Identity as commodity

As productive in, or at least coextensive with, a shift from Marxist to post-modern or Foucauldian explanatory frames in academic disciplines, capitalism itself seems also to have been fundamentally reconstructed and revalorised. The world order of capitalism and its characteristic construct of the sovereign nation state is fragmenting, along with the 'north-south divide' which was produced in the politically centralised organisation of western capitalist imperialism. The new world order has been posited as moving away from a "vertical geography of economic power to a 'horizontalising' divide between rich and poor (Mattelart et al, 1984: 421). Infotech and new media are widely seen as an axis of this shift. In turn, shifts in the global economy have restructured infotech and media industries:

[T]he state of the world economy has had important repercussions in the communications field. The accent on productivity and accelerated realization of surplus value is transforming both work organization and production processes [...] The most significant areas are those of publishing and the press [...] forced to implement an increasingly industrialized production. The growing penetration of international products into national communications markets testifies to the progress of internationalization in publishing, advertising, marketing, and audiovisual production. (Mattelart et al, 1984: 423)

The construct of capitalism has been displaced from the centre to the margins in cultural studies, but capitalism remains, all the same, at least tacitly acknowledged as a productive force. Indeed, the whole discourse of 'infotech' materialises a shifting relationship between industrial and cultural (or discursive) production.

The increasing commercialization of the cultural sector and the parallel development of the new technologies of communication have projected culture into the heart of industrial and political structures [...] The relationship between culture and industry is gradually being added to a debate formerly centred on that between culture and the state, an extension which has produced a rupture with existing definitions of 'culture.' (Mattelart et al, 1984: 422)

The collapse of the Cold War distribution of power might also be seen as a major factor in a 'crisis' in the Marxist paradigms upon which Cultural Studies has been based:

Marxism, a major point of reference for the whole cultural studies project in the U.K., has been undermined not just from the viewpoint of the postmodern critics who attack its teleological propositions, its meta-narrative status, its essentialism, economism, Eurocentrism, and its place within the whole Enlightenment project, but also, of course, as a result of the events in Eastern Europe, with the discrediting of much of the socialist project and with the bewildering changes in the Soviet Union which leave the Western critic at a loss as to what is now meant by right- or left-wing politics. (McRobbie, 1992: 719)

At the same time, whilst Marxism classically saw the media as an ideological tool of oppression and (middle-class) liberalism saw it as crucial to the maintenance of a democratic state (Curran and Seaton, 1991), such dichotomies are also now themselves in crisis:

Ultimately, profitability is tending to supplant the media's traditional function of preserving the res publica, and in the process is transforming profoundly the rules of democracy. (Mattelart et al, 1984: 423)

Taken as a whole, this confusing and confused postmodern discursive terrain has tended to sediment an overall view that we are, at best, 'stuck with' capitalist 'democracy' — a view strenuously fostered by multi-national industrialists:

As the head of a multinational corporation with more than 1,000 offices worldwide, Wriston argued that nothing should stand in the way of "an integrated economic and financial marketplace which government," and all of us, "must learn to live with." (Sinha and Stone, quoting Walter Wriston, Chair of Citicorp's, (1979) speech "Information, Electronics and Gold; cited in Sinha and Stone, 1995: 279)

Nevertheless, if capitalism is seen as itself a discursive product whose materiality is (re)produced through repetitive activity, then it presumably can, like any other discursive effect, become 'undone.' On the other hand, it is clearly not appropriate for the resistant practitioners of 'identity,' who's critiques were fundamental in the problematisation of Marxism, to return to a deterministic economism:

[T]he kind of Marxism which cultural studies can retain in these very different circumstances is as yet unclear. What does seem certain is that the return to a pre-postmodern Marxism [...] is untenable because the terms of that return are predicated on prioritizing economic relations and economic determinations over cultural and political relations by positioning these latter in a mechanical and reflectionist role. The debate about the future of Marxism in cultural studies has not yet taken place. Instead the great debate around modernity and postmodernity has quite conveniently leapt in and filled that space. (McRobbie, 1992: 719)

