Pinkwashing, "homonationalism" and postmodern imperialism

We’re standing on a small overpass right next to Yoyogi park in Shibuya, watching the parade section of the Tokyo Pride event doing its circuit through the local city centre. There’s a significant turnout here, something which is actually unusual by the standards of the Tokyo sprawl.

Not the crowds as such, of course, but them being united for a purpose other than fragmented work or consumption is a rare thing in a culture splintered into thousands of little tiny bubbles. Only mass-marketed events like the Olympics or a Taylor Swift concert manages to really mount large crowds around anything vaguely resembling a common idea, and it soon becomes obvious that the Pride event is not at all different in that regard.

It’s literally nothing more than a PR event for brand marketing within the framework of the totally appropriated myth of sexual liberation.

The problem isn’t just that the propaganda of the corporate state is taking advantage of the Pride/LGBT framework to further its own agenda - the spectacle around us has now been almost completely emptied of its own original content, substituted for nothing more than brands and their symbolic trappings.

But there’s a hint of an awareness of these contradictions among the people around us. With us up there on the bridge are pro-Palestinian LGBT activists, who are manifesting against the participation in the Pride event by multinationals like Kawasaki, who currently make up significant links in the supply chains of the Israeli armed forces during the ongoing atrocities.

This is all well and good. I just wished they’d have gone deeper. Who cares if Kawasaki happened to commit a little faux pas - why are they even here at all in the first place? Why are Coca-Cola and its employees celebrating “equal rights” in history’s most stratified class society, while just next door, the homeless of Shinjuku and the prostitutes of Kabukicho languish in despair?

Back in 2007, in Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar coined the concept of “homonationalism” around her analysis of how narratives of sexual liberation are being strategically deployed in support and reproduction of imperialism. Her point was that cultural phenomena like the LGBT movement function as key symbols of the purported openness, freedom and tolerance of liberal regimes, which are then used as a tool of identity-building and integration propaganda, as well as in the contradistinction of the sexually repressive, anti-democratic and primitive other.

The Muslim. The terrorist. Russia. China.

This is quite perceptive. In a sense, sexual diversity and liberation is the quintessential expression of the core value system of Westernized liberal regimes, where sexual license is closely akin to the highest possible good on a framework of hedonist secular consumerism. The details take a bit of unpacking, but we can just observe that Enlightenment individualism expressed within a capitalist framework devoid of any transcendent reference points will almost by necessity tend towards the radical unfettering of the libido as a moral absolute.

So the narrative of sexual liberation, closely connected to universal suffrage and women’s rights, is thus through a set of strong symbolic connections a key foundation of the basic framework by which we moderns make sense of what’s good and bad in the world.

And what’s important to note, this foundation persists as a social fact whether you’re a fourth wave feminist or a card-carrying neo-Nazi. As long as we’re in some sense bearers of the Enlightenment heritage, we must navigate the strong symbolic statements of the sexual liberation. And if we happen take a moral stance against them, we’re forced to address the inevitable contradictions that arise, since they so effectively channel the value-foundations of the liberal, secular order which almost all of us are anchored in to some extent.

For these reasons, it makes perfect sense for modern multinationals to specifically appropriate and recuperate the once subversive gay rights movement, repackaged into this vapid brand-marketing event whose strongest and most politically incendiary statement was the meaningless slogan of “Happy Pride!” heard everywhere throughout the streets of the Tokyo ward.

The Panasonic section

And for all the corporate propaganda around sexual liberation, there’s surprisingly little actual sex taking place at the Pride event in Shibuya. The passion is at the level of a flea market, with vaguely interested consumers picking through the weird offerings of the corporate stalls that make up 90% of the exhibits on the event grounds. Not quite the atmosphere of the free festival, unchained.

I didn’t even see people holding hands, much less anybody kissing another human being’s face in an expression of something vaguely akin to desire.

Of course, in keeping with the socially required behaviour, all of that stuff must be channeled into consumption, and not be spent on actual intimacy. The sex is found in the brands, in the marketing of pharmaceutical multinationals, in the free energy drinks and the selfies taken in front of the garish sports car planted smack-dab in the middle of the open-air venue, right next to the tents of Pfizer and Panasonic, where you can get a sticker and a key chain. And in a bald-faced rip-off from Shinto ritual you’re invited to write your name on a paper heart that you attach to a painted tree symbolizing your participation in the LGBT-corporate alliance towards the inclusion and liberation of everyone. The voluntary reproduction of the spectacular image of modernity and liberalism.

