Patriarchy Gets Funky
The Triumph of Identity Marketing

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/klein.htm
Publisher:  Marxists.org
Year Published:  2001
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX22822

How identity politics among young people through the 1980's and 1990's provided a lucrative market for corporations. From Chapter Five of the book "NO LOGO" (Flamingo).

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

As an undergraduate in the late eighties and early nineties, I was one of those students who took a while to wake up to the slow branding of university life. And I can say from personal experience that it’s not that we didn't notice the growing corporate presence on campus - we even complained about it sometimes. It's just that we couldn't get particularly worked up about it. We knew the fast food chains were setting up their stalls in the library and that profs in the applied sciences were getting awfully cozy with pharmaceutical companies, but finding out exactly what was going on in the boardrooms and labs would have required a lot of legwork, and, frankly, we were busy. We were fighting about whether Jews would be allowed in the racial equality caucus at the campus women's centre, and why the meeting to discuss it was scheduled at the same time as the lesbian and gay caucus - were the organizers implying that there were no Jewish lesbians? No black bisexuals?