Competition redefines the bounds of neoliberalism that forces heternormative assimilation.

Good neoliberal subjects, then, are more or less successful enterprise-units.41 The income streams they generate enable them to maximize their utility functions (or, at least, the purpose of generating income streams is to amass the resources necessary to maximize utility, whether this is realized or not). Ultimately, what these enterprises produce (or at least endeavor to produce) is their own preference satisfaction. The income stream may be used to purchase (or attract) the raw materials—shelter, groceries, a mate, etc.—which may be combined with non-market labor to produce whatever the neoliberal subject wishes to consume (warmth, nutrients, orgasm, etc.). This way of construing human activity makes of each individual a self-interested bundle of sui generis preferences calculating the costs and benefits of every available option for conduct and relationship in view of his or her [their] own likelihood of satisfaction. Everything we do is to be understood as utility maximizing behavior based on preferences and calculation. Even our most intimate associations—with our parents, with our spouses, with our children—are explicable on this model, according to Becker.42 Generosity and self-sacrifice are investments; genetically related offspring are commodities for which close substitutes are scarce; 43 and friendships are valuable insofar as they maximize one’s utility function. Becker is famous for having analyzed criminal behavior in this way. Law-breaking, he argues, be it parking in a tow-away zone or selling narcotics, is market behavior, and if authorities want to reduce it, they have simply to reduce the incentives to engage in it. There is no qualitative difference between people who break laws and people who do not; the “delinquent” is not a special kind of person.44 Repetitions of the choice to break laws leading to multiple arrests and incarcerations might generate the label and even the sub- jective experience of oneself as “criminal” or “delinquent,” but those identities are simply shorthand for aggregated preferences as expressed and implemented choices over time. Obviously, the same case can be made for the “homosexual,” as well as for any of the other sexual identity categories generated through the twentieth century. Everybody starts with their own set of personal preferences. Neoliberal theorists are not interested in the whence and wherefore of those preferences; it simply does not matter (although advertisers are very interested in how to generate new preferences for market purposes). As neoliberals see it, we all make predictions regarding what will satisfy our preferences and enhance our utility, and then we calculate the costs and risks of attempting to achieve satisfaction in each of the ways available to us at a given time. Our lives are made up of these thousands of calculated choices. Our identities are to be understood not as some underlying truth that comes into the world with us at conception or birth, or even as the names for biological and psychological developmental outcomes, but simply as names for relatively long-term patterns of behavior that can be thought of as manifestations of choice and strategy.45 For identities to have any value or meaning in neoliberal regimes, they must play some role in markets. And they do. “Lesbians” are a population with certain preferences cohesive enough to form a market—for four-wheel drive vehicles, Birkenstocks, power tools, wedding planners, and reproductive technologies. Likewise “gay men” are a population with certain preferences (and statistically, being [white] men, with about 30% more income to allocate than lesbians); so they are a market—for vodka, magazines, sophisticated household furnishings, men-only cruise lines.46 We call these stereotypes, which make them seem detrimental, and they do have detrimental effects. But unlike older stereotypes, the detrimental effects fall not so much on those who do but rather on those who do not fit them. Whereas it was terrible to be a limp-wristed sissy, it is not so bad to be an urban sophisticate with artistic flare; in fact, it might greatly increase one’s income stream. What is terrible is to be bullied out of an education, to try to survive among the ranks of the working poor, to be ill without insurance, or to raise children or care for a disabled partner without the civil rights necessary to protect their interests. Neoliberalism has an answer to whatever discrimination people suffer, however. It is to let the market handle it. Some people have a taste for racism or homophobia, a preference for avoiding contact with blacks or Jews or gays. They calculate the costs and risks of satisfying that preference, and then they do so in whatever manner best maximizes their utility. However, as Milton Friedman notes, “The man who exercises discrimination pays a price for doing so.” 47 If he happens to be an entrepreneur, this price interferes with operational efficiency. “A businessman or entrepreneur who expresses preferences in his business activities that are not related to productive efficiency is at a disadvantage compared to other individuals who do not. Such an individual is in effect imposing higher costs on himself than are other individuals who do not have such preferences. Hence, in a free market they will tend to drive him out.” 48 Indeed, markets have remedied some discrimination against non-heterosexuals.49 