INTRODUCTION
In May 2019, the British writer Louis Staples tweeted the following, alongside a picture of an ‘LGBT’ (lettuce, guacamole, bacon, and tomato) sandwich produced by the supermarket Marks & Spencer for ‘pride month’.Footnote 1
LGBT people: ‘it'd be nice if people could stop abusing us when we hold hands in public, we could teach LGBT lessons in schools and if the BBC could stop debating our existence on live air that'd be grea-
Capitalism: ‘what we're really sensing here is you want your own sandwich’
Beneath the surface of this joke lies a clear (and recurrent) critique of the corporatised character of LGBTQ rights in late capitalism; alternately referred to as ‘pinkwashing’, ‘rainbow capitalism’, ‘homocapitalism’, and when operationalised alongside (ethno)nationalist ideologies, ‘homonationalism’ (Puar Reference Puar2007; Rao Reference Rao2015; Lazar Reference Lazar2017). According to many, ‘pride is now capitalism with a rainbow hue… [and has] succumbed… to the depressing politics of conformism, respectability and moderation’ (Tatchell Reference Tatchell2019). This ‘succumbing’ of queer people to the logics of (neoliberal) capitalism is often referred to as ‘homonormativity’ (following Duggan Reference Duggan2003; see Brown Reference Brown2012; Hall Reference Hall2013; and Motschenbacher Reference Motschenbacher, Barrett and Hall2018 for critiques and redeployments of this term). Through this article, I contribute to ongoing critique of the pinkwashed discourses and practices of corporate actors in the globalised marketplace. Stated clearly (if a little glibly), it takes more than a sandwich to solve homophobia.
I also want to delve further into the operation of rainbow capitalist discourse, examining its interrelation with matters of affect and embodiment, inspired by recent engagements with these topics within discourse studies (e.g. Wetherell Reference Wetherell2012, Reference Wetherell2015; Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz, Hall and Coupland2016; Busch Reference Busch, Fina and Georgakopoulou2020; Pratt Reference Pratt2021). Indeed, I wish to examine the interrelation of affect with embodiment—the way this discourse makes use of human confinement within a feeling body to perform market-oriented ends (Milani Reference Milani, Barrett and Hall2018b). Referring to Staples’ tweet once more, we can see the significance of the feeling body captured in the very first homophobic injustice he lists: abuse for holding hands. For queer people, Staples asserts, hand-holding is an act of love that begets acts of hate. And, in short, this article is about the significance of that act—and its significance within the neoliberal marketplace, in which (like much else) it is subject to exploitation. The body, and discourses about the body, are central to how subjects are oriented against the normative logics of the contemporary market, with hands as parts of the feeling body asked to grasp, reach for, grapple with, and hold onto the contemporary, mass-mediated promises of neoliberalism—both literally and figuratively.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL PRELIMINARIES: EMBODIED AFFECTIVE-DISCURSIVE PRACTICE
Recent conceptual framings of language, cognition, and the body astutely note the importance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's observations of how consciousness, social structure, and emotionality exist within the ‘lived body’: in gestures and human perceptions of them, not hidden behind (J. Joseph Reference Joseph2017; Pratt Reference Pratt2021). Part of being human, in short, is that we are ‘condemned to meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1947/1962:xviii). It is only through our bodies that we can make sense of the world, but those bodies in-and-of-themselves are ‘things’ that we attribute meaning to and ‘do’ things in the world with, based on what we have understood from past interactions with objects in a ‘lived body’. Such theorising extends the mind beyond its ‘cage’ in the skull, and thus situates cognition, emotion, and other mental states much more fully ‘in the world’. The meanings we attach to sociocultural and political-economic ideologies, then, should be understood as a matter of sensation, as much as a matter of cognition. Hence, from within Merleau-Ponty's discipline, phenomenology, Stuart (Reference Stuart and Radman2013:341) has remarked that ‘if the hand is the window to the mind, it is only because the hand can grasp its world, apprehending and comprehending it in ways that make the organism more effective in its engagement, and to do this it needs a moving, feeling body’ (expounding Kant's purported aphorism that ‘the hand is the window to the mind’), Individual and collective beliefs, ideologies, hopes, and dreams are thus rightly understood as embodied, extended, distributed, and situated (at times strategically) in actions like the grasping of another's hand in one's own: in observing and being observed, affecting and being affected (Busch Reference Busch, Fina and Georgakopoulou2020).
This article is grounded by this phenomenological framework, and this sense of the feeling body. It is vital to understanding how feeling—in scholarly terms, affect—emerges in intersubjective, intercorporeal practices.Footnote 2 Embodied life is thus not solely about being ‘bodied’, but bodied alongside others, and feeling alongside them (Weiss Reference Weiss1999). Ultimately, I seek to ground this article in a cultural phenomenology, through which the condition of having a body is centralised as the subjective ground of experience (Csordas Reference Csordas, Weiss and Haber1999, Reference Csordas, Ram and Houston2015). Following this notion:
studies under the rubric of embodiment are not ‘about’ the body per se. Instead they are about culture and experience insofar as these can be understood from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the-world. (Csordas Reference Csordas, Weiss and Haber1999:143)
Whether describing our ‘bodily being in the world’, the reciprocal ways our selves and our world intersect, or ways powerful discourses in the world impact our idea of selfhood (following Foucault), cultural phenomenology offers a united focus on the ‘simultaneous aspects of a bodily synthesis that is taken for granted in our everyday life’ (Csordas Reference Csordas, Ram and Houston2015:52). In much simpler terms, cultural phenomenology is a tool for centring the body in studies of society and culture, whether in critical sociolinguistic studies (as in this article) or any other field. Csordas highlights the fact that embodiment is a vector to study society—we study the body not for its own sake, but because of its profound imbrication with humans’ agentive encounters with social life. Importantly, threading this discussion within recent trends within sociolinguistics and discourse studies, a cultural-phenomenological approach to sociolinguistics follows Bucholtz & Hall's (Reference Bucholtz, Hall and Coupland2016) and Busch's (Reference Busch, Fina and Georgakopoulou2020) discussion of discourses of the body (and the latter of affect as well). It also follows from longstanding insights into the dialectal relationship/s between value creation, the material world (including embodied spacetime), and symbolic systems (e.g. Chumley & Harkness Reference Chumley and Harkness2013). Overall, my objective is to advance sociocultural linguistic and anthropological discussion of how the material body, its capabilities, and the qualities of its experiences are integral in the production of discourse and are also dialogic products of discourse.
