Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics

Coolness has had remarkable longevity. Emergent in post–World War II black subcultures of jazz and blues, the aesthetics of cool morphed through white working-class icons such as James Dean and Marlon Brando until it was slowly absorbed into the transgressive white youth culture of the 1960s. Mainstream and popular culture in the United States never looked back: we have been speaking the language of cool ever since. Given the global reach of the US culture industry, this aesthetics has transformed geopolitically in considerable and interesting ways: cool is remarkably elastic. But the fundamental pose has not changed, namely, a controlled detachment that enshrines irony and a muted claim to nonconformity as highly valued, preferred social postures.

The stance of countercultural resistance has thus become endemically ambiguous in the white mainstream language of cool. On the one hand, the legacy of the James Dean–Marlon Brando icon imbues cool with the perennial rebellion of masculinist adolescence.¹ But, on the other hand, this folds all too neatly into the teleology of responsible male adulthood, thereby casting cool forever as an affect of adolescence that “real” adults outgrow, even if indulging periodically in culturally programmed midlife crises or the vicarious pleasures of parenthood. This barometer of masculinized adulthood thereby modulates racialization: white culture is only cool as an adolescent, but black culture is forever cool—forever, that is, a teenager in need of authoritarian controls.

The work of bell hooks underscores this racialization as one of the primary, long-standing co-optations of black culture. Focusing on the “fake cool pose” of hip-hop and gangsta culture, hooks positions contemporary black expressions of cool as part of the broader commodification of coolness.² For hooks, this “black-face” degradation of cool disengages one of the most powerful modes of social resistance in black cultural history. The founding fathers of cool, ranging from Louis Armstrong to B. B. King and Malcolm X, developed cool as a way to reclaim social life, heal the deep psychic wounds of chattel slavery and its permanent devaluation of black labor, cultivate one’s own sense of meaning in the world, and survive. But the gangsta culture of hip-hop and contemporary black aesthetics sells out these deep historical roots of resistance to a posture of cool that is identified with “the white man, with all the perks and goodies that come with patriarchal dominator culture.”³ She emphasizes, in strikingly economic (if perhaps latently Marxian) terms, that this sellout of cool in black culture always comes with the change from the desire for meaningful labor to the desire for wealth and fame. Rebecca Walker follows this line of thinking to collect an entire anthology of black writers exhuming the deep historical reservoirs of black cool. This effort explicitly involves wresting the meanings of cool from the ironic detachment sold by consumerist culture to all shades of alleged subcultures, including contemporary black aesthetics.

Tom Frank argues this is no accident. Marshaling evidence from various archives of marketing theories and the advertising industry, Frank argues that the US marketing machine took full flight in the 1960s largely through the explicit co-optation of cool. Focusing on the industries of advertising and menswear, Frank shows how, “in 1967 and 1968, … executives seized upon the counterculture as the preeminent symbol of the revolution in which they were engaged, embellishing both their trade literature and their products with images of rebellious, individualistic youth.”⁴ Frank draws loosely on Norman Mailer’s development of the Hipster, in his essay “The White Negro,” as “an ‘American existentialist’ whose tastes for jazz, sex, drugs, and the slang and mores of black society constituted the best means of resisting the encroachments of Cold War oppression” (CC, 12).

But Frank’s project is to investigate the production of this “hip” aesthetic in theories of business and marketing, not to investigate the racialized aspects of this transformation. Labeling this movement as the emergence of “hip consumerism,” Frank explains: “What happened in the sixties is that hip became central to the way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public” (CC, 26). Transgression and nonconformity became staples of, rather than threats to, the marketing machine. Framed by the aesthetics of cool and hip, the repeatedly reinvented “counterculture” becomes “an enduring commercial myth” (CC, 32) that fuels the illusion of social resistance, while materially, economically, and psychologically co-opting any last remnant of radical critique.

While I am sympathetic to Frank’s arguments, especially about the marketing of transgression and nonconformity as central neoliberal mechanisms, an implicitly Marxian version of ideological critique still structures his general argument of co-optation, especially in implicitly granting intentionality to the theorists of various business and marketing practices.⁵ Consequently, the sidestepping of race and gender, which is particularly worrisome because of the long tradition of Marxists’ fraught erasures of these categories, misses entirely the critical transformation in the concept of and cathexis to social difference in the neoliberal episteme.