So they can sell you their shit.

'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?

The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.

Orwell. 1984.

The ultimate meaning of sex in the neoliberal framework is nothing more than an act of solipsistic consumption, and the foremost expression of this framing (but far from the only one) is found in neoliberalism’s specific recuperated manifestation of the transgender phenomenon. The customization of the self and its body into the expression of a stunted, socially constructed consumer desire through pharmaceutical intervention.

Of course, big pharma just by coincidence happens to hold pride of place at the event grounds in Shibuya, with GSK cozying up next to Pfizer and Astra-Zeneca, with “team Coca-Cola”, Amazon, Sony and Panasonic close by, in what stands out to me as the most perfectly recuperated manifestation of a once-genuine social movement I’ve ever encountered. And there’s literally nothing else here. Nothing but corporate stalls as far as the eye can see.

Unfortunately, the problem is almost impossible to communicate. The point doesn’t get across.

One key problem is that the analyses of the situation are almost always mind-numbingly stupid. The most radical criticisms of corporate pinkwashing in the mainstream media basically amount to calling brands out for not being sufficiently orthodox instruments in the propaganda of liberal regimes and for the hegemony of Western capital:

And a representative example of the most common response to these issues being raised, which obviously takes form against the backdrop of progessivist mythology and its centerpiece of sexual liberation, is as follows:

I was at Tokyo pride last year and studied abroad in Tokyo for the first half of 2023. (Had a fantastic time, one of the most well run prides I’ve ever been to.)

Our professors explained to us that recent judicial opinions discussing more progressive takes on LGBTQ+ rights noted that a significant factor in ruling in favor of these movements is the corporate messaging seen from events like these.

While in America we see it purely as rainbow washing, in Japan, the corporate messaging is seen by judges as representative of the voice of the people because in theory the money follows the will of the people otherwise the companies wouldn’t be bothering with the campaigning so much.

I’m no expert and am still learning a lot, but I got the impression that culturally, the rainbow washing actually has really significant political effects for achieving actual rights that are still being pursued in Japan. It really changed the way I look at corporate sponsorship at pride. It’s a luxury that Americans get to look at it from a purely cynical standpoint (and also maybe a shame that American Judges let their politics ignore the same economic responses in America that are indicative of that same cultural shift towards progress that even corporations can’t ignore from a market share standpoint).

(Reddit comment).

The corporate recuperation, literally labelled as “rainbow washing”, is here seen in a progressive light, as a force for good, since the end goal of attaining legal rights and social recognition for the sexual minority groups is nonetheless being pursued. The idea is that corporate recuperation of sexual liberation within the framework of Pride is not a problem if it’s an expression of the consumer’s agency in the marketplace.

This is basically a defense of the “Spontanous Demonstrations” of Animal Farm as by definition an authentic manifestation of the general will.

One would perhaps rather argue that corporate recuperation of a social movement under capitalism is vastly more of a problem if it were an actual expression of the popular will (since the tendency would then by definition be in the direction of an explicit totalitarian fusion of capital and popular agency).

And I just can’t stomach the final paragraph. It’s a privileged “luxury” to be cynical about capitalist hijacking of social movements? This has to be one of the finest examples of unwitting self-contradiction I’ve ever come across.

This interpretation and the final sentiment could only be possible from a position of profound ignorance. A total lack of understanding of the violent repression expressed in and through the corporate appropriation and colonization of popular social movements.

Or is it rather that the authoritarian attachment to the mythology of progress and its redemptive promises makes it completely palatable that Pride is hijacked and turned into an instrument of propaganda for capital and empire, propped up by the exploitation of the working classes and colonized peoples of the world?

I don’t know.

But I do know that this puritan, repressed emanation of neoliberal ideology and the commodification of human intimacy I had the misfortune to witness in Shibuya is a far fucking cry from Stonewall.

References

Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. London: Duke University Press.

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Touch, we touched the very soul
Of holding each and every life
We claimed the very source of joy ran through
It didn't, but it seemed that way
I kissed a lot of people that day

Someone passed some bliss among the crowd
And we walked back to the road, unchained

The Sun Machine is coming down,
and we're gonna have a party