Affective Mobilizations: Pinkwashing and Racialized Homophobia in Out There

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the affective economies which materialize around race, sexuality and queerness in the British context to enable the production and mobilization of an exceptionalist discourse of gay-friendly and post-homophobic Britain (i.e., pinkwashing). The author investigates the discursive workings of pinkwashing coupled with the racialization of homophobia, through a critical reading of the BBC Two documentary Out There (2013a), written and narrated by British gay-identified writer, activist and artist, Stephen Fry. The documentary captures and is in fact captured within a global moment of human rights speculation in which some European nation-states have invested in affective discourses of queer futurities as a marker of their capacity for tolerance, in contrast to predominantly racialized subjects/communities within and outside of Europe, increasingly naturalized as always already homophobic (i.e., racializing homophobia). My reading of the documentary demonstrates the interconnection between pinkwashing and racialized homophobia as discursive inventions which depend on the mobilization of affects such as love, pride, terror, hate and (un)happiness, as currencies of governance. Far from being universal or abstract, I contend that British LGBTQ human rights speculative discourse draws on a highly racialized affective economy—which constructs racialized communities within Britain and racialized populations and states outside the West, as excessively homophobic, rendering pre-dominantly gay male British subjects (and homopatriarchy) as exceptional patriots.