The End of Rainbow Capitalism

karl marx was not gay but he provided one of the most sophisticated retellings of something that is pretty gay modernity for him modernity was marked by the rise of capitalism the creation of a class that only lives to sell its own labor market systems and all those things that is off millennials on twitter the founders of sociology those sexy people who first decided to systematically study society marx baber durkheim and dubois all commented on what modernity signified to them whatever the hell modernity was whether modernity was just a random period from the 1700s to 1945 just a fascination with grand narratives or just endless bureaucracy modernity as these crusty dudes saw it evoked a malaysian people it created economic and political structures beyond our understanding the erosion of traditional forms of life in the age of malaise it created glee modernity alienated and alienates people if the renaissance was the rebirth of society then modernity was that gross pubescent stage of adolescence where you realize that you're a human being and you're actually alive and that made people feel icky why exactly right now as society slowly transitions from the modern period to the postmodern period why do people still feel this way why is everyone chanting reject modernity embrace tradition modernity gave us hot pockets and colgate what do you mean the market system can theoretically give us everything we want and still leave us unsatisfied how can it work but also not work and whatever i'm getting ahead of myself you clicked for gay pirates and you certainly didn't click for the are they gay merch store but a fella's gotta pay rent and fuel his chalk addiction being gay isn't just about having silver hair in 2015 for some reason it isn't just about bisexual autumn hobbits it's more than new balances in a blizzard or that queen phase from high school the homosexual agenda isn't about anything material it's a transcendental philosophy what kind of gay are you disaster bisexual a town lesbian having an epiphany as the five seconds ago are you subtle on a sweater on some socks visit www dot it's all dot gay shop to browse are they gay merch and support the channel use code gaypirate to get 15 off all orders that's www.itsaw.gayslashshop well today i'll give you gay pirates but in the spirit of gay piracy i'm also scamming you i'm also here to talk about alienation in a capitalist market system queer people have been watching media for years they have grown into a reasonably large consumer group and yet often they still feel alienated and even exploited by the media they watch why why did glee have to be a formative part of my personal identity journey why our flag means death premiered in march of the year of our lord 2022 to wide acclaim and it quickly became the highest viewed good omens fan fiction on hbo max for a few weeks especially after it homosexually confirmed its homosexuals the show was loosely based off the real life actually existing at one point steve bonnet who ran away from his traditional gentleman lifestyle to become a gentleman pirate in the show and in real life where i heard grasses touched on his crusades out and about as a pirate he runs into the most infamous pirate who ever blackbeard edward also works while steed comes from the landed gentry class where his parents taught him things like how to create and benefit from structural crises ed comes from a property-less and transient background both of them hold different visions of piracy masculinity and daily life but this difference doesn't immediately provoke hostility between them instead they both become fascinated and enamored with the other sensibilities naturally they hit it off and then they hit on each other and they're gay oh and there's a kiss and now i need blackbeard as my male wife from the diverse and engaging cast to the excellent non-binary representation to the intimate exploration of class and masculinity something about this show feels new and i'm going to tell you some but not all of the reasons why but in light of me being a homosexual propagandist i'm first going to tell you about alienation under capitalism why has the market system fail to truly satisfy queer people and how does our flag means death subvert lgbtq plus people's historical alienation to find out i've watched the show religiously formed the love-hate relationship with continental philosophy and collected some primary data by asking viewers to send in letters the detail what the show means to them here's the results part one gay people let's talk about something heterosexual markets listen i'm no federal reserve chairman jerome powell and maybe take a little too long to tie my shoes but i'm an american and i like stuff i like that i can buy fan merchandise of the state of colorado i like that i can go into a denny's with my grandma or completely hammered at 4 am in theory the market tries its best to appeal to what people want max weber the critically acclaimed protestant bootlegging hoe of sociology once claimed that inequality and status weren't the only things that characterized the rise of capitalism capitalism also required rationalization rationality logical processes oriented towards coherent ends capitalism calculates efficiently in theory it bureaucratizes and tries to chug along as productively as possible theoretically rationally calculating consumers exact desires through efficient bureaucracies is always cute and sexy right well maybe let's use queer media to answer our question i'll start with something relatively obvious capitalism likes to turn groups of people into groups of consumers sometime in the 20th century after the world invented homosexuals and populations in western nations became more open to the leg but some movie-making people thought huh maybe gays like watching movies that aren't homophobic which theoretically is a good thing right sure something is better than nothing but in a system driven by profit scarcity and inequality in the right circumstances even breadcrumbs can be pretty profitable even james corden for some reason just because media executives discovered the queer consumer didn't mean that these executives sought to represent queerness authentically the goal of a company executive is to produce profit and the profit motive too often leads to the alienation of the powerless from the media that's supposed to represent them the result is kurt hummel a character relatively palpable to straight audiences but still technically gay he serves to make heterosexuals go oh that guy dances a gay his character arc runs through the most common beats the coming out the bullying the eternal pining things that queer people do experience but that under the