Pinkwashing Analysis

5. Pinkwashing is defined by Spaid as the cover-up that mobilizes gay friendliness to obscure problematic politics and is often used as a smoke screen to distract from this. On the other hand, homonationalism uses gay rights as public relations tools, in order to appear as progressive and make competitors seem not as progressive in order to bring about their exclusion. Quite literally, it is defined in the text as a term used “to describe the strategy of the Israeli government has utilized in recent years to cast Israel as a ‘modern democracy’ by highlighting its purportedly progressive gay rights policies” because gay marriage is not banned here, and gays can also serve in the military. This pinkwashing was expanded with the funding of Israeli
gay rights tours to promote its “gay haven” as a popular gay tourist destination, outcasting and shaming other countries for its homophobia and lack of gay rights. However, this specific incident of pinkwashing is used as propaganda “aimed at covering up the brutal realities of Israeli’s ongoing theft of land and resources from Palestinians, its system of apartheid, its siege on Gaza, the wall it continues to build to annex the land and restrict movement through Palestine, its ongoing support of settlements,” along with other atrocities that are forgotten about or smokescreened by the romanticizing of pinkwashing, blinded by the romanticization of Israeli’s gay politics (120). Pink washing ultimately is used to “justify military intervention and/or cover up and distract from their violent misdeed,” which has occurred during President Obama’s time in office, in which he often speaks and advocates for gay rights, which cloaks other devastating and violent incidents he has also supported, such as “his development of drone warfare, his record-breaking levels of deportation, his failures to close Guantanamo, the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his support for austerity measures and scandalous bail out of banks, and his leadership of the most imprisoning country in the world” (24).
This is fueled by the idea that gay friendliness equates to civilized politics and people. Hillary Clinton often utilizes pinkwashing with her “gay rights are human rights” speeches that, “obscures the actual geopolitical context of the reconfiguration of global power in the aftermath of World War II, the weakening of traditional European empire, the consolidation of the U.S empire as a dominant world power, and the divying up of spheres of military influence and control along what would become Cold War battle lines,” forgotten with HRC’s seemingly attractive and appealing globalization speeches (105). She also uses homonationalism when speaking about how those from the LGBTQ community are often “arrested, beaten, terrorized, even executed,” (8) referred to by the authors as “the time is now” speech as Clinton “brings gayness into the universal and affirms the
universal” (106). She scolds other seemingly less progressive, less civilized countries for their mistreatment of the LGBTQ community, but fails to acknowledge how she too is imbedded and benefits from a white, heteronormative, capitalist system that maintains and profits from the abuse of this community, and only uses this rhetoric in order to appeal to “gay voters” (107). This new “international human rights movement” utilizes both concepts because it distracts audiences from bigger more important issues, caused “by focusing purely on the crimes and not on the reasons behind them,” and even occurred during the “obvious proving wrong of the invisible hand theory,” during the Pinochet rule. The movement then assumes a homonationalist position and positions Amnesty International as the ultimate idol when regarding human rights, when its “policy of impartiality,” have put gay rights “back up by those military complexes that have most abused them,” as justifications for war and increased militarization to fight against the anti-gay “other” (108).These tactics are used to normalize the idea that “to be pro-gay is to be pro-military” as anti-gayness is perceived as a military threat, and thus, invasion and violence of these anti-gay areas are justified and seen as progressive acts to secure expansion of revolutionary progression. “The emergence of a neoliberal gay and lesbian rights politics has produced a distorted version of anti-homophobia as a newly circulating rational for expanding apparatuses of racialized violence,” a result of homonationalism (110).
This is occurring in Palestine in order to enhance “criminal punishment and surveillance technologies” in order to respond to gendered violence, when in fact, this incident merely pinkwashes the coincidence that this is merely convenient and replicated by America’s models of “prison privatization or imprisonment-for-profit,” that was occurring in other parts of the globe, and America is able to escape taking responsibility for these infractions (110). Rather anti-homophobia is used as justification and excuse to invade, colonize, and police other areas, all under the name of “progression” and “anti-homophobia,”and is used in order to boost and promote imperialism and capitalism excusing or hiding the fact that “the figure of the gay hate crime victim operates domestically to pass laws expanding prison sentences and police budgets.” This is to ultimately “justify military intervention overseas” (111), part of the “sympathetic victim” phenomenon, that directly and merely detrimentally affects certain unprivileged groups and results in increased
violence. Mainstream gay groups that utilized pictures of Chelsea Manning as the “sympathetic gay soldier” did so only to appear as progressive and supportive of DADT, however, failing to recognize the problematic politics behind this legislature, even from an anti-homophobic stance. These groups also only capitalized on these images and did not actually care about her or her situation enough to identify her with proper gender pronouns, and as a trans woman, while also ignoring dangerous realities of being a soldier, in order to “depict her within a friendly white gay pro-military masculinity,” as a result of homonationalism (114).