In the 'South' there seems to be less poverty of imagination. Although the middle-classes of many nations readily pledge remunerative allegiance to the globalisation of bourgeois consumer culture, there has also been considerable organised resistance to new forms of cultural imperialism — from the level of ethnographically imagined communities to that of national governments:

International organizations of an essentially technical nature have also begun to feel the political effects of an increasingly global questioning of the geopolitical distribution of power in the field of information. (Mattelart et al, 1984: 424)

The North American experience is also a-typical even in the Western bloc.

In countries where the networks of mass-cultural production and distribution were immediately integrated into a market philosophy, an acceleration of the commercialization process is less likely to be experienced as a radical rupture. (Mattelart et al, 1984: 422)

European traditions of state regulation of production, as well as the Marxist critical separation between capitalism and the sphere of its ideology, produced a different discourse in Europe. Gilroy (1993a) noted that, in contrast with the 'multiculturalist' climate of the United States, Britain lacked "a political language for making sense of its post-colonial and hetero-cultural condition." (24)

The characteristic product [...] is an image of the nation as a cultural archipelago: a string of discrete locations on which dissimilar sovereign cultures can reproduce without any unwelcome intrusion from neighbours. (Gilroy, 1993a: 24)

However, as well as furnishing a referent for resistance, national or cultural difference has also been deployed as a marketing tool of the global economy (Gilroy, 1993a: 25). Any appeal to national identities (and, of course, the figure of the nation itself articulates a history of violent imposition) as potential saviour of cultural specificity is always-already recontextualised by the multinational deployment of media technology and simply serves to commodify the identities themselves for recirculation (for example the culturally hybrid style of MTV's satellite service to the Indian sub-continent). Thus, the strategic drawing of ethnographies of (sub)cultures, both globally and in the west, can be seen as already presenting themselves for commodification and recirculation (25).

Within the west, it has been disputed whether the proliferation and recirculation of (life)styles facilitates or challenges the commodification of identity, the hyper-production characteristic of contemporary capitalism, and the 'over-development' of western economies (Mercer, 1990). Wiegman (1994) saw consumption as the characteristic context of identity production in contemporary representational regimes both in the academy and more generally. By claiming the name 'lesbian' we effectively already endorse commodification. Thus, "we have little alternative action but to participate" (Wiegman, 1994: 4).

Epstein and Straub (1991) argued that capitalism has a recuperative, appropriative mode which allows "marginalized or stigmatized forms of sexual behaviour and identity to filter into consumer culture — packaged in disguised forms which take away the edge of any political threat posed by those sexualities. But although the marketing of gender ambiguity is both recuperative and conservative, it may nevertheless allow "those who are politically marginalized opportunities to 'decode' ambiguity in more politicized interpretation" (Epstein and Straub, 1991: 10). The recirculation of marginal, subaltern, or subcultural codes of identity might, at the same time, also be regarded as the cutting edge of post-modern practices of resistance:

Were we able to think consumption differently as a process figuring integration, engulfing, the loss of boundaries, dependency, and collaboration, we might better be able to re-conceive the apparatuses of mass distribution and mass consumption as technologies with an enormous capacity for mobilizing new political communities [...] we, too, are implicated in the commodification of culture as producers and consumers [...] the process of community-building [is] a process no longer directed by us as the knowing, politically correct avant-garde, but one that includes us as co-opted but nonetheless struggling participants. (Radway, 1992: 516)

The 1960s New-Left construct of encoding resistance to 'recuperation' into marginal cultural production has very clearly lost any meaning in this discursive context in which sub-cultural, ethnic or sexual styles are produced in subversion of dominant aesthetic values, but then reappropriated in fragmentary form, commodified and recirculated through the dominant culture.

