Making difference profitable: Extraordinary homonormativity and corporate queer visibility

This article examines how corporate-sponsored queer visibility reshapes queer politics in London, UK. Drawing on discourse analysis of two advertising campaigns, Sensodyne's ‘Life's Too Short’ and Harrods' ‘Set Your Stage’, I show how racialised queer visibility is increasingly mobilised through market logics that link happiness, authenticity and anti-normativity to productivity and consumption. Rather than assimilating queer subjects through sameness or respectability, these campaigns celebrate queer difference. This marks a mutation of homonormativity, which I term extraordinary homonormativity, a formation in which queer anti-normative ideas are no longer positioned outside of homonormative inclusion but are valorised as a market asset. Ultimately, these regimes of corporate-sponsored visibility depoliticise queer struggles and detach them from broader movements: raising urgent questions about the political limits of visibility under neoliberalism.