Abstract
This article examines how corporate-sponsored queer visibility reshapes queer politics in London, UK. Drawing on discourse analysis of two advertising campaigns, Sensodyne's ‘Life's Too Short’ and Harrods' ‘Set Your Stage’, I show how racialised queer visibility is increasingly mobilised through market logics that link happiness, authenticity and anti-normativity to productivity and consumption. Rather than assimilating queer subjects through sameness or respectability, these campaigns celebrate queer difference. This marks a mutation of homonormativity, which I term extraordinary homonormativity, a formation in which queer anti-normative ideas are no longer positioned outside of homonormative inclusion but are valorised as a market asset. Ultimately, these regimes of corporate-sponsored visibility depoliticise queer struggles and detach them from broader movements: raising urgent questions about the political limits of visibility under neoliberalism.
Since its inception in the late 1980s, queer politics has been deeply intertwined with the concept of visibility (Hanhardt, 2013). Queer people, spaces and movements have long resisted erasure and the dominance of heteronormativity by asserting their presence in public life (Hennessy, 1994). While visibility has remained central to the project of queer liberation, corporations have become increasingly central actors in mediating particular forms of queer visibility (Nicolazzo, 2020). Corporate engagement with queer communities is not new and has a longer history tied to the emergence of the gay market. Scholars such as Rosemary Hennessy (1994) have analysed how queer identity started being commodified in the 1990s, identifying that the commodification of sexuality is central to market growth. Katherine Sender (2004) showed how the commodification of queer in the 1990s was framed as a decision driven by business rather than politics. David Eng (2010) coined this commodification as a form of queer liberalism. More recently, Olimpia Burchiellaro (2023) has argued that corporate diversity initiatives operate as forms of ethical rehabilitation in moments of capitalist crisis. What distinguishes the present moment, however, is that within corporate-sponsored visibility there is a heightened emphasis on championing the diversity of queerness: from multinational sponsors such as Barclays and British Airways supporting Pride in London since 2016 (BBC, 2017), by providing corporate floats prominently positioned within the parade, to high-profile collaborations like the skincare brand Aesop's partnership with the bookshop Gay's the Word to create a queer library in its Soho store in 2025 (Time Out London, 2025), where curated shelves of LGBT + literature were showcased as part of the brand's commitment to community and inclusion. These commercial tie-ins reveal how corporations position themselves as allies in queer liberation.
I examine the intersections between corporate advertising and queerness to trace the emergence of new regimes of queer-of-colour visibility in London, UK between 2017 and 2023, a period marked by the intensification of corporate diversity branding alongside deepening material inequality. I explore the promises that these forms of visibility offer and consider how they are reshaping queer identities, subcultures and political life in London. While a substantial body of scholarship critiques the entanglement of queer visibility and capitalism, this work has tended to focus on assimilation into white, middle-class respectability. Scholars have variously theorised this as commodification (Hennessy, 1994), homonormativity (Duggan, 2003), the displacement of redistribution by recognition (Fraser, 2007), homonationalism (Puar, 2007) and queer liberalism (Eng, 2010). Comparatively little attention has been paid to how corporations have mobilised the diversity within queerness; particularly through the celebration and commodification of racialised queer difference in advertising. The incorporation of queer people of colour into market regimes in London marks a departure from earlier theorisations of visibility. These emerging regimes of visibility simultaneously celebrate anti-normative ideals of queer liberation while encouraging forms of assimilation through consumer culture. This duality both extends and complicates existing critiques of homonormativity. This shift must be situated within a broader political conjuncture. In the current political moment, sponsored queer visibility is unfolding alongside the rise of far-right and fascist politics in the UK and beyond. This present moment shows how the liberal promise of sexual inclusion is hollow, contingent and incapable of securing material protection for most queer subjects. Abeera Khan (2025) suggests that rather than opposing fascism, ‘liberalism is fascism's prefiguration’, arguing that liberal inclusion has masked the process of ongoing organised abandonment and violence that has contributed to the rise of fascism today. This article builds on this insight by highlighting that extraordinary homonormativity functions as a tool of masking this on-going organised abandonment.
I open by examining the relationship between corporate brands and local queer groups aimed at enhancing the visibility of racialised queer people in London. I then consider two advertising campaigns: Sensodyne's 2021 ‘Life's Too Short’ campaign and Harrods’ 2021 ‘Set Your Stage’ campaign. Through these examples, I show how corporations appropriate anti-normative queer aesthetics to brand themselves as progressive allies, even as their messaging stabilises queer liberation within narrow, depoliticised frameworks of sexuality. These campaigns often blur the distinctions between queer and LGBT+ in mainstream discourse, contributing to a shifting manifestation of homonormativity in the present moment. Ultimately, I argue that the entanglement of queer visibility politics and corporate sponsorship in London has generated a dialectical discourse: one that simultaneously celebrates radical queer politics while urging queer people of colour to engage those politics primarily through consumption. This produces what I conceptualise as a new iteration of homonormativity, an extraordinary homonormativity, which is distinct from the one theorised by Lisa Duggan (2003), insofar as it no longer rests on sameness or respectability but on the commodified celebration of difference, situating queer subjects at the intersection of anti-normativity and neoliberal inclusion. This form of inclusion masks the structural abandonment of queer people in the name of visibility.