When Joe Cool appears in the Peanuts strip and grants a subcultural plotline to the iconic cartoon, Marxist analyses can certainly run the gauntlet and read Schulz as smuggling a working-class critique of capitalism into the all-American narrative of Charlie Brown’s angst. But they cannot make any sense of why Coca-Cola would then become the pronounced sponsor of the classic A Charlie Brown Christmas television special. In the same vein, a Frank-inspired understanding of marketing as co-opting the cool of youth culture in the 1960s makes some good sense of how, especially in the wake of his assassination and James Deanian tragic death, John Lennon’s cultural transgressions become o so cool. But such a loosely Marxist analysis fails even to broach how the racialization of Yoko Ono persists as the hypersexualized, perverting scapegoat for the downfall of the Beatles and Lennon’s white, working-class ethos.

The changing meanings of cool run much deeper. The widespread embrace of cool stretches much further than the genius of marketing pamphlets and advertising machines aimed at menswear. The transformation of coolness, with its deep roots in black culture, from an ethos of resistance and survival into a widespread cultural posture of ironic detachment that is formally emptied of any historical or political content captures the transformations in social difference underway in the neoliberal episteme. Coolness perfectly expresses the neoliberal transformation of social difference from a historical repository of xenophobia to a fungible unit of rational calculation: coolness expresses difference-as-fungible. It erases the deep historical roots in black culture, just as hooks argues, but it does so in ways that exceed the explanatory parameters of commodification, where a standard of evaluation (albeit money or consumerism) still holds a singular power over the social field.

Given its purely formal character, difference-as-fungible finds its most meaningful expression in the social metric of numerical statistics. Epistemologically, difference-as-fungible assumes a pure formalism and thereby initiates an aesthetic mode of judgment that cannot become a source of conflict. Social difference-as-fungible becomes merely a particularly intensified zone through which interests can be magnified or minimized, depending on one’s preferences. But to prefer is to make an aesthetic judgment—to state one’s tastes, one’s likes and dislikes, one’s proclivities. It is not an ethical judgment about the ontological value of anything.

Under classical liberalism’s relation to capitalism, the comparative values of such exchangeable preferences would be solved by the purely formal monetary standard—and the market would provide the commodification of difference a kind of redemptive excuse. But the neoliberal social rationality does not function in that ontology or epistemology: the neoliberal move toward the fungibility of differences heightens and intensifies this purely aesthetic dimension of difference itself. The purely formal character of the differences emphasizes the innocuous character of these fleeting, ephemeral partialities: whether one is “better” than another depends on which interests are being served, in which market, for what infinite permutations of delight.

Coolness allows difference to proliferate and intensify in a purely formal and thus purely superficial manner. It initiates us into the strange social epistemic space of endless, scalar comparison as the barometer of subjectivity. Unhinged from any historical or ethical barometer, social difference-as-fungibility cannot be a source of conflict. And this is precisely how it becomes one of the most insidious transformations of our neoliberal social worlds.

Unsurprisingly, social media enacts this cool fungibility remarkably. The formal similitude of cyber platforms is a vehicle for, not an impediment to, the endless proliferation of “different” poses, snapshots, images, tweets, and witticisms that can then be evaluated on the basis of that treasured statistic: the number of hits determines just how cool one really is. While coolness was once the hallmark of black masculine culture and still carries masculinist social structures, we neoliberals all want to be cool: we all want to float across the endless stream of verisimilitude in free, intensified, and stimulating forms, becoming ever so interesting—and ever so cool.

The cathexis to this register of cool thereby animates the neoliberal social rationality. While the Lacanian register of the imaginary, especially when paired with the circuit of the drive, captures the crucially comparative and endlessly looping aspect of this kind of subjective development, it cannot account for the multidimensional, scalar kind of judgment that (allegedly) unmoors social difference from histories of bigotry and xenophobia. Lacan’s orientation in his originary accounts of the imaginary toward explaining human development locates the imaginary in a dyadic space of the mother and child, which is then extended through language into the ontology of other and self. As I argued chapters 2 and 3, the neoliberal social rationality does not turn on this kind of dyadic epistemic space and, accordingly, ideological interpellation does not capture neoliberal processes of subject formation, racialization, or racism. In aiming to render the market the site of veridiction across all aspects of social life, the neoliberal social rationality intensifies and multiplies differences far beyond the dyadic relation of self and other that structures liberalism’s histories of xenophobia. The neoliberal social fabric becomes a fractured conglomeration of diffuse, fungible differences. The more intensified those differences become, the more superficial they are. The less historical or psychological depth is attached to them, the better they float across context and meanings—and the cooler and cooler one is!

REREADING SOCIAL DIFFERENCE

It is unsurprising then that we are so deeply confused about social difference in neoliberal cultures. The ongoing, constantly repeated mantras of celebrating diversity leave us not merely perplexed, but profoundly confused. What could it possibly mean, in a culture so deeply structured by its cathexis to xenophobia, to act as if racial differences or nonnormative sexualities are suddenly something to embrace and even celebrate? As our students sometimes tell us, often without intending to do so, the categories of social difference that have been so critical to the work of feminist and leftist social theorists have lost a good deal of their meaning.