heterosexual gaze become all that defines queerness and queer people it is a queerness packaged into a neat technically true but partially inauthentic and easily comprehensible box boxes are easy to sell authentic complex multi-layered experiences not so much it makes sense so when queer people with their authentic complex multi-layered lives look back on the box they might feel a generally positive connection but it still looks a little distant queer media alienation is that distance practices within a profit-driven market context that separate queer people from queer representation in media there are two types of queer media alienation because i just made them up i'll call the first exploitative alienation this is when the market turns against queer viewers and uses the fact of our collective existence and culture for profit large media corporations extract queer cultural values from queer communities and don't produce anything for those communities in return stereotypes are one example of exploitative alienation it extracts queer cultural elements like gender non-conformity and turns these elements into jokes for straight people to enjoy most of that boils down to haha gay people make funny noises which is true some viewers might be familiar with this other type of exploitative alienation queerbaiting queerbaiting is when sherlock merlin supernatural teen wolf if you don't speak 2014 tumblr then queerbaiting is a practice where the creators of a fictional product especially tv shows hint at the possibility of queer representation through subtext but ultimately never intend on delivering full force gays i frequently cite teen wolf as an example just because it's so insidious and obvious you can imagine it there's two guys being dudes they had some tension on the show they got a huge fan base because of the gayness and so the creators played up the tension to attract more viewers the writers and creators behind teen wolf utilized the tension between styles and derek not only to win over an audience but to use that audience to win awards and acclaim here's how they marketed themselves for the teen choice awards [Music] you're so soft oh oh my god hey well hi there oh camera and fans we're just snapping vote for us it's teen wolf for best summer show yeah teen choice summer show something let's find teen wolf and vote for it just whenever you see teen we'll fill in that circle because we really appreciate it and we'll take more naps like these for you and maybe on you screen yeah and now i'm to be stuck to that derrick all the way what a hunky leg but of course teen wolf never confirmed anything queerbaiting alienates show creators extract the cultural experiences of queerness benefit from those cultural experiences after thousands of queer fans flock to these tv shows and in the end creators never deliver on these hints of subtext when one of my viewers emailed me for this video they provided a pretty good retelling of what it feels like to be alienated by queerbaiting back in the days people used to talk a lot of [ __ ] about fans who bought into queer pairings and shippings people accused it of being a fetish a weird freudian attachment to older men an obsession with reading gay subtext and everything and you know what i kind of believed it for a while too the audience has been gaslit by writers and producers into believing that wishing for queer representation on a show that had queer subtext was wrong disrespectful with queerbaiting queer viewers feel alienated by the very media that promises to represent them these writers distance queer people from their own communities cultural signals meanwhile queer audiences are mocked for picking up on the subtext put in place to exploit their support so there's a second kind of queer media alienation that isn't exactly exploited instead of extracting in a non-productive way the practitioners of this type of queer media alienation extract queer cultural signals and elements in a productive way but these products aren't always good the second type of queer media alienation is hegemonic alienation please validate me american sociological association let me demonstrate hegemonic alienation by breaking down the idea of rainbow capitalism i promise this video will be about gay pirates hegemonic alienation involves instances where companies in the market attempt to appeal to queer people's collective existence through things like social media rainbows however the company's goal is not to represent queerness authentically it's to extract profit and maintain the hegemony or dominance of the market system media executives extract queer elements from culture and pump out commodified forms of these queer cultural elements the ultimate goal is to get us queers to put our little grippers on target pride merch absolutely disgusting anyways unrelated you should get your gay merch from www.it's all gay use code pay my rent to get 10 off let me demonstrate hegemonic alienation by breaking down the idea of rainbow capitalism i promise this video will be about gay pirates according to a little known academic theorist named wikipedia rainbow capitalism is the incorporation of the lgbtq plus movement to capitalism consumerism gentrification and the market economy oh you're gay you use uber right we know you use uber spotify we're gay you can uh listen to um you people like elton john right hey gays ever stop at the gap well we actually stand for gay and proud now for the love of god basically companies try to appeal to queer and progressive consumers to profit from queerness is it a good thing that queerness gets visibility i guess it is in some ways right like i appreciate the shout out pink floyd great album but in other ways not so much i personally prefer animals but on the subject of visibility how does the visible spectrum of light even recover from the month of june not all visibility leads to the outcomes we need as a society i don't need my catholic mexican grandma looking at my grinder messages nor do i need the algorithm to remind me that i'm not straight and that i'm in love with james mcavoy i know these things and the restraining order shows that he knows these things too to understand the alienation caused by remote capitalism we first have to understand the relationship between homosexuality and modernity when goldman sachs whoever that is pretends to be gay for the month of june their intention is to appeal to a category a category of human behavior identity and being but these modern categorizations of human behavior into states of being didn't exist before the 19th century before the 19th century humans didn't understand homosexuality as an identity or as an immutable characteristic homosexuality was something you did with your