Corporate-sponsored queer visibility
On a warm summer morning in June 2023, I walked through Granary Square, a space nestled between several high-end shops, high-rise offices, cafes and cultural institutions. As I moved past the benches lining the edge of the square, I noticed something familiar yet unexpected: two large portraits mounted above the benches, with the words Queer Joy printed in bold text across them. I paused. The faces were not anonymous models but individuals I had danced alongside many times before on dance floors across London, especially within queer-of-colour nightlife scenes. Here, they were smiling against vibrant backdrops, frozen in staged moments of joy. Curious, I moved closer and discovered that these portraits were part of a larger open-air photography exhibition titled Queer Joy, installed across Granary Square from 1 June to 31 August 2023. The exhibition was jointly sponsored by Skittles, Gay Times, Getty Images and Queer Britain. Its aim was to ‘better represent the vibrant and dynamic LGBT+ community within the UK’ through 50 photographic portraits, each representing a wide range of ages, racial and ethnic backgrounds, body shapes and gender expressions (Gay Times, 2023). Subjects included artists, performers, organisers, nightlife workers and community figures, foregrounding the heterogeneity of queer life rather than a singular or uniform aesthetic. In this sense, the exhibition sought to expand the range of bodies, identities and lives that could appear as joyful and worthy of public recognition within a highly visible urban space.
What struck me most about the exhibition was not only the visibility of the individuals it portrayed but also the visibility of the exhibition itself, its prominent placement within one of central London's most commercially valuable public spaces. The fact that the exhibition could occupy this space for the entire summer was not incidental; it was made possible because it was sponsored by two multinational corporations. In London, where public space is increasingly privatised and surveilled (Shenker, 2017), the ability of queer people of colour to appear in such a setting depended on the authorisation of corporate actors. The visibility granted by the exhibition reveals how corporate sponsorship has become a key mechanism through which racialised queer presence is rendered publicly intelligible. This visibility is underwritten by a particular logic. As Pardo-Roques, Senior Brand Manager at Skittles, explained, ‘By helping people See The Rainbow, 1 we hope to drive more acceptance through visibility’ (Gay Times, 2023). This framing casts visibility as a mechanism for social transformation, wherein the display of racialised queer joy becomes a tool to foster tolerance, recognition and inclusion. The promise embedded in such statements is one not simply of representation but of conditional belonging: that through being seen, marginalised subjects might earn legitimacy, access and protection within the dominant culture.
While queer joy has long functioned as a mode of collective survival and refusal in the face of structural violence, 2 when channelled through such corporate frameworks it risks being abstracted and valorised. Sara Ahmed (2010) and Lauren Berlant (2011) have shown how under capitalism, joy and happiness often operate as an affective attachment to the promise of inclusion within structures that remain fundamentally oppressive. In this context, the articulations of joy within this exhibition circulate more like an affective register that can be displayed, consumed and valorised rather than demanding structural changes. This aesthetic and rhetorical celebration of queer joy unfolded amidst deepening material inequalities in the United Kingdom, including rising rates of transphobic violence, the dismantling of public services, increased poverty and housing insecurity and persistent attacks on migrant rights (Smith, 2020). This juxtaposition foregrounds a central tension within contemporary visibility politics: joy is made hyper-visible at the very moment when the conditions necessary to sustain queer life are being systematically undermined.
While corporate uses of queer imagery are not new – Hennessy (1994) famously described queer identity as the ‘hot new commodity’ of the 1990s – earlier regimes of visibility overwhelmingly centred white, urban, middle-class queer subjects. Over the last decade, however, London has witnessed an expansion of corporate partnerships with queer organisations, nightlife collectives and individual artists that explicitly foreground racialised queer difference. For example, in 2020 Munroe Bergdorf rejoined L’Oréal as the company pledged to ‘support Munroe's fight against systemic racism’ (BBC, 2020). That same year, Pantene partnered up with the charity Gendered Intelligence and influential queer figure Travis Alabanza to launch the campaign ‘Your Hair, Your Dream’ (Spell Magazine, 2020). In 2021, ASOS collaborated with ExistLoudly, a non-profit group supporting Black queer youth in London, as part of the launch of a limited-edition genderless collection (May, 2021). Since 2019, NYX Professional Makeup UK has partnered up with UK Black Pride through its ‘Proudly Pro-You’ initiative (NYX Professional Makeup UK, 2026). Meanwhile, Queer Brewing, launched in 2019, explicitly claims to ‘provide visibility and representation for LGBT+ people’ through its ‘evocative branding’ and donations (Queer Brewing, 2026). Taken together, these initiatives vary in form and scale, yet they share a common objective: to increase the visibility of queer people of colour within the mainstream public sphere.