Rather than read this simply as the failure of feminism or our students, I want to follow out the possibility that the confusion itself is caused by a transformation in the categories in neoliberal cultures. If we take seriously the argument about neoliberalism no longer functioning through ideological interpellation, then these categories of social difference and our modes of cathexis to them must also be thoroughly reconsidered. One of our most pressing tasks as critical, feminist theorists is thus to elaborate these transformations of concepts and cathexes in the specific categories through which contemporary neoliberal cultures specify and regulate social difference.

The effort to do so, however, has mired much of our feminist critique in ideological trappings. Still living out the fears and realities of the heated debates about the competition of victimization, we continue to be haunted by the politics of ressentiment in our attempts to articulate the differing vectors of social difference.⁶ In broad strokes, two recent scholarly developments offer a snapshot of the contemporary formulations of this persistent problematic: the ongoing, heated debates about intersectionality and its meaning, relevance, constraints, and codes; and the emergence of language such as precarity and abandonment.

The ongoing debates about intersectionality often seem to spring from a failure to recognize the substantially different disciplinary epistemologies through which intersectionality is formulated.⁷ Consequently, the participants in these debates often seem to speak across one another, understanding Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of intersectionality in critical legal studies to refer to remarkably different objects, problems, and dynamics. I thus agree with Roderick Ferguson’s recent assessment that many of the debates are structured by a fundamental confusion and disagreement about the ontological status of linguistic referents and the will to truth that animates them.⁸ For example, particular analyses alter immensely according to whether one takes intersectionality to refer to a classically liberal project of amelioration through inclusion, a description of the multiply embodied character of a historically produced identity category, an attempt to analyze the complex process of naming particular and mutually constituting historical vectors, or a synecdoche for “race.”

Emergent roughly alongside these debates, the broader turns to concepts and figurations such as precarity and abandonment initiate a way to sidestep the vagaries of identity categories and analyze broader historical, political, and economic vectors of disenfranchisement. While I am concerned, as I noted in the introduction, with the singular cathexis to pain (and subsequently the dead-end dyad of victim and guilt) that the language of precarity, abandonment, and bare life so often implies and initiates, I agree with the turn to a broader rubric of analysis that can speak effectively to the variegated material instantiations of social difference without canceling the crucial differences among and between them. Moreover, given my long-standing approach to social difference as a historicized dynamic (especially the racializing of sexuality and the sexualizing of race), I continue to conceptualize social difference as an active vector of material, social life, rather than as a static category of identity.

As I turn to the reconfiguring of social difference in the neoliberal episteme, therefore, I aim to articulate the problematic in a language that still finds some traction in neoliberal social rationalities. This means we must be able to speak both in and beyond the traditional categories of social difference (gender, class, race, sexuality, and the infamous etc.). That is, given the sociohistorical fugue in which I place my analysis of our shared historical present, we must become nimble enough to articulate the material instantiations of social difference that jam the neoliberal machine of fungibility, while still calling out the exact contours of that resistance when and where and how it appears, despite the appearance of being “old fashioned” and woefully uncool.

With grave doubts about whether I have become that nimble, I offer the language of “somatic xenophobia” to articulate this persistent resistance to neoliberal fungibility across the precise instantiations of that resistance in the variegated social field. No book or theory or singular perspective can or should pretend to address all forms of oppression. Accordingly, I understand my sustained focus on the persistence of racialized difference and racism in the US neoliberal social fabric as one of those multiple iterations. Wanting to sidestep the problems of victim-competition and its accusations of omission, I hope the language of somatic xenophobia will amplify the amazing work of so many activists and scholars in various sites of simultaneous precarity and resistance, especially that of disability and trans* cultural politics.⁹

In the rest of this chapter and chapter 5, I analyze this transformation in categories of social difference directly and explicitly. To do so, I focus on the four traditional categories through which cultures of liberalism articulate, in differentiating and mutually constituting manners, social difference and that continue to structure, albeit in shifting and often obfuscating ways, neoliberal social fields: gender, class, race, and sexuality. I argue that the differentiated historical ontologies of each of these categories render them differently transformed in neoliberal cultures. Through the Lacanian registers of the imaginary and the real, I argue that, despite the transformation of gender and class into cool neoliberal accessories, somatic xenophobia persists in the neoliberal episteme in the singular form of race that is always already sexualized.

