The Twilight of Equality?

I found this week’s reading to be a bit arduous for me. Reading Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality was more of an alienating experience as opposed to the previous writings of Renda, Ulysse, Kincaid, and even Mohanty. Because of her at times, over-the-top, exhaustively descriptive, painfully complex sentences, it took three or four readings just for me to get past the introduction. I don’t have much too comment on this week, perhaps because the subject matter was tough to grasp simply because I don’t have much of an economics background, but also because the dense material was cloaked in Duggan’s highly academic writing style.

However, after I managed to decipher her writing style, I found her case studies to be provocative and fascinating. She does an excellent job of demonstrating the rhetoric surrounding the “master terms and categories” like public and private. This rhetoric is apparent in her study of the Gay movement from the 1950s to the 1990s. She explains that by the 1980s, antigay forces “attacked gay rhetorical claims for privacy-in-public and for publicizing the private, specifically, and worked to define the private sphere as an isolated, domestic site completely out of range of any public venue” (Duggan 53). This type of rhetoric leads to the “deceptive” equality of the rhetoric of the Independent Gay Forum, specifically of Andrew Sullivan and how the trickle-down effect of equality “anticipates the Disneyfication of democracy as boardroom dealmaking” (54). This chapter was a place that at times I did enjoy her writing style especially the last quote. But also, Duggan makes a good point, because if you are like me and aren't able to read between the lines of some of these so-called progressive organizations, then you are missing their underlying support of neoliberal politics which inevitably lead to global inequality as opposed to global equality. The way Duggan structured her argument was quite convincing.

I think that Duggan is arguing that this is time (the early 2000s) that we should understand the negative effects of neoliberalism and urge for a new egalitarian approach of every resource--material, political, and cultural as opposed to just parts instead of the whole. I wonder, now that it is a decade later, what Duggan’s analysis of neoliberalism would be today.