There are many reasons why queer people, groups and charities might partner up with corporations, including economic precarity, desires for visibility and the scarcity of alternative platforms. These dynamics cannot be adequately addressed within the scope of this article (see Burchiellaro, 2023). 3 Here, instead, I focus on the structural effects of this engagement: how corporate sponsorship reshapes the meanings, limits and political possibilities of queer visibility itself. I argue that corporate-sponsored visibility reconfigures queer political desire around recognition, consumption and aspirational belonging. The result is a visibility that is both celebrated and constrained: one that affirms diversity while tethering queer life to the logic of the market.
‘Life's Too Short’: Be your authentic self
The new corporate-sponsored regimes of racialised queer visibility in London are not only producing new consumers for corporations but also reshaping queer culture, identity and politics. In this section, I analyse the 2021 ‘Life's Too Short’ campaign, to illustrate how queerness is increasingly being linked to neoliberal ideas of productivity. While this form of recognition can offer greater cultural visibility for queer people of colour, it is fundamentally conditional. I argue that the campaign encourages people to perform queerness in highly individualised and palatable ways, recasting queerness as a personal resource that can be optimised by coming out. In October 2021, Gay Times in partnership with Sensodyne launched a campaign called ‘Life's Too Short’. The stated aim of the campaign was to capture the ‘importance of living authentically as a unified community as well as individually in our pride’ in order to find queer happiness. The campaign featured four queer individuals (two of whom were people of colour) narrating their coming-out experiences. Their stories were shared in two formats: short, informal videos distributed via social media platforms, and a long-form feature article by Zoya Raza-Sheikh (2021) published in Gay Times. The article combined personal narratives with photos of participants smiling while enjoying an ice cream or a hot drink – images that visually echoed Sensodyne's established advertising aesthetic.
While the campaign did not explicitly advertise Sensodyne's products, both the videos and the article made the sponsorship clear. The inclusion of Sensodyne's branding and stylistic trademarks – most notably the visual emphasis on bright white teeth – established a clear association between the stories of the campaign and the corporate sponsor. For these reasons, I interpret ‘Life's Too Short’ as a form of advertising, albeit one that deploys emotional storytelling rather than direct product promotion. Throughout the campaign, the terms ‘queer’ and ‘LGBTQ+’ were used interchangeably. For example, the feature's byline read: ‘the importance of unfiltered queer self-expression is vital to the LGBTQ+ community’ (Raza-Sheikh, 2021). In both the videos and the article, queerness was presented as a broad umbrella term synonymous with non-heterosexual identity. This slippage collapses significant political and theoretical distinctions between the two terms and reflects a broader trend in dominant culture that erases the specificity of queer as a concept forged in opposition to assimilation.
Historically, queer emerged from subcultural and activist contexts as a critique of assimilationist lesbian and gay politics in the West, predominately the USA (Hennessy, 1994). Queer theorists and activists challenged empiricist understandings of identity, instead positioning identity as performative, unstable and contingent (Butler, 1993; Cohen, 2005). As such, queer's roots lie in a refusal of respectability, normativity and the demand for coherence that often underpins lesbian and gay identity politics. However, when queer is increasingly mobilised as a stand-in for LGBTQ+, this oppositional edge is blunted. This conflation positions queerness within the extraordinary homonormative framework, rendering it compatible with neoliberal ideals of self-management and success. The ‘Life's Too Short’ campaign illustrates this shift clearly, particularly in how it links the act of coming out with enhanced productivity. Saffron, an aspiring film photographer featured in the campaign, shared how seeing queer representation gave her the confidence to come out. She reflected that remaining closeted had held her back. Her coming out is framed not only as a moment of personal liberation but also as a catalyst for professional and creative growth. She explains that in retrospect, ‘not being true’ to herself by not being out was holding her back (Saffron, quoted in Gay Times, 2020). Her story mirrors a familiar narrative in mainstream LGBTQ+ discourses: that of self-actualisation through authenticity. Crucially, authenticity here is not treated as a pre-existing or inherent quality, if such a thing can be meaningfully said to exist, but as a normatively produced ideal tied to disclosure. Then, within this story, coming out is positioned as a precondition for professional flourishing and creative success.