[W]e confront a series of 'style wars,' skirmishes of appropriation and commodification played out around the semiotic economy of the ethnic signifier. The complexity of this force-field of inter-culturation ambushes any attempt to track down fixed meanings or finalized readings and opens out instead on to ambiguous relations of economic and aesthetic systems of valorization. (Mercer, 1990: 260)

The wearing of, for example, dreadlocks or fetish clothing can no longer be taken as indexical signifiers of oppositional political practices. The commodification of identity has taken on new meanings and can be seen as offering new subversive potentialities and connections.

Black expressive cultures affirm while they protest. The assimilation of blacks is not a process of acculturation but of cultural syncretism (Bastide, 1978). Accordingly, their self-definitions and cultural expressions draw on a plurality of black histories and politics [...] creat[ing] material for the processes of cultural syncretism from extended and still-evolving relationships between the black populations of the over-developed world and their siblings in racial subordination elsewhere.

The effects of these ties and the penetration of black forms into the dominant culture mean that it is impossible to theorize black culture in Britain without developing a new perspective on British culture as a whole. (Gilroy, 1997: 340)

Effectively, a 'diasporic' black culture is able to disseminate and syncretise a culture of opposition through the very economic structures of capitalist imperialism. "A new structure of cultural exchange has been built up across the imperial networks which once played host to the triangular trade of sugar, slaves and capital" (Gilroy, 1997: 343). Despite these more challenging accounts of the commodification of identity and its effects, postmodern approaches might still be seen as "flawed by an inattention to the processes of exclusion which structure and limit access to consumption [...] Indeed, there often seems to be a wilful avoidance of questions of poverty and hardship" (McRobbie, 1977: 73).

Postmodernism and the pink pound

White queer media in Britain have tended largely to accept and to take up a 1990s marketing approach to 'identity.' The circulation of queer signifiers through mainstream media has indeed generally been celebrated by queer communities. Surveys conducted by The Advocate magazine in the US between 1977 and 1980 initially indicated a 'pink pound' effect (Clarke, 1991: 187). Advertisers wished to reach this new market but without risking any 'negative association' by heterosexual consumers which might limit their products' appeal to the gay niche. The solution was to utilise the very codes traditionally deployed by gays to communicate with one another without being readable to potentially punitive heterosexuals. This technique is known as 'window' advertising.

Gay 'window' ads avoid explicit references to homosexuality by depicting only one individual or same-sexed individuals within the representational frame [...] But 'gayness' remains in the eye of the beholder: gays and lesbians can read into an ad certain subtextual elements that correspond to experiences with or representations of gay/lesbian subculture. If heterosexual consumers do not notice these subtexts or subcultural modes, then advertisers are able to reach the homosexual market along with the heterosexual market without ever revealing their aim. (Clark, 1991: 188)

Male gays have never been strangers to conspicuous consumption but the socio-economic context of this practice has also changed. For male homosexuals, pleasure in consumption was, initially, an offshoot of the camp re-appropriation of the feminised conspicuous consumption of commodities signifying possession or aspiration to (heterosexual) white, middle-class, status. These would be re-arranged to represent a gay environment through ironising the feminising aspects of middle-class conspicuous consumption — the legendary camp obsession with interior design, chocs, and frocks. The resignification of capitalist commodities through gay culture was effected by gays themselves by reference to a covert discursive field of meanings shared, if also contended, by all participants. Gay consumerism has recently been resignified, however:

The gay media is currently burgeoning, not only with advertisements for gay goods and services, but also with articles on the phenomenon of conspicuous gay consumption. (Woods, 1995: 148)

Woods argued that the new conspicuousness of a once clandestine gay consumption is predicated on the need to establish and project a gay identity through the purchase and display of 'lifestyle' goods and services. The commercialisation of the gay sector has meant that items are now purchased as 'gay' commodities rather than re-appropriated from the (capitalist) circulation of heterosexuality and resignified as queer.