This cultural-phenomenological baseline aligns with Wetherell's (Reference Wetherell2012:14; 2015) view that ‘there are no neat and easy dividing lines between physical affect and discourse… [and] the unit of analysis for social and cultural research on affect [is therefore] affective-discursive practice, that bears on and formulates the conduct of activities’. Overall, it is nowadays clear that critical discourse scholars must pay attention to the modalities and meanings of embodied experience in everyday interaction, including mediatised, corporatised communications like those examined here. Embodiment is no ‘private affair’, but ‘always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies’ (Weiss Reference Weiss1999:5). And because they are shared, embodied experiences and interactions are both haptic and affective—touching, in both senses. As extract (1) makes clear, this is a fact of life.
(1) I feel like your hands are probably the main part of your existence, like, you do everything with your hands so getting to hold hands with someone that you love is like a real connection.
As the speaker in extract (1) demonstrates, the embodied actions of the hands are vernacularly understood as an affective-discursive practice, a way to communicate ‘connection’ as well as enact mutual feeling. This extract points to how people orient to (and are oriented by) dense, inextricable links between bodily actions, affects, and discursive and sociocultural formations in the world. Through this article, I engage with existing discussions about these links, specifically to highlight their involvement in the mediatised, embodied, and affective legitimation of neoliberal capital into the future. I examine individuals’ orientation to a culture (and chronotope) of unfettered neoliberal capitalism: a kind of ideologically constituted, narrative, corporeal creation, a time-space envelope in which embodied actions and movements in the world are articulated according to essentially linked trajectories toward particular events and eras (Park Reference Park2018). Orientation is ‘about how the bodily, the spatial, and the social are entangled’ Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2006:181), and for me, their entanglement is clear in #HoldTight, the campaign from which extract (1) is drawn.
In the words of The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), who launched #HoldTight on 13 February 2017, ‘holding the hand of the one you love is the most basic gesture of affection there is. Yet in 2017, this simple celebration is still difficult for many members of the LGBTIQ community’. In ANZ's words:
(2) We're aiming to highlight what is a gesture that is difficult for many in the LGBTI community and turn it into a celebration of love and by asking people to ‘hold tight’, when they feel like letting go.
ANZ launched #HoldTight via a simple film (henceforth HTF),Footnote 3 which begins with a montage of hands engaging in a series of everyday activities, as a melancholy piano score plays (see Figure 1). The disembodied hands reach for each other as people walk, relax by a pool, fold laundry, and climb a tree. Close to touching, but not quite. It is only as the viewer realises that these are same-sex couples (of diverse races, ages, and gender presentations) that the hands clasp one another, however briefly. Following a short scene of two women on a bus letting go—faced with a scowl from a man nearby—the film shows each couple release their grip much more quickly than they were shown coming together. Within seconds, each couple has let go in response to another person's gaze. The final scene shows a couple approaching a pub with two men drinking outside. As we would expect from the previous scenes, the couple hesitate. However, as their hands clasp tighter, dramatic orchestral strings swell, and a final montage of each couple holding firmly to each other plays. ‘When you feel like letting go’, the on-screen text reads, ‘#HOLDTIGHT’. The final message: ‘ANZ is proud to continue supporting the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras’.
Figure 1. Selected stills from the #HoldTight launch film (HTF).
I encourage the reader to watch HTF as well as a staff testimonial (henceforth HST) and video celebrating ANZ's sponsorship of Auckland Pride (henceforth HAP) before moving onto the next sections—all can be accessed via links provided in note 3. These bank-produced examples of ‘diversity discourse’ are central within my #HoldTight dataset, as described below. Witnessing their embodied and affective resonance aids understanding of the emotional valence of ANZ's sustained pride campaigning, and my theoretical framework.
SETTING THE SCENE: NEOLIBERAL ORIENTATION/S FOR ‘DIVERSE’ SUBJECTS
Mediatised ‘diversity discourse’
While many in academia unpack what exactly corporate and political institutions accomplish by advocating for diversity, the concept is undeniably ‘in vogue’, and questioned far less stridently in vernacular spaces. As Vertovec (Reference Vertovec and Vertovec2015) discusses, it is difficult to probe how diversity is constituted by public institutions when their use of the word is so unquestioned—and taken for granted. Diversity is framed as inherently collaborative and sensible, unlike a concept like ‘equality’, which is understood as idealistic, or invoking critique, or complaint: overly combative when compared with the immanent cohesion presupposed by monocentric pushes for diversity. As Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2012:81) puts it, ‘to speak the language of diversity is to participate in the creation of a world’—a feelgood world, fusing positivity with the right amount of non-conformity and forms of digestible difference. From this perspective, diversity (as a concept, and the name for that concept), while on the surface resembling a vibrant flag, flying high and boosting pride, may rather function as a kind of cloak, obscuring power relations (employing positive affects to do so).
Critiques of ‘diversity discourse’ highlight the word's semantic flexibility. Urciuoli (Reference Urciuoli2003) refers to it as an agreeable, ambiguous ‘strategically deployable signifier’. Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2012) discusses how circulating the language of diversity is a way not to enact change—a ‘non-performative speech act’, a way not to do things with words. Similarly, Park (Reference Park2013) refers to ‘diversity management’ as a ‘metadiscursive regime’, which in his case instils ways of thinking about the linguistic capacities of workers. More broadly, such regimes can be seen as a generalizable framework for inscribing stances toward diversities, telling us how to recognise them, and ‘what the inclusion of “the diverse” can be useful for’. As Park (Reference Park2013:559) states, ‘diversity management can be situated within the neoliberal transformation of society that is reconfiguring the way we understand our selves and social relations’. Overall, diversity discourse can be seen as a regime that conditions and evaluates essential/ised differences between people and crafts ‘diversity’: the market-friendly face of social differentiation.
Feelgood regimes of diversity are highly salient in the rapid mainstreaming of LGBTQ rights within the corporate sector, and in the context of the mediatisation of contemporary communication. Since pinkwashing is undoubtedly underpinned by a market-friendly imperative, it is vital to also understand how this imperative is nowadays presented in such a feelgood way, at such a scale, that it is inconceivable for rhetorics of pinkwashing to have no influence on how LGBTQ identities are joyfully conceived and ongoingly produced. This is the implication of modern-day mediatisation processes, through which ‘representational practices of institutions semiotically mediate and thus participate in the circulation of meaningful images and interpretations of the world around us’ (Park Reference Park2018:480). Recent corporate diversity campaigns like #HoldTight are by no means the first wave of LGBTQ people strategically embracing the market or having the market embrace them. What mediatisation points discourse-oriented scholars’ attention toward, however, is how values and rhetorics that are expressed and disseminated by institutions according to market logics can expand in meaning and be enthusiastically taken up by actors outside of contexts that are clearly mercantile or consumer-driven. Thus, when queer people are subjected to the strong capitalist imperative undergirding pinkwashed rhetorics of pride, these imperatives can take root in the ways they access and proclaim pride, even if individual voices object to the practices of pinkwashing. Such is the dominance of capitalism—even if ubiquitous rainbows or insincere ‘LGBT’ sandwiches are rightly criticised, the media and mediatised logics are still deeply imbricated in the ways queer identity is built. Thus, contemporary media about LGBTQ rights not only inform subjects as to what LGBTQ identity/ies is/are, but also inform subjects on how LGBTQ others can be helped, and what that help looks like. In fact, it establishes that as a possibility in the first place. Media about LGBTQ diversity orient us to the usefulness of diversity management—as a way forward.
