Project Description
How do LGBTI rights activists and corporate sponsors interact at the Pride Parades to generate a civil religious ritual with wider integrative potential for society?
During the past 15 years, we have witnessed a curious coming-together of very different groups of actors in a rapidly growing cultural phenomenon, the LGBTI rights movement. The most visible elements of this movement, the Pride Parades, are getting ever more popular by attracting millions of participants and by garnering support from very large organizations.
What is puzzling is that these Parades have managed to bring together what used to be considered cultural opposites: radical NGO’s and neoliberal corporations, hair-dyed HIV activists and Danske Bank suits. Cultural-ideological chasms of such width are typically only bridged by value systems associated with civil religions, such as national myths. This observation leads us to engage with the research question at the heart of this research project.
Our Case
Pride Parades have existed for 50 years, but it is their corporate underpinning which is astounding. In 2019, Copenhagen Pride included over 70 companies as sponsors, among them 7-Eleven, Netto, Starbucks, Coca Cola, Tuborg, Ørsted, Microsoft, Mærsk, TDC, IBM, Danske Bank and Nordea. The ‘original’, that is New York’s Pride Parade, features an even larger number of sponsors, ranging from Morgan Stanley to Unilever, Nissan and Kellogg’s. Much critical commentary has read this development in terms of the ‘commercialization’ of Pride. This critique however ignores the extent to which Pride Parades share numerous similarities with sacred events. These similarities might add up to what Robert Bellah called a civil religion.
Designed to either replace or accompany older forms of Christianity, a civil religion provides followers with flags, hymns, symbols, martyrs, sacred sites and annual rituals of commemoration in order to forge the bonds that are needed to sustain the substitutes of a universal church. In the twenty-first century, and against a resurgent political particularism, movements like Pride seem to celebrate a secular version of the universality that formerly characterized churches. As a feast of love, colour, music, drinking, eroticism and playfulness, Pride Parades share the enthusiastic atmosphere of religious celebrations, such as the Roman Bacchanalia, Easter parades, and Carnival. There are also similarities between Pride Parades and more organized elements of religion. Many employers, for instance, encourage their employees to turn up in corporate-branded t-shirts, and participants who join the floats of non-profit organizations or who march as individuals often share similar outfits. This uniformity, but also other forms of social-symbolic interaction, helps engender a particular spirit among those who take part. This spirit consists of a feeling that the event celebrates something collective and transcendent, namely the universal human right to be included and feel accepted without discrimination. It is in this spirit that gifts are handed out to complete strangers: music, drinks, and small tokens like flags, balloons, sweets, toys, condoms, etc. Crucially, these gifts are shared among the crowd to be consumed on site as a symbol of what is collectively believed in. Further, Pride Parades, like many religious rituals, celebrate martyrdom, suffering and sacrifice. Indeed, the first Pride festivals were held in commemoration of the people who had rioted on New York’s Christopher Street in June 1969 and who had been violently beaten by police. Pride Parades have their own liturgy, including specific colours (the Rainbow) and appropriate music that often celebrates hedonistic themes. Other liturgical elements are the diligent preparations, the official walking route, and the end-point that most often consists of a central landmark, such as Copenhagen’s town hall square that becomes ‘Pride Square’.
The concept of civil religion currently experiences a renaissance in the social sciences and our project is the first to study Pride Parades in terms of an emerging civil religion. Existing scholarship has so far not made the connection between the LGBTI rights agenda and this central concept of contemporary sociological theory. Applying this concept to the LGBTI movement allows us to investigate the unifying potential of Pride Parades for wider society. Exposing Pride to this concept, with its universal solidarity base, opens up an entirely new perspective, especially since the Parades are often associated with identity politics, lifestyle enclaves and cultural sectarianism.
The Literature
The extant literature has of course acknowledged the social significance of Pride Parades as well as their increasingly commercial character. However, there are substantial gaps in the literature, suggesting that researchers have not taken this growing phenomenon seriously enough. Firstly, although the research literature on LGBTI, inclusion and diversity has seen an enormous growth since the 1990s, the most visible element of this movement, the Pride Parades, has received surprisingly little attention, with the notable exception of Katherine Bruce’s work. Most studies of Pride Parades focus on Pride tourism and other aspects of the resistance/consumption dilemma. This research perspective, however, is bound to the ‘commercialization’ critique and mainly asks what the corporate entanglement of the Parades does to the Pride movement. This perspective ignores what the mainstreaming of Pride might do for wider society in terms of forming an integrative value system that strengthens democratic culture.
Further, it is noteworthy that the literature has so far completely missed the semi-religious character of the Parades. With regards to this, our research will draw on the so-called ‘new’ sociology of religion, which in contrast to older sociologies focuses less on established churches, denominations and sects, and more on popular culture events like festivals, football matches and live roleplaying as the sites of new, secular religiosities. Merely identifying quasi-religious elements in the Pride Parades would limit the project to a phenomenological exercise without engaging more deeply with the Parades’ ability to act as a symbolically unifying social glue. In this regard, there are further gaps in the literature. The wider social effects of corporate sponsorship and theproblematic development of ‘Rainbow capitalism’ and ‘Pinkwashing’ have been heavily researched separately, but not brought together empirically with regards to the Pride Parades. What has attracted attention is the exploitation of gay rights and gender issues in marketing campaigns. Widely debated, for example, are the attempts by large multinationals to link consumer brands to particular gender-related causes, such as breast cancer, and to capitalize on Pride through rainbow-themed merchandise. Yet, corporate sponsorship of Pride Parades has not received much attention in terms of its potential broader social effects. Hence, there is little knowledge about the organizational drivers of such corporate engagement, the reception of sponsorship among different stakeholders (e.g. media, tourism industry, etc.), and the long-term effect of such sponsorship on intrinsic motivation within the civil society groups that make up the Pride movement.
