No Sex, No Crime, No Shame: Privatized Care and the Seduction into Responsibility

Abstract

The article reflects on the interrelation between neo‐liberal economy and sexuality. The neo‐liberal paradigm issues a paradoxical appellation of individualization and privatized responsibilities. The latter not only refer to personal well‐being and growth, but also demand for care relations, which substitute for the shrinking of the social system. The thesis is that homosexual lifestyles figure as avant‐garde positions, which promise to provide a “solution” to the paradoxical demands for individualization and care. Reading visual representations of lesbian and gay figures in media and advertisements the author argues that non‐normative genders and homosexual ways of existence gain access to the mainstream via the mechanism of “projective integration”. This mechanism stimulates a new hegemonic consensus via the disarticulation of the socio‐political contradictions of the global capitalist economy and the affirmation of not only new forms of intimacy, but also new forms of exclusion.

Notes

1. Renate Lorenz thwarts queer theory's optimistic reliance on sexual deviance as a mode of subversion: “I do not in any way consider the power of sexuality to be thoroughly ‘subversive,’ for it plays … an important role in the ‘voluntary’ assumption of disadvantageous working conditions. It takes part in the loading of the subject with an ‘expense’ that envelops her/‘us’ in the power of wage labor.” (Lorenz 2007: 104).

2. Capitalist “tolerance” towards non‐normative sexual identities indicates for David Evans (1993) the “amorality of the market”, which incorporates anything that can be turned into profit; for D'Emilio (1983) and for Hennessy (2000) it is part of the modernization of capitalism, which needs a more flexible, individualized workforce and finds it embodied in the late modern, gay male middle class.

3. A feminist reading more interested in the paradoxical appeals of neo‐liberalism, which offers autonomy simultaneously as a promise and a coercion, is provided by Pühl (2003).

4. Chandan Reddy, looking at US neo‐liberalism, diagnoses a reorganization rather than a cut‐back of the social safety net; a process that plays exactly on the aspiration to partake in it and the risk of exclusion. Its effect is the “consolidation of a welfare state for lower‐middle‐through‐upper‐class US citizens … This consolidation promises not ‘social redistribution’ but rather the distribution of entitlements” (Reddy 2005: 104).

5. Michael Peters points to the “twin strategies of a greater individualization of society and the ‘responsibilization’ of individuals and families” (Peters 2001: 85). This seems similar to my argument, but Peters understands “responsibilization” exclusively as the promotion of self‐reliance, self‐care and individualized “investment decisions concerning one's health, education, security, and retirement” (2001: 92). While I also see this tendency, I would still argue that the “enterprise self”, presumably acting on rational decisions and contracts, is simultaneously taking responsibility and care for those who are close, for lovers, friends, kids, to whom one has emotional rather than contractual bonds.

6. This is all the more surprising, since male homosexuals have been traditionally depicted as a threat to the nation, often figuring as scapegoats for national crisis or decline (Alexander 1997; Nieden 2005). Concerning a modernized image of the nation see Ha (2006).

7. Kien Nghi Ha (2006) elaborates a similar argument in relation to hybridity and how it is used in late modern Western societies. “Hybridity”, a non‐essential concept of difference, becomes a tool for modernizing the nation state: “I suggest to discuss cultural hybridity and national identity not as conceptual oppositions, but as a functional relationship, which allows the nation to expand and modernize the symbolic field of national self‐representation by creating a more colorful, joyful, and attractive image of itself. In the global competition of national economies and cultures it is even for the nation a task of growing importance to appear cosmopolitan and open for productive flows of migrating capital, creative subjects, and powerful symbols.”

8. Lorenz offers the term “crossings” for the individual negotiation of contradictions, which would rather need to be handled politically through reworking norms and social practices. Crossing various social positions (for example, of the “unmarried domestic worker” and “lesbian university teacher”), trying to pass (temporarily or permanently) as one while not negating the others, holds simultaneously a promise and a threat: crossings offer “a social promise of recognition, but at the same time were bound up with a threat, should the assumption of the position not sufficiently succeed” (Lorenz 2007: 122).

9. Unlike Ann Pellegrini, I think that heterosexuals are indeed being addressed as precariously close, hopefully not too close, to the promising difference. Pellegrini recognizes the double address, but keeps a clear dividing line: “Others work on the line pitching heterosexual and queer consumers at once, relying on the latter's ability to read between the lines and the former's—what?—commitment to denotation. (I continue to marvel at the profitable ignorance of heterosexuality. Innocent of any reading but one, the straight consumer covers his ass in a hermeneutics of plausible deniability.)” (Pellegrini 2002: 138).

10. Ferguson (2005) explains this as a thoroughly racialized process that secures white privilege. This would mean that it is not by chance that the bodies of the “projective integration” are white.