Queer linguistics and discourse/s of homonormativity
Queer linguistics is informed by an agitated epistemological stance that ‘rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favour of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal’ (Warner Reference Warner1993:xxvi): at its heart, a commitment to disruptive, insubordinate, transformative politics. From within, there are numerous critics of the anti-normative aspects of queer thinking who note how this supposedly anti-establishment form of politics has begun to latch onto grandiloquent forms of institutional gatekeeping and identity politics (Wiegman & Wilson Reference Wiegman and Wilson2015). Though cautious of a hollow ‘rhetoric of queer’ (Sicurella Reference Sicurella2016), its anti-normative potential still guides my thinking. Simply put, ‘queer’ is disruptive and resistant to normativisation regarding what queer is, who queer people are, or what they want.
As a ‘queering’ action, differentiating it from broader understandings of sexuality within studies of language, queer linguistics immanently seeks to agitate the apparent ‘progressive’ credentials of pinkwashing practices. This same sense of agitation inspired Duggan's (Reference Duggan2003) aforementioned notion of ‘homonormativity’—that is, politics that embrace heteronormative institutions and conspicuous consumption, and valorise individual freedoms as part of a generally privatised and ‘depoliticised’ gay culture. Despite reasonable qualms about the morphological structure of ‘homo’ + ‘normativity’, and valid concerns of how too-strident critiques of ‘assimilationist’ LGBTQ politics denigrate so-called ‘ordinary’ lives (Brown Reference Brown2012), Duggan's definition of homonormativity is germane to my analysis: a resource for critically examining how mediatised discourse crafts—and hijacks—queer relationality (Mowlabocus Reference Mowlabocus2021).Footnote 4
Recent discussion of queer theory's contributions to sociolinguistic knowledge underlines the importance of ‘communal imaginings’ as a source of intersubjectivity, rightly noting that queer people perennially engage in ‘strategically normative’ practices of identity formation (Lazar Reference Lazar2017) and always desire identity, if unpredictably and in non-essential forms: ‘identity just is’ (Hall Reference Hall2013:636). However, it is fair to continually scrutinise how norms of identity form. This is not an axiomatic attack on ‘the importance of being ordinary’ (Brown Reference Brown2012:1068) but rather an interrogation of how intersubjective identity formation yields to dominant political economy: how ordinary affects and ‘tie signs’ get co-opted within all-encompassing neoliberal mediascapes. Ultimately, I argue here that the way corporate affective-discursive (and embodied) practices like #HoldTight operate is altogether too powerfully ordinary for them not to be seen as both proudly ‘homo’ and norm-producing for LGBTQ identity, following Hall (Reference Hall2013) and Motschenbacher (Reference Motschenbacher, Barrett and Hall2018), and ‘homonormative’, following Duggan's (Reference Duggan2003) critique. I wish to suggest that an especially pertinent question for politically motivated queer linguists is: how do these two impressions of homonormativity cohere in social relations and (affective-)discursive practice? What sociocultural and economic norms underlie mediatised visions of bright futures for queer identities?
Thinking about homonormativity requires a nuanced perspective about LGBTQ people's potential to resist unjust power structures, and even embrace certain relations of power for strategic ends (Lazar Reference Lazar2017). Homonormative phenomena find validity in localised sites, especially outside the metropole—naff, normative signifiers in the big city may provide life-saving affirmation elsewhere (Motschenbacher Reference Motschenbacher, Barrett and Hall2018). Ultimately, heteronormativity and homonormativity (however the latter is theorised) exist on an uneven pane. Yet Warner's (Reference Warner1993:xiii) popularising framing of heteronormativity explicitly linked struggles for queer liberation and against stigmatised ‘self-understanding’ to ‘deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body’, and these norms are implicated in the somatic, intimate ways actors like ANZ ameliorate ‘relations between the brand and its customers… [and] the way a brand's image, as a set of symbolic meanings and affective relations, is portrayed in the media’ (Richey & Ponte Reference Richey and Ponte2011:167). I wish to consider how mediatised corporate networks ameliorate their image by establishing homonormative ‘self-understandings’ that, in employee testimonials and melancholy films, traverse rational, embodied, and affective modes of head, heart, and hand.
As Milani (Reference Milani, Baker and Balirano2018a:23) has evocatively demonstrated, queer linguistics has the capacity to uncover how neoliberal capitalism is able ‘to rope gender and sexual anti-normativity into its logic’. At a time when LGBTQ activism and subjectivities have been profoundly shaped by capitalist ideology (Comer Reference Comer2022), Duggan's (Reference Duggan2003) analytical notion of homonormativity is a vital tool which pushes back against the ‘sticky’ ways that neoliberal institutions embrace us, hold us tight, and orient subjects with market-friendly queer hope.
Neoliberalism as a ‘global rationality’
Neoliberalism, like ‘queer’ and ‘diversity’, has become somewhat of a hot topic in recent social-scientific and sociocultural linguistic scholarship (e.g. Martín Rojo & Del Percio Reference Martín Rojo and Del Percio2019). It thus risks becoming an ‘unhelpful buzzword’, unless the ‘neo’, and what distinguishes classic economic liberalism from neoliberal capitalism, is clarified (Milani Reference Milani, Baker and Balirano2018a). It is certainly necessary to have cohesive understandings of the way the logic of the market now permeates ‘virtually all aspects of social behaviour’ (Martín Rojo & Del Percio Reference Martín Rojo and Del Percio2019:1)—directing the course of peoples’ linguistic repertoires, and the choices they make in discourse. Milani (Reference Milani, Baker and Balirano2018a:26), following Nikolas Rose and Michel Foucault, helpfully remarks that ‘neoliberalism is not just about an ever-increasing expansion of markets… but also involves a more subtle array of technologies of self-government through which the consuming individual internalises a fallacious sense of being a sovereign subject’. What Foucault called ‘governmentality’ is not enforced by violent means but often acquires a form of internalised compliance and ‘neoliberal agency’ (Gershon Reference Gershon2011), that is also an embodied agency (cf. Csordas Reference Csordas, Ram and Houston2015)—an agentive yet constrained way of navigating the world. In this understanding, to ‘govern’ is ‘not to govern against liberty, or despite it; it is to govern through liberty—that is, to actively exploit the freedom allowed individuals so that they end up conforming to certain norms of their own accord’ (Dardot & Laval Reference Dardot and Laval2013:11).
