Rethinking Resistance: The Queer Play of the Women’s National Basketball Association, Visibility Politics and Late Capitalism

Abstract

This article employs the methodology of contextual cultural studies to explore the protest strategies of ‘Lesbians for Liberty’, a group of fans who staged a ‘kiss‐in’ during every time‐out of a nationally televised game between the Women’s National Basketball Association’s (WNBA) New York Liberty and Miami Sol. Designed as a way to challenge homophobia and lesbian invisibility sanctioned by the New York Liberty management, this article suggests the fans’ kissing activism promotes visibility and single‐issue identity politics as strategies for change. While the fans’ actions make lesbian bodies intelligible in a sporting and leisure space that too frequently imagines heteronormativity, a closer analysis reveals the rhetoric of Lesbians for Liberty and the WNBA’s marketing strategies are both complicit with ideologies and shifting processes characteristic of late capitalist profit‐enhancing practices. This article concludes by offering a discussion of queer and feminist writings that attempt to again theorise resistance in light of late capitalist marketing strategies, which have co‐opted the rhetoric of equality in the service of capital. The ultimate goal of this analysis is to join broader dialogues about the efficacy of identity‐based models of resistance by using the Lesbians for Liberty’s desire and actions as productive sites from which to rethink bodies, pleasures and resistance differently.