ABSTRACT
This chapter guides the book into broader discussion of the global corporate sector’s engagement with LGBTQ ‘diversity discourse’, and the metadiscursive regime of diversity management (Park 2013). The empirical focus here is Pride and Prejudice, a conference with transnational scale and influence hosted by The Economist, which aimed to ‘catalyse fresh debate on the economic and human costs of discrimination against the LGBT community’. This chapter’s event-ethnographic study demonstrates how The Economist and other commercial institutions use rhetorical tactics of cost and opportunity to construct diversity as a financial imperative, how The Economist and other actors frame themselves as leaders in altruistic change and ultimately, how the purported import of Pride and Prejudice lies in how it exemplifies a discursive strategy I call affective legitimation. Discourses of diversity are powerful tools for invoking atmospheres of equality, tolerance and freedom. However, they are also increasingly wielded by corporate actors to facilitate market globalist exchange and sell ‘diversity’ as a ‘non-performative’ floating signifier (Ahmed 2012) – in ways that do not diminish the material inequality or prejudice experienced by ‘diverse’ others.
