Skip to main content

Zhexi Zhang Prompt #2


The rainbow flag, alternatively referred to as the LGBT pride flag, has been a symbol of the LGBT community for over forty years.

The original rainbow flag was designed by Gilbert Baker and flown at the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Prior to that event, the pink triangle, once used by the Nazi regime to identify homosexual men interned at concentration camps, had been used a symbol for the LGBT community. However, the community sought a new symbol in Baker’s design which had eight color strips representing sex, life, healing, sunlight, nature, magic, serenity, and spirit. Over the years, it has been adapted and redesigned, resulting in the popularized six-color version of today.

Historically, the rainbow flag has belonged to the LGBT community as a niche countercultural artifact in the larger heteronormative society. Its rise to general popularity is inseparable with the rise in LGBT advocacy, with President Clinton first declaring June as “Gay & Lesbian Pride Month” in 1999, Massachusetts becoming the first state to legalize gay marriage in 2004, and the Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states in 2015. The entrance of LGBT culture and persons into all walks of life has led to the rainbow flag flying on storefronts, in window displays, and on advertisements. Unlike the earlier days when flying a rainbow flag could incriminate and stigmatize someone, companies now inundate their branding with rainbow stripes during pride month. While some may deem the popularization of the rainbow flag as a symbol of success for the LGBT movement, the co-optation of the rainbow flag by companies and the heteronormative mainstream reveals a problematic power imbalance and the normalized commercialization of activism.

Nike was one of the first large corporations to celebrate pride month in 2013 by releasing the first of its “#betrue” collections. Levi’s and Converse followed suit in 2014 with their own pride month products, and Adidas entered the market in 2015. Since then, the rainbow flag, which was once only popular, or “cool”, within the LGBT community was widely co-opted by companies and the mainstream to demonstrate their alliance with the community, or so they would advertise. The irony, as identified by Malcolm Gladwell in his 1997 article The Coolhunt, is that the way the rainbow flag is co-opted in the mainstream often fails to capture its essence and coolness, resulting in the companies’ efforts being generic and commercialized replicas of the cultural artifact (Gladwell, 1997). Certainly, Adorno and Horkheimer would also say that the mainstream’s desire to seek and become coolness is perpetuated by the capitalistic market saturated with false needs (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944).

The producers and customers, often unaware of the complex history and ever-salient issue represented by the rainbow flag, reduces LGBT pride and alliance to donning six-color stripes. The coolness of the rainbow flag, once only conspicuous to the LGBT community, was hunted down and taken up by the heteronormative mainstream, depriving the flag of its original coolness and imposing it with a commercialized redefinition. One could even argue that the campiness of the rainbow flag, in the sense of its niche, artificiality, and exaggerated colors, is camp no longer once adopted by the mainstream (Sontag, 1964).

Not unlike popular feminism, LGBT activism, represented by the rainbow flag, becomes a product to be bought and sold when co-opted by the mainstream. Similar to Sarah Banet-Weiser’s argument against the commodification of feminism, the commodification of awareness in this instance reduces the nuances of the original LGBT movement to a flag, normalizing the overlook of many complex issues surrounding the community through feel-good activism (Banet-Weiser, 2015). All someone needs to do to embrace popular LGBT activism is to buy a t-shirt with rainbow stripes on it without knowing the issues faced by the LGBT community everyday. Not unlike how the simplicity of embracing popular feminism resulted in a similar case for popular misogyny, the easy-to-embrace popular LGBT activism has also solicited its own countermovement under the guise of equality for all. The heightened visibility of the LGBT community, especially through commercial products that saturate society, challenges the heteronormativity and is bound to produced push back (Banet-Weiser, 2015). While one must not overlook the cultural significance that popular LGBT activism brings, it is also necessary to recognize its often performative nature and its ability to solicit opposition.

The feel-good activism applies to not only customers but producers as well. Perhaps what is worse than how companies co-opt the rainbow flag and flaunt their supposed support for the LGBT community is how quickly these contents gets taken down after pride month ends. This phenomenon reveals the power imbalance between the heteronormative mainstream and the LGBT community. The heteronormative mainstream has the power to decide what is cool, co-opt LGBT culture when it is in its interest, and move on when pride month is over. The rainbow flag, a symbol with historical and emotional significance for the LGBT community, is captured by companies to capitalize on the “coolness” of LGBT culture and create profit.