Consumerism had never been a recognisable convention of any lesbian discourse. Ironising a feminising construct of consumerism would be difficult for lesbians to do, since a woman performing feminising activities hardly has any 'denaturalising' effect. Lesbian style had been constituted instead in resistance to the imposition of the passive and sexualised appearance of heterosexual femininity through cosmetic alteration of appearance and restrictive clothing. In this sense, it has been anti-consumerist. In any case, lesbian feminism avowedly opposed consumerism in consistency with its "countercultural, anti-capitalist roots" (Clark, 1991: 189). Lesbians were not targeted by marketers as a specific consumer group. This was partly because their relative lack of visibility made them difficult for advertisers to identify and address, partly because lesbians were seen as economically disadvantaged, but mostly because of fears of 'negative association' for their products. 'Lipstick lesbianism' has been characterised as reactive to radical feminism — whether the observer interprets this as a healthy rebellion against feminist limitations or a reactionary reinscription of heterosexual femininity resisted by a previous generation of feminist lesbians (Strega, 1985; Stein, 1989; Blackman and Perry, 1990). There may also be an economic explanation, however. A survey in OUT/LOOK (a US lifestyle magazine) at the start of the 1990s indicated that lesbian income was higher than had previously been thought (Clark, 1991: 189). This new fascination for 'lifestyle' among lesbians, which has made them so much more attractive to marketers, might even be an effect of the marketing of queer identity. The lifestyle of the 'Yuppie' which proved an exceptionally profitable consumer group was created by the format of marketing research in the 1980s (Clark, 1991: 189).

The recognition-coding (verisimilitude) of lesbian identity which made it available for recirculation was taken to be either a 'butch' figure appearing alone or a role-play between two women. Advertisers also incorporated coded reference to lesbian-iconic films which were also liked by 'independent' heterosexual women (such as the reference to Thelma and Louise in the Renault 5 ads). Clark pointed out that the lesbian reader of such advertisements is aware of the duality built into the representation in that it is designed primarily to appeal to heterosexual women. Thus, lesbian readings incorporate not only the "duality of its hetero/homo-sexual appeal but also the multiplicity of lesbian interpretations made available through the diversity of lesbian reading formations" (Clark, 1991: 194). "The metaphor of the window [...] posits an active reader" (Clark, 1991: 188). The activity of the lesbian reader of window advertising thus problematises feminist claims that advertising invariably represents 'the woman' as passive object of the gaze. The appropriative attitude now "cuts both ways" (Clark, 1991: 195). At the same time, commodities are also increasingly produced for the lesbian market by lesbian-owned small enterprise:

[...] [L]esbian identity functions as the means for defining the specificities of both production and consumption. While this relation - of lesbian made, sold, owned materials - approximates in the 1990s a tamed separatism, it is more than disturbing that the commodification of the lesbian as a category of identity is often what passes, inside and outside the lesbian community, for evidence of political progress [...] if political power means a cultural visibility framed by the commodity aesthetic, what kind of position of power — and empowerment — are we claiming? (Wiegman, 1994: 3)

A constructionist approach to identity lends itself more easily than an essentialist one to a dual strategy of assimilation and denial. "Because style is a cultural construction, it is easily appropriated, reconstructed, and divested of its original political or subcultural signification" (Clark, 1991: 196). The commodity advertised is in no way signified as having particular relevance to lesbians. Lesbianism is re-presented as a style of self expression, as much a consumer choice as any other style. Furthermore, the recuperation of lesbian styles to mainstream femininity also opened out the choice of 'passing' where it is advantageous for lesbians to do so, whilst still retaining a lesbian lifestyle. These effects forced a reassessment of lesbian subcultural practices themselves, since their oppositional meanings must undergo transformation in the process of 'mainstreaming.'

