“The darker the fruit”? Homonationalism, racialized homophobia, and neoliberal tourism in the St Lucian–US contact zone

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the discursive representations of a “homophobic hate crime” case against gay US tourists in the small-island state of St Lucia, especially within the mainstream US media. Drawing on the interrelated concepts of homonationalism, pinkwashing, and racialized homophobia, the study opens up the complexities of race, sexuality, and neoliberal globalization, and aims to transcend a “perpetrator/victim” mode of analysis. I argue that media representations of the case serve to “characterize” St Lucia as innately homophobic, as a sign of its incapacity for gender and sexual tolerance and therefore of its failed/misguided sovereignty. In doing so, these representations shore up claims about US exceptionalism through the racialization of homophobia and the production of white gay US subjects as exceptional global citizens.