I went to Target in search of pride; specifically to see for myself one of their “Pride Month” displays. The store just outside of Portland looked busy enough on a Saturday and the lines at the registers were long, though that may have been due to understaffing.
The Pride display was in the front of the store but so small and tame it took me a while to find it.
There were two smaller displays in the store that I found.
I visited a second Target that shared this model, a display up front with two or three mannequins, then one or two stations reminding us to “Celebrate Pride month” and “take pride”. Very subdued.
But what about the everyday, typical Target aesthetic? I took a lap around the store to sample that, weaving through milling Mestizo housewives having bored conversations in Spanish as they rooted out children’s underwear; they appeared oblivious to the models looming over us like icons in a church. Like me they aren’t represented there, despite all the clamor about how the iconography being offered celebrates, at long last, people like them in all their glorious mediocrity. They probably haven’t even heard this schtick, don’t care and weren’t asked about it anyway.
The world as represented and celebrated in Target is overwhelmingly Black!, female and overweight.
Where it is not that it is queer, sexually ambiguous, and racially ambiguous.
Beyond that there seems to be a trend in freckles, lots of freckles, in particular the freckles of the Black! “redbone” type, as the manifestation of diverse ancestry.
Also vitiligo. Because of course.
Fashion advertising has long had a thing for gap-toothed Black! women; here they seem to be deployed where the need for an explicitly heterosexual pitch (selling mascara to aspiring hoes, for instance) is tempered with race.
On my way out I lingered for a moment near the little Pride display up front, taking another discrete photo when a young couple–heterosexual, normal–working their way through the rows of clothing behind, stumbled into it.
“Gay.” One of them said, with a depressed revulsion, as if they’d been combing the beach and came upon a dead seagull. They turned about.
Whether or not the apparent easing up on propaganda for this year’s Pride Month is due to exhaustion I don’t know, but that exhaustion exists.
untethered 