Through Saffron's story, the campaign starts to build a narrative in which coming out publicly is not only important for fostering tolerance but also presented as advantageous for economic productivity. Here, coming out is portrayed as something that is not just good for one's well-being or social justice but also vital for the business of living – a process that ‘requires neoliberal queer subjects to make investments geared towards the maximization of their human capital’ (Burchiellaro, 2023: 22). The seductive power of this narrative lies in its promise that challenging gender and sexual norms can be reconciled with market success, and that it can be mobilised for professional gain. This idea is also echoed in the story of 39-year-old Londoner Ali, who described his coming out as a transformative event that enabled him to become more proactive and ambitious. He stated: The day I told my mum that I was gay changed my life. It gave me that feeling of acceptance and relief at the same time and I knew then the world could not do anything to dampen my spirit […] Since then, I try to make sure that I approach life with a proactive and ‘to do’ attitude. If I give it my best go, and it doesn’t work, then I know it's not because of me and I move on […] If it's something that I really want then I know I need to go after it hard and make sure that I give it all […] Ultimately, be happy with who you are, as at the end of the day you will be in charge of your happiness. (Ali, cited in Raza-Sheikh, 2021)
Crucially though, this campaign assumes that coming out is a desirable rite of passage for all queer people. Queer-of-colour critique has long challenged this assumption, showing that the experience of coming out is uneven, context dependent and shaped by race, class, disability and exposure to violence (Decena, 2008; Samuels, 2003). In particular, this narrative does not account for the nuance surrounding coming out – the closet is not a singular threshold but rather a shifting positionality (Haritaworn, 2008) that changes across spaces and relationships. By positioning coming out as both liberatory and productive, the campaign implicitly casts those who cannot or choose not to come out as insufficiently queer or insufficiently invested in their own flourishing. In addition to this, phrases such as ‘to do attitude’, ‘being proactive’ and ‘giving it your best’ fold the queer racialised subject into the urban, neoliberal queer enclave of upwards social mobility through ‘hard work’. This aligns with what Liz Bondi (2005) calls the ‘neoliberal grammar for success’(p. 497), wherein structural inequalities are obscured by a focus on individual resilience and merit. In other words, this narrative claims that ‘success is possible’ not despite one's identity but rather because of it (Browne, 2014: 171). Ali's story lends itself to the neoliberal demand of self-government, where not being able to be productive, happy or proactive is a personal flaw that coming out can solve rather than a political collective problem. At the heart of this visibility lies an implicit expectation of self-managerialism and self-responsibility.
The Gay Times’ rationale for partnering with Sensodyne further illustrates the campaign's alignment with neoliberal discourses of self-regulation and personal responsibility. In a press release, the publication stated that LGBTQ+ people face a ‘unique set of challenges’ related to oral hygiene and that the campaign would be a ‘fun’ way to raise awareness (Gay Times, 2020). These challenges, they claimed, include higher rates of smoking among LGBTQ+ individuals, which increase the risk of oral infections and subsequently lead to ‘lower self-esteem, anxiety, and a decline in motivation’ (Gay Times, 2020). While mental health issues such as low self-esteem and anxiety are indeed prevalent within queer communities (Chhabra and Kapadia, 2023; Meyer, 2010), the attribution of these conditions to individual habits like smoking obscures the broader structural forces that produce queer vulnerability in the first place. By framing these challenges in terms of lifestyle choices rather than systemic marginalisation, the campaign reproduces a familiar narrative in which the queer subject is imagined as detached from histories and structures of domination. Such narratives ignore the material conditions shaped by decades of austerity, the dismantling of welfare and public health infrastructure, the UK's Hostile Environment immigration policies, enforced heterosexuality, the exploitation of racialised labour and the surveillance and criminalisation of minoritised communities (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021). These are not peripheral issues but central to the lived experiences of many queer people of colour. In this context, market-driven visibility does not challenge structural violence but rather rearticulates it through a framework of personal failure and individual recovery, creating conditions that mask the ongoing structural abandonment.
