The business of belonging: Homocapitalism, homonormativity, and cu/queer economic geographies in São Paulo, Brazil

This paper examines the rise of corporate LGBTQ+ activism and homocapitalism in Brazil, highlighting the productive incorporation of queers into capitalism. Mobilizing transnational queer materialist critiques in tandem with critical perspectives from teoria do cu, the paper sheds light on how homonormativity operates not simply as a set of cultural norms or representational tropes, but as a structural and ideological formation that integrates queer inclusion into global circuits of capitalist accumulation while obscuring the material and historical violences sustaining those circuits. The paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the Out & Equal Forum in São Paulo, exploring how corporate investments in LGBTQ+ diversity operate within wider economic geographies that differentially fold queers into global capitalism. In so doing the paper contributes to extant debates in queer economic geography about the relationship between queerness and (homo)capitalism, underlining the importance of moving beyond hegemonic homonormativity critiques to grasp the complex, uneven ways in which queers are incorporated into (homo)capitalism.