Joanna Wuest

From 2015 to 2021, hundreds of corporations and CEOs defended LGBTQ rights from discriminatory legislation and embraced diversity-themed reforms to their offices and investment practices. Just as rapidly, conservative counter-boycotts, litigation, and presidential crackdowns cowed business advocates. This project narrates how organized capital from the C-suite to small business has shaped the substance and fate of sexual and gender minority rights and representation in the twenty-first century. Cutting through reductive accounts of “woke capitalism” and culture wars, it situates the rising and falling fortunes of LGBTQ liberalism in transformations to law, corporations, and political donor networks. In doing so, the project also reveals the origins and psychic resonance of those conspiratorial narratives which frame gender identity clinics and queer-friendly corporations as having been “ideologically captured” by trans advocates and their allies in the billionaire class. Such increasingly powerful ideas tap into broader populist suspicions of those deemed elite threats to the polity’s interests. In all, “After Equality” is a story about the ongoing crises of American capitalism’s legitimacy and its civil rights regime.