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Rao, Rahul (2015) 'Global Homocapitalism.' Radical Philosophy, 194. pp. 38-49.

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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’.

Item Type: Journal Article
Keywords: LGBT rights, capitalism, World Bank, IMF
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > Department of Politics & International Studies
Legacy Departments > Faculty of Law and Social Sciences > Department of Politics and International Studies
ISSN: 0300211X
Copyright Statement: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Date Deposited: 05 Nov 2015 10:05
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/21232

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