Attempts to integrate queers into society lead to homonormative subjects who reproduce the same oppressive regulations of gender and sexuality and depoliticize queers

These achievements may seem like genuine progress, especially through a recognition– redistribution lens. Gay and lesbian sexual specificity is being recognized, destigmatized, and normalized. Economic injustices facing gays and lesbians are being redressed. But I want to cast a more critical look at some of these victories for signs of an ongoing production of a neoliberal queer subject—a phenomenon associated with a regime of sexual regulation that some have called “homonormativity” (Duggan 2003; Drucker 2015). This neoliberal subject may embody forms of sexuality and gender that overflow heteronormativity at the margin (“homo”), yet at the core they remain “normative,” constituted as white, well-educated, middle-upper classed, predominantly cisgender-male, depoliticized, and committed to heteronorms and neoliberal capitalism. The forging of this subject helps stabilize some of the contradiction between queer sexuality and capital’s social reproductive needs. Simultaneously, it recasts the old contradiction into newer forms, into the divide between queers with capital and queers without, between normative queers and deviant queers, between queer elites and queer outlaws. In the final instance, what appears as progress is revealed to be the reproduction of the same oppressive regulation of gender and sexuality. Heteronormativity, together with settler colonialism, racism, slavery, and patriarchy forms “the historical foundation that has not been surpassed but serves instead as material conditions reproduced in new ways in the present” (Goldstein 2018: 83).15

Let us start with marriage equality, a goal often considered the Holy Grail of mainstream gay and lesbian rights movements. A wave of high-profile same-sex marriage legalizations in recent years has brought some degree of recognitive and redistributive justice to same-sex couples. But who are these couples in whose name this battle is fought? Consider the following passage from the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. (US Supreme Court 2015b: 28)

This is less a defense of the dignity and rights for queer people than an edict extolling marriage. Justice Kennedy’s reasoning idealizes marriage as unconditionally good, natural, and wholesome. Monogamous marriage is so highly desirable that the exclusion of queer people, the argument goes, is a gross injustice. Conveniently ignoring the fact that there is nothing natural about marriage or monogamy, same-sex or different-sex alike, this ruling puts marriage on a pedestal while expanding its boundary to admit same-sex couples who can afford and are willing to emulate the moralizing heteronormative family. Marriage equality is precious, yet the freedom to marry disproportionately benefits only a few “queers with enough access to capital to imagine a life integrated within North American capitalist culture” (Munoz 2009: 20). For queers without capital, this hollow victory has secured little more than an empty bliss, molded in the image of bourgeois heterosexual domesticity.

A similar observation can be made with regard to the demand for the rights to have and raise children. Even in places where formal political and legal rights for queer persons to have children are secured, adoption, surrogacy, and assisted reproductive technology often remain prohibitively expensive. Consider the difference that Merve Emre has documented between a single woman working in a biotech company in Silicon Valley that offers $20,000 benefits for elective egg freezing and “two sick brown queer and trans women” whose desire for children is thwarted by poverty, mental illness, and the fatal violence that disproportionately threatens trans women of color (Emre 2018; also see Cardenas 2016). On the one hand, they both share a queer reproductive desire, a will to make life where the “natural” and “normal” ways are dead ends. Their convergence highlights the invisible privilege of cisgender-heterosexual couples’ reproduction. On the other hand, the structural inequalities that separate them make clear that legal remedies and technological interventions often serve to reinscribe the normative reproductive fantasy without closing the gap in access. To rephrase Micha Cardenas, the right to have a baby is an empty right if you neither have the biological input nor can afford it from the market (Cardenas 2016).