Accordingly, in this chapter, I turn to gender and the transformation of class into consumerism. To do so, I focus on two contemporaneous examples, one from popular culture and one from academic culture: metrosexuality and the theory of gender performativity. Through these, I argue that gender in the mainstream culture of the United States has become a kind of playground for the neoliberal social rationality, offering up superficial spaces that are easily evacuated of any historical meanings and that are thus served up for endless self-enhancement and manipulation.¹⁰

Intensified through a transformation of class into consumerism, gender has become a perfectly fungible kind of social difference, floating freely across more intractable manifestations of race and sexuality. Metrosexuality cuts gender loose from sexual difference and thereby, at least allegedly, from homophobia. Gender becomes a playful accessory to the subject of interests’ endless drive for cooler and cooler images—especially of itself. As a consumerist practice, gender-as-consumerism-run-amok enacts the neoliberal circuit of the drive, obfuscating yet further the role of class in neoliberal social ontologies and becoming a vehicle for the process of rendering social differences fungible. In the following chapter, I turn to race as a sexualized vector of social difference that presents more obstinate instantiations of long-standing, somatic xenophobia to the celebratory evacuations of the neoliberal machine.

GENDER: THE NEOLIBERAL PLAYGROUND

Milton Friedman, the recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976 and University of Chicago economist, is widely hailed as “the grandfather of neoliberalism.” Along with colleagues such as Gary Becker and T. W. Schultz, Friedman developed and disseminated the core economic principles of the Chicago School brand of neoliberalism, which was exported across the world.¹¹ For example, in his Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1962, Friedman extols the merits of the free market as the social guarantor of individual freedom—the heart and soul of any liberal democracy. In this classic text of neoliberal theory, he lays out the essential problem of the twentieth century as a veering from nineteenth-century “true” liberalism, thus positioning neoliberalism as a return to those nineteenth-century values. The primary corrective, as Friedman sees it, is a return to “freedom” as the fundamental value of liberalism to supplant and thus repair the damages wrought by those early-twentieth-century bastardizations of liberalism, namely, “welfare and equality.”¹² For Friedman, of course, the meaning of this “freedom” boils down to a matter of “individual choice.” The individual is transformed from citizen to consumer: the individual’s ability to choose becomes the fundamental concern of society and the open, free market ensures and protects this much better than the laws of government.

Arguing against welfare and equality and for the free market, Friedman locks onto a central value that drives this system, a value that neoliberal cultures and some of their most allegedly avant garde movements (including various forms of leftist social theory, most especially queer theory) have also embraced: nonconformity. The fundamental fear of neoliberalism is not equality, as it is for the twentieth-century liberals, but conformity. Writing most directly against state socialism and stoking the Cold War fears of the time, Friedman extols the values of nonconformity over and over again. He argues that the capitalist free market can and does fund dissent from governmental policies, but that socialist economies cannot. While agreeing with the anticommunism of McCarthyism, therefore, he disagrees with its process: the private market protects against injustice (CF, 20–21). And it does so much more smoothly than any governmental policies (or witch hunts) because the market always ensures individual choice—and thus nonconformity. As he tells us through an exemplary metaphor:

The characteristic feature of action through political channels is that it tends to require or enforce substantial conformity. The great advantage of the market, on the other hand, is that it permits wide diversity. It is, in political terms, a system of proportional representation. Each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants and get it: he does not have to see what color the majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit. (CF, 15)¹³

Here, we have the full transition from citizen to consumer that exemplifies the transition from liberalism to neoliberalism: to vote is to purchase. And because a man (clearly a gendered subject here) can “vote” however he wishes, in Friedman’s mind, the market frees us from the onerous problem of conformity.

Nonconformity both ensures individual choice—the gold standard of social progress for neoliberals—and, of course, keeps the market churning along: the free market demands innovation, endlessly. Friedman’s argument is quite straightforward: only the free market can ensure individual freedom of choice; to fuel the free market, we must have endless innovation and diversity; to ensure innovation and diversity, we must stimulate competition; therefore, to ensure individual freedom of choice, diverse innovation, and competition, we must cultivate and encourage nonconformity as the grandest value of free market democracies. This is the heart of Tom Frank’s analyses of the co-optation of cultures of cool in marketing strategies in the 1960s and 1970s. But rather than read that as a kind of ideological manipulation (or, worse, a conspiracy theory), I offer Friedman’s text here as an example of the kind of social rationality increasingly driving all modes of living in neoliberal cultures. More specifically, I offer it as exemplary of the fundamental transformation in social values of neoliberal cultures that is slowly rendering us way too cool. This excessively cool detachment has been enabled primarily through the social difference we call “gender” and the unhinging of consumerism from class.