Evans and Gamman (1995) analysed the contingency and contextual specificity of the lesbian 'gaze' onto popular culture, noting a distinction between the film-studies construct of 'the gaze' as phallic signifier and a more general use of the construct within radical feminism as 'shorthand' for patriarchy (15). Rejecting the feminist conflation of the activity of looking with masculinity - which they argued is produced as an effect of this confusion, Evans and Gamman took the view that such a negative inference denies lesbian visual pleasure. Furthermore, feminist models of 'the gaze' have conferred a monolithic status upon it which "privileges gender inequalities over all other forms of inequality, including that of race," and denies specificities of "[w]ho is viewing, as well as the context of viewing" (24). Evans and Gamman differentiated between a lesbian gaze onto a cinematic image which "cannot look back" and a lesbian context in which "individuals cruise each other on the street, or in clubs, the mutual exchange of glances is sexualised and often reciprocal" (Evans and Gamman, 1995: 15).

However, while there may be no such thing as an essentially 'lesbian' gaze, there is certainly lesbian imagery in circulation. As Suzie Bright has observed, lesbian porn videos featuring butch/femme relationships [...] are experiencing a consumer boom in the USA. Evidently, many lesbians enjoy these videos which eroticise women for women. Some would argue that this is because there is a different gaze at work within them. We would argue, however, that there is no essential 'lesbian gaze' at work here, but that lesbian film-makers and lesbian audiences bring different cultural competencies to bear on the production and consumption of lesbian imagery. (Evans and Gamman, 1995: 35; with reference to Mayne, 1991; Boffin and Fraser, 1991; Every Conceivable Position, roughcut made by Clare Bevan and Mandy Merck but never broadcast by the BBC, 1991; Ellsworth, 1986)

Lewis (1997) noted that the techniques deployed by lesbians to re-appropriate mainstream cultural representations differed from the techniques used to decode texts produced in what was perceived as a lesbian context.

In contrast to the polysemic free-play of fashion fantasy by which readers produce lesbian pleasure in the consumption of mainstream magazines, responses to the fashion content in the lesbian magazine Diva suggests that in a subcultural context readers deploy a realist mode of reading that demands a monosemic positive images iconography. (Lewis, 1997: 91)

From conversations with Diva's Editor and the responses of lesbians within her own circle, Lewis differentiated two broad, but overlapping, reading techniques:

One regards lesbianism as an authentic identity based on lived experience outside the magazine which readers expect Diva to properly reflect and represent [...] The other constructs identity through reading and then seeks social spaces in which that identity can be lived out and recognised, often through the appropriation of mainstream women's fashion. (Lewis, 1997: 101)

Whilst the former group would seem to represent the persistence of a lesbian identification with radical feminism, the latter appears to support Clark's speculation that lesbianism(s) might actually be produced in the format of marketing address. Lewis noted that the latter type of reader is "able to deal both with the swift changes of style and fragmented identifications associated with postmodernity" (102) and is primarily associated with young people.

As queer and ethnic identifications become increasingly recuperated to the mainstream, and a multicultural model is applied to marketing demographics, it becomes increasingly questionable just how threatening such counter-identifications or the acts which they reference might be to 'power'. Indeed, it becomes difficult, actually, to demarcate subcultural practices from dominant (capitalist) practices of identity production.

During the single reading experience of flicking through a lesbian or gay magazine, viewers are engaged in reading dominant representational codes which may be more or less overtly open to same-sex pleasures [...] and in reading editorial images that have an overtly gay 'meaning'. To consume a lesbian or gay lifestyle magazine is thus an experience of reading simultaneously with and against the grain. (Lewis, 1997: 98)

To what extent can such reading practices be construed as produced in or productive of a resistant mode of identification?

Can we unproblematically herald the consolidation of the lesbian as a category of being when this being is increasingly signified by our saturation in commodity production, both countercultural and, to a limited but growing extent, 'mainstream' as well? (Wiegman, 1994: 3)

As the 1990s progressed, 'countercultural' and 'mainstream' became harder to differentiate. Feminism and lesbianism, on the other hand, tended to diverge as lesbian identity depoliticised.

