Teaching homocapitalism with Rahul Rao’s out of time the queer politics of postcoloniality: navigating against queer inclusivity as a way of shoring up capital

Abstract

In an interview entitled, ‘Rituals of Exclusion’, Michel Foucault (1989) describes the University as a transformative societal ritual. At University, students are put out of society’s circulation during which they are taught the values of society to prepare them for reabsorption and reintegration. In this liminal phase, university educators I contend have a responsibility to be inspired by the sense of community, diversity and care with which our students arrive, while imparting upon them the skills and knowledge to address the pressures of the adult world. Jack Halberstam offers an account of the creativity and sense of community with which our students may enter University. ‘Children are not coupled, they are not romantic, they do not have a religious mentality, they are not afraid of death or failure, they are collective creatures[and] they are in a constant state of rebellion against their parents,’ (Halberstam 2011, 47). (Rao 2020) text Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality offers a meticulous and compelling guide to help our students navigate the potentially deceptive strategies of the adult world, which redirect youthful queer desires for radically different futures, fixating them instead to the postcolonial syllogisms Byrd’s epigraph alerts us to. ‘In contexts where queerness is criminalised, homocapitalism offers a persuasive strategy for queer inclusion operative in a moment in which homonationalism has not (yet?) succeeded in drawing recalcitrant societies into its embrace or, worse, has aroused their antipathy,’ (Rao 2020, 151). Through the concept of homocapitalism, Rao cautions against a politics of inclusion that co-opts queer cultures and queer activisms in order to preserve a racialised capitalist order. Rao encourages our students to be mindful of a non-redistributive recognition politics (Duggan cited in Rao 2020, 153), and shares a savviness against the potential instrumentalization of queer inclusion by financial institutions and political elites. Global financial institutions (GFIs) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) claim to be increasingly inclusive of LGBT rights agendas. Rao places these shifts within the context of the Global Financial Crisis and a longer history of using sex and gender to manage the crises of capital. The concept of homocapitalism provides students with a cautionary manual for what is at stake in the kinds of concessions inclusion through capitalism entails. LGBT activist networks in Uganda and India, where much of the research for this text is conducted, negotiate moves from the global development industry to pacify their struggles. This pacification means that rebellious parts of social identities are abandoned, and only those fungible parts of social identities are awarded a future (Agathangelou 2013), and inclusion through homocapitalism re-work queer