bros in the agora like ancient greeks sure loved to be men who loved men but the greeks weren't gay the practice of homosexuality was a practice ingrained into an institution similar to oh i don't know driving today like today you drive a car we don't attach a bunch of social significance to being a driver being a driver isn't an identity from which people judge your character and from which you subjectively experience the world they don't view part of you as fundamentally being a driver you don't put driver in your twitter bio driving is just something you do of course people with same gender attraction don't choose to have gay thoughts and attractions so the driving analogy isn't one to one especially since gay people can't drive but the main point is our understanding of same gender attraction changed and changes over time we went from describing driving to drivers from people who practice same acts to people who were homosexual we went from discourses which described practices to those which described people the 19th century the same century which saw the creation of the category of homosexual was the dawn of modernity an age of industrial capitalist development and the increased bureaucratization of society in other words people were organizing stuff and making more rules about this stuff that they hoped would help them achieve their goals it was a new way of thinking about the world before we just banged dudes in the agora and now we're organizing dudes and calling them things like anglo-saxon the hell is nova scotia social theorist and key to my heart jurgen habermas calls the advanced capitalist way of thinking instrumental rationality that basically means that when you do things you try to calculate your actions as specifically and efficiently as possible to achieve a specific goal when someone thinks with instrumental rationality they're basically trying to solve the question what is the most efficient approach to achieve a goal how do i wed james mcavoy in the least amount of stuff habermas viewed instrumental rationality as one of the most important features of capitalist societies the government needs to calculate how to best achieve its goals when money is limited and critique is infinite the economy needs companies to calculate the best way to gain profit or else literally everything in the world falls apart for some reason instrumental rationality and the costco hot dog combo are baked into the fabric of capitalism but instrumental rationality needs to be efficient and people tend to be pretty efficient when they can box the world into categories and symbols for quick judgment rainbow flag yay monkey picture straight wait a second said a bunch of the most horrible people in human history what if we applied instrumental rationality to humans what if we oh my god gay people no in the 19th century homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny the sodomite had been a temporary aberration the homosexual was now a species homosexuality was no longer a practice but a state of being and with some modifications that still essentially how being homosexual is viewed today no one today is going to outwardly call gay people a separate species of mitsuki misfits but people still generally think of homosexuality as something fundamental to the person's identity and how they move about the world of course the idea of homosexuality evolved over the course of the 20th century and many people queer people included have come to identify with the categories produced by modernity so even though the essence of these categories remains similar in that we categorize people they've also shifted quite a bit but instrumental rationality persists when we talk about people equipped with the knowledge that the category of homosexual exists the market methodically calculates how to appeal to the homosexual demographic while also maintaining mass appeal for the rest of consumers profit is king in theory sounds cool right queerness for everyone awesome i'm gay and proud so i should love the gap right wait what's that noise this video is brought to you by communicative action communicative action jurgen habermas says it's the best way to build your cultural community why would you use instrumental action to build a social identity and culture what are you an accountant don't you know that instrumental action pertains to a certain sphere of society instrumental action belongs to the sphere of markets and government economy and state the point of instrumental action is to coordinate your actions around a specific goal as efficiently as possible or in other words to do your actions based on instrumental rationality so let's say you're an executive and you want to make a queer show within capitalism you have one goal make profit so to raise viewership from the decently profitable queer demographic you have to calculate the exact steps that you think would get you to the most profitable queer television show the markets answered james corden good system right that's instrumental action fueled by instrumental rationality according to habermas with the bangs communicative action is a type of action that belongs to culture and private life communicative action is motivated by the mutual understandings and agreed interpretations we have of a given situation if your goal is to make a television show about queerness under communicative action frameworks you don't calculate your strategy based on a goal like profit your action is instead based on collective shared understandings about queerness it's based on communicative rationality a rationality oriented towards understanding and agreement so when you produce a television show about queerness you produce it based on the authentic cultural consensus of queer people to base it on mutual understandings and authenticity rather than which sad girl music the data tells you the gays like this month in essence instrumental rationality motivates action to the question which actions will accomplish my goals in the most efficient way possible meanwhile communicative rationality motivates action through the question which actions are supported by the consensus of other social actors now back to your scheduled programming i don't always love the gap sometimes it helps to see rainbows everywhere for one month but a lot of the times it feels weird and inauthentic as habermas stated the instrumental rationalization of social products like queerness doesn't feel organic markets don't appeal to gay people they appeal to gay consumers governments don't appeal to gay people they appeal to gay citizens it feels alien rainbow capitalism the system it appeals to our right to be human rather than our actual humanity remember that scene at the end of love