Economic theory, GLBT-Queer Culture Revised - 23 Feb 04

for

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary and International Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Culture; Routledge UK,

In a global economy, glbtq cultures/identities are subject to lingual diffusion as illustrated by the international financial success of straight director, Ang Lee's film, The Wedding Banquet (see Mark Chiang 1998). That is to say, markets both instantiate and eviscerate queer identities by, on the one hand, shaping products and jobs to appeal especially to glbtq customers and workers and, on the other hand, by seeking to increase profits by expanding hitherto queer product niches to include straights.

Can one capture the economic impact of queer culture on the circular flow of national output/consumption by measuring how many units of currency per year of queer culture are bought and sold? Does one count only sales of new glbtq books, art, movies, television, radio, theatre, receipts at gyms, sex clubs and bars? Does one include the shows deriving from glbtq cultures but aiming at mainstream culture, like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? How should one account for clothing designs by glbtq people or sales by stores catering to glbtq consumers but also selling to straight folks?

Conventional thinking in economics might lead one to consider measuring the share of queer culture in a nation's Gross Domestic Product. Yet this standard approach fails, since boundaries for glbtq cultures do not exist, and this conventional thinking is being challenged by the new field of queer political economy (Cornwall 1997) which posits that, as we grow up, we each develop neural pathways used to perceive, to "think," and to verbally articulate ideas leading to an interdependence between: 1) language-based cognitive codes physically encoded in neural networks, and 2) markets connecting profit-driven sellers and novelty-seeking buyers. In short, part of each person's cognitive code is a social map which we use to try to place ourselves and each other into social identities.

To look at how markets interact with glbtq identities at the start of the 21st century, we must understand why globalization is increasingly guiding the activities of more and more humans around the globe and is also making markets around the globe increasingly tightly linked to each other. This happens first for capital markets whose per-unit transaction costs are relatively low, but it is spreading ever more widely to markets for manufactures, agriculture and even services as transaction costs of communicating, searching, enforcing/adapting and shipping between "national" markets continue to fall.

This process of globalization contributes to the evolution of cultures around the world because markets seduce their participants to adopt a common mental code for evaluating the items traded on these markets. This interaction between markets and cultures consists, first, of transforming the language-based cognitive codes with which people think. For example, historically, a key by-product of the spread of wage labor was to enable people to think of being economically independent from their kin and from agricultural activities. This allowed glbtq individuals to move to urban areas and to meet each other and to discover their often hidden (from themselves) same-sex erotic interests as they participated as customers of boarding houses, molly houses, bathhouses, coffee shops and cruising spots in, for example, England in the eighteenth century. Somewhat similarly, though changed by the filter imposed by gender in Western cultures, lesbians emerged as a self-aware and socially distinguished group in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Cornwall 1997 for references).

This process appears to be being replicated in other cultures as the role of agriculture shrinks and of wage labor spreads. It leads to people generally investing heightened importance to categories we now label glbtq, but which had often hitherto seemed not worthy of much public notice. Thus, newly positioned enunciators of norms of respectability (especially doctors and, later, psychologists) abjected so-called "homosexual identities" as exemplars of Other (Laqueur 2003). This "queering" of certain behaviors and individuals, labeling them egregious transgressors of respectability, led those so labeled to react by adhering more strongly to each other as a distinct group, even flaunting the condemned behavior. Thus the queer imprecations were "queered" by being embraced by their targets in newly evolving niches in labor, housing and entertainment markets.

A response by profit-seeking business to the emergence of distinct glbtq people was to aim products (for example, club clothes, bars and clubs, books and periodicals) to them. This formation of queer market niches gave these businesses a degree of brand-name distinctness and hence market-power by which to earn monopoly profits. Of course, this evolution of markets reinforces the social cohesion of self-identifying participants in queered markets, but it can also seduce non-queer, self-imagined non-homophobic people (‘metrosexuals’) as well as not-gay-self-identified glbtq people who discover a certain pleasure (perhaps of tweaking norms of respectability) gotten when consuming these newly queered goods (for example, coming to glbtq dance clubs). This evolution suggests to marketers-producers that they can enlarge profits by aiming at self-conceived ‘sophisticated’ heterosexuals.

Thus, we might argue that glbtq identities get doubly queered by globalization: markets serve as a social blender mixing and matching body-costume-identity parts across whatever social identities currently exist both reifying (for example, queering previously straight products like music/dance venues) and also dissolving these cultural boundaries (queering hitherto queer product niches by seducing non-glbtq people to join glbtq people making this product less queer). Queering seems to be like negation: double queering results in un-queering.

But globalizing queerness is not a simple process. The spread of the “internationally diffused loanword ‘gay’” is very problematic: it suggests the Western notion of "gayness" is spreading to non-Western societies, but it may mean very different things in other cultures where social names/categories and practices have long existed for various types of same-sex relations. Simply assigning ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ to an international market may blind us to distinct cultural patterns and evolutions (Murray-Roscoe 1997:34, 314; Vanita-Kidwai 2000:xxiii).

The erasure of national boundaries by markets leads us to inquire what globalization does to national identities/nationalisms. This question is important since the rise of contemporary notions of sexual orientation coincided with the rise of the modern European state (as Eve Sedgwick (1992:238) has noted) which in turn is closely tied to the creation and reification the Other, a bourgeoisie-self-justifying social process tied to that inventing the label “homosexual.” For just one recent example, we note that in the United States, following World War Two, traitor, Red, and pervert were conflated in McCarthyism and in the many laws and policies which came out of that.

Indeed, the political usefulness of arguing that homosexuality is a “threat” to national security and doing this in order to re-enforce national identity has been observed in many nations following the end of World War Two. But we can see here how international markets can also work to weaken identities and so to eviscerate nationalism and homophobia. For example, in recent years Singapore has become especially welcoming to gay visitors by encouraging circuit parties (on Nation's Day, no less!) even though gross indecency, in public or private, between two male persons is, at least at the start of 2004, punishable by two years in prison. Such events may also serve, as in Eng's film, to divert attention from class and ethnic inequality. Thus global markets are the wedding banquet that marries and blends middle-class, capitalist social identities in a paradoxical feast of transnational, intercultural consumption, production, marketing and politics.

Bibliography:

Chiang, Mark. 1998. Coming Out into the Global System: Postmodern Patriarchies and Transnational Sexualities in The Wedding Banquet. ch. 24, pp. 374-395 in David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom (eds.) Q&A: Queer in Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.

Cornwall, Richard. 1997. "deconstructing silence: the queer political economy of the social articulation of desire." Review of Radical Political Economics 29 (1) [March] 1-130.

Laqueur, Thomas W. 2003. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York: Zone.

Murray, Stephen O. and Will Roscoe. 1997. Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature. New York: New York University.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1992. Nationalisms and Sexualities in the Age of Wilde. ch. 12, pp. 235-245 in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger. 1992. Nationalisms & Sexualities. New York: Routledge.

Vanita, Ruth and Saleem Kidwai. (eds.) (2000) Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, New York: St. Martin's.

Richard Cornwall

Word count: 1198 (not counting the title, my name or the Bibliography)