The neoliberal logic embedded in such campaigns promotes solutions like proper dental hygiene, meditation, exercise or pharmaceutical intervention as adequate responses to anxiety, depression and grief. These solutions depoliticise suffering by casting it as a private, manageable issue, thereby deflecting attention from the everyday violence that produces queer precarity. What emerges is a model of queer subjectivity that is not only hyper-visible but also hyper-responsibilised: compelled to manage its own well-being through consumer practices that ultimately uphold the very systems that generate harm. In addition to this, the Gay Times’ rationale for partnering with Sensodyne, owned by GSK Consumer Healthcare, reinforces the campaign's neoliberal framing. In a 2020 press release, Gay Times explained that Sensodyne was chosen due to its reputation for inclusive workplace policies and its high ranking on Stonewall's Equality Index, describing the company as an ideal ally in the journey towards ‘true liberation’ (Gay Times, 2020). Yet the campaign's invocation of ‘liberation’ is revealing, as it situates freedom not in structural transformation but in the ability of queer individuals to be productive, self-managing subjects. This vision of liberation rests on two key ideas. First, it individualises emotional life, suggesting that well-being is determined by one's capacity to regulate feelings and remain motivated and efficient. Second, it encourages the cultivation of ‘positive’ emotions, positioning optimism and resilience as moral imperatives. This framing abstracts vulnerability from its material and political context. Those who remain anxious, grieving or precarious are implicitly framed as failing to orientate themselves correctly towards happiness, rather than as responding to ongoing structural violence. In this way, happiness in this campaign operates as a moral technology (Ahmed, 2010) that converts political suffering into an individual affective problem, binding queer subjects more tightly to the very conditions that produce their precarity.
This logic is not unique to the ‘Life's Too Short’ campaign. Since 2014, corporations have increasingly argued that LGBTQ+ inclusion is not only a moral imperative but also an economic asset (Rao, 2020). The World Bank has promoted a ‘business case’ for LGBTQ+ inclusion, claiming that acceptance and visibility lead to higher productivity and national economic growth. Rao (2020) describes this framing as ‘homocapitalism’: an ideological project that governs queer life through aspirational recognition, defining what it means to be a desirable and recognisable subject. The celebrated queer subject is hard-working, self-sufficient, out and optimistic, while those who are unemployed, closeted or unhappy are rendered unintelligible or deviant. Visibility in this context operates through individualised notions of citizenship and belonging, where inclusion is secured through productivity, emotional management and consumer participation rather than collective struggle. This produces what Irving (2008: 54) describes as the ‘neoliberal queer subject par excellence’. This is not a wholly new requirement but its nature has changed: the emphasis is no longer on hiding or passing but on hyper-visibility and confession. Coming out is thus reframed as the primary mode of queer agency, reducing queerness to an individual act of self-realisation rather than a collective political stance (Decena, 2008).
Within the ‘Life's Too Short’ campaign, this dynamic is particularly clear. While the campaign acknowledges structural challenges such as ‘existing in a heteronormative society’, its proposed solutions remain individualistic (Raza-Sheikh, 2021). This logic dovetails perfectly with neoliberalism, which shifts the burden of happiness and success onto the atomised individual, rather than interrogating the systems that produce suffering in the first place. This shift reframes the responsibility for social change away from collective movements and onto individuals. This creates what C Riley Snorton (2014: 94) calls a ‘glass closet’; a condition which is ‘marked by hyper-visibility’ that simultaneously confines and disciplines queer subjects. This increasingly compulsory performance of coming out becomes central to socially legible queerness, aligning queerness with a homonormative subject position that upholds dominant institutions rather than contesting them (Duggan, 2003). However, unlike earlier formulations of homonormativity, the narrative at work here simultaneously demands assimilation while celebrating difference. This regime rewards those who can render their difference productive, legible and emotionally palatable. Extraordinary homonormativity in this formulation rests on the successful management of anti-normativity in service of capital. In the next section, I extend this analysis by examining how a second advertising campaign mobilises queer difference as a form of cultural capital.
‘Set Your Stage’: Disrupt gender/sexual norms through the market
The promise of inclusion through the market occurs in contradictory ways. In this section, I argue that homonormativity as an analytic needs to be retheorised: not as a politics of sameness alone but as a mutable formation capable of absorbing and valorising difference under contemporary market conditions. Lisa Duggan (2003) developed the term to describe a moment in which the integration of LGBT+ people was predicated on sameness: on fitting into heteronormative standards of privacy, domesticity and respectability. In the contemporary moment, however, this is no longer the case. Corporate campaigns now routinely celebrate queer difference, particularly racialised and gender non-conforming expressions, even as these differences are absorbed into capitalist logics of value. What we are witnessing is not a simple assimilation of queer subjects into mainstream norms but rather a commodified celebration of difference. I describe this mutation as extraordinary homonormativity: a formation in which queer difference and anti-normativity are no longer positioned outside of homonormative logics but are actively embedded within them. I illustrate this shift through an analysis of Harrods’ ‘Set Your Stage’ campaign.