Contending that neoliberalism has become a totalising form of existence ‘from the state to innermost subjectivity’ (Dardot & Laval Reference Dardot and Laval2013:18), I consider it a generalised, globalised normative framework which deploys market logics to orient individuals’ selves, future dreams, and bodily practices in a new way. All of this, in essence, points to the way neoliberal values act as a guiding morale and rationale for social life—and how for LGBTQ subjectivity, norms for same-sex attracted identity are increasingly subsumed by and within marketised norms that entrepreneurial and self-governing individuals conform to. As one way forward for understanding neoliberalism (and breaking free from it), this behoves queer and critically minded scholars to pay attention to neoliberalism's affective and psychodynamic registers—including its evocative chronotopes encouraging belief in a better tomorrow (cf. Adams, Murphy, & Clarke Reference Adams, Murphy and Clarke2009). As this article's potted analysis makes clear, #HoldTight demonstrates the role of the feeling body in this process of governing—an affected agency made compliant, in part, through its presence in Merleau-Ponty's ‘lived body’ indistinguishable from the world ‘out there’. This is because #HoldTight relies on the affective-discursive dimensions of touch, but also precisely because of how ANZ's articulations of embodied emotion orient our innermost selves to a neoliberal future—a better time, and better world, where ‘we can hold tight to each other’, and which ‘we must hold tight for’.
EXAMINING ANZ'S #HOLDTIGHT CAMPAIGN
Even cursory scrutiny of HTF, as illustrated in Figure 1, indicates two things about #HoldTight. First, there is the critical point that the campaign demonstrates ANZ's concern for its standing in the minds of consumers, and indexes how ANZ manages ‘brand value’: what Arvidsson (Reference Arvidsson2007:15) calls ‘the affective and relational complexes that arise as commodities circulate in the social’. #HoldTight allows ANZ to move beyond advertising its products, and instead advertise its ‘principles’. From this perspective, ANZ customers buy meaning, personality, mindsets, and attitudes, rather than just their function or benefit (Riley Reference Riley2020). Pinkwashing and ‘homocapitalism’ are just one element of this broad, ‘woke’ process (Rao Reference Rao2015), through which mediatised representations of ‘diversity’ are seen as proof of progress: of an effervescent and productive world in becoming, with corporate brands at the moral forefront of change.
Second, it is essential to highlight the fact that the #HoldTight campaign is extremely moving—regardless of reasons to be concerned by the cultural politics of ANZ's pride campaigning. HTF is beautifully produced, with a stirring soundtrack. It captures, in essence, the loveliness of holding hands. I suspect that it helped lift the spirits of many queers (like my own partner and I) who sometimes struggle to show affection in public. It may have swayed votes in Australia's marriage equality postal survey in 2017. Almost certainly, the especially affective tone of #HoldTight was timed to coincide with this survey, through which Australia's LGBTQ community experienced great highs—and abject, sustained criticism from the broader public. My appreciation for ANZ's voice on this issue cannot be understated.
ANZ have been involved in LGBTQ ‘diversity and inclusion’ campaigning for over a decade. Figure 2 provides an illustrative overview of activities over several years. As part of their sponsorship of Mardi Gras, ANZ dress up ATMs in Sydney as GayTMs (especially along Oxford Street, in Sydney's historic ‘gay village’): replete with disco balls, drag paraphernalia, and kissing superheroes. (These ATMs greet users with an on-screen ‘Hello gorgeous’.) In 2016, the bank ‘came out’—rebranding its Oxford Street branch as GayNZ, complete with pink velour and ‘sassy stained glass’ (including drag queens). In the words of one customer, it was ‘luxurious, gold and gay’. In 2018, for the first Mardi Gras after Australia legislated same-sex marriage, they became YayNZ, with (as with #HoldTight) a branded ‘hashflag’, #SoMuchYay, visually representating joy (Highfield Reference Highfield2018). In 2019, their campaign took ‘a little bit of Mardi Gras to those who need it most, by transforming Oxford Street signs all across into the country into fabulous beacons of inclusion’. In 2020, using the hashtag #lovespeech, ANZ sought to reclaim and rework forms of prejudicial language (understandably controversial, given this involved repeating it a great deal); for example, ‘trans people are sick (of being sooooooo fabulous)’. ANZ even has its own drag queen, Anzabella, a business systems manager who transforms into his alter-ego in order to make ‘a high-heeled stand for acceptance of diversity everywhere’. Certainly, the bank plays with its own brand as part of its Mardi Gras sponsorship and support for diversity. Indeed, that's precisely the point—presenting ANZ's very ontology as that of a compassionate, playful brand (and ideal workplace), using situated, material, embodied, and affective semiotic resources to do so (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2012).Footnote 5
Figure 2. Illustrative examples of ANZ LGBTQ diversity campaigning, 2014–2019.
There is much for a critical sociolinguist to examine here: for example, the metadiscourse around hate and ‘love speech’; a recurrent ‘fabulous’ as a signifier sine qua non for LGBTQ identity (Comer Reference Comer2022), the equivalence of queerness with femininity, frivolity, and camp; and troubling implications that rural queers need metropolitan liberation. However, in this article, I focus on exploring how feeling bodies are used and oriented via #HoldTight. I specifically examine the ways that the hands and affective phenomena intertwine in discourses in circulation around #HoldTight, linking them to pinkwashed neoliberal politics and values represented by ANZ's engagement with pride.
My dataset comprises of a multimodal and cross-media collection of #HoldTight data, tracked from the campaign's launch in February 2017 through to the release of #SoMuchYay in 2018. At its core lie three ANZ-produced videos: the launch film (HTF), a video from Auckland Pride (HAP), and a staff testimonial video (HST) which metapragmatically describes the meaning of holding hands as a tie sign, its meaning within #HoldTight, and how these two affective-discursive meanings surface within ANZ employees. Ultimately, my arguments in this article derive from analysis of HTF, HST, HAP, and other professionally produced videos from ANZ's #HoldTight website and YouTube, and twenty-five social media posts by ANZ's Australian and New Zealand profiles on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook (carrying over 1,500 comments/interactions). Hyperlinks in note 3 direct the reader to illustrative examples of this data.
