Marketable Queerness and the Crisis of Queer Futurity
摘要
This chapter interrogates the entanglements of queer visibility and market logic in India through the lens of pink capitalism. It critiques how queer identity is commodified by corporate brands, particularly during Pride Month, as a performance of allyship that rebrands queerness as a lifestyle. Such commodification strips queerness of its radical, intersectional politics and aligns it with neoliberal consumerism. This commodification of queerness is similar to what José Esteban Muñoz terms the “here and now” of pragmatic inclusion—one that flattens “queer futurity” into consumable and neoliberal presentism. The chapter also looks at José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “queer futurity” and argues that the neoliberal present is dominated by rainbow-washed marketing campaigns. It obscures the utopian horizon of queer liberation by anchoring queerness in consumption and corporate inclusion. Similarly, Lisa Duggan’s notion of “the new homonormativity” reveals how rainbow-washed campaigns offer fantasies of belonging tethered to consumption, obscuring Pride’s roots as resistance. In the Indian context, where queer representation is often confined to upper-caste, English-speaking, urban bodies, it renders working-class queer rural lives structurally invisible. This chapter explores a future for a radical reorientation toward queer futurities that resist market capture. It calls for a radical reorientation toward queer futurities rooted in solidarity economies, intersectional justice, and collective imagination.