Launched in September 2021, Harrods' ‘Set Your Stage’ campaign exemplifies how capitalism has co-opted queer ideas of liberation. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Iggy London, who is celebrated for ‘giving a voice to underrepresented communities’ (Harrods, 2021), the campaign reimagines the iconic Harrods store in Knightsbridge, London not as a traditional luxury retail space but as a glamorous playground for queer joy and creative expression. The video opens with Kai-Isaiah Jamal, a poet, trans-visibility activist and co-founder of the collective BBZ, walking slowly through the glistening marble halls of Harrods, dressed in a flowing, grey-and-blue button-down ensemble that blurs the lines between formal wear and fashion editorial. The store is eerily empty of shoppers; its polished floors, glittering chandeliers and immaculate designer displays become a dramatic stage. Jamal's voiceover begins to recite an original spoken-word poem about ‘changing the face of fashion, changing the ideas of bodies in fashion, who should be in fashion and who should be celebrated’ (Harrods, 2021). Musicians Priya Ragu and CKTRL emerge, joined by a cast of Black and brown models in striking gender-fluid couture. They move with confidence and joy, dancing through the aisles, spinning beneath spotlights, lounging across velvet sofas and posing in front of mirrors and display cases. They animate the store, turning Harrods into a site of performance and pleasure. The visual language is cinematic and hyper-stylised, using soft lighting, slow motion and rich colour palettes to evoke a dreamy, utopian atmosphere. The video culminates on the rooftop at golden hour, where the cast gathers silhouetted against the London skyline. In a final crescendo, Jamal delivers the closing lines: ‘H is for those of us that make horizons from hurricanes … who rewrite hieroglyphics and headlines … the generation that has come and made home here, right here’ (Harrods, 2021). The scene suggests triumph, arrival and belonging. The message: queerness is not only allowed within luxury space but celebrated as its lifeblood.
The campaign as a whole and the final lines of Jamal's spoken word poem in particular draw heavily on discourses of transgression and anti-normativity commonly associated with queer politics. By using the language of revolution, resistance and extraordinary identity, the video not only positions Harrods as a supporter of queer people but actively rewrites history to position it as an active participant in the histories of queer disruption and organising. On its website, Harrods quotes Jamal explaining that the poem was intended to inspire ‘young creatives to take up space and disrupt it’, highlighting Harrods as a fitting site for this disruption due to its commitment to diversity and inclusion (Mx Jamal, quoted in Harrods, 2021). While this statement expresses a desire for recognition, it diverges from the assimilationist politics of the 1990s, which often framed LGBT+ rights claims in terms of sameness, privacy and domestic respectability. This campaign reframes queer people of colour as unique, creative disruptors, and as cultural innovators. Its emphasis on disruption and anti-normativity suggests a challenge to the exclusionary norms of the fashion industry. This reframing which centres queer racialised difference and styles itself as disruptive signals the need to revisit and expand Duggan's (2003) theorisation of homonormativity. In today's context, homonormativity must be understood as plural, mutable and responsive to shifting market logics.
Part of what the concept of homonormativity has done over the past two decades is to draw attention to the tension between assimilation and disruption within queer politics. It has named and critiqued the mainstreaming of queerness (Eng et al., 2005) and the emergence of a ‘new and vehement cult of gay ordinariness’ (Halperin, 2012: 443) which has made queerness palatable through conformity to norms of privacy, domesticity and respectability. Yet this distinction begins to collapse in campaigns like Harrods' ‘Set Your Stage’, where anti-normativity is no longer positioned outside of homonormativity but becomes central to it. The performance of queer difference, particularly by queer people of colour, is celebrated not in defiance of capitalism but through its logics. This signals a shift: queer anti-normativity is no longer simply resistant but is now marketable, stylish and embedded in luxury branding. What emerges is a new form of extraordinary homonormativity that celebrates difference while simultaneously folding it into corporate value.
This form of homonormativity does not erase queerness but reconfigures it. It demands that queer subjects perform their uniqueness in ways that are legible, consumable and compatible with market interests. It demands diverse subjects to ‘perform a kind of assimilation – an assimilation to corporate culture, to production and consumption – that is simultaneously the articulation of sameness and difference’ (Joseph, 2002: 23). In other words, while this campaign acknowledges queer identity as anti-normative, and celebrates its uniqueness and makes it visible, it also fixes what it would mean to be queer. Queerness becomes about the self-expression of gender and sexuality through luxury and high-end fashion. By mobilising the language of queer and intersectional politics and featuring recognisable figures from queer subcultures, the campaign constructs a narrative in which resisting norms of whiteness, heteronormativity and gender conformity can be achieved through consumer choice. While this appears to challenge some social norms, it ultimately privileges the market as the primary site of queer politics. The anti-normative becomes profitable, and difference becomes a form of brand value. This ultimately reshapes the boundaries between what counts as queer politics and what is good for business; what is normative and what is resisting norms. Here, the anti-normative potential of queer is harnessed and reworked to fit within market interests by re-organising the site of queer politics away from the streets and into the market via consumption. This harnessing of queer can be understood in a Bourdieusian framework as corporations extracting cultural capital to position themselves as different from their competitors (Bourdieu, 1984). Queer politics, in this formulation, becomes a source of distinction rather than disruption.
