APLICACIONES PRÁCTICAS

A number of interesting points thus emerge from tracing the implications of this ethnographic engagement for the critical understanding of inclusion and the broader field of queer OS. Firstly, the experience of fieldwork revealed that whilst scholarship on homonormativity provides a useful entry point from which to engage with the (re)organization of gender/sexuality in relation to the discourse of LGBT-friendliness, it seems that trenchant forms of homonormativity do not simply enable access to the institution of domestic privacy but allow some aspirational LGBT* subjects access to inhabit and extend into corporate spaces and places in ways which do not necessarily entail that their ‘LGBT-ness’ has to be sacrificed (Casey, Mclaughlin & Richardson, 2004; Richardson, 2004).

Indeed, whilst as Rumens (2018) notes, one “offshoot” (para 13.25) of the rhetoric of inclusion is that it implies LGBT* subjects “no longer need demarcated LGBT+

spaces or ‘cultures’ that previously served as muster stations for organizing politically and as contexts for providing support and intimacy” (Ibid), the experience of fieldwork would reveal that LGBT spaces and ‘cultures’ were still sought after and desired.

Whilst these were not simply erased by efforts towards assimilation, they were accentuated in remarkably neoliberal ways. Ultimately then, it seems that a much more fruitful use of the concept of ‘homonormativity’ in the field might be unlocked if this is used not merely to merely denote- and denounce and oppose- ‘normativity’ (Brown, 2012), but to ‘pluralize’ (Love, 2015; Martin, 1994a) it, and understand the ways in which it is ethnographically operationalized, organized and laboriously performed and inhabited. This will be explored in Chapter Six and Seven.

Secondly, understanding inclusion in the ‘diversity world’ of business as a politics of

‘crashed ceilings’ encourages us to think about the spatial dimension of inclusion and, in particular, on the nature of the spaces and places in which this is done. Whilst a lot

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has been written about the spaces and places of work, with a growing interest in the socio-materiality of labour and the role of architecture in (re)producing inequalities and exclusions (Dale, 2005; Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008), it is still unclear how this relates to inclusion (for an exception, see: Hirst & Schwabenland, 2018). These questions are especially important not only given the multiple ways in which the “normalization of lesbians and gay men through a number of key sites including the military, the market, ‘marriage’ and ‘the family’ suggests that ‘old’

public/private boundaries are breaking down” (Richardson, 2004, p405), but also in light of queer critiques of the ways in which neoliberalism privatizes, de-politicizes, domesticates, or indeed gentrifies, the sites of LGBT politics.

All of the events attended in this field took place in the privatized spaces of large transnational corporations. These spaces and places re-inscribed the importance of

‘visibility’ and ‘authenticity’, which represents an interesting link between architecture and the requirements of contemporary labour processes (Boxenbaum, Jones, Meyer & Svejenova, 2018; Dale, 2005; Hirst & Schwabenland, 2018;

Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). Open-plan offices, vast lobbies, indoor fountains and trees: being in these spaces often felt like being ‘outside’, in ‘the public’.

At the same time, these spaces were also heavily regulated and controlled. Whilst, in theory at least, the events were mostly free and could be attended by anyone, their boundaries were often policed by gatekeepers, security and ‘borders’ of various kinds.

These borders not only created hierarchies between those who belonged- with tickets, appropriate documentation, and/or guest passes provided by other employees- and those who did not, but were also replete with moments of failure, in which I was denied entry and/or was ‘stuck’ inside (as previously discussed in Chapter Two, section 3.3.2).

In addition, whilst these were constructed as ‘inclusive’, performing gender/sexuality in successful, entrepreneurial and ‘professional’ ways seemed to be a requirement for participation. As the work of Jane Ward (2008) exposed, what counts as ‘professional’

is often determined according to normative class logics. Ultimately thus, whilst, as previously argued, these spaces could serve as “muster stations for organizing politically and as contexts for providing support and intimacy” (Rumens, 2018, para.

