“Because bodily flexibility has become both a commodity (in the case of cosmetic surgeries for example) and a form of commodification, it is not enough in this “age of flexibility” to celebrate gender flexibility as simply another sign of progress and liberation. Promoting flexibility at the level of identity and personal choices may sound like a postmodern or even a queer program for social change. But it as easily describes the advertising strategies of huge corporations like the Gap, who sell their products by casting their consumers as simultaneously all the same and all different…
Advertising by other companies, like Dr Pepper, whose ads extort the consumer to “be you!” and who sell transgression as individualism, also play with what could be called a “bad” reading of postmodern gender. Postmodern gender theory has largely been (wrongly) interpreted as both a description of and a call for greater degrees of flexibility and fluidity…
In other words, it has become commonplace and even cliched for young urban (white) gays and lesbians to claim that they do not like “labels” and do not want to be “pigeon holed” by identity categories, even as those same identity categories represent the activist labors of previous generations that brought us to the brink of “libration” in the first place…
As Lisa Duggan claims: “new neoliberal sexual politics... might be termed the new homonormativity - it is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a semobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption”...
Increased flexibility, as we know, leads to increased opportunities for the exploitation by transnational corporations of cheap labor markets in Third World nations and immigrant communities in the First World…
As many Marxist critics in particular seem to be fond of pointing out, identity politics in the late twentieth century has mutated in some cases from a necessary and strategic critique of universalism into a stymied and myopic politics of the self.”
- Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place