This study examines the semiotics of homonationalism in the publicity videos of Pink Dot SG, an LGBT social movement in Singapore. Since its inception in 2009, Pink Dot has been holding an annual rally, attracting increasingly... [ view full abstract ]
This study examines the semiotics of homonationalism in the publicity videos of Pink Dot SG, an LGBT social movement in Singapore. Since its inception in 2009, Pink Dot has been holding an annual rally, attracting increasingly larger crowds by the year. This is notwithstanding the criminalization of gay sex in the authoritarian nation-state and the resolutely heteronormative public sphere surveilled by the government. One of the reasons for the tolerance of Pink Dot’s annual gala events is attributable to the movement’s homonationalistic stance. The concept of ‘homonationalism’, originally developed to describe how LGBT identities have been mobilized by Western nation-states for instrumental purposes (Puar 2007), has been adapted by Pink Dot in its publicity videos as a form of resistive politics (Lazar 2017). In other words, Pink Dot has astutely aligned the LGBT movement with patriotic values of nationalism.
Here, I analyse the official videos from 2009 to 2016 in order to show the semiotic construction of homonationalism therein. Undertaking a multimodal discourse analysis of the language, colour, visual images, photographic footages and symbolic uses of the body, I focus on two aspects of the semiotics of homonationalism in the videos: the colour symbolism of pink (Koller 2008) and ‘Pink Dot’ as a concept. The latter, in turn, is examined in terms of the semantic meanings accrued to the conceptualisation of ‘Pink Dot’ as well as the performance of a corporeal semiotics in which human bodies are configured to create, symbolically and physically, a human pink dot. The paper demonstrates the creative and pragmatic ways the social movement operates so as to carve out a legitimate visible space in the national public sphere under the watchful eyes of an illiberal government.
References
Koller, V. ‘Not just a colour: pink as a gender and sexuality marker in visual communication’, Visual Communication, 7(4).
Lazar, M. (2017) ‘Homonationalist discourse as a politics of pragmatic resistance in Singapore’s Pink Dot movement: towards a southern praxis’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 21(3).
Puar, J. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press.
