In this paper, I follow recent moves within critical discourse studies to understand how socio-historically marginalized groups respond to and resist unjust power structures (e.g. Lazar 2017), by presenting a multimodal critical discourse analysis of data drawn from the websites/social media outreach of 10 transnational LGBTQ rights organizations (e.g. mission statements and YouTube videos by institutions like AllOut). Grounded in queer-theoretical debates about ‘homonormativity’ (Duggan 2003), my analysis focuses on two pervasive rhetorics within advocacy discourse: a claim to global LGBTQ identity, and appeal to transnational solidarity (Altman 1997; Seckinelgin 2012). These rhetorics, achieved through linguistic, visual and material resources, reveal a number of tensions and inconsistencies; for example: they celebrate cosmopolitan progress, while unsettling it through neocolonial representation; they claim to be worldwide forces, while lacking linguistic diversity; and they praise the transformational power of love, while undermining it via a neoliberal ethos of profitability (cf. Banet-Weiser and Lapansky 2008). Ultimately, I argue that the ostensibly – to some extent, legitimately – positive messaging of transnational (Western-led) LGBTQ advocacy is in fact more complex and contingent than is widely assumed. The institutionalized and often commodified communication of LGBTQ advocacy organizations increasingly serves as guidance for how, and why, pride matters, and the means by which LGBTQ equality can be achieved. In a world riven by other longstanding material/social inequalities, it is important to retain a critical stance on the rhetorics and politics of “pride”, taking note of what is absent, mitigated or otherwise lost in slogans of resistance and progress.
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Banet-Weiser, S. and Lapansky, C. (2008) RED is the New Black: Brand Culture, Consumer Citizenship and Political Possibility. International Journal of Communication 2: 1248-1268.
Duggan, L. (2003) The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press.
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): 420–441.
Seckinelgin, H. (2012) Global civil society as shepherd: Global sexualities and the limits of solidarity from a distance. Critical Social Policy 32: 536-555.