In order to facilitate the shift of queer politics away from the streets and into the marketplace, corporations are increasingly presenting themselves not only as celebrants of queer difference but also as political allies of queer communities. This marks a significant departure from the 1990s, when corporations first began targeting LGBT+ consumers but were careful to avoid any overt political positioning. Sender (2004: 2) demonstrates that companies at the time went out of their way to insist that their decisions were motivated purely by profit: public relations departments denied any ideological or political allegiance to gay liberation movements, claiming that their decisions were about ‘business, not politics’ (Sender, 2004: 2). However, 22 years on from Sender's (2004) insightful analysis, corporate rhetoric has radically shifted. Many companies now publicly align themselves with queer causes, attempting to conflate consumption with political solidarity.
Harrods' ‘Set Your Stage’ campaign is emblematic of this shift. Alongside the campaign, the company's diversity mission statement affirms this politics. It reads: We embrace a broad definition of diversity here at Harrods; from gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, background, and experience to other dimensions such as lifestyle and family responsibilities. Our goal is to increase the representation of all dimensions to reflect the customers we serve and the increasingly diverse and global marketplace we operate in. We believe ‘Diversity’ depends on inclusion. This starts with creating a safe space and enabling everyone to be seen, heard, valued, and respected for the person they are and the uniqueness they bring. Inclusion also means being attentive to fairness and enabling everyone to contribute at their full potential to create a feeling of community and belonging in our colleagues. (Harrods, 2023)
This illusion of inclusion is further reinforced by initiatives such as Stonewall's Workplace Equality Index. The index offers accreditation to companies based on their inclusivity practices, awarding high-scoring firms the title of ‘Diversity Champion’. While Harrods has yet to receive this title, other corporations that have received it include Unilever, Barclays, KPMG and the weapons manufacturer BAE Systems (Stonewall, 2023). Such recognition is prominently displayed on corporate websites as proof of progress and commitment to queer employees. But rather than signalling structural change, these corporate affirmations of queerness often provide the ideological scaffolding for a new form of homonormativity: one that is entirely compatible with market logics as it incorporates some queer subjects ‘through a liberal politics of recognition that obviates the need for redistribution’ (Rao, 2020: 163).
To fully grasp this shift, it is crucial to situate it within the broader political and economic context of the UK. Over the past 12 years, corporate interest in promoting diversity has intensified, particularly in response to ongoing capitalist crises (Rottenberg, 2014). In particular, this trend gained momentum after the 2008 financial crisis and has deepened during subsequent periods of economic stagnation (Bloom and Rhodes, 2018). Bloom (2016) notes that in moments of capitalist crisis, companies often redirect public attention away from critiques of the free market towards their supposed ethical commitments. The surge in racialised queer visibility then must be understood within this context of austerity, precarity and increasing privatisation. I argue that rather than reflecting a straightforward embrace of social justice, embracing queer visibility serves a political function: to rebrand corporations as progressive and inclusive. Similarly, Burchiellaro (2023: 33) argues that ‘corporate investments in LGBT+ inclusion can also be read as ethical rehabilitation of corporations via the (moral, social, and political) appeals of diversity in the wake of capitalist crisis’.
These narratives work to renew public confidence that capitalism can be ethical. For example, Burchiellaro (2023: 31–32) illustrates how Barclays constructs an imagined legacy of queer allyship by highlighting its long-standing sponsorship of Pride, its Stonewall accreditation and its promotion of a transgender woman to branch manager. This carefully curated corporate history exemplifies the entanglement of social justice with capitalism, framing the corporation not only as an inclusive workplace for queer people but also as a platform for political change. In doing so, it generates a narrative that capitalism, once indifferent or hostile to queer life, has now reformed and can be trusted as a ‘force for queer good’ (Burchiellaro, 2023: 34). Within this narrative, queer people are encouraged to see corporations as allies and to invest their political hopes into them, recasting the corporate space as a site of political progress. However, this vision of queer liberation collapses the distinction between capitalism and social justice. It reframes queer freedom not in terms of structural transformation but as the individual freedom to express one's gender and sexuality through consumer choice. Underpinned by a neoliberal ethos of self-expression and personal responsibility, queerness is made compatible with the market and, in the process, stripped of its disruptive political potential. Rather than challenge systemic inequality, this version of queer politics affirms the status quo, redirecting the radical energy of queerness into the safe channels of representation and consumption. This vision of liberation moves queer politics away from demanding structural change and pacifies the troublesome potential of queerness.