I follow established principles in multimodal critical discourse studies, adopting a ‘queer(ed)’ positionality (following Thurlow Reference Thurlow2016), via increased attention to dimensions of embodiment, affect, and material culture. A queer, critical attention to the performativity of affect ‘entails focusing on the visible practices through which emotions are produced semiotically and are taken up within specific constraints’ (Wetherell Reference Wetherell2012; Milani Reference Milani, Barrett and Hall2018b). Milani's discussion of ‘queer performativity’ takes up Butler's (Reference Butler2015) notion of the ‘performativity of the body’ to advance discussion of the ways that ‘bodily action and gesture… signify and speak, as [political] action and claim’ (Butler Reference Butler2015:83), but stresses the importance of affect in this process: ‘when the body speaks politically, it is not simply by advancing a rights claim; it also mobilises affective resources, which are indissolubly part and parcel of that political claim-staking’. (Milani Reference Milani, Barrett and Hall2018b). This article in turn advances discussion of the ways in which the affective speaking of the body politically is itself a resource for neoliberal institutions and other agents to perform the ‘non-performative’ politics of diversity (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2012; see also Glapka Reference Glapka2019).
ANALYSIS: #HOLDTIGHT AS A STEP TO A BETTER WORLD/TIME
This following indicative analysis demonstrates how ANZ's campaign makes strategic use of the double-meaning of ‘hold tight’—weaving the neoliberal institution and social actors together in the creation of a better world and better time, a chronotope where ‘we hold tight to each other’, and which ‘we must hold tight for’. The first of these is where the significance of hand-holding as embodied practice comes to the fore, with rhetorics of intimacy used to instil emotions and craft a ‘pseudo-social’ (Thurlow Reference Thurlow, Tannen and Trester2013) relation between public and brand (Richey & Ponte Reference Richey and Ponte2011).
Intimacy: A better world where we hold tight to each other
As an archetypal Goffmanian tie sign, the holding of hands is a resource for expressing romance and intimacy with another person, and for communicating that relationship to third parties. Hand-holding is thus an affective-discursive practice, which distributes affect between people as a relational phenomenon. Holding hands, however, is not affective through a haphazard ‘swirling’ of emotion (Wetherell Reference Wetherell2015); rather, according to experimental psychology, touch functions to transmit emotions from one to another (Hertenstein, Holmes, McCullough, & Keltner Reference Hertenstein, Holmes, McCullough and Keltner2009). Holding hands has been found to alleviate pain, reduce amounts of the stress hormone, cortisol, and boost the release of the attachment hormone, oxytocin. The affective resonance of hand-holding does not end there, however. Che, Siemens, Fetjek, & Wassersug (Reference Che, Siemens, Fetjek and Wassersug2013) indicate that 26% of lesbian couples consider hand-holding a political act, as well as risky. Thus, as an act of intimate display, hand-holding indexes affects ranging from love to defiance and defeat. ANZ's own research (released to coincide with #HoldTight's launch) indicated that only 43% of the LGBTIQ community are truly at ease to do so.Footnote 6 Hand-holding and touch are thus understood as deeply intimate phenomena—the body, speaking politically—which ANZ takes it upon itself to uphold as a way to defy prejudice, share love, and ‘stay strong’ through #HoldTight. Furthermore, ANZ positions itself as a brand, employer, and community whose relation with the 57% who do not feel comfortable doing it is an intimate one (see extract (2)).
ANZ establishes the importance of the tie sign via HTF's representations of intimacy, and its negation: banal sheet-folding, languid poolside moments, walking in nature; hands being quickly yanked away, cautious glances down, couples turning away from one another, and the gaze of third parties. Additional videos re-inscribe its importance, while foregrounding ANZ's leadership role (as a pioneering workplace, and in steering society toward better values). The speaker in extract (1) above, quoted from HAP, a video from Auckland Pride festival, describes how the ubiquity of your hands in everyday life gives them the power to forge connection. While numerous speakers praise ANZ, the viewer is shown multiple slow-motion clips of clasped hands being dipped in glitter—a promotional activity typical of large-scale events like pride festivals (Comer Reference Comer2022). Later in HAP, the speaker in extract (1) explicitly praises ANZ for the campaign.
(3) I think the HoldTight thing is connecting communities, so you're spreading love to more than just our community, you're spreading our love to everyone else as well.
In asserting a love which belongs to or is uniquely invoked by queer people, this speaker engages in a teleological, normative narrative of progress and a kind of scalar, affective ‘enworlding’ (Hall Reference Hall2019; Comer Reference Comer2022). It manifests a pervasive ideology that situates ‘love’ as an all-powerful response to prejudice, which anti-queer animus lacks, and which LGBTQ people innately harness—to spread en masse to people via a simple tie sign (especially one which sparkles). Extract (4) represents an example of how teenage/young adult festival attendees in HAP echo her thanks to ANZ, for amplifying a united message, ‘hold tight’, as a ‘big voice’ (presumably, whose economic might legitimates self-appointed societal leadership).
(4) I think it's great that ANZ are supporting this—it makes other people feel good about themselves to be supported, I think… yeah it's building a more accepting culture… So far we've been a lot of small voices, it's nice to have a really big voice among us.
Because they embody the future, these young people's enthusiasm for ANZ's actions thus expresses a benign accession to a future society guided by the dominant ‘big voices’. During HAP and other ANZ videos advertising #HoldTight, sequences of (glittered) hands coming together are interspersed with young people smiling and laughing, ‘loving’ their sparkling hands, and expressing regret for the fear they felt in the past—expressing a teleological scale through which ‘a more accepting culture’ (free from fear or shame) is certain to be built through ANZ's campaign (Hall Reference Hall2019). It is important to note, of course, that HAP's mediatised account is edited to frame Auckland Pride as uniformly enthusiastic about #HoldTight; it is safe to assume that many young attendees are critics of ‘homocapitalist’ pride.
The oneness, joyfulness, and playfulness on display in HAP exemplify the ‘relationality that is at the heart of normativity’ (Wiegman & Wilson Reference Wiegman and Wilson2015:18)—how ‘normalness’ or ordinary practices like hand-holding function as resources for queer world-building. Yet, it is right to resist ways in which queer play and intimate affects between non-normative subjects might strategically present the world as benevolently dominated by ‘big voices’—and occlude ‘the economic stakes that… queer visibility serves for the well-functioning of global capitalism’ (Milani Reference Milani, Baker and Balirano2018a:24).
