Description
The subsumption of desire has been central to the maintenance of the American world system. It facilitated mass identification with ostensibly universal national ideals and obfuscated the gendered and sexualized hierarchies which guaranteed their universality. Under Fordism, the national ideal of suburban nuclear family life disavowed the estrangement of queer and racialized populations who were unable to assimilate to the prescriptions of this heteronormative nuclearity. The Fordist regime of accumulation rested on the assumption that not only could labor be rationally organized, but so too could the desires and pleasures associated with ‘family time.’ The commodification of leisure in the space of the home hence became central to the reinforcement of social integration. Under neoliberalism, the heteronormative family was privatized. That is, the family became a sacred and sanctified alternative to the Fordist welfare state. This national ideal of the private family masked the processes of dispossession, displacement, and death that constituted the underside of neoliberal gentrification, privatization, and redevelopment. Desire was once again subsumed under this social order, as affective investments in the private family secured the fantasy that it could guarantee enduring well-being and security. During both phases of US hegemony, the subsumption of desire in the historical process established an illusion of equivalence among members of the national body politic, while enabling the creation of particular racialized and non-normative gender and sexual hierarchies that were integral to the reproduction of US capital.