The commercialization of LGBT culture through the rainbow flag also infringes on the community’s right to opacity (Glissant, 2020). Through shedding light on the community, the visibility can invite unwanted attention and scrutiny such as popular homophobia. The misrepresentation, or rather the act of reducing the LGBT culture and issues to a flag provides a false clarity and way of advocacy for the LGBT community in the heteronormative society. However, the historically oppressed and marginalized LGBT community is certainly not given much of a choice in the matter of visibility through commercialized campaigns. While some may argue that heightened visibility puts the community on a path towards equality, it does not forgo the fact that such visibility is granted by the heteronormative mainstream through co-optation and its desire for the LGBT “coolness”.



References

Adorno, T. W., Horkheimer, M., & Noerr, G. S. (2009). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford Univ. Press.

Banet-Weiser, S., & Author Sarah Banet-Weiser Director of the School of Communication at USC Annenberg. (2015, January 21). Sarah Banet-Weiser. Culture Digitally. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://culturedigitally.org/2015/01/popular-misogyny-a-zeitgeist/.

Gladwell, M. (1997, March 17). The Coolhunt. The New Yorker.

Glissant, É. (2020). The Cry of the World. In Treatise on the whole-world (pp. 7–17). essay, Liverpool University Press.

Sontag, S. (1964). Notes on Camp. The Partisan Review.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Olufikemi Ogunyankin Prompt #5

Kendrick Lamar’s Camp Eye for the ‘Other’ Kendrick Lamar is an award winning African-American rapper and songwriter, who distinguishes himself from his peers by transforming his raw life experiences into pieces of art. His music videos for Alright and ELEMENT. convey the patterns of Afro-surrealism, transformation of trauma and Black perservance. Coined by Amiri Baraka, Afro-surrealism is the “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one ... the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life” (p.p. 164-165). It is how Black creatives present the larger-than-life experience of racism in a way that is shocking and doesn’t seem real. This concept, integrally shared by the two videos, will be discussed in the context of the ideas of Stuart Hall and Susan Sontag. In chapter 4 of Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices, Hall discusses “regime[s] of representation,” which are the “visual effects through which ‘difference’...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tamara Wurman Prompt #1

What the Fork?: The Good Place as a Hybrid of High and Low Culture Eleanor Shelstrop lived a terrible life and behaved, by most standards, immorally. When she dies, she finds herself mistakenly in “The Good Place” (think: heaven) as a result of a clerical error. In an attempt to avoid being sent to her actual afterlife destination, the aptly named “Bad Place”, Eleanor asks one of her friends to teach her how to be a good person. So the show thus follows Eleanor as she tries to learn moral philosophy posthumously so she can fit in in the good place without being discovered as someone who doesn’t belong. While I could go on about the entertaining plot twists of Michael Schur’s NBC sitcom, The Good Place , and the hilarious, nail-biting inter-character dynamics, the philosophical undertones of the show also mark a fascinating intersection between “high” and “low” culture. Particularly in the scenes where the characters directly engage with well-renowned philosophi...
6 comments
Read more

Srinidhi Ramakrishna Prompt #2

Srinidhi Ramakrishna Professor Lingel COMM 123 9 October 2019 Drag Ball Slang in the Mainstream             The revitalization of underground drag ball culture in the 1970s and 1980s provided queer communities of color a space to safely play with norms of gender and sexuality without fear. In an era when the AIDS crisis was ravaging LGBT populations and discrimination against the queer and mainly young Black and Latinx ball participants was embedded into US society, the ball scene was – and continues to be – rooted in resistance. The highly ritualized subculture has its own intricate structure. Grinnell College’s “Underground Ball Culture” (n.d.) describes how in balls, competitors ‘walk’ against one another in categories to win prizes, doing things like dancing, strutting, or spoken word. Categories often play with exaggeration and reality. From a common category, “Realness” (how well can competitors b...
2 comments
Read more