The ‘montage of hand-holding’ representations exemplified at the link in note 3 illustrate the embodied, touch-oriented affordances of #HoldTight media. In HAP and other videos, dreamy, slow-motion shots of glittering (or glowing) stereotypically ‘fabulous’ hands invoke the chronotope indexed by ‘hold tight’—a liberated world. They possess a haptic modality: clasped hands effusively spreading ‘love’ in communities connected through #HoldTight (extract (3)). In HST, this haptic intimacy is also invoked multiple times through close-in shots of interspersed LGBTQ and ally employees’ hands as they discuss the meaning of the practice, describing and gesturing the many intimate ways they hold hands (as exemplified under ‘HST hands’, as provided in note 3).
(5) Linked in like that… fingers in… and it's just a squeeze around the knuckles… intertwined, yeah, fingers intertwined… and their little finger in and the other person holds on like this...
The testimonial uses repeated invocations such as ‘it's just holding hands’ to present a mediatised incredulous stance—a sense of this tie sign as a basic, human need. Indeed, HST ends with a senior executive speaking volumes through silence—her hands clasped together, her eyebrows raised, in a sign of agitated disbelief.
At other moments through the campaign, the action is spectacularised in wearable tech (as seen in the data provided in note 3). During Mardi Gras 2017, ANZ distributed custom wristbands that light up when infrared technology detects that wearers’ hands are holding. This ‘illuminating’ example of material semiosis demonstrates #HoldTight's complex multi-sensoriality: its use of multiple resources to index and engender senses of tactile, almost alchemical, intimacy. The bank entextualises itself, not just as embodied through wearers, but furthermore as a transcendent, bright blue conduit, working across bodies to spread love.
A final sense in which intimacy emerges in #HoldTight is found not only in how the campaign represents (and exploits) the meaning(s) of hand-holding, but their pseudosocial responses on social media posts using the accompanying hashtag (Thurlow Reference Thurlow, Tannen and Trester2013). As illustrative ‘embodied/affective responses’ provided in note 3 exemplify, one finds multiple instances of the bank tweeting as a ‘we’ with emotions as raw as those of those members of the public affected by ANZ's media. In response to a tweet saying, ‘I'm not crying, you are’, ANZ respond: ‘you got us there’. In another, they confess: ‘sorry about the tears—we've been a bit like that too’. On YouTube, they ask a commenter for tissues. In another, they claim to blush from a compliment given to the campaign, and regularly use lovehearts or ‘x’ as a cosy sign-off. Notably, across #HoldTight media and its hashflag, the shape of holding hands is represented as an ANZ-branded loveheart. Within ANZ's framework for audience engagement, the sticky embodied affects prompted by the launch film are strategically re-purposed as a veneer of intimacy between brand and consumer—barriers being torn down. It is in fact simply a different veneer, of adequation, in which performed (perhaps genuine) emotions of social media staff are re-scaled and identified as an institutional stance and identity. From a trenchant perspective, this synthetically personalised ‘intimacy’ is evidence of (homo)normative neoliberal affects: corporations are people, corporeally imagined, who understand queer pain, who hold our whole selves tight. Tellingly, toward the end of HST, the employee who plays Anzabella (also quoted in extract (9)) states: ‘being able to bring your whole of self to work, is what this is all about’.
Anticipation: A better time we can hold tight for
The second key meaning of #HoldTight is evidenced in HST when a young ANZ employee states that we need to patiently wait in hope: ‘we need to hold tight that the world is going to be a better place for the LGBTI community, and that's what I'm excited for’. At HST's conclusion, the same speaker underlines the tangible feeling of a squeeze, but also the intangible value of hand-holding.
(6) It's a sign of love. It's a sign of respect. And a gentle squeeze of the hand is one of my favourite things … that says so much more words ever could.
For him (and arguably most people) the meaning of hand-holding lies, if not beyond words, beside them (see Thurlow Reference Thurlow2016). As well as invoking affects related to the joys of hand-holding, then, his statement also stirs affects tied to the injustice of denying its most unsayable affects to others. Following this moment, the video fades to black, then ends with a bright blue burst and the distinct, semi-circular shape of a sunrise: a new dawn, overseen by the bright blue ANZ logo, and three words: ‘Diversity. Inclusion. Respect.’ (this ending is common to all #HoldTight media). It is notable that at this time, ANZ's brand identity centred on the tagline, ‘your world, your way’. Cumulative accounts of this affective-discursive practice build up from banal invocations of a squeeze to a grand vision of a new world.
Hence, as well as building a sense of proximal intimacy—of their interests and ‘values’ intertwined with the LGBTQ community's—ANZ also build a sense of anticipation and change-in-becoming. Following Park (Reference Park2018), anticipation is framed ‘as an affective state, an excited forward looking subjective condition’ (Adams et al. Reference Adams, Murphy and Clarke2009:247); a way to ‘orient oneself temporally’. This orientation to the future—essentially unknowable, a realm of unexploited potential—correlates with neoliberalism's long-standing regimes of optimisation as a moral responsibility, in which subjects are compelled to anticipate a ‘speculative future’ in the present (Adams et al. Reference Adams, Murphy and Clarke2009:247). In essence, like most contemporary banking practice, it engages in a kind of iteratively predictive world-making, betting on a brighter tomorrow—with the message that holding tight brings a better future into being, in which we can all be ourselves, bringing ‘our whole selves to work’. This claim is repeated many times in HST, addressing both queer subjects and allies.
(7) My advice for young people would just be, just hold tight, just be yourself, just don't let go.
(8) Talk to someone. And find out how it does feel to not be able to do this very simple gesture and see if you can make a difference in your small community and send the ripples out from there.
(9) It's everyone having that courage that will make the change, and it makes me really happy. It really does.
Thus, the banal yet inspirational act presented in the closing shots of HTF is re-scaled as a courageous, change-making act—a (if not the) way forward for progress. In extracts (7)–(9), responsibility for battling homophobia placed (literally) in the hands of victims, in individuals’ holding tight—qualified as ‘just’ holding tight, as a ‘very simple gesture’—is scaled as the first of countless ripples ‘that will make the change’. The speaker in extract (9) is clearly emotional: his voice breaks as he speaks. Thus, ANZ employees’ own sad affects (which are indisputably real) are re-scaled as launching pads from which ANZ's bright future can spring (which is indisputably speculative).