It has now been twenty-five years since Judith Butler developed her Althusserian reading of gender, extending the insights about the role of “the family ISA” in assigning gender subject positions. Taking up Althusser’s own examples about the intensity of ideological interpellation at the site of birth,¹⁴ Butler showed how such intensity was fraught with anxiety, especially the particular anxiety about homosexuality. I won’t rehearse the arguments: they are so well known and have gathered such authority that they seem to interpellate us, leaving us unable to think without or beyond the (unseen) framework of gender as performative interpellation. The impact on queer theory, where Gender Trouble is still regularly positioned as a founding text, was particularly intense, as Butler helped to frame sexuality as a distinct socio-psycho-political dynamic requiring specific tools and modes of analysis.

Butler’s arguments had such a tremendous impact, in part, because they capture so much of the constructed yet simultaneously binding character of this strange phenomenon, gender. Moreover, in her insistence on the performative character of interpellating practices, Butler provided some opening through which to conceive political resistance against the heterosexist, patriarchal norms of gender, namely, through the “cracks” of always imperfect gender performances. There is no perfect repetition, especially for the unnatural phenomena of gender. For feminists and queers, this came as a considerable relief. For neoliberals, it played into the kinds of marketing tools already well afoot by 1989, as Tom Frank’s work aptly shows. And now, in the mid-2010s, for critical social theorists, it should prod us to theorize beyond interpellation and identification as the exhaustive horizons of subject formation and to historicize the cultural ascendancy of gender as a kind of playground for the endless stimulation that neoliberal subjects of interests crave.

Although Butler later regretted and sometimes tried to move beyond drag as the exemplar of her theories of gender performativity, the ways that her work was taken up through this singular example are instructive for us now. Fusing Jodi Dean’s argument that neoliberalism functions through imaginary, rather than symbolic, identities with Tim Dean’s provocative critique of Butler as developing gender exclusively as an imaginary phenomenon, I argue that Butler’s early theories of gender performativity and their remarkable impact—both inside and outside the academy—surprisingly capture the fundamental transformations underway in neoliberal social rationalities.

Recall that, for Jodi Dean, the dynamic of social formation in the neoliberal episteme is not the fulfilling of a prescripted, socially anchored identity, but rather the endless pursuit of cool, ever new, interesting, and stimulating poses: we become purely what Foucault calls “subjects of interests” when we are most superficially oriented and stimulated. Especially when set loose in the circuit of the drive, unhinged from any teleology of desire, we loop endlessly through the superficial stream of images that we increasingly call “happiness.” As imaginary identities, we seek and respond to intensifying practices that are thoroughly aestheticized and, even more particularly, visually cathected: we are pursuing cool, ever new, interesting, and stimulating looks, images-as-identities. In the social rationalities and practices of the neoliberal episteme, cognitive registers shift from the symbolic to the imaginary: image is everything, as Nike and every other marketer know all too well. And gender, with the constructed, liberatingly superficial spin that the fetish of drag gives it, is the perfect vehicle for such endeavors. Gender is the neoliberal playground.¹⁵

In this context, when Tim Dean critiques Butler’s concept of performative gender as constricting gender to the aesthetic problematic of mimesis, he may actually help to articulate how gender is beginning to function in neoliberal social rationalities and practices. Tim Dean’s project is to locate the precise ontological error in Butler’s reading of gender as performative. Rightfully extending her concept of drag beyond the realm of gender, Dean demonstrates this category error through the infamous reading of Paris is Burning. As Dean puts it, “According to Butler, almost every conceivable kind of identity can be a form of drag insofar as, being imitable, identity is revealed to be itself imitative.”¹⁶ This restricts our analyses of subject formation to “the level of imaginary representations” and, in turn, “restricts vital political questions to the arena of ego identifications” (BS, 71). (This echoes Viego’s concerns about dominant readings of racialization and racism that I sketched at the end of chapter 2.)

Pursuing his project of offering a more robust, Lacanian understanding of transgender and transsexual identifications (a problematic pairing), Dean corrects Butler’s ontological error “by factoring the Lacanian real” (BS, 71) back into the questions of gender and sexuality, a project with which, as will become clear in the following chapter, I am entirely sympathetic. But Tim Dean’s work also allows us to see, however inadvertently, how Butler’s theorizing of gender captures, also inadvertently, a fundamental transformation underway in the neoliberal episteme: we are purely and only how we appear and the more interesting we can appear, the more successful and cooler we are! And gender, especially understood as the endless donning of cool new fashion accessories, is the most fabulous way to intensify our ever so cool appearances.¹⁷

