Disarming as a tactic of resistance in Pink Dot

Pink Dot is an annual rally in support of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people in Singapore. In a country where many prefer to avoid overt displays of dissent, Pink Dot has gained significant popular support. In this article, I explore how it has done so. Through a close multimodal analysis focusing on the use of colour, layout, and typography in a Pink Dot 2017 flyer, I demonstrate how these features work together in the Singaporean context to realize meanings of positivity, warmth, and inclusivity whilst simultaneously de-emphasizing notions of claiming rights. I argue Pink Dot discursively attenuates the potentially discordant elements of its message and marshals this apparent neutrality to gather support for its ostensibly depoliticized message – a process that I term disarming. It is an assimilationist strategy deliberately made for Singapore’s particular sociopolitical context and it has proven effective in securing mass popular support amongst Singaporeans.

A corpus-assisted analysis of the discursive construction of LGBT Singaporeans in media coverage of Pink Dot

Beginning in spring 2009 and continuing annually since, members of Singapore’s LGBT communities have assembled at Hong Lim Park at an event dubbed Pink Dot. The original goal of the gathering was to help build a more inclusive nation by standing up to discrimination faced by LGBT Singaporeans. While the early Pink Dot events were all but ignored by the mainstream state-run press, the change in tone, the increasing number of attendees, and the participation by members of the ruling People’s Action Party and their families made the gathering impossible to ignore. This paper uses a corpus-based keywords analysis to evaluate the main lexical differences between the media coverage of Pink Dot by the state-run press and that of the sociopolitical blog The Online Citizen. Two separate language corpora (State Media and Online Citizen), each containing approximately 111,000 words, were compiled from available coverage of Pink Dot dating from 2009 to 2018. Using SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004, 2014), top keywords and phrases were identified by comparing these corpora to each other. Through a preliminary exploration of the collocational environments and the concordance lines adjoining these keywords, this paper sheds light on how language is being deployed in an attempt to sway a debate of great national and regional significance.

Tracing trans-regional discursive flows in Pink Dot Hong Kong promotional videos

In this article, we extend discourse analytical research that has focused on Pink Dot events in Singapore to events in Hong Kong. As such we engage queer Sinophone perspectives to examine the simultaneously local and transregional epistemological flows that converge and diverge within the margins of the Sinophone cultural sphere. Using a multimodal analysis of two Pink Dot Hong Kong promotional videos, we investigate the extent to which these videos follow the (homo)normative and (homo)nationalist discursive strategies identified in the literature on Pink Dot Singapore. Our analysis suggests that ambivalences surrounding national identity, citizenship and state-sponsored national values in the Hong Kong videos bring into question readings of the Pink Dot movement as a (homo)nationalist enterprise, thus indicating an emergent relocalization of Pink Dot strategies that draws attention to how queer movements in Hong Kong are currently being shaped within the city’s broader sociopolitical context.

Ideological manoeuvres in and around Pink Dot

This commentary comprises two parts. In the first part, different ways ‘ideological manoeuvres’ performed in and around Pink Dot discourses in Singapore and Hong Kong, as evinced in this special issue, are highlighted. ‘Ideological manoeuvres’ refer to the ideological actions and skilful management undertaken by social actors, explicitly or implicitly, to bring about or secure a tactical end in support of, or in opposition to, the Pink Dot LGBT social movement. In the second part, how the ideological manoeuvres are on-goingly shaped by, and shape, the geopolitics of gender/sexuality in Singapore and Hong Kong are discussed. In this regard, two areas are highlighted: the politics of Pink Dot’s expressed apoliticism; and the transnational purchase of Pink Dot’s mode of political organising. Both of these areas ‘speak to’ a critical project on the decolonisation of gender/sexual knowledge-making and practice in these two Asian contexts.

For family, for friends, for (true) love

We examine promotional materials produced by two organisations in Singapore, TrueLove.Is and Pink Dot, to investigate how these two groups employ discourses of love to support their opposing views regarding the reconcilability of Christianity and same-sex desire. TrueLove.Is is a Christian ministry that encourages LGB Christian Singaporeans to “come out, come home”, while Pink Dot is Singapore’s largest and foremost LGBTQ movement. We identify similarities and differences in their persuasive discourse strategies regarding ideas of love as discussed by lesbian Christian pastors. Although they position the idea of love similarly, their agendas are completely polarised. TrueLove.Is takes the position that non-heteronormative activity is ungodly and sinful, while Pink Dot offers a reconciliation between Christianity and same-sex desire. We employ Peterson’s (2016) approach to homophobic discourse analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics and a comparative discourse analysis to investigate the ideologies that inform the two organisations’ materials about the treatment of LGBTQ Singaporeans.

Language and sexuality studies today

This article presents a short overview of the field of language and sexuality since the mid-1990s and discusses two issues that have repeatedly played a role in my own work in the field during the last decade: the incompatibility of the term homosexual with non-heteronormative language use, and the question of what counts as queer linguistic work.

Thickening language and sexuality studies

In this contribution to the special issue of the Journal of Language and Sexuality celebrating its 10th anniversary, I reflect on several key articles in the journal that related to my work in language and sexuality with queer, Latinx and bi/multilingual individuals and organizations, survey the field of language and sexuality today from my vantage point, and propose several directions for the future of language and sexuality studies, namely: to engage multilingualism, to question our ideologies as researchers, to grapple more deeply with intersectional through ethnography, and to consider age more seriously.