Not only are causes of homophobic views unaddressed, but ANZ presents itself as an ‘oracle’ institution, whose workers have insight into what the future brings. I am not implying here that same-sex couples’ holding hands is not a defiant act of resistance—it is—but highlighting how the embodied, affective resonance of this act lends credibility to ANZ as a benevolent agent. This scale-jump plays into ANZ's hands by centring them as part of the solution to the perils of homophobia—framed as residing in individuals. It boosts the brand value of their product, while leaving unaddressed how overarching socioeconomic structures constrain individual actions or behaviours. Statements like extracts (7)–(9) enshrine an anticipatory stance toward the future which—while unsurprising, given the discrimination queer people face—also functions as a mediatisation of the future. Mediatising the future, in a time of neoliberalism, as Park (Reference Park2018:479) states, can mean valorising the future and ‘carefully managing ourselves in the present to maximise the profit we can gain in the future’. With these critiques in mind, it is right to question just what #HoldTight coerces members of the public, and especially, LGBTQ people, to anticipate, and how the campaign co-opts recirculating ‘queer signs’, qualities of signs, and affects in the process. A better future is certainly welcome, but does the one ANZ envisions (even for simple practices like hand-holding) present queer subjects not just with a gesture of support, but also a steering hand; guiding them how to live freely, and in effect, marketing the benefits of neoliberal governmentality?
CLOSING DISCUSSION: #HOLDTIGHT, AN AFFECTIVE ECONOMY AND A NEOLIBERAL CHRONOTOPE
One could easily understate the power of affect as a semiotic resource, or with regard to holding hands, understate the complex affective terrain the practice has in the minds of LGBTQ people (Che et al. Reference Che, Siemens, Fetjek and Wassersug2013). As with prior studies interrogating pinkwashing and diversity discourse, my examination of #HoldTight has sought to underline ways that this campaign did not solely represent embodied affects but prompted them within subjects for political-economic ends. There are critical reasons to question what those ends are for the bank, but at the onset of this conclusion, it is vital to underline how impactful the defiant attitude presented at the video's close is. Truthfully, its messaging enchanted me when I first encountered it—‘hold tight’, stay strong, the world will change. My reflections here, on the form and purpose of a queer, anti-normative politics, are thus tentative and uneasy: an open-ended provocation, rather than a neat conclusion (Wiegman & Wilson Reference Wiegman and Wilson2015).
To dismiss a priori the nature of what #HoldTight performs, as non-queer, reductive, or regressive, is to ignore the ways certain normative practices form what Lazar (Reference Lazar2017) calls a ‘politics of pragmatic resistance’ for ‘ordinary’ queer lives (Brown Reference Brown2012). That is, it ignores how queer/LGBTQ actors may adopt ‘a sustained collective strategy which seeks to advance the LGBTQ movement’ (Lazar Reference Lazar2017:425) while being realistic about the pace of change, ensuring it is responsive to adverse context. This includes the ordinary lives of ANZ's LGBTQ employees, for whom the bank is an unwavering ally, and lives like mine, in which the feeling of yanking a hand away from another is all-too-familiar. #HoldTight (and ANZ's other diversity campaigning) can regardless be seen as ‘homonormative’ in the broad sense, as well—think glitter hands, think flamingos, think fabulous—positioning same-sex sexualities as a salient norm and valorising certain kinds as (contextually) preferable over others (Motschenbacher Reference Motschenbacher, Barrett and Hall2018). The question is whether this broader homonormativity (or perhaps ‘homo-norm seeking’) also translates to a depoliticised constituency—whether feelgood sentiments around hand-holding and collective queer pride-making are hijacked (or perhaps, quelled and domesticated) for neoliberal ends.
Who is hailed by a ‘hello gorgeous’ voiced by a benevolent bank staffed by happy workers—and who is represented in the bank's mediatised vision of a benevolent future? From the exaggerated pursed lips of the GayNZ-branded drag queen in Figure 2—puckered mid-air kiss, as a ‘mwah’ (see the ad in note 4)—through to the clasped hands shown in Figure 1, which this article focuses on, it is fair to say that the multimodal semiosis of the body is deeply ingrained in however such benevolence gets expressed. It is also fair to say that a (metropolitan) cis gay male sensibility—albeit one which transgresses gender norms through drag and exaggerated femininity—is centred within ANZ's campaigning, even as ANZ aims (or professes to aim) for a vaster, universal, pan-LGBTQ acronym kind of inclusiveness. To their credit, ANZ offset historic biases toward Western gay male cultural tropes through the diverse bodies/hands used across #HoldTight. However, the fact remains that a universal inclusion cannot manifest in any movement enlivened through a top-down vision of queer personhood guided by sine qua non appeals to (gay male) fabulousness. This fact reminds us, furthermore, that it is only ‘subjects included at work’—rather than all diverse subjects, at all times—who stand to benefit from the imposition of diversity regimes (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2012).
In a context of mediatised neoliberalism, in which actors like ANZ wield great power on LGBTQ subjects’ habitual uptake of practices and identity markers—from a glittering of one's hands, to one's conception of bright futures, to one's conduct outside a pub—it is important to apprehend the teleology of LGBTQ politics: where do they lead? Such moves recognise, as Duggan (Reference Duggan2003:3) does, that ‘neoliberalism was constructed in and through cultural and identity politics and cannot be undone [without] analyses that respond directly to that fact’. Duggan's ‘depoliticisation’ denotes not a lack of politics entirely, but rather an iterative shaping of political action in support of an insolvent, non-transformative politics.