WELCOME, METROSEXUALITY

The cultural emergence of metrosexuality in the United States and United Kingdom in the early 2000s offers a particularly apt example for analyzing these transformations. Proclaimed the coolest, latest thing on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 2003, metrosexuality came on the scene as the coolest, latest thing the neoliberal market had cooked up. Of course, the fashion industry had known this for some time: any good neoliberal knows that a style has already lost its edge by the time it reaches the cover of the New York Times Magazine. Still, the play of androgyny and, particularly, the making cool of effeminate masculinity in metrosexuality became confusing cultural phenomena for feminist and queer theorists, for a short while. (Metrosexuality was officially proclaimed dead in 2012, since it is passé to note that which is fully mainstream; and, as the cartoon in the New Yorker in 2013 shows, it is clearly mainstream.)¹⁸

On the one hand, following Butler’s lead, gender-bending had been hailed (pun intended) by feminists as one of the ultimate barometers of social change, a sure sign that the patriarchy was crumbling. But as metrosexuality has become cool and hip, nothing seems to be changing: economic indicators such as the gender gap in employment, wages, and salaries have not substantially changed; the wedding industry is flourishing and about to be boosted in unforeseen ways as same-sex marriage is gradually legalized; and the assault on women’s reproductive rights and justice is intensifying across the United States. So, what is going on? How is it that gender-bending has been co-opted as the latest, coolest thing by the neoliberal market? And what does this tell us about the transformation in categories of social difference as well as processes of subject formation in neoliberalism?

To analyze this, I first return to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which became remarkably popular roughly a decade before the cultural emergence of metrosexuality. Arguably the most culturally challenging aspect of Butler’s work in Gender Trouble was her link of gender binaries and normativity to a heterosexist concept of sexuality. This was, of course, not news to feminists, who had been analyzing and articulating the endemic connections of sexism and heterosexism, sometimes alongside white supremacy, for some time by 1989. The 1970s were overflowing with feminists, across a range of ideological and political affinities, calling out the constrictive roles that patriarchal sexism forced upon women, including quite directly the constitutive roles of heterosexism and white supremacy. The names doing such work from a wide variety of (often conflicting) cultural standpoints far exceed any single, exhaustive list: Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Gloria Steinem, Cheryl Clarke, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks, the Combahee River Collective, Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, etc. (A very different kind of twist on the now infamously Butlerian “etc.”) I particularly emphasize Hortense Spillers’s remarkable essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” published in 1987, which thoroughly racializes gender as a critical tool of chattel slavery and colonialism (an argument María Lugones continues to develop). In this historical light, it is quite puzzling why and how Butler’s arguments became so popular, especially given the esoteric and rather torturous prose of Gender Trouble.

I do not claim to solve this puzzle, nor do I want to invoke the ridiculous kind of reductions that would be required by such a claim to do so. Rather, I offer a couple of speculations about linguistic, philosophical, and cultural transformations to offer a context in which to read the remarkable popularity of a thoroughly academic book such as Gender Trouble. As with any kind of historical reconstruction, the speculations I offer are partial; one can always find counterarguments and paths less taken for any genealogical analysis. My effort is not to offer the “true” reading of Gender Trouble and its widespread reception. I am not interested in arguing further about whether the theories of gender performativity Butler develops are “correct” or “true,” as I hope is already clear in my discussion of Butler in chapter 2. Rather, I am interested in why and how they became so fascinating and provocative to so many of us, in and beyond the academy.

Therefore, I want to historicize (very briefly) the text of Gender Trouble and its most salient theory, gender performativity, as an exemplar of many of the critical transformations involved in the broader cultural unleashing of gender as the neoliberal playground. Not claiming any kind of cultural causality, I read Gender Trouble as exemplifying several conceptual and categorical transformations that are underway in neoliberal social rationalities and practices, especially as we find them enacted in the United States and United Kingdom in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That is, I argue that Gender Trouble may be a quintessentially neoliberal text.

On the one hand, the abstraction of Butler’s argument offered a clear schematic of the hegemonic chain of signifiers that transcended some of the cultural, historical, and even personal contexts that enabled easier dismissals of some of the previous feminist analyses. The canonization of Gender Trouble as one of the founding texts of queer theory, however, impels us to see how Butler’s arguments enabled the disarticulation of gender from both sexism and sexuality, and most certainly from such old-fashioned, decidedly uncool concepts as patriarchy and white supremacy. These shifts in language from the unabashed use of “patriarchy,” “white supremacy,” “heterosexism,” and “homophobia” in the 1970s and early 1980s to the more domesticated “heteronormativity,” “gender performativity,” and, eventually, “homonormativity” and “queer” in the 1990s and 2000s indicate more than merely stylistic predilections. They indicate a substantive shift in the register of analyses from deep historical structures of domination toward more abstracted and ahistorically rendered cultural iterations of normativity.