Lesbian commercial media

Lesbian voluntary organisations and sites of cultural production in the 1970s (and into the 1980s) were marked by resistance to capitalist work practices such as the hierarchical division of labour. These 'inefficient' counter-capitalist organisations have largely given way, in commercial as well as voluntary sector production, to the dominant accent on 'productivity'. This prioritisation has been enforced by a range of capitalist-institutional pressures on queer commerce, and by funding bodies in the voluntary sector. These economic forms of productive control of lesbian discourse have been, in many ways, far more effective in disciplining lesbian discourse than regulatory censorship or institutional exclusions had been. As with the globalising tendency of new media technologies, as the circulation of lesbian identities expands, its articulation tends towards univocality and institutionalisation to the (hyper)capitalist mode of production.

Changes in British lesbian media production and reception thus need to be placed in the wider context of more general transformations in the matrix of marginal cultural production. My account of these changes (where not referenced specifically to academic sources) is based on conversations with Linda Gibson (former Editor, Shebang), Frances Williams (former Editor, Diva), Gillian Rodgerson (formerly News Editor, Gay Times; Editor, Capital Gay; and currently Editor, Diva) and on all of their contributions to a course on Lesbian Culture and Politics which I taught at London University's Centre for Extra Mural Studies between 1992 and 1995; as well as interviews which I conducted whilst researching an article for Diva on lesbian independent cinema (Graham, 1994) with Helen de Witt (former programmer, Scala Cinema; Acquisitions Officer, Cinenova; currently programmer, Lux Cinema); Laura Hudson (former programmer, London Filmmakers' Co-op Cinema; director, Super-8 Festival; currently Publicity and Marketing Officer, Cinenova); Jacqui Lawrence (Commissioning Editor, C4); and Cherry Smyth (Programmer, Lesbian and Gay Film Festival).

As noted in a previous chapter, lesbian feminism (both in the US and in Britain) had produced an explosion of marginal lesbian publishing ranging from mimeographed newsletters to academic journals. In Britain, there was considerable participation by black lesbians. In the early 1980s, Outwrite, an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, radical feminist newspaper was set up by a group of mainly black women (Mason-John, 1995), who also made a major contribution to Spare Rib. Publication under marginal conditions was always difficult, but under free market conditions the going got considerably tougher. Commercialisation of the club scene meant that funds became hard to raise through 'benefit' events. People are reluctant or unable to donate labour to low-profile, oppositional, projects. Many of the alternative distribution networks set up in the 1970s collapsed in the 1980s, along with the smaller (and more accessible) commercial distributors. Consolidation left distribution almost entirely to big businesses which demanded not only a reliability and quantity difficult to furnish on a shoe-string, but also control of politically sensitive or 'obscene' content. Those 'alternative' bookshops which survived the 1980s did so by commercial adaptation which also tended to exclude unreliable, impractical, and un-glam 'grey' publication.

At the same time, lesbians themselves also began to demand higher production values. Capitalisation thus became increasingly necessary to launch commercially reliable and attractive lesbian publications. Lesbians had not characteristically built up capital reserves, having been minimally interested in commerce. In any case, lesbians had always been disadvantaged in the male-dominated gay commercial sector as well as by more conventional sources of capital being generally seen as skint, unreliable, and unruly.

Gay Times had already incorporated Gay News, gradually transforming from organ of the Gay Liberation Movement to a glossy, lifestyle magazine financially secured by advertising and the proceeds of gay pornography which its parent company, Millivres, also distributes. The 1980s saw the rise of giveaway newspapers such as Capital Gay and The Pink Paper capitalised by gay businesses and resourced by advertising. As a lifestyle magazine, Gay Times, developed glossy, professionalised journalistic news and production values and a content dominated by celebrity interviews, 'lifestyle' items, and presentation of 'issues' carefully moderated to avoid conflict or negativity. The Pink Paper maintained more of a campaigning tone (although frequently criticised for its white-middle-class-male news values), whilst 'disco-bunny' giveaways led by Boyz look more like a sexually explicit version of mainstream girl-teen-mags.