As of 2008, according to an Equality Forum survey, 473 of Fortune 500 companies included sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies.50 Increasingly, such companies offer partner benefits to employees in same-sex relationships. And the job market is not the only market to address discrimination. For example, for many years the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibited insurance companies from selling domestic partner health insurance policies in Virginia. Having discovered a lucrative market niche outside the state that they felt sure could be replicated within it, the companies lobbied hard to change the law. In fact, when gay and lesbian activists attempted to attend the General Assembly hearings on the question, insurance representatives urged them to stay away, so as not to confuse a free market issue with a social issue; the companies’ spokespeople would handle everything. And they did. The legal change that ensued was thus a result of market pressure, not of demands for equality or justice. Of course, this market approach only works to end discrimination if inclusion of the groups of people in question is profitable. When it is not, there simply is no remedy. Those lesbians and gay men, transpeople and queers of all sorts who are without sufficient human capital and resources to allocate in markets may well still be subject not only to discrimination but to harassment and violence. But to return to the question at hand, within a neoliberal framework, an identity is not coincident with a subject position. Neoliberal subjects are (or should be, if they are rational) self-entrepreneurs; it is up to them to acquire whatever discipline is needed to enhance their human capital and compete in the marketplace. Identities, when they come into play at all, are simply labels imposed on aggregated choices, which in turn are based on sui generis preferences; they are not the names of developmental trajectories, as they are in regimes of disciplinary normalization. Consequently, they will not be strictly enforced on every individual human body. And this brings us back to queer theory and politics. Queering in the Absence of Firm Identities The project of queering identities began in the early 1990s as a way of breaking down rigid delineations of experience and desire. Queer theorists pointed out numerous examples of ambiguous or veiled homosexual desire in apparently heterosexual images, tropes, characters, and plot lines in classical literature, drama, and film, as well as in popular culture. They showed us that our own real-life sexual and gender identities were simulacra, constantly requiring reenactment, reiteration, and representation to bolster and sustain themselves. They resisted and challenged homogeneity of identification by inciting identities to proliferate and endlessly differ from themselves. In short, where our normalized identities defined and imprisoned us, they excavated exits and melted bars. They showed us that those identities had histories and political investments and interests that transcended and sometimes opposed our individual lives and well-being. They laid bare the mechanisms of disciplinary normalization. They encouraged us to experience dis-identification and estrangement. In Foucault’s terms, they helped us to get free of ourselves.51 Now, however, if disciplinary normalization is receding where it is in tension with expanding regimes of security wherein circulation (of money, commodities, information, human bodies, etc.), not development, is paramount, how are queer theory and politics situated? If “queer” resists the forces that would contain us in normalized identities, can “queer” also resist the forces that would transform us into utility maximizers operating as entrepreneurial firms? Or is it more likely just to render us all more open to marketing across what used to be our normalized identity boundaries? The question is pressing because, on some fronts at least, it looks like queering identities facilitates the expansion and multiplication of markets. To attract a desired mate, a straight man might need to invest in his human capital by learning from—and then by purchasing the same products as—men with fashionable “queer eyes,” as depicted on an early twenty-first century reality TV show, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Straight masculinity needs to be softened or refined; hence, a little queerness is good for everybody. In some queer youth cultures, boundary breaking and gender-bending strategies rely very heavily on deploying purchased products; one announces one’s challenges to identification through clothes, jewelry, hair styles, tattoos, personal electronics, and similar accoutrements and often through relatively rapid changes in these modes of personal stylization. After all, in a neoliberal world, what does refusing to be contained in an identity mean other than refusing to make consistent consumer choices? It will be argued that this popular culture appropriation of “queer” has little or nothing to do with the queer politics of the 1970s and 1980s or with the queer theory and politics of the 1990s. And there is merit in that argument. My point is not that the work done in those decades was misguided, only that, with the changes in notions of identity that have occurred with the advance of neoliberalism over the last four decades, that sort of work now will inevitably be appropriated and, to use a very old word, co-opted. It