Cover not available
Article published In:
Pink Dot: Discursive Formations, Constructions, and Contestations
Edited by Adi Saleem Bharat, Pavan Mano and Robert Phillips
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 10:2] 2021
► pp. 105–128

For family, for friends, for (true) love

Negotiating discourses of love within the LGBTQ community in Singapore

ORCID logo | National University of Singapore, Singapore | King’s College London, UK
ORCID logo | National University of Singapore, Singapore
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.
Keywords: Singapore, Christianity, TrueLove.Is, Pink Dot, Systemic Functional Linguistics, homophobia, discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Public discourses of same-sex desire in Singapore: TrueLove.Is and Pink Dot
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1From Pink Dot with love
    • 2.2TrueLove.Is: Contemporary interactions between Christianity and same-sex desire
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Christianity in the promotional materials of TrueLove.Is and Pink Dot
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1SFL-assisted discourse analysis
      • 4.1.1Parataxis in Tryphena’s Story
      • 4.1.2Hypotaxis in Tryphena’s Story
      • 4.1.3Parataxis in Our Heroes – Joan & Pauline
      • 4.1.4Hypotaxis and embedded parataxis in Our Heroes – Joan & Pauline
    • 4.2Comparing discourses of love in TrueLove.Is and Pink Dot
      • 4.2.1(Ir)reconcilability of sexual and religious identity
      • 4.2.2Conditionality of solidarity and acceptance
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion: Towards a contingent sexual politics
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 16 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.20009.hir
References (51)
References
Abdullah, Walid Jumblatt. 2019. Electoral secularism in Singapore: Political responses to homosexuality. Asian Studies Review 43(2): 239–255. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bertone, Chiara & Franchi, Marina. 2014. Suffering as the path to acceptance: Parents of gay and lesbian young people negotiating Catholicism in Italy. Journal of GLBT Family Studies 10(1/2): 58–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borba, Rodrigo, Hall, Kira & Hiramoto, Mie. 2020. Feminist refusal meets enmity. Gender and Language 14(1): 1–7. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Jianlin. 2013. Singapore’s culture war over section 377A: Through the lens of public choice and multilingual research. Law & Social Inquiry 38(1): 106–137. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Chong, Terence & Goh, Daniel PS. 2014. Asian pentecostalism: Revivals, mega-churches, and social engagement. In Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia, Bryan S. Turner & Oscar Salemink (eds), 402–417. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chua, Lynette. 2012. Pragmatic resistance, law, and social movements in authoritarian states: The case of gay collective action in Singapore. Law & Society Review 46(4): 713–748. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
. 2018. The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as A Way of Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Colla, Elliott. 2013. In praise of insult: Slogan genres, slogan repertoires and innovation. Review of Middle East Studies 47(1): 37–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DiStefano, Teresa M., Croteau, James, Anderson, Mary Z., Kampa-Kokesch, Sheila & Bullard, Melissa A. 2000. Experiences of being heterosexual allies to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people: A qualitative exploration. Journal of College Counseling 3(2): 131–141. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duggan, Lisa. 2003. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Edenborg, Emil. 2018. Homophobia as geopolitics: ‘Traditional values’ and the negotiation of Russia’s place in the world. In Gendering Nationalism: Intersections of Nation, Gender and Sexuality, Jon Mulholland, Nicola Montagna & Erin Sanders-McDonagh (eds), 67–87. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enguix, Begonya. 2009. Identities, sexualities and commemorations: Pride parades, public space and sexual dissidence. Anthropological Notebooks 15(2): 15–33.Google Scholar
Finlay, Barbara & Walther, Carol S. 2003. The relation of religious affiliation, service attendance, and other factors to homophobic attitudes among university students. Review of Religious Research 44(4): 370–393. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gabb, Jacqui. 2001. Querying the discourses of love: An analysis of contemporary patterns of love and the stratification of intimacy within lesbian families. The European Journal of Women’s Studies 8(3): 313–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ghaziani, Amin. 2011. Post-gay collective identity construction. Social Problems 58(1): 99–125. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Go, Christian. 2019. Love is love is love: Politicizing affect in the linguistic landscape of the Metro Manila Pride March. (Paper presented at the 26th Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference, University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
Golebiowski, Zofia. 2006. The distribution of discoursal salience in research papers: Relational hypotaxis and parataxis. Discourse Studies 8(2): 259–278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grant, Ruby, Beasy, Kim & Coleman, Bianca. 2021. Homonormativity and celebrating diversity: Australian school staff involvement in gay-straight alliances. International Journal of Inclusive Education 25(8): 960–975. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guo, Ting. 2020. Politics of love: Love as a religious and political discourse in modern China through the lens of political leaders. Critical Research on Religion 8(1): 39–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hiramoto, Mie & Teo, Cherise Shi Ling. 2015. Heteronormative love makes a house a home: Multimodal analysis of luxury housing ads in Singapore. Journal of Language and Sexuality 4(2): 223–253. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Itakura, Kyohei. 2015. Making Japan ‘out-and-proud’ through not-yet-consensual translation: A case study of Tokyo Rainbow Pride’s website. Queer Cats Journal of LGBTQ Studies 1(1): 3–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ji, Peter, Du Bois, Steve N. & Finnessy, Patrick. 2009. An academic course that teaches heterosexual students to be allies to LGBT communities: A qualitative analysis. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 21(4): 402–429. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ji, Peter & Fujimoto Ma, Ken. 2013. Measuring heterosexual LGBT ally development: A Rasch analysis. Journal of Homosexuality 60(12): 1695–1725. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnston, Lynda T. 2005. Queering Tourism: Paradoxical Performances at Gay Pride Parades. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lazar, Michelle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leap, William. 2020. Language Before Stonewall: Language, Sexuality, History. Cham: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meyer, Doug. 2014. Resisting hate crime discourse: Queer and intersectional challenges to neoliberal hate crime laws. Critical Criminology 22(1): 113–125. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mikulak, Magdalena. 2019. Godly homonormativity: Christian LGBT organizing in contemporary Poland. Journal of Homosexuality 66(4): 487–509. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, Shannon J. & Stack, Katie. 2014. African-American lesbian and queer women respond to Christian-based homophobia. Journal of GLBT Family Studies 10(3): 243–268. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ministry of Community Development. 1995. Singapore: A Pro-Family Society. Singapore: Ministry of Community Development.Google Scholar
Ng, Yi-Sheng. 2017. Pride versus prudence: The precarious queer politics of Pink Dot. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 18(2): 238–250. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Grady, Gerard. 2019. SFL and critical discourse analysis. In The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Geoff Thompson, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine & David Schönthal (eds), 462–484. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Park, Joseph SY. 2009. Regimenting languages on Korean television: Subtitles and institutional authority. Text & Talk: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies 29(5): 547–570. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peterson, David. 2011a. Neoliberal homophobic discourse: Heteronormative human capital and the exclusion of queer citizens. Journal of Homosexuality 58(6/7): 742–757. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011b. The ‘basis for a just, free, and stable society’: Institutional homophobia and governance at the Family Research Council. Gender and Language 4(2): 257–286. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016. Homophobic grammar: The role of transitivity and phoricity in homophobic formation. Journal of Language and Sexuality 5(1): 61–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Robert. 2008. Queering online: Transnational sexual citizenship in Singapore. (Unpublished) PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine.Google Scholar
. 2013. ‘We aren’t that different’: Globe-hopping discourse and queer rights in Singapore. Journal of Language and Sexuality 2(1): 122–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. ‘And I am also gay’: Illiberal pragmatics, neoliberal homonormativity and LGBT activism in Singapore. Anthropologica 56(1): 45–54.Google Scholar
Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Radics, George Baylon. 2021. Challenging antisodomy laws in Singapore and the former British colonies of ASEAN. Journal of Human Rights 20(2): 211–227. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ream, Geoffrey L. & Savin-Williams, Ritch C. 2005. Reconciling Christianity and positive non-heterosexual identity in adolescence, with implications for psychological well-being. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education 2(3): 19–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rowlett, Benedict & Go, Christian. 2021. “The amazingly fabulous tuktuk race”: Mobility and carnival praxis in the semiotic landscape of Phnom Penh Pride. (Paper presented at the 11th Conference of the International Language and Gender Association, Queen Mary University of London [online])
Schuck, Kelly D. & Liddle, Becky J. 2001. Religious conflicts experienced by lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy 5(2): 63–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spencer, Leland G. & Barnett, Joshua Trey. 2016. Rhetorics of incommensurability: Disarticulating queer Christianity in mainstream news coverage of the Soulforce Equality Ride. Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture 1(2): 141–158. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tan, Chris. 2015. Pink Dot: Cultural and sexual citizenship in gay Singapore. Anthropological Quarterly 88(4): 969–996. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
VanderStouwe, Chris. 2016. “Straight-ish”: Constrained agency and the linguistic constructions of sexual identities, desires, and practices among men seeking men. (Unpublished) PhD dissertation, UC Santa Barbara.Google Scholar
Yue, Audrey & Zubillaga-Pow, Jun. 2012. Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