13.25), we could argue that the forms of support, intimacy and ultimately ‘solidarity’

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these spaces provided can only extend to those who ‘belonged’. It thus seems that the private continues to shape “the very ethos of neoliberal homonormative conceptions of freedom- free to consume and to possess despite the hordes of [excluded] lives and bodies fenced out of these extremely private and privatized domains” (Manalansan, 2005, p151).

What might this mean for the shape and direction of LGBT politics and inclusion, given that these (privatized) sites seem to have become the central locations of LGBT politics in the UK- as evidenced, for example, by Stonewall’s symbiotic relationship with many of these corporate actors? Whilst we can thus far only speculate about these implications, it would appear that these spaces, whilst mobilizing the language and temperament of ‘queerness’, worked against a socially progressive queer politics. In particular, we might want to speculate that this could work against class solidarity and addressing issues which do not make ‘good business sense’. As Berrey (2014) has argued in one of the rare explorations into how the discourses of diversity and inclusion (re)produce class biases, hierarchies and inequalities, ‘breaking glass ceilings’ is often done by ‘ignoring dirty floors’, in which issues of economic inequality are often side-lined in favour of ‘business-friendly’ versions of social progress and justice.

Moreover, we might also want to speculate on the democratic character of these spaces and the fact that the kind of politics they enabled is mediated through ‘the corporation’, a seemingly public but ultimately private entity which lacks the democratic mechanisms which regulate public life. Relating back our discussion to the various debates and historical shifts discussed in Chapter Two (section 2.1.4), what appears to be happening is a shift of LGBT politics away from the trade unions- the dominant focus and locus of LGBT workplace activism in the late 1980s and through the 1990s- to the LGBT network (Colgan & McKearney, 2012). Whilst we may agree that this move may have been strategic, and that mobilizing the business case and including

“benefits to the organization and not just to LGB [sic] employees” (Stonewall, 2005, p22 cited in Colgan & McKearney, 2012, p362) may give traction to ‘inclusion’ in the corporate workplace, this also limits the autonomy and democratic character of the spaces and places of LGBT politics, effectively under the control of corporate

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structures and thus lacking operative accountability of more public notions of ‘the LGBT community’.

Ultimately, as Bloom and Rhodes (2018) have argued in CEO society, we could argue that we are witnessing today is a ‘corporate takeover of everyday life’, where the very grounds upon which socio-political life unfolds has shifted to the realm of business.

This is a realm which proposes a fantasy of meritocracy, and, engendering highly seductive narratives (of success, recognition, happiness), encourages us to think that we can all achieve this, if only we work hard enough, if only we attend the training programs, events, and workshops organized. Indeed, the experience of fieldwork revealed that the emergence of ‘LGBT-friendliness’ is accompanied and “reflect[s]

different constructions of the public sphere, what can and cannot be done there, as well as assumptions about who can legitimately occupy such spaces” (Richardson, 2004, p405). This has important consequences beyond the ‘diversity world’ of business itself. Indeed, as noted by Rahul Rao (2015), conceptualizing ‘the problem of inclusion’ in privatized and gentrified terms enables corporations to construct homophobia as ‘merely cultural’ (Butler, 1997), that is, as something that can be redressed by “changing mind-sets”⁹⁰ rather than addressing the broader (economic, political, and social) structures through which some expressions of gender/sexuality are rendered abject (Puar, 2007; Rumens, 2018). This poses serious questions about what inclusion might mean beyond the ‘diversity world’ of business, where, as Rumens (2015) notes, “a culture of austerity…[has] not just stifled ‘good practice’…but…also reversed it” (p184) (discussed in Chapter Five). As discussed in the next Chapter, in the social world of ‘queer activism’- whose members were concerned with, poignantly, opposing the closure of a ‘queer pub’ by property developers- the promise of LGBT inclusion was experienced as, in the words of a participant, a “Trojan Horse draped in a rainbow flag”⁹¹, a phenomenon characterized by a number of (discursive, physical, and political) ‘closures’, and which ultimately worked to side-line important redistributive issues engendered by processes of privatization and gentrification.

90 Fieldnotes, March 2017; LBWomen event.

91 Fieldnotes, August 2017; Coleen, outside the Tower Hamlets Town Hall.

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