By the 1990s, lesbian visibility had also increased and lesbianism was admitted to the ranks of the 'issues' being glossed over in the more pro-feminist mainstream women's glossies. In 1993, "the [US] national press discovered lesbians" (Lebow, 1993: 19). Lesbian cultural production shifted towards alignment with 'pink pound' free market ideology and 'lifestyle' consumerism. In this context, lesbian periodicals were effectively drawn into a vacuum of expectation, producing a run of lesbian 'lifestyle' magazines. Shebang, a more politicised lesbian giveaway appeared as sister to the Pink Paper in 1992 in competition with the one remaining radical-feminist independent, Lesbian London. In the context of an expansion of gay publications with relatively high production values (with the launches of Phase, and Attitude), Diva was capitalised in 1994 by Millivres as a 'lifestyle' glossy targeting a white, professional, thirty-something, lesbian consumer group posited by analogy to Gay Times' male target group. By the mid 1990s, the independent giveaway Lesbian London collapsed, and the remaining commercial lesbian magazines, Diva and Shebang, were capitalised by gay-male organisations with executive editorial control.

The surviving marginal independents, Quim and Bad Attitude, showed a radically different style and content. Mason-John (1995) noted a black lesbian contribution to more marginal lesbian journals of the 1980s which was largely absent from the glossies which tended to tokenise black women. Whilst the independent, Quim, had solicited little black lesbian involvement editorially after the initial involvement of a black lesbian, it did regularly feature the work of black artists (15). There have been constant complaints, however, concerning editorial exclusion of material produced by-and-for black lesbians within the commercial sector (reported by Mason-John, speaking at a meeting called at Unison Headquarters in London, March 1995, to respond to Radclyffe, 1995). When Shebang, which was popular but failing to attract adequate revenue, was relaunched, a putative female 'disco-bunny' was targeted as a largely imaginary counterpart to the already saturated male category. This was felt to have limited lesbian verisimilitude, and was greeted sardonically by its young, clubby, lesbian target group. Quim, Bad Attitude, and Shebang collapsed by the end of the 1990s, leaving British lesbian publication dominated by Diva (although lesbian publications with minimal production values still are still sporadically produced and circulated, particularly in provincial cities).

In common with their 'lifestyle' antecedent, the women's magazine, gaynlesbian 'lifestyle' publications must attract as much revenue as possible. Their style and content must thus appeal to the maximum number of potential readers whilst alienating as few as possible. The result tends to be a disproportionate focus on sex and commodity consumption, and a MOR approach to 'issues'. This process of commodification was further aided by a convergence between the agenda of women's magazines and that of gay/queer discourse itself — sex and consumption. The well-capitalised glossy proved popular beyond its target demographic of well-heeled thirty-somethings.

Images of lesbians on TV, as lesbians are wearily aware, had been controlled by heterosexuals ever since the 1960s 'social problem' documentaries dared speak its name at all. By the 1970s, lesbianism was tokenised in dramas and sitcoms, or served up as exotica. The standards of 'balance and objectivity' fancifully adhered to by middle-class, white, male, heterosexuals who control British TV ensures that showing lesbianism generally results in little more than a public opportunity for its opponents to vent "acrimonious anti-lesbianism" (Collis, 1994: 122). Early BBC efforts at gay programming were white-male-biased and heterosexually addressed. In 1982, C4 launched with a chartered commitment to 'minority' programming (a sort of indie BBC2), including bits and pieces for gays. By 1989, Out was provoking mixed reactions amongst lesbian and gay audiences, but nevertheless seemed to epitomise a celebratory sense of having arrived in the mainstream.