While we feminists may still be highly habituated to reading gender through heterosexual interpellation and its endemic sexism, the emphatic embrace of denaturalizing gender as a culturally mediated and repetitive performance seems to make gender more pliable for the workings of neoliberalism. As neoliberal social rationalities render the role of history less and less culturally valued or even legible, this notion of “culturally mediated and repetitive” becomes quite thin. Consequently, the connection of gender to long-standing structures of sexism, heterosexism, and even white supremacy is simply lost. Liberated from the heavy baggage of interiority and symbolically scripted roles, with their fixed sexual expressions, gender can float freely as the most playful of signifiers. Once we understand that gender is performative, it seems we can just begin performing it to our endless entertainment and expansion of wardrobes (despite Judith Butler’s screams of protest).

We can now see how Butler’s Gender Trouble, while not framed as an analysis of gender in the neoliberal episteme, maps out many of the philosophical moves involved in this kind of unmooring of gender from deep political and historical structures. Grounded in Nietzschean critiques of causality and subjectivity, the text easily reads as a quintessentially postmodern liberation of gender from all forms of constriction and domination. Gender Trouble can be read as a playbook of neoliberal celebrations of and incitements toward nonconformity, a playbook read most assiduously by many of us (myself included) taking on the next historical mantle of coolness, queer theory. The feminist insistence on an endemic connection of gender back to sexism and heterosexism thereby increasingly falls on deaf ears. We sound like historical throwbacks, caught in those dark days when oppression reigned over (presumably dowdy, certainly prude) feminists who lacked any sense of humor—or of style. So uncool. We are cast into that “Siberia of feminism,” as Angela McRobbie so aptly analyzes the kind of analysis eschewed wholly from the grand celebrations of gender in the postfeminism era of the neoliberal episteme.¹⁹ And, in the terms of my broader efforts here, the category of gender begins to exemplify the cultural embrace of social difference as fungible, as evacuated of any political heft or historical weight—as o so cool.

Bringing this to bear on the cultural ascent of metrosexuality, we see how the social barometers regulating gender-bending practices in the early twenty-first century are fraught with ambivalence and anxieties about this tension between normative sexuality and normative gender (with any connection to sexism and racism utterly erased). From its inception, the phonic echo of heterosexuality in metrosexuality ensures the ongoing heterosexuality of the metrosexual man.

Mark Simpson’s official coining of the term in his essay “Meet the Metrosexual,” on Salon.com in July 2002, followed by a self-interview in 2004, is laced with homophobic insistences that he—and the metrosexual man he is “outing”—is not homophobic. The subtitle to the essay reads: “He’s well dressed, narcissistic and obsessed with butts. But don’t call him gay.” Simpson then proceeds to parody coming out—“Ladies and gents, the captain of the England football squad is actually a screaming, shrieking, flaming, freaking metrosexual. (He’ll thank me for doing this one day, if only because he didn’t have to tell his mother himself.)”—as well as AIDS, claiming he was “contact traced” by the New York Times to be “Patient MetroZero.”

These capture the general flavor of the two posts, which are filled with historical references (Oscar Wilde, Norman Mailer, The Village People) to show how gay culture cornered the market on narcissism long before metrosexuality. While these references overtly support the claim that the metrosexual is post-homophobia, the caricatures of gay culture are all too well worn as homophobic tropes. By the time Simpson provocatively suggests that the metrosexual, following on the middle-class slaying of the nineteenth-century dandy, is actually killing sexuality itself, only one message is legible: the metrosexual ambivalence about sexuality altogether. Very cool.

I do not belabor Mark Simpson’s clearly playful, ironic, and very cool posts on Salon.com in order to call him out as a homophobe. (That would, obviously, be so uncool.) Rather, I read these posts and the broader cultural phenomena they are describing as examples of the kind of political confusion that so often attaches to gender-bending practices in these neoliberal times. With names such as David Beckham and Brad Pitt and films such as Fight Club, American Psycho, and Spiderman attached to the term, “the metrosexual” clearly refers to straight (mostly white) men who are indulging gay aesthetics.

Setting political questions aside, the metrosexual is explicitly defined by two intertwining characteristics: an unabashed narcissism and the drive to spend and consume as recklessly as necessary to feed the image. As Simpson describes this “new” cultural phenomenon, the metrosexual “might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference.”²⁰ In this emphasis on unbounded narcissism, the metrosexual becomes the quintessentially imaginary identity, obsessed with cultivating the endless adoration of others. Allegedly freed entirely from homophobia and any other boorish concern with politics (or history), the metrosexual is the ideal subject of interests.

Still, insofar as metrosexuality emerges as a kind of transitional phenomenon in neoliberal transformations of gender and thus in neoliberal transformations of social difference into apolitical, fungible coolness, the ambivalence about sexual normativity and gender normativity persists across its various cultural iterations. For example, the regulative role of heteronormativity is more pronounced, if still fraught with ambivalence, in the contemporaneous, extremely popular television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which aired under that precise title and theme from 2003 to 2005 in both US and UK versions.