simon where you know the two dudes get together on the ferris wheel and everyone starts clapping [Applause] [Applause] what the hell was that yeah i like celebrations of queer joy as much as the next guy but queer joy is not something meant to be observed by the cold calculating stare of 20th century fox and now a pop quiz which of these pictures feels like a more authentic representation of queerness which of these outfits is gayer which of these pictures has more queer energy i asked my audience these questions and after receiving eight thousand four hundred and eighty two responses here are the results seventy four point seven percent or about six thousand people selected option two eighty four point four percent or about seven thousand people selected option two eighty two point six percent or about seven thousand people selected option one and what percent of survey respondents identify as lgbtq plus 96.4 so what does the survey tell us queer culture is real and rainbow capitalism isn't it seven thousand people didn't pick jade on accident they knew what they were doing goldman sachs wrapped in rainbows is not an authentic form of queer expression that's obvious and i don't really need to state it it's alienation it's instrumentalization and because of some weird shared consensus that we have as queer people we all communicatively understand that jade is a lot more bisexual than goldman's rainbow sack we implicitly understand the communicative consensus through our shared queer experience corporations can't capture that because instrumental rationality can't capture that you can't use the instrumental rationality of the market on people and expect results full of meaning and understanding the market isn't as good at fulfilling the dark james mcavoy shaped voids within our souls only communication and consensus provides genuine soul fulfilling community this is instrumental rationality this is communicative rationality this is the future this alienation doesn't just extend to cultural symbols queer storylines can become commodified and instrumentalized in the same way people are a lot of queer people are tired of movies like love simon centered around coming out and celebrating queerness in the most unnatural sanitized way i liked love simon like it was entertaining to me but its faults are clear the market primarily knows how to produce certain queer storylines coming out stories queer suffering stereotypes and soft caucasian these often feel calculated and designed to be especially palpable to straight audiences and liberals sanitized portrayals of queerness often fail to feel organically executed it feels like straight people trying to explain queer concepts to a general market some characters and forms of representation are necessary it helps to see that representation but queer people need and deserve more than just what is necessary we need queer characters that just exist that are just people one of my viewers stated it's nice to see a depiction of genderqueer life that isn't written like a lecture on gender identity that feels like it's actually helping to further understanding of non-binary people by not actually trying too hard another viewer also commented i'm not saying that sho should ignore the hate queer people get but after a century of stereotypical villainous yassified [ __ ] dying at the end of the movie portrayals isn't it long overdue to have a happy queer story there is a type of art that a system oriented towards profit produces previously referenced turtleneck propaganda machine michelle foucault had a lot of thoughts one of his most insightful ones is this power relations in society are not best characterized by repression people usually think that power works to silence people and sometimes oftentimes it does but this repression is accompanied by repressive institutions laws indicating how to repress and the types of discourses we use to make people invisible power produces more than it represses produces discourses categories and technologies of silence power produced the categories of queerness and it produced its modern meanings when the category of homosexuality first developed the meanings surrounding the category of homosexual cast people with queer identities and attractions as a deviant in this way the category of homosexuality facilitated the silencing of queer people but it also produced and reproduced a whole new regime of knowledge and how we think about sexuality itself that evolved over time over the course of the 20th century as social attitudes towards queer people changed our society adapted it didn't make space for queer emancipation instead it made space for queer people and meanings in a system of profit while queer people communicatively developed their own cultures of daily life through organic on the ground communicative rationality the system of the economy and the state instrumentalized queer culture in a way that aligned with the paradigm of the economy and the state and now queer media is a mass-produced ball of suffering five-second edits and twinks trunks on a good day throughout the 20th century the market and state reformulated the meaning of queer culture towards profit and bureaucracy in the 21st century the economic and political system integrates queerness into the social order through consumer aesthetics and citizen roles which melting senator should i vote for if i want to keep my rights sometimes it makes me really happy that i can walk into a target and buy a rainbow shirt a gay shirt but other times something feels wrong and distant and i feel guilty that it feels wrong and distant shouldn't i be grateful as long as it's the market and the state system creating cultural meaning through instrumental rationality and not people on the ground organically using consensual communicative rationality people will always feel disconnected from cultural elements because they didn't consent to the meetings created on their behalf i didn't ask for your opinion on [ __ ] american airlines and now people look back on what they have been told is queer culture and we all feel a distance sometimes maybe is it just me is it hopeless of course not because every once in a while something slips through part two the gays there are a million incredible things to say about our flag means death the representation of non-binary characters is organic and one-of-a-kind the racial diversity is authentic and allows for millions of people to see themselves represented in complex and subversive roles and of course the queer love story at the center isn't about two 16 year old middle class caucasians being pushed into lockers and coming of age but instead about two flawed middle-aged men discovering their identities in a relatable