Methods and Theoretical Approach
This project employs methods from the fields of ethnography, organizational studies, the sociology of religion and social history, and applies them in order to study the preparations for, the conduct and the after-effects of World Pride Parade in Copenhagen in August 2021. This event, which might see as many as two million visitors and participants, affords an exceptional opportunity to study in situ the emergence of a broadly unifying social ritual. Unlike other researchers who have studied the Pride movement, our project focuses on how the civil-religious elements of the Parade are co-created by Pride activists and corporate sponsors. Theoretically, the project thus assumes that Pride as an emerging civil religion is the outcome of complex and often implicit interactions and negotiation processes between the Pride organizers and their corporate partners.
The project operationalizes the concept of civil religion by framing it within affect theory and critical performativity. Affect theory suggests that subjects are always already constituted by preconscious, embodied feelings. Theories of critical performativity, in turn, suggest that social norms are constituted and changed not so much by activations of language but instead by the socio-material environments within which these norms exist. Pride Parades are part of a new kind of socio-material environment for social norms and values, and they provide the scenes for intensely affective, self-transcending experiences. Such experiences of collective self-transcendence are typically associated with the sacred aspects of religions. Civil religions allow groups of people an experience of rising above the mundaneness of daily life by worshipping values held in higher regard, such as shared myths and national heroes. Pride Parades provide such self-transcending experiences and an affective environment that makes participants feel they stand up for something higher than themselves. These experiences then enable the performative creation of broadly integrative values and norms. In the case of Pride, these values and norms circulate around human rights and the sacredness of the person. Pride Parades celebrate this sacredness and help reinforce the universal idea of love as an inalienable human right. This project will therefore analyze how organizers and participants go through stages of embodied and affective self-transformation and self-transcendence that lead them to worship higher values, in our case the value system of universal human rights.
Empirical Research
Subproject 1
(Jannick Friis Christensen)
The main part of the empirical research will be carried out in form of a three-year post-doctoral research project. Based on an organizational ethnography of the Copenhagen Pride movement and participant observation at Pride Parades in Denmark, this project will study at close hand the preparations for the 2021 World Pride event. Interviews and videography at various events will be used to produce data on how activists and Parade participants enact and then report on their emotional stages before, during and after the events. These data will be used to identify stages of self-transformation at the events which then create a sense of common purpose and collective normativity that may last even after the events have finished. The postdoctoral project will also study the activation and social reception of corporate interest in the Pride movement. The postdoctoral researcher will therefore study the effects that the presence at exhibits and on floats has on corporate participants as regards their own affective self-transformation. The growing importance of these corporate participants has of course not remained unopposed. Since 2018, alternative Parades are being held in Copenhagen that celebrate LGTBI as a counter-cultural movement and reject any corporate involvement. In the study of the reception of Pride as a public ritual, taking in both ‘external’ (homophobic) and ‘internal’ (anti-corporate) counters to Pride is central. Therefore, the project will produce qualitative data through interviews with the organizers of the Nørrebro (counter) Pride Parade as well as with corporate sponsors.
Subproject 2
(Stefan Schwarzkopf)
Follows how corporations that once supported mainstream Christianity are now lining up to create a new (civil) religion. In order to test the hypothesis that the interaction of corporate sponsors and civil society actors generates a civil religious ritual with wider integrative potential for society, it is of course important to find out howand why Pride Parades initially came to feature floats from private companies. This subproject will develop a genealogy of the Pride Parades and mainly draw on document analysis in order to study how these Parades, which once began as smallish counter-culture events that stressed the recognition of gay communities, over time managed to link themselves to the higher cause of human rights. Looking at the historical evidence on how the Parades positioned themselves, this transformation was not teleologically preordained but required a shift in both language and performances. This part of the project will involve a research trip to the Hagley Archive, the largest repository of American company archives, in order to study how corporations first found their way to supporting the Pride Parades.
Subproject 3
(Sine Nørholm Just)
Aims to find out how the Pride Parades and associated events become publicized and thematically framed. Empirically, the subproject will focus on social and mainstream media discourses surrounding the LGBTI movement before, during and after the Pride Parades, and especially in the run-up to and the aftermath of World Pride Week 2021, and it will map how the crowd affects generated at the Parades then circulate publicly. Discursive framings as they emerge in the public sphere are very important to study, since civil religions only work if they are widely mediated. It is through mediated discursive framings that the sacrality of the person becomes a naturally accepted mind-set not only for activists who promote the LGBTI agenda and the hundreds of thousands of participants at the Parades in Copenhagen, but in fact for the millions of people who are not participating.
Subprojects 1 and 2 will be based at CBS and subproject 3 at Roskilde University. The project’s Advisory Board consists of a world-leading researcher and two practitioners. Karen Lee Ashcraft is Professor in the Department of Communication and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research examines how relations of difference – gender, sexuality and race – shape organizations. She will act as a Keynote Speaker at the 2020 ‘Gender, Work and Organization’ conference. Further, there will be two practitioners represented, one from Happy Copenhagen and one from Danske Industri, ensuring the project’s engagement with Danish civil society and industry organizations.