Tracing Intraregional Discursive Flows via Pink Dot Events in Singapore and Hong Kong

In this talk I aim to extend discourse analytical research that has focused on Pink Dot LGBTQ+ events in Singapore to those of Hong Kong. Owing to imagined perceptions of Singapore and Hong Kong’s shared (majority Chinese) ethnic, cultural, and “illiberal” socio-political characteristics, I engage queer Sinophone perspectives on sexualities 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 a recent Pink Dot Hong Kong promotional video, I investigate to what extent this video follows discursive strategies identified in the literature on Pink Dot Singapore as “pragmatic resistance”. In this way, these strategies, like those in the Singapore promotional materials, tend to make use of (homo)normative narratives in order to comply with dominant cultural and regulatory modes of citizenship and conduct. In contrast, however, the constructions of sexual citizenship in the Hong Kong video clearly diverge from the more (homo)nationalistic strategies of Pink Dot Singapore towards a much greater ambivalence, where national alignments are noticeably absent. As a result, these constructions bring into question readings of the transnational Pink Dot movement as a homonationalist enterprise, grounded in imaginings of Pan-Asian (Chinese) normative social and cultural convergences. I therefore suggest that the ambivalences surrounding national identity, citizenship and state-sponsored values in the Hong Kong videos indicate an emergent relocalisation of Pink Dot Singapore strategies that draw attention to how queer movements in the city are being shaped within the current Hong Kong socio- political climate