workers to one that needs consumers: non-reproductive sexual practices such as masturbation, sodomy, or homosexuality were forbidden or stigmatized for not generate offspring that was necessary to maintain the economic system, but gradually the process of mechanization of labour has enabled the move to a system that does not need that many workers to keep supply as consumers to ensure demand, easing the pressure on sexuality and enabling tolerance towards other forms of eroticism.

However, the inclusion of sexual diversity to the capitalist model is not done because it has a social nature, but because of the possibility of customers to increase surplus value. But as access to surplus value is uneven, the system itself produces exclusion, making it incompatible with equality, freedom, and feminism. It is common to notice how the dominant discourse praises women or gays who achieve power positions, connecting with the ideology of meritocracy, individualism. and competitiveness, while justifying that others have not attained these positions of power because they have not work hard enough, blaming them somehow; when the reason that others can not access positions of power comes from the very fact that these positions exist and that they are unique and exclusive.

On the other hand, capitalist society has not accepted all sexual-diverse people equally. The greater social tolerance exists, the greater access to resources these people have, joining sexual orientation and sexual identity to gender, ethnicity, and social class issues. Therefore, in general, only gay, cisgender, western, white, and middle or upper class men are accepted into the social context of consumption. In addition, this framework promotes an homogeneous and heteronormative identity of the gay man ideal, who has a certain beauty, a muscular and hyper-sexualized body, male behavior, career success and a specific purchasing power, establishing which bodies are desirable and which are not, and leading to marginalize, even from the gay community itself, effeminate men or who do not fit within this aesthetic model.

In the pre-gay period, youth is worth of sexual exchange, but the elderly homosexuals were not stigmatized. With the extension of gay model and institutionalization that this entails, a sex market is formed were one of the most appreciated goods for sexual intercourse, as well as virility, is youth. The overvaluation of youth imposed by the gay style involves a underestimation of the mature adult male.

— The gay model. Pink society. p. 93

Symbolic and material rights

File:Same sex marriage map Europe detailed.svg

Symbolic rights of non-heterosexual couples in Europe:

  Equal marriage

  Civil union

  Foreign recognition

  No recognition

  Equal marriage forbidden

While, within this capitalist framework and depending on the country, some symbolic rights such as access to equal marriage or recognition of gender identity have achieved, these rights are subordinated to the people's resources, income and social position. Symbolic rights must therefore be supported first by material rights that guarantee a dignified life, linking social and cultural items to the economy and the material elements.

In this regard, the trend has been that the gay movement has not defined the political agenda, but the opposite, adapting to heteropatriarchal and heteronormative schemes defined from the traditional capitalist optics, incorporating the social vision of family, property, body, economic organization, or sexual experience from heterosexual schemes. It has not been problematized the matrix where LGBT rights are inserted. For example, it has struggled for equal marriage, without questioning the concept of marriage, its history, if necessary in society or whether other types of marriage are possible, making the fight for equal marriage, sustained by the ideal of romantic love, the basic goal of the LGBT movement that makes it seem there is nothing else to fight for, thus stopping the sexual emancipation through a moralistic condemnation of free sexuality.

Politics and LGBTI movement

With all that, and contrary to the ideas of equality, traditionally the political left has treated the LGBT movement (as it happened with feminism) as extravagance or cultural singularities which fragmented its political agenda, without attending the specific needs of non-heterosexual people and reducing their problems to the rest of the working class. However, the feminization of poverty worsens on lesbians and transsexuals or effeminate gays are relegated to unskilled jobs because of not participating of certain patriarchal masculinity. Only belatedly LGBT claims have been integrated into the left political struggle, when the capitalist cultural hegemony began to incorporate the gay community.

Today, it is noted that the LGBT movement is depoliticizing and at the same time is being increasingly used for political and economic purposes, that is to say, once achieved certain symbolic rights, LGBT claims blur, but from the political and economic sphere are used for other purposes, as the profit that involves the celebration of LGBT pride parade which is relegated to a mere show; the requirement for the protection of LGBT rights to give aid to developing countries; or the use of LGBT equality to support racist and xenophobic positions by far-right parties. Thus, it is making the LGBT community, traditionally critical of the State, support the homonationalism, that is, feeling identified with countries that defend favorable positions to LGBT equality and demonizing other cultures, especially the Islamic, as well as being conducive to back neocolonialist policies and forgetting the homophobia, transphobia, and sexism that still exist within the Western world.

Current protest movements in Spain

In Spain, since the emergence of the anti-austerity movement, various groups have held demonstrations and claims demanding a sexuality for everyone which is not subordinated to political and economic interests.

Alternative Pride, Indignant Pride and Critical Pride (Orgullo Alternativo, Orgullo Indignado y Orgullo Crítico)

File:Manifestación Orgullo Crítico 2015.JPG

Critical Pride 2015 (Orgullo Crítico 2015) arriving at Puerta del Sol (Madrid).

Following the pass of equal marriage in Spain, the LGBT Pride Parade was ceasing to be a protest demonstration to gradually becoming a tourist business that even, with full corporations' autonomy and supported by institutions, changed the date of 28 June, recalling the Stonewall riots, to the first week of July, only because the simple holiday influx interests.

Since 2006, different demonstrations against LGBTI commodification were held annually in some suburbs of Madrid, as Vallecas, called Alternative Pride or Critical Pride (Orgullo Alternativo or Orgullo Crítico), retaking 28 June as the central axis of action. In 2011, after the success of the protests of the 15-M Movement, several involved groups raise the issue of adapting the demands to LGBT reality. Thereby the first Indignant Pride (Orgullo Indignado) was organized with various activities calling for a different sexuality regardless of economic performance, taking into account gender, ethnicity, age, and social class intersectionalities besides other non-normative corporalities.

Later, the event retrieved the name Critical Pride (Orgullo Crítico), based on the earlier demands in addition to claims against pink capitalism and apart the official Pride. Movements in other cities, such as Barcelona or Seville, have also been organizing events in this direction.

Trans October (Octubre Trans)

Also in 2011, the momentum of 15-M collects the wake of the demonstrations of October for the International Day of Action for Trans Depathologization, which were being performed in Madrid and Barcelona in previous years, to coordinate a series of events and vindicate the social space for other identities that did not fit within the gender binary system. So, every October, various activities included in Trans October (Octubre Trans) are organized to question heteropatriarchy and pink capitalism.

See also

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