and humorous way and on top of that it's just an overall well-written witty show plenty of people will tell you these things so instead i'll tell you the ways our flag means death subverts queer media alienation first how does it subvert exploitative alienation you know the type of alienation that extracts queer cultural signals but does not produce anything for the queer community in return well for one the show gives queer characters autonomy in a really unique and incredible way gone are the days of those shows with one queer whose wrists are living down to the earth's core there's nothing wrong with that of course but here in this show there's three non-hetero relationships representing all types of personalities some are villains some are camp some are gentlemen some keep me up at night there's so much variety another exploitative tactic that our flag means death subverts is queerbaiting like i said before queerbaiting is that thing where people hint at the gay thing then don't do the gay thing of course our flag means death isn't the first show to confirm popular queer relationships after fan fiction rivaling slowburn shira and the princesses of power did the gay thing after they hinted at shira catcher romance for several seasons adventure time also did the gay stuff with princess bubblegum and marceline legend of korra had a scene with some last minute lesbians as well and oh owl house had the thing with the thing and then this one and what the has anyone else noticed all the lesbians around here i'm not saying that because i'm at a post 2015 kristen stewart movie screening it's because there's an interesting trend of romantically confirming women and femme relationships and animated kids shows i find it quite awesome actually i'm glad all the wulus out there are getting their moment but if i were to theorize about the subject you do silly things like the patriarchy society sees women as less capable of being predatory or sexual than queer men so these relationships seem more safe and kid-friendly and the fact that these are animated allows a kind of separation from reality a kind of separation from reality that makes the queer representation at least somewhat permissible to conservative audiences queer women are still oppressed for sure but conservative audiences may find queer animated women and femmes more digestible and less threatening than queer men i'll just reiterate to the conservative bros watching uh aquinas does not make people a threat the west was going to collapse anyways it's fine how is our flag means death unique in its subversion of queerbaiting well traditional queerbaits don't usually involve two women but instead hypothetically queer men like darren chris most of the time it's two dudes who form an extremely close relationship and act out romantic tropes together causing some people to interpret their relationship as queer it's not necessarily that audiences view all forms of male intimacy as gay it's more about how queer people who were starved of decent representation their entire lives are given hope by the possibility that a relationship can be gay because in most of these queerbait type scenarios if you replaced one of the characters with a woman most audiences would expect a romance there's a long history of queerness in cinema and a lot of this history involves codes and subtext that survive to this day in a way inexorably linked to queerness subtext and queerness go hand in hand all queer people have had throughout history has just been subtext so we're pretty good at picking up on it when it's there yet show creators disproportionately target and condemn those who sometimes view some male characters as queer to some to suggest that two male characters could be queer is the ultimate crime i guess you could say that subtext is just in our blood remember when a bisexual person at a supernatural convention asked jensen ackles about possible bisexual interpretations of his character and the entire crowd booed and the actor responded with don't ruin it for everybody remember when steven moffat said that queer interpretations of sherlock were trivializing the issue of queer representation and he dismissed the idea by saying that the character of sherlock didn't have any time for romance is the subject of who you prefer to date is unlikely to come up in the middle of the crisis you know why are you so determined to be alone you are referring to romantic integrity watson which i rather fear you are as i have often explained before all emotion is a pond to me oh you are not a horrible person if you interpret dean and castiel as bros who stare at each other nor are you terrible if you interpret sherlock and john as campy business partners [Applause] the problem is when you completely deny that queer interpretations can be a part of someone's reading of the text or even worse when you judge these queer interpretations as predatory there is a very specific history of hostility from audiences and show producers against male queerness queer baiting is just one of the many ways that queer male intimacy or even just male intimacy in general has been demonized in culture another side effect of demonizing queer male intimacy is the programming of queer people to view the possibility of queerness in a pessimistic way it alienates queer people from the media they enjoy because they will always fear that show producers will find more ways to call them deviants for perfectly reasonable readings of media one of my viewers wrote to me about how they felt watching the representation and our flag means death i've been in fandom for a decent chunk of my life and by this point i feel like i've been pretty much conditioned to expect everything to be a queerbait even when showrunners promise something over and over again i find myself unable to trust them to give me the queer representation that they promised because i've been lied to so many times before i was shocked with both myself and the showrunners myself for somehow not letting myself trust that i would actually get genuine representation and the showrunners for actually delivering on representation the natural queerness of our flag means death reminds us that it isn't healthy when a chunk of your audience is alienated by the prospect of their own representation and i'm glad our flag means death does a bit of the work in deprogramming our skepticism with a little bit of queer joy after having that scene with steed and ed in the moonlight after that leg grazed that other leg after that hand grazed that face the showrunners on our flag means death didn't throw their hands up and say you guys are reading too much into this they're just bros can't bros blush a little instead they confirmed the queerness that