does not challenge neoliberal subjectivities directly enough not to be; its focus was disciplinary normalization. But can we turn queering into resisting neoliberalism? I believe so, and I believe we should. First, why should we? I will not make a comprehensive argument here. Instead, like Foucault in the first lecture of the 1977-1978 series, I will assert a “conditional imperative” 52: If we want to resist domination, if we want to resist the current political tendency to lock people down in a single grid of intelligibility and mode of living (and surely that is essentially what queer politics and queer theory have aimed to oppose all along), then in addition to resisting what remains of normalized disciplinary identities, we must resist and challenge the neoliberal reduction of people to calculating, self-interested entrepreneurs of themselves. This is the way of thinking and approaching life that we all are being pressed into within neoliberal regimes of power. For those few who actually succeed in turning themselves into self-entrepreneurs, viewing every aspect of their existence in terms of competition, investment, and profitable exchange, such a life is likely to be impoverished in every way except financial. And for those who fail—which is likely to be a large majority of people on our planet, including a majority of North Americans and Europeans—the material, if not also the psychological, results are little short of terrifying. What we must queer now, I believe, is not so much normalized identity but neoliberal subjectivity. If neoliberalism is able to impose its conception of human being fully, the world will be a much worse place, in my view, than it is now. Relationships, including communal and civic relationships, will be devalued to the breaking point, and material scarcity in the absence of those relationships will drive people to desperation. So, how can we queer neoliberal subjectivity? Queering, like queer “itself,” never appears in unity. There will be many approaches and possibilities, and they will not obey common distinctions between theory and practice. With that word of caution, I will conclude this essay by discussing three closely related courses of action. The first begins with a policing of our language. Let us pause and consider each time we find ourselves about to describe an action as an “investment.” This, I think, would be the first step in resisting the neoliberal financialization of lives and selves. Sometimes people do invest, such as when they allocate some of their incomes to 401(k)s. But why think of taking classes as “investing”? Why think of maintaining one’s home as “an investment”? Why think of getting to know colleagues at conferences as “investments”? There are other ways to describe these activities. In fact, all these things usually involve some pleasure in the moment and have many desirable effects besides increasing one’s net worth in the marketplace. Interrogating the use of financial language in everyday life is crucial for identifying the ways in which neoliberal discourses and values are shaping us and our relationships. I suspect, furthermore, that a sustained resistance to financial language might also lead us eventually to undertake a critique of neoliberal temporality with its multiple postponements into an apparently unending futurity of projected returns.53 A second, probably closely related practice of resistance to neoliberal domination might begin with simply taking note of desires and pleasures that are neither market-based nor market-valued. Non-(re)productive sexuality might be a prime example, as might friendship and communal relationships outside the kinship systems that are taken to be the fundamental units of capitalist consumption. To be sure, there are ways of construing such things in market terms if we choose to, as Gary Becker’s work makes clear, but if we pay close attention to what really brings us joy in those activities and relationships and find ways of expressing that joy or pleasure or desire in non-financial and non-market terms, collectively we may generate a basis upon which to live in resistance to neoliberal domination. Finally, in addition to examining the ways we speak of our own actions in everyday life and the ways we understand and live in relation to others, we might actually take a more activist stand against gay and lesbian market identities. By this I mean something more than simply challenging stereotypes, which has been done for decades. I mean, also, challenging the gay and lesbian organizations that promote our communities as markets and that buy into the idea that what justice for all amounts to is assimilation into the dominate market economy. Let me quickly add that I am not advocating a withdrawal from market economies (I believe that would be impossible), nor am I suggesting that we relinquish the gains made against discrimination in employment. Instead, I am suggesting, in a Foucauldian vein, that we problematize those goals and do what we can to render them questionable. As David Harvey wrote recently, “We are, often without knowing it, all neoliberals now.” 54 We have already been re-shaped to a great extent, and alternatives to neoliberal language and concepts are no longer readily available. But they can emerge if the radical contingency of our own ways of being make themselves felt in our questioning. In other words, alternatives can form and domination can be opposed through an antineoliberal practice of queer.