ABSTRACT
Visibility in commodity culture is in this sense a limited victory for gays who are welcome to be visible as consumer subjects but not as social subjects. The increasing circulation of gay and lesbian images in consumer culture has the effect of consolidating an imaginary, class-specific gay subjectivity for both straight and gay audiences. "Queer" began to circulate in public and academic writings in the early nineties, the sign of an unsettling critical confrontation with heteronormativity, a distinctly postmodern rescripting of identity, politics, and cultural critique. Butler's book Gender Trouble offers one of the most incisive and widely read critiques of heterosexuality. Butler's work suggests several points about gender and sexuality that are politically important to queer theory and politics. The postmodern fetishizing of sexual identity also characterizes two essays by Diana Fuss and Teresa de Lauretis that treat visibility and sexual identity.
