The Power of “Pride”: Representation & Resistance in Popular Advertising

This paper explores three discursive themes that emerge from the 2022 Pride campaigns of Nike, Converse, and Vans, and shows how they work to create a “good queer object”: one that navigates searching for a liveable life within a context that works to disallow it to the point of death. Pride advertisement campaigns in the United States in 2022 reveal the navigations of the queer body in popular representations and discourses of advanced capitalism. I argue that conclusions of whether these representations “work” or “don’t work” as acts of resistance against hegemonic powers fail to account for the growing reconfiguration of political and social order through neoliberal market logic. The contours of this queerness exist at a time when these same bodies are normalised via cultural apparatuses of visibility yet face increasing political and material vulnerability. I use the rhizomatic media framework with feminist and trans* scholarship to explore the negotiations of the queer body and its fight for the right to live in a neoliberal context: what type of “queerness” is being produced through these logics, what are the negotiations at play, and what are the implications for power and resistance?