Chapter 4 , “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture,” claims that visibility offers a significant but limited victory for gay and lesbian individuals who are welcome to be visible as consumers but not as social subjects. The increasing circulation of gay and lesbian images in commodity culture has the effect of consolidating a new class-specific queer subjectivity for both straight and gay audiences. In the early 1990s, “queer” began to circulate in public and academic writings as the sign of an unsettling critical confrontation with heteronormativity, a distinctly postmodern rescripting of identity, politics, and culture. The chapter considers visibility as a feature of queer activism as well as its appearance in media and advertising before turning to the theoretical work on visibility by Judith Butler and others. The practice of critique is then offered as an alternative.
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