Weirdwashing
Capitalism & Non-Conformity; Co-option & Commodified Quirks
Capitalist culture has an uneasy relationship with non-conformity.
Individuality is celebrated, in principle: a stock talking point against all forms of socialism has long been that socialism mandates conformity, while capitalism promotes individual self-expression. Heroes are non-conformists almost by definition, and capitalist culture loves heroes (heroic figures in Communist propaganda have often been nameless workers, which is a different kind of thing).
An inability to fit in is a ubiquitous element in the back-stories of people who achieve extraordinary things, both fictional and real. Being an outsider is seen as romantic.
But then, the villains in fiction are very often non-conformists too — and our culture obsesses over its villains almost as much as it loves its heroes. Notably, the ways that villains don’t conform are far more likely to be identifiably queer-coded (and often Jewish-coded).
Regardless, non-conformity sells. Everybody, it seems, wants to be different from everyone else. This is a problem on a number of levels, starting with the basic fact that if everybody’s special, then nobody’s special.
All too often, symbols of nonconformity — and resistance to the existing order of things — are carefully packaged and mass-produced, with their rougher edges sanded off for easier consumption. Weirdwashing is when people and especially corporations trade on surface indicators of strangeness, difference or rebellion, without making space for the real thing.
As well as reducing political movements to little more than marketable images, this can lead to signifiers of real, important differences between people — which have often been targets for othering and stigma — catching on among people with the social power to bear them without getting any trouble for it. As well as heavily diluting the meaning they held for the people they came from, this usually does little to prevent those people still being stigmatised for the same things.
Traditionally Black hairstyles are one much-discussed example of this. Styles that are popular with Black people (both for deep cultural reasons, and because they are just very practical for kinky hair) have often been suppressed in white-dominated societies: prohibited in schools and workplaces, and so on. It can annoying, to say the least, for people who have been punished for certain choices to see other people make those choices with no repercussions: adopting them, minus the practicality and cultural significance, as generic markers of nonconformity (or fashion statements).
A best-case scenario might see this adoption of other people’s cultural signifiers learning something from the relevant culture, while leading to greater acceptance of practices for the less-privileged people who originated them; it might even result in some fruitful hybridisation. On the other hand, a worst-case scenario could see even more stigma added, as these cultural expressions become associated with naive attempts at rebelliousness, often with confused mythology attached, while their original meanings are buried.
The more privileged a person is, the easier it is for them to step outside the bounds of normativity. Rich white straight men get to be celebrated for their eccentricity; everyone else has to be careful how they tread. As the film-maker Alice Lowe memorably put it, “being a woman is weird, and you’re allowed one weird. Being surreal is two weirds, and you’re not allowed two weirds… Two weirds is too weird.” If someone is very lucky, their perceived genius might compensate at least a little for their failure to be a rich white straight man, but the pressure to be ‘conventional’ and unchallenging gets greater for every way that a person is marginalised. Acceptance can often be stiflingly conditional.
I think it’s important for everyone to be proud of their weirdness — and I do think that everyone is weird in one way or another (some more than others) — but it is vital to recognise how much harder it is for some people to be openly weird. My hope is that Weird Pride will help make it easier for a lot more people to be open about their weirdness, especially people whose baseline existence is minoritised. That has to include people who aren’t excitingly weird, in ways that can make them a lot of money; who are just intensely passionate, disablingly neurodivergent, different — in ways that are not marketable.
Everyone deserves the chance to understand that their weirdness can be a strength.