In the ‘Set Your Stage’ campaign, lyrics like making ‘horizons from hurricanes’ and ‘fight hierarchies in all hours’ evoke the language of resistance and allude to the histories of queer political organising. Yet, this reference is ‘purely formal […] hollow, stripped of historical residues, especially if those residues bring with them the ethical and political conflict’ (Winnubst, 2012: 94). This gesture towards radical politics becomes a performance of dissent emptied of its stakes. The visibility on offer here requires an active forgetting of the radical roots of queer politics and identity (Eng, 2010) and a remaking of the meaning of queer liberation. The end message of the ‘Set Your Stage’ campaign, which is not unique to Harrods, is one that invites racialised queer people to disrupt, explore their self-expression and be proud of their identity if it remains within the existent structure.
This depoliticised invitation masks the ongoing harms that these same structures produce. The imperative to challenge capitalism itself is erased. In doing so, campaigns like that of Harrods do not merely reshape queer expression; they also detach queer politics from other radical movements, including anti-racist, feminist and working-class struggles (Rao, 2015). This creates a rift between popular representations of queerness and its solidaristic, intersectional origins. Olúfẹ´mi O Táíwò (2022) calls this process ‘elite capture’. Elite capture refers to the process of political projects being ‘hijacked—in principle or in effect—by the well positioned and better resourced’ (Táíwò, 2022: 23). In this case, we see how corporations, which are better resourced, are hijacking queer-of-colour politics. As a result, ‘corporations are increasingly becoming sites of extraordinary and marketable queerness, while economically marginal sites are being systematically emptied of their queerness’ (Burchiellaro, 2023: 9).
This newer form of homonormativity, while having a similar depoliticising impact, differs in how it manifests from its original conception. Hennessy's (2017) analysis of the relationship between queerness and capital helps clarify this shift: she argues that capitalism is an amoral system concerned only with the accumulation of value and therefore is capable of endlessly absorbing and rearticulating radical difference. Capitalism's flexibility enables it to appear in a constant state of self-reinvention, including by embracing formerly marginal identities when doing so becomes profitable. If championing diversity in fashion shifts public attention away from the exploitative labour and extractive practices on which the industry depends, then corporations will readily embrace inclusion and visibility as part of their ethical rebranding (Hennessy, 2017). In this context, the radical edge of queerness is neutralised, reimagined not as oppositional but as dynamic and marketable (Murphy and de la Fuente, 2014). The inclusion of queer people of colour is thus made possible not through resistance to capital but through its capacity to reconfigure the terms of recognition and profitability. Understanding this requires us to track how discourses of normativity and anti-normativity collide, intersect and reshape each other within late capitalism (Tyler, 2018). Therefore, anti-normative ideas or phrases are not always outside of capitalism but are instead increasingly central to its evolving logic, especially in an era of ‘extraordinary homonormativity’.
Conclusion
I have explored how increased queer visibility when propelled by market logics reshapes queer identity and politics. Through an analysis of the ‘Life's Too Short’ campaign, I showed how such visibility narrows queer agency to the act of coming out, aligning personal fulfilment with market participation. As a result, neoliberalism not only normalises ‘the vectors of identity formation’ (Winnubst, 2012: 88) but also installs a social rationality that privileges detachment from structural conditions in favour of individual ‘worthiness, value, and productivity as prerequisites for recognition’ (Irving, 2008: 40). Within this logic, queer people of colour are encouraged to become ‘the right kind of queer by deposing your hope for happiness in the right place’; a place increasingly defined by capitalist norms (Ahmed, 2010: 106). The commodification of difference is central to this process. In my analysis of Harrods' ‘Set Your Stage’ campaign, I examined how queer discourses of anti-normativity are being redeployed to present corporations as progressive allies in queer liberation. This performance of difference reveals a shifting form of homonormativity: one that no longer rests on ‘gay normality’ but instead celebrates queerness as unique, creative and disruptive. I have termed this mutation ‘extraordinary homonormativity’ to capture how queer difference and anti-normativity are not always opposed to homonormative inclusion, but can be folded into capitalist structures, rendering anti-normativity not as a threat to the system but as an asset within it. This points to a broader transformation: anti-normativity, once seen as a mode of resistance, is now increasingly mobilised in service of racialised capitalist interests. As such, we must pay attention to how anti-normativity travels, because when it is detached from material struggle it can be mobilised to legitimise rather than disrupt racialised capitalist structures. For queer organising, this analysis offers a word of caution. It suggests that visibility and representation, when mediated by the market, are insufficient grounds for resistance and may instead require renewed attention to material struggle and solidaristic politics beyond corporate inclusion.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I express my gratitude for the kind support and generous feedback from Sophie Chamas, Alyosxa Tudor, Abeera Khan, Damien Gayle, molly ackhurst and Kerem Nisancioglu.
Declaration of conflicting interests
There are no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article