was obviously there not only did they confirm the type of subtext that people have been picking up on for years but the show creator acknowledged that it's kind of weird how stories in the past haven't acknowledged queerness i know you told me when we first spoke that you were inspired by rom-coms in terms of crafting the series little did i know how really true that statement was it's the only reason to make the show if you didn't do that it would just be weird i mean you're using rom-com beats you're using these like they're together and it's funny because we're so habituated to be like bromance bromance bromance and it's such a simple move to put them together i was watching butch cassidy and the sundance kid on the airplane the other day and if you add one shot to that movie that's a romance that's a non-platonic romance it's all there because of heavy cinematic censorship of queerness in the 20th century queerness on screen could only exist in subtext for decades only as slightly odd educated villains or as women in hats but queerbaiting creators always alienate queer people from their own subtext but now finally we have a kiss a confirmation but of course our flag means death goes beyond that not only does the show subvert exploitative queer alienation like queerbaiting it also subverts hegemonic queer alienation to remind you hegemonic queer alienation occurs when uh [Music] um the market attempts to appeal to the collective existence of queer people by extracting cultural themes and then trying to produce something out of these themes the ultimate goal isn't to represent queerness authentically but to profit from the community and progressive allies we talked about rainbow capitalism as the example anyways um have you ever bitten into an apple and it was a little creamy you probably bit into a macintosh apple i love max apple to my eye the name is mcavoy of apples it's a bit of a disorientating experience because all your life you've been told to expect a picturesque crisp crunchy by the book borderline fascist apple but here comes the macintosh and it spits in your goddamn face and says why the hell would you ever want a shiny apple when you could have a dull sandy freak of nature watching our flag means death is a bit like biting into a mac it expands the cultural construction of apples i mean queerness into something new fresh fruit you watch it and you feel a bit disoriented like why isn't the gay guy being homophobed why isn't he being slammed into a locker why isn't he acting like fruity gay hero yas queen slay well there's a few things about this first this show embraces queer villainy while negative queer stereotypes take away people's agency because they say that gay equals bad only portraying gay people as queer icons or heroes can also take away queer people's agency imposing any ideas about groups of people whether good or bad takes away that group's ability to find themselves again the kiss at the end of love simon epitomizes this [ __ ] are you cheering about gay queer heroes yeah neil icon uh elton john slay hiro ellen yass j edgar hoover yeah talking about queer people like their majestic brave icons and always heroes alienates queer people from the reality of being queer we're just like everyone else we impulsively buy slim gyms during the holidays we go i haven't really moved today so what's the point in showering we run for president we're murderers thieves heroes villains and you guessed it regular old people the book bad gays a homosexual history by ben miller and hulemi argues that gay hero narratives in the study of history aren't really as helpful in combating homophobia as we think they are the idea that all gays are queens and icons removes queer autonomy choice and self-determination sometimes the interaction of our sexualities with the outside world motivates us to do bad stuff that is not that queer identity inherently motivates us to do bad things but that we live in a world through the lens and experiences that our identities whether queer or not queer give us sometimes we choose to do bad stuff in relation to certain experiences connected to our identities miller and lemmy call these failed attempts at understanding ourselves queer people make mistakes when they're trying to understand their identity it's totally possible for a queer person to project their internalized homophobia onto others through hostility one of the guys who led the lavender scare which targeted homosexuals in public office in the 50s was gay do you think maybe there was like some kind of do you think maybe like a sexuality affected how he saw things and did things and thought about things and took action on the things that he thought about probably and on the other hand it's totally possible to fall in love with someone homosexually and be driven to passionate fits because homosexual love is still love and love drives us crazy queer people like all people do bad things and sometimes those bad things are connected to your personal queer experience and if you haven't noticed straits and cisgender people also do bad things connected to their straight and cisgender experience we're all people working through stuff queer people are people and queer people are bad sometimes because people are bad sometimes miller and lemmy also suggest challenging traditional progress narratives in history and culture narratives of progress when applied to social categories tend to be counter-intuitive because they tell us that we must aim towards a constructed vision of progress who writes the goals of progress elton john why do so many progressives suggest that progress only looks like celebrating a single archetype of a purell sanitized queer icon what's wrong with saying that queer history is complicated diverse and full of different definitions of icon and hero oh whoops sorry dominant social system i forgot that it bothered you that queer people's exclusion from traditional institutions in the west facilitated the unbreakable link between queerness and underground economically destructive and politically subversive communities what's your name again essentially all i ask is for nuanced gay characters and our flag means death delivered we aren't saying this is a gay pirate show this is a pirate show and that's it the characters on our flag means death aren't traditional heroes or gay icons because they aren't defined by the queerness that capitalism constructed some of the pirates are nice some are mean everyone has a different background a different source of pain that isn't coming out of the closet their character traits aren't defined by their queerness yet their queer experiences drive character development even if steed has a life beyond his queer experience as a big