‘For business it boils down to one thing’: affective legitimation in LGBTQ diversity discourse

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper underscores how articulations of/about affect establish the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of what is authorized, encouraged, redeemed, or prohibited within discourses that legitimate neoliberal governmentality. Through an exemplary analysis of LGBTQ diversity discourse data, I demonstrate how institutionalized ‘endorsements’ of diversity frame employees’ selves entirely as resources for capital, and legitimate ways that LGBTQ workers conduct themselves as feeling actors (and productive workers). This has implications far beyond the realm of LGBTQ inclusion. Building upon descriptions of discursive legitimation suggesting that strategies function in combination with one another, the process I describe, ‘affective legitimation’, is one where they cohere. Financial, bureaucratic or political-economic concerns are imbued with emotion, becoming something ‘more-than’. Diverse subjects’ authentic selfhood, innermost desires, productivity, personal and professional fulfilment, and idealized self-sufficient citizenship are grafted together – treated as equivalent, thus affirming rationales of corporate profitability and entrepreneurial self-actualization. As one speaker quoted here remarks, ‘for business it boils down to one thing’. It is vital to apprehend how contemporary discourses about workers’ capacity to feel entwine with discourses about how it feels to have ones’ labour rewarded: how sanctioned outcomes endorse certain ‘feeling rules’, and how such rules strengthen the authority and legitimacy of capitalist exploitation.