One of the major concerns at Channel 4 was the likely impact of the programme on advertisers [...] What actually happened was that the rating figures for the programme regularly exceeded the one million mark, a figure not much lower than Channel 4's average rating figures for much of the mainstream programming. (Hamer and Ashbrook, 1994: 167)

C4's Dyke TV (1996) was the first specifically lesbian-focused TV, coming perhaps just after a peak of lesbian-and-gay optimism in an unprecedented level of mainstream exposure. Dyke TV was clearly committed to "multiplicity," covering a wide range of issues and identities. C4's commissioning of "minority" media production by competing, small, independent, companies, might, nevertheless, be argued to have produced a homogenising conformity with the aesthetic standards and production practices of upmarket commercial TV.

US TV barely utilises the documentary form and would not, in any case, have been prepared to 'risk' discussion of homosexuality prior to Gay Liberation for commercial reasons. The first successful gay character appeared in a US soap (the satirical series Soap) in the 1970s. Through the 1980s gay and lesbian characters became popular in TV soaps and sitcoms both in the US and the UK. By 1996, there were 22 gay and lesbian characters on American Network TV and such characterisations became associated with the most commercially successful mainstream shows (Tickled Pink, Tx: C4, 1997). This popularity gave unprecedented clout to media pressure groups such as GLAAD in the US. The approach towards representation most often assumed by urban, high-visibility, queer activism has been a combined strategy of a post-modern attitude towards mainstream culture, a quasi-separatist base for cultural production, and engagement in the 'style-wars' of identity proceeding from this sub-culturally productive base.

New forms of 'alternative capitalism' produced effects in excess of the appropriation and recirculation of marginal codings through mainstream channels of communication, however. One of the most revealing assumptions underlying commentary on the commodification of lesbianism during the 1990s has been the idea that lesbianism is 'catching up' with gay male commercial success. The voiced-over commentary to the historical documentary It's Not Unusual (Tx: BBC2, 1997) described a rapid expansion of the lesbian club-scene during the 1990s and argued that it had been "delayed" in following the gay male disco phenomenon by a lesbian "political focus" in the 1970s and 1980s. Groocock similarly argued that "[f]or lesbians the process of self-affirmation and empowerment has been slower [than for gay men]" (Groocock, 1994: 117). The idea is also often put forward in queer discourse that the alliance between lesbianism and feminism was some kind of heterosexual feminist 'hijack' (see Rubin, 1984: 298-299; Weeks, 1985: 217; Groocock, 1994: 104). Whilst many might argue that a heterosexual agenda had achieved re-ascendancy within feminism by the latter part of the 1980s, lesbians would, on the contrary, appear rather to have 'hijacked' feminism in the 1970s (Love and Abbot, 1972: 107-134; Faderman, 1991: 206-209). The resignification of the commodification of lesbian identity as 'delayed' by feminist politics teleologically positions queer capitalism at the apex of lesbian endeavour and resignifies lesbianism as its inadequate mimicry. Thus, lesbianism is doubly subordinated first as 'poor relation' to male homosexuality and then through an occlusion or re-attribution to heterosexual women of the fundamental re-articulation of feminism and sexual politics actually achieved by lesbians.

Another noticeable effect of the institutionalisation and commercialisation of the productive matrix of queer theory and media has been the creation of a queer 'chattering class'. That is, within academia and the media there has developed a professionalised network engaged in the production and disciplining of the representational regime of queer. This productive group is small, and somewhat isolated from its constituency in a way similar to that described by Showalter's (1989) analysis of the effects of the assimilation of feminist and African-American discourses into the academy. As in the case of the mere 200 or so individuals who control almost the whole of US network TV production (The Tube is Reality, Tx: C4, 1991), professionalised queer media producers are not, of course, motivated by a will to misrepresent. Rather, they reproduce the specificities of their own discursive order, effectively re-ordering all lesbian or queer contestations within the terms of the (white, heterosexual, male dominated) capitalist productive matrix and that of the institutions which employ this chattering class. Besides its homogenising effects, this process further forecloses a publicised critique of capitalist praxis.