The trans, leftist YouTuber Natalie Wyn (also known as ContraPoints) recently released a video on the topic of opulence. One of the most compelling aspects of this video is the way that Wyn attempts to wrestle the concept of glamor away from its elitist and exploitative incarnation, in which glamor merges with the concept of opulence, and is used to reinforce upper-class power by merging wealth, status and aesthetic appeal. This opulent version of glamor, by combining the flaunting of wealth, status and fashion, produces an aesthetic standard that is unattainable for most people. Wyn cites Terre Thaemlitz, who insists that glamor in its present form “is suspect as a critical-minded political forum because it is about social distance, not social integration. The promise of the pop-glam diva is not the promise of social transformation, but individual transformation in which the exploited becomes the exploiter. It is a promise of an individual's class mobility, not social betterment or class critique.” Wyn follows this up by citing John Berger, who, in Ways of Seeing, claimed that “[t]he happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest—if you do, you will become less enviable.”
This kind of individualistic, opulent glamor is structurally dependent on exclusion and exclusivity. The underlying logic behind this type of glamor is a mode of desiring that attaches value to scarcity. It is an extension of a competitive economic logic that attaches a higher value to rare and scarce resources, and devalues anything that is in abundance. Such an attitude thwarts post-scarcity social and political programs, since once a material, social and/or economic good ceases to be scarce, it loses its value. Such a logic places individuals and communities on a perpetual, competitive treadmill of chasing ever-evolving needs and wants, never fulfilling its promises to satisfy or satiate, but instead changing the desirability criteria as soon as a good or service becomes attainable.
What Wyn doesn’t mention is the degree to which sexuality in our culture operates according to the same logic as opulent glamor—that is to say, according to the scarcity-valuation model. In our cultural moment, sexual attractiveness goes hand-in-hand with social distance and non-reciprocation. Peter Bailey sketches out the rules and mechanics of this mode of sexuality in his brilliant (and somehow little-known) essay “Parasexuality and Glamour.” There, Bailey coins the term parasexuality to describe a dynamic in which a person (or persons) commands the sexual desire of many without reciprocating that desire—a practice which he insists is a “familiar but largely unexamined phenomenon of glamour.” Central to this conception is the enforcement of social distance—a distance that tends to be produced and maintained by some form of mechanism: a stage or bar top; a shop window; a screen, etc. “Distance not only sustains and protects the magical property that is commonly recognised in glamour, but also heightens desire through the tension generated by the separation of the glamour object and the beholder, a separation that also functions to limit the expression or consummation of desire.” The result, according to Bailey, is a type of “managed arousal” that uses an “enhanced public visibility” to entice and then channel sexual desire—a “sexuality that is deployed but contained, carefully channelled rather than fully discharged; in vulgar terms it might be represented as ‘everything but.’” For Bailey, the exemplary parasexual figure is the nineteenth century barmaid, but it would be difficult to over-emphasize the centrality of this tendency in contemporary culture. This is the very rationale behind the “follower-to-following ratio” on Instagram—a platform where “influencers” build narcissistic empires where millions of users will follow a single, self(ie)-objectifying star, without the star following them back. The more you like them, the further it puts them out of your league. The logic of “everything but” informs the way that sexually provocative content on social media and on television and in advertisements is able to “work up” sexual desire without ever dissipating it—not only because the featured object of desire remains distant (inaccessible through a screen) and does not reciprocate the desire of their viewers, but also because the platforms themselves prohibit material that would “get you off.” In this sense, one might call many of the social media platforms “parapornographic.” They are designed to expand and channel desire using parasexual glamor, and content restrictions further facilitate the process.
This is a mode of desire production and management that is endemic to consumer capitalism. “Glamor sells things,” the advertiser Richard Surrey insisted in a 1920s trade journal in which the modern foundations of the profession of marketing were forged. Glamor, Surrey thought, was “the very core of our art of advertising—Selling By Imagery, as I like to call it—this task of making things seem fairer than they are.” The advertiser who failed to use glamor to his advantage “fails to use a deep and easily navigated channel into the harbors of human consciousness.” Marketing rouses desire and entices engagement, while simultaneously associating that desire with products and services. Advertisements have exploited the media of film, television, print, radio, web, etc., and they have often done so using glamorous figures such as fashion models, actors/actresses, celebrity musicians and athletes, and, increasingly, “influencers.” In her book on fashion models and sexuality, Elspeth H. Brown traces the evolution of the model as a parasexual figure of “commodified sexual appeal that has emerged as a central aspect of modern marketing,” a figure that has been “central to the accelerated circulation of commodities in advanced capitalist societies.” According to Brown, “[m]odels sell commodities by using their bodies to produce commercialized affect in relationship to specific goods,” and this use depends upon the simultaneous flaunting of those bodies and the disciplined enforcement of distance and unattainability on the part of the model. A lot of effort went into the process of “both draw[ing] on and contain[ing] the implicitly explosive sexuality of bodies on public display,” and this containment depended upon the “cordon sanitaire of the runway, the stage, [and] the printed page.” In “[t]his production of managed sexuality,” as Biley describes it, models “are available to the scrutinizing gaze while eluding its implied denouement—that is, sex. The implied sexuality of the model, the film star, or the pinup is contained . . . through distance.”
It’s clear that for Brown and for Natalie Wyn (or Contrapoints), queer cultural practices have both defied and propped up this exploitative mode of desiring. Brown demonstrates how queer glamor helped to forge the modeling industry, which, in turn, lorded the resulting desirability over its audiences. Brown shows that there is a complex dynamic at work, in which queer aesthetics can perpetuate capitalist regimes of desire exploitation and social, sexual and emotional distance. There is a Deleuzian process at work here, where queer aesthetics and desiring break away from the normative, restrictive and stale mainstream, only to be re-incorporated or appropriated back into the mainstream. In this sense, queer aesthetic practices can help to sustain normative exploitation of desire by constantly supplying the mainstream with new, fresh material and expanding frontiers.
Yet not all queer aesthetics necessarily reproduce this dynamic. At their worst, queer aesthetics reproduce an opulent version of glamor that maintains a link between value and scarcity. At their best, however, queer aesthetics shatter this link, and hitch value to uniqueness instead. Another queer aesthetics takes pleasure in transitioning—not (necessarily) in the transgender sense (though I am extremely curious about the extent to which transitioning between genders, just like role-playing, carries with it the pleasure of experiencing and provoking new kinds of desires), but in the experience of contrast and/or threshold from one program (or aesthetic regime) to another. The very act of queering carries with it the pleasure of subverting an object or experience or a behavior’s relationship to its context and surrounding. What’s radical here is a mode of desirability that takes pleasure not in status-based scarcity, but contrast and differentiation. Desire, rather than always reaching upwards on a unilinear, aspirational scale, and desiring those at the top and seeking to attain a higher and higher place within the hierarchy, a queer aesthetics of differentiation privileges the horizontal mobility of drifting from one desire to another. Spiraling outwards and skating across, rather than climbing upwards and building a status-affirming following beneath you. An appropriate metaphor here is the tangled spaghetti knot depicted in Alicia McCarthy’s painting a place where winning doesn't depend on losing, where a complex, closed-loop knot ostensibly replaces the linear, hierarchical, inflow/outflow, input/waste, winning/losing paradigm of the straight, vertical line.