ABSTRACT
Few historians directly expanded on British historian and sociologist Jeffrey Weeks’s or historian John D’Emilio’s focus on capitalism, even as later research emphasized commercial spaces of the large metropolis as critical sites of homosexual identity and community formation. In Britain, however, Lisa Power recounts that political engagement by homosexuals as a group with consumer capitalism only appears with the explicit anti-capitalism of the Gay Liberation Front. Building on feminist scholarship and African-American history, Alexandra Chasin finds a correlation between equality struggles and target marketing. While market forces contributed to ‘hailing’ into existence a cohesive and public gay and lesbian movement, the overall effect of consumer capitalism, Chasin concludes, is divisive and fragmentary. Jasbir Puar describes the complicity between homosexuals and heteronormativity, state priorities, neo-liberal politics and the race, class and citizenship privileges they require as another form of homonormativity.
