ABSTRACT
Anchored by the queer-theoretical and cultural studies scholarship of Jose Esteban Muñoz and Sara Ahmed, this concluding chapter sums up the previous analysis chapters to offer up a purposely (queerly) incomplete and open-ended account of the mediatization of equality. As part of this summary, I describe my own entanglement with the alluring and enchanting discursive formation examined in this book and characterize what it offers as an ersatz equality: a thingified, commodified version of the true condition. This chapter summarizes the rhetorical tactics and discursive strategies underpinning the mediatization of equality, and how these scale a utopian LGBTQ future as something around the corner, just within reach – so long as queer individuals continue to embrace the affirmative, self-maximizing politics of neoliberal governmentality. In closing, this chapter advocates for a new perspective on discourses of queer cosmopolitanism, for LGBTQ rights, in the form of a global heterotopia. This re-purposing of contemporary mediatized discourses of equality creates ‘a new future’ (Heller and McElhinny 2017) by focusing on the acts of hope we can commit to in the present: not a demand for the world, or for forms of infinite global queer mobility, but rather a demand for enough, for all.
