Target and the Absurdity of Corporate Progress
Recently, we’ve focused on criticizing legitimist voices in queer (trans and divergent sexual) spaces. A lapse into a false sense of security and progress made legitimist politics extremely appealing to those who sought psychological validation of their own identities. Yet nothing has yet been said of the influence of corporations on our means of self-expression and the deficiencies of their particular forms of activism. Nor have we discussed the psychological effects of this cultural seizure by corporate interests.
Pride merchandise, including items relating to queer identity and activism, is a major advertising campaign for several retailers, who see the community as a market for clothing, sex products, medications, and other goods. These goods, rather than deep interpersonal connections, are used to denote one’s connection to the community. The queer community, particularly the homosexual and bisexual portions of that community, have substituted money for activism and reform for revolution.
Yet it will not do for us to be bitter. Bitterness in the face of past failures will not change the way things are today; moving on from the legitimist position is the only way to move past that bitterness. Legitimism has failed because it was never a revolutionary proposition. It never addressed the very social relations that made queer oppression possible; leaving mechanisms of social control in place, it celebrated only that queer people were not subjected to them.
This made the recent move to target queer communities incredibly easy. Queer liberation is only possible through the overthrow of the existing social order that has enshrined certain gendered, sexual, racial, and economic relations. Stonewall and the ensuing movement was thoroughly anti-capitalist, anti-police, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist. Revolutionaries ignited the queer rights movement, not capitalists, not the petty bourgeoisie, not whites.
Over time, whites, the petty bourgeoisie, and capitalists overtook the initial leadership because of the murder of Marsha Johnson, political correctness, and capitalist-imperialism. Suddenly, the revolutionary prospects of the queer rights movement were erased under a tide of sympathy-mongering and making the community more “acceptable” to supporters. This jettisoned the trans and sex-worker groups within the community, who were consistently at risk of murder, rape, and assault.
This refocusing, mostly occurring in the deradicalization of the 1980s and ’90s, led to increased political support for queer rights. As the AIDS epidemic seized the community, queer organizations adopted much more limited positions for healthcare, equality, and acceptance for queer people. Leaders were no longer concerned with revolution, but instead used the wrong tactics to ensure the community’s survival. In creating an “acceptable” face for the movement, they obliterated queer unity and communal identity. Revolutionary leaders such as Johnson and Silvia Rivera were sidelined for the comfort of white petty bourgeois activists. Johnson was murdered in 1992, possibly by the police. Rivera died in 2002, nearly 30 years after her Gay Power speech, where she chastised the queer white middle class for their failure to support trans women and the whole queer community.
Corporations entered the queer community during deradicalization and have increasingly seen us as a promising market for goods. Commercializing the gay rights movement allowed the petty bourgeoisie within it to advocate for their limited, moderate demands. For this reason, the leaders of our community organizations have remained favorable to business, political parties, and other legitimate political and economic forces.
Those who did not fulfill the “typical” or “acceptable” identities portrayed by our organizations for these purposes were ostracized, marginalized, or ignored. When building coalitions, the white petty bourgeoisie in the queer rights movement obliterated economic solidarity brought about by discrimination, hatred, and violence against the queer community. This dramatically shifted queer liberation away from survival demands and toward supplemental demands, despite the fact that survival for certain groups remained (and still remains) extremely difficult (particularly the colonized who identified as trans women).
Now, the time has come to acknowledge the mistakes of the past and move toward the future. Queer liberation must be a total socio-economic program dedicated to eradicating social, economic, racial, gender, and sexual inequality at any cost. Queer liberation is not capitalist. Queer liberation cannot be subject to market pressures, as Target has illustrated with the removal of some of its pride merchandise. Queer liberation is a deeply contentious, deeply revolutionary demand that we eradicate the patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. If queer leadership continues insisting that we should stick to legitimate, moderate organizing, we will be destroyed.
