SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In this article I ask why leading institutions of global capitalism have begun to take activist stances against homophobia, and why they have done so now. Central to these initiatives is a common-sense understanding of homophobia as a cultural disposition that might be disincentivized through the deployment of economic carrots (the promise of growth) and sticks (the withdrawal of capital). Revisiting debates over recognition and redistribution politics, I argue that viewing homophobia as ‘merely cultural’ enables international financial institutions (IFIs) to obscure the material conditions that incubate homophobic moral panics, and their own culpability in co-producing those conditions. Positioning themselves as external to the problem they seek to alleviate, IFIs are able to cast themselves as progressive forces in a greater moral struggle at precisely the historical moment in which austerity and capitalist crisis threaten to bring them into ever greater disrepute. Through a critical survey of recent IFI initiatives on homophobia, I attempt to delineate the emerging contours of what I call ‘global homocapitalism’.