Ding, Gao
2024. Queer Singaporean futures after 377a: establishing homonormativity as concrete labour. Journal of Gender Studies ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Khoo, Jill & Christian Ilbury
2024. Navigating ‘safe’ and ‘non-safe’ queer spaces. Journal of Language and Sexuality 13:2 ► pp. 201 ff. DOI logo
Ng, Reuben, Ting Yu Joanne Chow, Wenshu Yang & Stefano Federici
2024. News media coverage of LGBT identities over 10 years in a 400-million-word corpus. PLOS ONE 19:4 ► pp. e0300385 ff. DOI logo
Rowlett, Benedict J. L. & Christian Go
2024. “The Amazingly Fabulous Tuk tuk Race”: mobility and carnival praxis in the semiotic landscape of Phnom Penh Pride. Social Semiotics 34:3 ► pp. 430 ff. DOI logo
Meyer, Seth J.
2023. Social equity and LGBTQ populations in African public administration: A macro‐ and micro‐approach. Public Administration Review 83:1 ► pp. 181 ff. DOI logo
Pak, Vincent
2021. Coming out ‘softly’. Gender and Language 15:3 DOI logo
Pak, Vincent
2023. Lighting, signing, showing: The circulability of Pink Dot's counterpublic discourse in Singapore. Journal of Sociolinguistics 27:1 ► pp. 24 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.