bad pirate his very queer love for ed influences the decisions he makes as a pirate the whole feeling of the show it's just it's it's it's it's new but also literally old which is the other way that our flag means death subverts hegemonic media alienation it simultaneously takes queerness to a place beyond history and yet still celebrates the historical queer culture that we know most shows that cover old-time gays center homophobia as the main conflict that keeps our wistful oscar bait lovers apart but in this show homophobia isn't really there people just kind of vibe and kiss who they want some people suggest that gay pirates openly having a quickie behind some barrels is historically inaccurate but it isn't that historically inaccurate i'm not saying that people kiss dudes as they pleased in the 18th century but our flag means death takes place in a pre-modern period with different paradigms of regulating queerness and the show plays with those paradigms remember when i talked about how modernity and instrumental rationality produced the category of homosexual in the late 19th century the show takes place just before high modernity went viral before the word homosexual even existed so some coming out scene where steed righteously says i'm gay it doesn't make sense within the historical context but somehow the show uses pre-modern conceptions of sexuality in a post-modern way i ca i can't it's too pretentious in our flag means death queerness isn't stated or labeled but it exists it doesn't exist to be a category but as a part of daily life this is queerness in a world without capitalism and without ideology it's what could be when they teach you about capitalism in an american high school they tell us capitalist societies are great because they have achieved so much progress which is is true from the perspective of a narrative of progress with a goal limited by the ideology of a system but what if we remove the narrative what if instead we asked why do we need to instrumentalize our identities in the service of a narrative what if what if we just did stuff for fun in the golden age of piracy where mostly dudes got on ships and sailed in close proximity for years homosexual and homosocial institutions flourished according to br berg pirate to pirate intimacy was the only consistent form of sexual contact pirates experienced at sea to the point where queer bonds became institutionalized to the practice of metallitage on paper madeleitage was a formal bond between two pirates they agreed to share everything together protect each other live together and be gay together according to the historians who brought you heterosexual alexander hamilton some unions between mate lots were probably platonic but several historians contend that a good chunk of these bonds were definitely beyond bromosexual countless records of romantic and non-platonic bonds between pirates survive to this day in this way the pirate world represents a time where queer culture and queer experience and queer institutions flourished without the need for hyper-calculated capitalist categories of identity queerness in the pirate world and by extension in our flag means death exists beyond its category and an almost transcendental sort of state what does that even mean help i don't know video essay saying word our flag means death is what i like to call post-revisionist history and according to obscure sociology any term with the prefix post is extremely correct and sexy our flag means death changes history in a historical way that feels contemporary to move beyond modernity our flag means death returns to the past here's what one viewer said about the queerness in our flag means death at the end of the day it's so nice to see queer people just get to hang out and be queer i saw a lot of me and my friends in these characters just based on their personality and the way they talk to each other these characters don't need to be groundbreaking commentaries on homophobia or heteronormativity or being queer in the 1700s or whatever because that's not who real queer people are they're just queer and that's the best representation i could ask for no labels in the show tell us that something is queer culture yet queerness obviously permeates the show i think this is gay right the concept of found family for example millions of queer people have experienced rejection from one's blood family the need to find your own family and communities of shared identity in that sense the queer experience parallels the pirate experience especially in this show society rejected these misfits and so they find a true very queer home at sea this very queer concept of found family remains true to its connection to queer culture and yet the word gay is never uttered so is it a contradiction how can our flag means death exist before queerness with it and beyond it it's because our flag means death doesn't celebrate the queerness emergent from capitalism and instrumental rationality it celebrates a queerness constructed collectively by the community on the ground in hot topics everywhere it simultaneously celebrates contemporary queer cultural meanings while removing the parts of these meanings created by the market and that's the power of our flagmen's death it shows us what queerness looks like and can look like in the everyday it's not a queerness determined by instrumental rationality of the market but by the communicative ideals of everyday life gays talking to gays agreeing about gays being gays rainbow capitalism tells us that queer progress only looks like drag queens and nuclear codes but our flag means death questions progress itself there aren't any moral lectures appealing to straight viewers no homophobic stepfathers who need a change of heart no james corden queerness isn't categorical it's transcendental when jim tells everyone to keep calling them jim and ask the other crew members to use they them pronouns there isn't any soft stock piano music underscoring jim's heartfelt lecture on what it means to be a non-binary person jim just exists and it's fine hey keep calling me jim when steed tells his wife about being in love with a male wife he doesn't say i'm gay while the entire crew pops out of the other room with applause he just says he's in love with a man and it's fine what's her name his name is this is the queerness we should embrace in a post-modern world a friend sent me some important words on our flag means death you know genuinely i like the show because it's so rare to see a relationship between two men who aren't young and skinny and fresh-faced and stuff one major weakness of the modern online gay community is that it centers around people who are no older than 30. how quickly we forget where we came from