Who Speaks the Language of Queer Politics? Global Queer Normativities Beyond U.S. Homonormativity

• In Event: 363 - Section on Sex and Gender Paper Session. Gender and Sexual Politics: The States of Neoliberalism

Abstract

US-based scholarly critiques of homonormativity have demonstrated that on one hand, neoliberalism co-opts identity/cultural politics, partially by creating an illusionary distinction between "economic issues" and politics and culture. On the other hand, the critique goes, progressive movements become increasingly infiltrated with the values, logic, and vocabulary of neoliberalism. Yet, whether pointing out a depoliticization of queers altogether, or showing how what is presented as "political" is channeled through the logic of neoliberalism, recent criticisms of normativities produced and upheld by queer movements in the West have focused exclusively on homonormativity as defined by LGBT politics' relationship to the logic of neoliberalism. Two things follow from this literature that I challenge using my ethnographic observations: First, with the current definition of homonormativity, there is a narrowing understanding of "the political," according to which the Istanbul-based LGBT activist group I study looks like the poster child of queer intersectionality, while normativities they (re)produce vanish from sight. Second, we encounter a narrowing understanding of "the commercial" with an increasingly monolithic understanding of "the market," where consumption is aligned with depoliticized neoliberal queer existence. This latter point is challenged by my ethnographic observations at a women-only queer bar in Istanbul. I argue that class informs normativities through cultural capital beyond what gets circulated through neoliberal ideas of what is profitable, fundable, and respectable. I also argue that we must put pressure on whether "the political" is a value by definition, and that we should investigate what kinds of exclusions are produced by "being political."

Author

• Evren Savci, San Francisco State University