SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis examines how queer people of colour exist in a liminal between assimilation and refusal in relation to racialised queer visibility in London. It asks, how and why does racialised queerness become visible in London? For what purpose and for whom? To explore these questions, this thesis adopts a queer Marxist framework and is split into two parts. Part one examines the rise in racialised queer visibility propelled by corporations through advertising and brand partnerships in London. By examining how queer of colour visibility is produced, it argues that this form of visibility has reconfigured homonormativity by inviting racialised queer people to disrupt norms and explore their identity through consumption. I argue that this visibility is not just being levied from above, but is also an object of desire for queer people of colour. I foreground in my analysis the structures and conditions under which this visibility is produced to argue that this form of visibility is seductive because of the affects that sustain it: happiness and cruel optimism. Part two of this thesis locates possibilities of resisting dominant queer narratives of queer visibility in the realm of queer of colour nightlife. It illustrates how the queer of colour dance floor provides a space to feel ‘seen’, to feel joy, build communities and build infrastructures of mutual aid support. I argue that the queer of colour dance floor provides a different form of agency that is rooted in a refusal to perform queerness in ways demanded by visibility politics. However, the utopian possibilities offered by the queer dance floor cannot be thought about in isolation, without paying attention to the labour that goes into creating these spaces. I argue that the club exists as both a site of refuge, where nightlife world-making takes place, but also a site of struggle that makes invisible the exploitation of those that make queer nightlife possible. Both parts of this thesis embrace the contradictions embedded in queer of colour life in a neoliberal capitalist city by examining how discourses of the normative and anti-normative constantly collide, clash, and intersect to produce a lived impasse. In doing so, this thesis charts how queer of colour existence in London moves between both assimilation and refusal.