and the importance of understanding that most of us will one day live to be an age at hundreds of thousands of our people never got to see the relationships in the show are portrayed so naturally and simply that i can't help but feel hope but do we need to say gay a lot of people find comfort and home in the labels that originate from the modern period i wear hawaiian shirts before the age of 30 because i want people to look at me and hear the word bisexual in their souls these words and labels and identities are important for queer people to understand themselves and their identities in a messy world if words didn't matter then homophobic bills like the ones in florida wouldn't be trying to stop the discussion of queerness in public schools i guess it depends on whose terms do we say gay who is saying gay and why if there are a few things to take away from this video it's that first power is productive power is everywhere it produces meanings and discourses that govern how we think about the world the way power manipulates our visions of community should not dictate how we move forward instead uncoercive collective communication and collaboration should inform our actions if you want to say gay don't say it because jpmorgan chase said it's june do it because you want to collectively contribute and strengthen a community you belong to second modern media representation of queerness doesn't always work even when it's good on paper people want different types of representation than the ones we've had so far they don't want recycled storylines about queer pain even if gay people love recycling our flag means death was disorientating different and novel because it is unlike most queer media people feel programmed by the state of queer media to think pessimistically about representations of themselves they anticipate the pain of queerbaits they anticipate alienation and stereotypes and we all know that the problem lies in the way the market directs executives to make the most profitable and sanitized version of queerness possible so what are we going to do about it third our critiques of modern media representation aren't working either we often think of power in simplistic binaries dominator versus dominated power versus resistance oppressor versus the oppressed but no one fits neatly into either category the oppressor often comes from a past of oppression and the oppressed can reproduce oppression through their actions so we must be extremely careful about how we critique the oppressed who oppress there are thousands of well-meaning queer employees on the goldman sachs corporate team believe that their existence as an open queer person makes a difference to those who used to be excluded from such prestigious spaces and in a way these people are making a difference people's lives are materially better from the shitty visibility of a gay goldman sachs banker or a gay media executive i mean some executive somewhere at hbo had to greenlight our flag means death right but queer people on the other side of the dollar know that rainbow capitalism is obviously not the best representation of queerness and we have to walk the fine line of critiquing rainbow capitalist tendencies in a way that doesn't marginalize queerness further like when conservatives say that disney is a part of a grand conspiracy to promote homosexualism to the kids that is not the time to say you're right conservatives i agree that corporations shouldn't promote homosexuality in the way they currently do rainbow capitalism stinks you can advocate for the type of transcendental queerness that exists in our flag means death without putting down queerness in general corporate queerness extracts queer cultural signals but we shouldn't criticize corporate queerness because of the queer cultural signals we should criticize the fact of corporate extraction if you recoil at the first sign of a rainbow gap logo perhaps take a moment to reflect on what exactly you're recoiling about and make sure that it's these genes queer cultural elements appropriated by corporations can be re-appropriated and subverted again by you a capitalist system somehow coughed out our flag means death so it's not impossible to coordinate through oh here comes the sexy sociology words communicative action and create media that is genuinely meaningful and authentic who would have guessed that producing good cultural products is so simple just let people express their identity in their own terms put more queer writers in writer's rooms and okay so maybe it's not so simple but it's possible and i understand if it's tiring i understand the fear of the contemporary moment i do it's up to you what you want to do with your identity and if corporate pride ever helped you in a moment of darkness that's a completely reasonable experience but what if what if we were to define queerness beyond our moments of darkness what does queerness look like in a world where the necessity for basic visibility is fulfilled i personally prefer open and unstable queer expressions over segmented and structured categories instrumentally employed in the service of profit especially when the differentiation that comes with structured categories makes it easy for anti-queer discourses to establish themselves the goal isn't to eliminate queerness as a category of existence nor is this a call to be subtle and quiet about your queerness not at all this is the opposite our flag means death offers a glimpse into how 21st century transcendental queerness is possible this flag did not come from a corporation it came from people on the ground living their lives and it should reflect that authentic experience do not let them sell this flag back to you do not let governments tell you what it means the selling of the flag means that one must justify the existence of the flag and ultimately the existence of queerness but it's okay if there's no reason for queerness to exist because at the end of the day everything is gay because everything can be gay in a world where queer signifiers are integrated into infinite experiences is it all gay you decide hey gay thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe if you're interested in homoerotic propaganda support the 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Channel: Alexander Avila

Views: 582,746

Keywords: our flag means death, ofmd, video essay, funny, music, gay, lgbt, pride, sociology, philosophy, tube, stede, bonnet, edward, teach, blackbeard, habermas, foucault, theory, thinkers, drums, jazz, cute, fan video, music video, elton john, good omens, crowley, aziraphale, relatable, gay pirate, non-binary, representation

Id: 5xQVFYWvd3o

Length: 61min 16sec (3676 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022