#HoldTight is a powerful affective-discursive practice, and according to ANZ, one with a political aim: valuable as a means of enshrining positive emotions in the broader politic, while (hopefully) quelling negative animus and leading toward a better future. It is the body speaking politically: ‘embodied semiosis with an affective component’ (Butler Reference Butler2015). Fully interpreting the nature of #HoldTight as an embodied, affective political claim means paying attention to the iterative performativity of a hashtag/hashflag representing intertwined hands, a wristband that illuminates with touch, emotive staff narratives, emotive hand-holding, and a complex semiotic landscape: GayTMs, pride floats, lots of glitter. I have not fully covered this multimodal terrain here. What I have offered is an indication that analyses of ‘homocapitalism’ and mediatisation benefit from a cultural-phenomenological perspective that places embodied practices at the centre of analysis (Csordas Reference Csordas, Weiss and Haber1999, Reference Csordas, Ram and Houston2015) and is attuned to the sociopolitical value of affect as something strategically wieldable—stylable and manageable (Milani Reference Milani, Barrett and Hall2018b; Glapka Reference Glapka2019; Pratt Reference Pratt2021). What does this use of this tie sign perform? What does it do?Footnote 7 If, at some level, I don't care that #HoldTight is homonormative (in both senses), because it centres such a lovely sentiment, and makes my community feel safer—then can this be attributed to how the ‘humble joys’ of hand-holding (Lordon Reference Lordon2014) are intrinsically linked to the inculcation of material inequality as normal, even desirable? Considered this way, even the knowledge that hand-holding carries risk or is only ever partly secure benefits ANZ, through a ‘backdrop of sad affects’ (Lordon Reference Lordon2014:100) which justifies a speculative orientation to late capitalist futures. How much might tiny squeezes of the knuckles at the behest of ANZ contribute to an ongoing legitimation of neoliberal mindsets and conducting of queer conduct? Speaking frankly, is it the right type of ‘norm’ for ANZ's media to guide queer progress if (as one example) they have loaned $10 billion to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris Agreement—tugging at young people's heartstrings, endearing them to hold tight for an existentially threatened future?Footnote 8
#HoldTight constructs an affective economy: that which aligns ‘bodily space with social space [and mediates] the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004:119). Ahmed's (Reference Ahmed2004, Reference Ahmed2014) theory imbricates with matters of political economy, providing a way of thinking about affect as produced as an effect of its circulation, and its value within particular routines of circulation. In affective economies, emotions are a social ‘glue’ that functions by adhering subjects together. Through that sticking-together, and shared orientation, affects gain affective value and create collective effects (Pratt Reference Pratt2021): ‘the accumulation of affective value shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds’ Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004:121). For me, then, and following from Ahmed's writing on ‘queer phenomenology’, #HoldTight constitutes an orienting affective economy: ‘about the direction we take that puts some things and not others in our reach’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2006:56). Same-sex intimacy means that queer bodies ‘extend less easily into space’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2006:101), and thus the #HoldTight campaign seems a welcome disruption of heteronormative space. The obverse perspective, however, indicates that #HoldTight allows normative orders of space, sexual practice, and politics into our bodies and subjectivities—governing, through embodied liberty. In this way, it demonstrates further how homonormativity can be identified in the ‘contours,… textures and… ruptures’ (Mowlabocus Reference Mowlabocus2021:32) found in the politics of everyday life; a world-building project which extends from our innermost subjectivities and desires to the supposedly infinite potentialities of neoliberalism. It co-opts many ‘mainstream’ gay and lesbian signifiers—themselves borne through capitalist consumption (D'Emilio Reference D'Emilio, Snitow, Stansell and Thompson1983)—to evolve modern LGBTQ communities and politics in its own fashion, alongside Trojan horse-like performances such as #HoldTight that suggest a more substantive revolution that will never come (Mowlabocus Reference Mowlabocus2021). Scholars like Miranda Joseph long ago warned against ‘the romance of community’ (Joseph Reference Joseph2002)—how forces of capital incorporate senses of kinship, breeding a complicity between feelgood cultural and communal values and the unequal circulation of economic value. This article's cultural-phenomenological perspective underlines how this agentive complicity with neoliberal governmentality relies upon a multi-semiotic intertwining of affect and embodiment: an intertwining as powerful and heartfelt as that of one's hand in another's can be (Gershon Reference Gershon2011)
#HoldTight frames equality, under the guise of ‘diversity, inclusion, and respect’ as ‘easy, effortless, and just around the corner’. While this ‘fantasy of immediation’ (Mazzarella Reference Mazzarella2006) seems to craft a hopeful path forward for progress in which LGBTQ people are loved, it also happens to benefit a bank—with every clutch, grasp, or intertwined pinky conducted through #HoldTight (indeed, enacting it) functioning as a citation of ANZ's benevolent brand (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2012). As a semiotic and affective ‘act of hope’ (Borba Reference Borba, Peck, Stroud and Williams2019), then, #HoldTight seems less a ‘radical reorientation of knowledge’, in the vein of Miyazaki (Reference Miyazaki2004:149). Rather, it seems a decidedly norm-staking, embodied, and affective orientation of LGBTQ subjects specifically toward a world and future in which their potential can be reached (and exploited). While such a future feels good, it is ultimately an overly linear, individuated mode of anticipation: a metadiscursive limiting of hope to the just-around-the-corner, and a fastening of queer safety to late-capitalist successes—and excesses (Adams et al. Reference Adams, Murphy and Clarke2009; see also Lee & Silva Reference Lee and Silva2021 on the ‘metaleptic temporality’ of hope as a non-linear orientation to the present, and Comer Reference Comer2022 for more on discursively scaling hope at the collective).
#HoldTight thus invokes what Park calls a neoliberal chronotope: ‘an ideological articulation of what type of people occupy the market-oriented time–space of the future, how they conduct themselves towards others, and what kind of affective and moral stances they display’ (Park Reference Park2018:480). Echoing Ahmed's discussion of non-performativity, the anticipatory affective chronotope of LGBTQ becoming in #HoldTight can overall be seen as a way to limit change, to quell political-economic dissent. Within this chronotope, some LGBTQ people will thrive—basking in pride, holding tight. Because of it, however, within the injustices of global capitalism, countless people end up unaddressed, deprived, silenced—a way ‘the world takes shape by restricting the forms in which we gather’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2012:182)
Paraphrasing the final remarks of Duggan (Reference Duggan2003), #HoldTight provides a way to ‘revel in the pleasure of political life’ but it is an open question as to whether it folds our hearts and hands into a world worth living for. While joyfully proclaiming the freedom to hold hands is ‘indissolubly part and parcel’ (Milani Reference Milani, Barrett and Hall2018b) of the performativity of anti-homophobic claim-staking, the way #HoldTight articulates a time-space in which queer and allied subjects (employees, customers, and the general public) joyfully accede to power, rather than resist it, is of great concern. If neoliberalism's lesson is that ‘the subject is always to be constructed’ (Dardot & Laval Reference Dardot and Laval2013:318), then at the very least our understanding of homonormativity as a ‘structure of proliferations’ (Wiegman & Wilson Reference Wiegman and Wilson2015:17) needs to embrace a cultural-phenomenological understanding of how mediatised visions of ordinary queer futures are hijacked by neoliberal institutions—to be proliferated through subjects in at-once discursive, affective, and embodied forms.
As an enticing invitation to perform a liberatory politics through the feeling body, #HoldTight is a reminder of how ‘through their involvement in pride, corporate sponsors appropriate the promise of queer liberation’ (Mowlabocus Reference Mowlabocus2021:213). Such invitations are increasingly immersive and commonplace in our mediatised society, yet I urge caution and consideration regarding what accepting such invitations restricts: what they do not allow us to perform. We can (and should) hold tight, for better.