The premise of the reality show was basic: it showed how good heterosexual men can be coached into becoming more sensitive—and more aesthetically savvy and appealing—heterosexuals precisely through the aesthetic sensibilities of homosexual men. The role of heteronormative sexuality in these gender-bending practices thereby becomes clearer: (1) so long as heterosexuality is not under any serious threat, there are presumably no limits to the play of gender as a fabulous fashion accessory that can be intensified and consumed ad infinitum; (2) the reworking of masculinity into ever more appealing and interesting aesthetic modes is welcome as an enhancement of heterosexual desire and pleasure; (3) if the homosexual can deliver this reworking of straight masculinity, then homosexuality can become more and more enmeshed in the perpetuation of more interesting, savvy heterosexuality that will, in turn, be all the more culturally powerful.

Without the distracting protestations against homophobia of Simpson’s posts, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy shows more clearly how the crucial stake in metrosexuality is the transformation of masculine heterosexuality into a more aesthetically interesting and varied phenomenon; it is not any challenge to normative heterosexuality itself. The exciting aspect of the show, which captured the attention, imaginations, and perhaps even fantasies of a widespread (if largely straight, female, white, middle-class) audience, was the amplification of masculinity as a fresh site for the inventiveness of gender—of neoliberal gender unleashed from any concerns about sexism or heterosexism, but still quite happily playing into heteronormativity. Good ole fashioned heteronormativity could begin to flourish through gender variance, bolstered by the apolitical stance that adheres to all cultural positions of normativity.

Of course, the emergence of this fresh gender playground primarily in the professional classes to which metrosexuality is marketed confirms the kinds of class stratifications we have come to expect of the neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme. But as Simpson emphasizes, metrosexuality turns primarily on a man’s spending priorities and habits, not on his class position.²¹ The metrosexual becomes an exemplary neoliberal subject of interests not only because he embraces gender for endless experimentation and enjoyment, but also because he does so through unabashed and ever joyful consumerism. He confirms the fantasy of instant wealth directly by enacting it: one’s spending habits need not correlate to one’s class position, as the ongoing fetishizing and purchasing of remarkably expensive tennis shoes by lower-class, working-poor communities show.²² The role of class, which has never been a recognized or comfortable category for liberalism and its adamant myth of meritocracy, intensifies in neoliberalism into the role of spending and consumerism.

UNCOOL DIFFERENCES

This slide from class to consumerism in metrosexuality does not mean, however, that class no longer matters. Class structures continue to modulate the neoliberal social field, shaping and limiting the transformation from class to consumerism, from sexuality to consumerism, and from race to consumerism. Some differences remain intractable.

Not all differences are cool. Not all differences can be aestheticized, scrubbed clean of historical residues, evacuated into glorious superficiality, and transformed into an oh so cool accessory. The historical ontologies of bodies are not so easily erased. The soma resists, demarcating our various social differences according to scales of malleability. Some differences, written into bodies and psyches by long patterns of sustained, systemic xenophobia, remain intractable to the allure of superficiality and fungibility enacted in neoliberal social rationalities. These more obstinate differences, these recurrent instances of somatic xenophobia, carry a historical ontology that cannot be so easily expunged.

Attention to the different historical ontologies attached to various categories and instantiations of social difference thereby offers a crucial way to parse contemporary politics around various issues, such as reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, disability rights, transgender rights, prisoners’ rights, and immigration. In the line of thinking I am advancing, these issues are mediated by the kinds of histories that shape and inform the different bodies involved. While that in and of itself is far from a new argument, the neoliberal intensification of liberal categories of social difference substantially confuses our abilities to read those histories. Unmoored by the cool motor of fungibility from historical cathexes to xenophobia, the variations among particular iterations of social difference are flattened.

Put differently, the neoliberal command to “celebrate diversity” aims to decathect the histories of explicit, if still disavowed, xenophobia that stratified the social fabric of liberalism. These ugly histories are just bad historical hangovers—totally uncool. But this does not mean that they do not continue to shape and inform arguments over various forms of social difference and their attendant political rights, as we see in the ongoing assault on women’s reproductive rights, the proliferation of anti-immigrant sentiments and politics, the persistence of only redemptive representations of disability, and the inability to cognize the complexity of trans* lives beyond anything more than a fretful aberration. If we are to intercede in this confused social landscape in the name of justice and ethics, we must develop analytic skills to decipher this interplay between historical xenophobia and its aestheticized erasure.

We must begin, with Hortense Spillers, to think through the terrifying histories of our American grammar.