From big business sponsorship of Pride to annual rankings celebrating the most LGBTQ-friendly employers, the message that corporations are now diverse and inclusive places to work for LGBTQ+ people is being emblazoned on corporate headquarters, showcased on websites and promoted by visible LGBTQ+ senior executives. But what do these commitments to inclusion really mean? What do they actually do? And how do they translate in practice?
While welcoming the corporate turn to LGBTQ-friendliness as a sign of progress is certainly tempting, new investments in diversity might actually reproduce the very structures of power that have historically made corporations bastions of (white, cis-heterosexual, male) privilege.
In my recent book The Gentrification of Queer Activism, I suggest we resist the urge to read the corporate turn to diversity simply as evidence of more inclusion. Instead, we should look at how these investments are experienced by those on the receiving end of this newfound friendliness, as well as what they might mean in the broader context of LGBTQ+ activism and sustained efforts to ethically rebrand corporations in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
Indeed, the notion of workplace diversity emerged in part as a way of dealing with some of the challenges facing corporations at the turn of the century. For decades, activists grounded in antiracist, feminist, queer and anticapitalist social justice movements had been challenging inequality in the workplace, in some cases forcing corporations to acknowledge discriminatory practices. Meanwhile, growing criticism of corporations required new forms of leadership, management, and of course, reputational damage-control developed to re-establish confidence and legitimacy in the power of the market.
Reconfiguring differences no longer as sites of historical inequality but as the source of a new, productive advantage, diversity becomes one of the cures to corporation’s ailments: an invitation to invest in its promises with a renewed confidence in capitalism’s ability not only to reform itself, but to actually adjudicate on matters of social justice. Where activist-driven equality agendas demanded that corporations redress injustice, diversity instead tasks diverse subjects themselves with helping companies succeed, both morally and financially, by unleashing their productivity, becoming workplace role models, and putting their differences to work in self-advancing ways. Instead of structural redistribution, visible and successful LGBTQ+ leaders – from Silicon Valley lesbian tech CEOs to activists-turned-diversity consultants – reassure us that diversity is not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do, financially speaking.
But what are the limits of valuing diversity because it is fundamentally good for business? Is LGBTQ+ inclusion really best served by capitalism? And do the interests of LGBTQ+ employees really align with those of corporations?
On the one hand, the neoliberal elevation of the free market as the ideal framework within which freedom can be achieved suggests that yes: perhaps new opportunities for workplace productivity might really be the markers of what counts as a valuable LGBTQ+ life. Diversity workers in particular, were keen to explain that making a business case for diversity was particularly useful in getting corporate leaders to take questions of inclusion seriously.
On the other hand, however, the idea that diversity is fundamentally valuable because of the value it brings to the corporation has some serious limitations. Indeed, while for some entrepreneurial LGBTQ+ employees, the truism that diversity is good for business has opened up significant leadership opportunities, for others it has entailed the emergence of new expectations regarding how to be LGBTQ+ at work, new forms of exploitation designed to extract diversity work from (sometimes unwilling) employees, and the erection of new brick walls that work to keep the hierarchies of corporate power intact.
This begs the question of what all of this is really for. Over the past few years, headlines have been dominated by critiques of pinkwashing, in which activists accuse corporations of caring about LGBTQ+ inclusion merely for commercial gains. Such accusations are especially conspicuous during Pride month, when some of the world’s biggest corporate actors – some of which have rather questionable human rights records, including weapons manufacturer BAE Systems to oil giant Shell – are especially keen to show their support for LGBTQ+ inclusion.
Of course, corporations reassure us that they care deeply about LGBTQ+ inclusion, justifying these investments by suggesting that they are supported and driven by their own LGBTQ+ employees. Yet, such justifications not only elevate the freedom of individual LGBTQ+ employees against the broader interests of the community, but actually pit corporate investments in LGBTQ+ inclusion against a more expansive version of queer liberation. This is a version of liberation which does not seek to reform structures of power – including corporate power – through more diversity but strives to connect identity struggles to a broader fight against climate extinction, extractivism and imperialism, all of which are fuelled by corporate greed and capitalism’s unstoppable quest for ever-greater profits.
Thus, while corporations increasingly invite us to celebrate their commitments to LGBTQ+ diversity as evidence of a newfound freedom, meaningful change would require actually challenging versions of liberation that are not merely compatible with capitalism, but quite literally reconfigured in the service of upholding corporate power. These versions of liberation centre struggles for economic redistribution and not only the recognition of diverse gender/sexual identities as key to the making of more liveable queer futures beyond the corporation.
Olimpia Burchiellaro is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations, School of Social Sciences at the University of Westminster.
The Gentrification of Queer Activism by Olimpia Burchiellaro is available here for 80.00 on the Bristol University Press website.
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