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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 3.Method and data
- 4.Results
- 4.1Keywords and semantic mapping
- 4.2Concordance and collocation
- 4.3
Homosexuality/homosexual
- 4.4
Gay
- 5.Discussion
- 5.1The state and the status quo
- 5.2Civil society and change
- 6.Concluding remarks
- Notes
-
References
References
Ang, Peng Hwa & Nadarajan, Berlinda
1996 Censorship and the internet: A Singapore perspective.
Communications of the ACM 39(6): 72–78.
Anthony, Laurence
2011 AntConc. Tokyo: Waseda University.
[URL]
Baker, Paul
2004 ‘Unnatural acts’: Discourses of homosexuality within the House of Lords debates on gay male law reform.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(1): 88–106.
Baker, Paul, Gabrielatos, Costas & Khosravinik, Majid
2008 A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press.
Discourse & Society 19(3): 273–306.
Baker, Paul
2010 Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Baker, Paul
2014 ‘Bad wigs and screaming mimis’: Using corpus-assisted techniques to carry out critical discourse analysis of the representation of trans people in the British press. In
Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies,
Christopher Hart &
Piotr Cap (eds), 211–235. London: Bloomsbury.
Channel News Asia
2008 31 registrations at Speakers’ Corner one month after relaxed rules.
[URL] (
October 12 2020)
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.
Chua, Lynette
2014 Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Gabrielatos, Costas
2018 Keyness analysis: Nature, metrics and techniques. In
Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review.
Charlotte Taylor &
Anna Marchi (eds), 225–258. Oxford: Routledge.
Gellner, Ernst
1959 Words and Things. London: Routledge.
George, Cherian
2007 Consolidating authoritarian rule: Calibrated coercion in Singapore.
The Pacific Review 20(2): 127–145.
The Guardian
2019 Star Wars: Lesbian Kiss Cut from the Rise of Skywalker in Singapore.
[URL] (
October 12 2020)
The Independent
2019 ST edits out portion of Pink Dot story that said LHY and family had attended the rally.
[URL] (
October 12 2020)
Jones, Lucy & Collins, Luke
Kilgarriff, Adam, Rychlý, Pavel, Smrž, Pavel & Tugwell, David
2004 The Sketch Engine. 2004.
Information Technology (ITRI) 81: 105–116.
Kilgarriff, Adam, Baisa, Vít, Bušta, Jan, Jakubíček, Miloš, Kovář, Vojtěch, Michelfeit, Jan, Pavel, Rychlý & Suchomel, Vít
2014 The Sketch Engine: Ten years on.
Lexicography 11: 7–36.
Lee, Terence
2005 Gestural politics: Civil society in “new” Singapore.
Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 20(2): 132–154.
Liu, Xi
forthcoming.
‘But if Taiwan legalizes same-sex marriage…’: Discourses of homophobia and nationalism in a Chinese antigay community online.
Critical Discourse Studies.
Loh, Chee Kong
2011 Investigative journalism in Singapore. In
The AWARE Saga: Civil Society and Public Morality in Singapore,
Terence Chong (ed), 96–105. Singapore: NUS Press.
Mothership
2019 Lee Hsien Yang attends Pink Dot for first time with Li Huanwu & Heng Yirui.
[URL] (
October 12 2020)
Ooi, Can-Seng
2010 Political pragmatism and the creative economy: Singapore as a city for the arts.
International Journal of Cultural Policy 16(4): 403–417.
Phillips, Robert
2020 Virtual Activism: Sexuality, the Internet, and a Social Movement in Singapore. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
PinkDot.sg
2020 FAQ: Things to know about Pink Dot.
[URL] (
October 12 2020)
POFMA Office
2019 Regulations.
[URL] (
October 12 2020)
Rodan, Garry
2003 Embracing electronic media but suppressing civil society: Authoritarian consolidation in Singapore.
The Pacific Review 16(4): 503–524.
Santonocito, Carmen S.
2019 LGBT people in the speeches of Italian and British PMs: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis.
Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 11(2): 187–212.
Sinclair, John
1991 Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singapore Department of Statistics
The Straits Times
2016 Blogger Amos Lee Arrested Again.
[URL] (
October 12 2020)
The Straits Times
2017 Pink Dot Rally to have Barricades, Security Officers, as well as Checks of Bags and ID.
[URL] (
October 12 2020)
The Straits Times
2019 Fake News Law Invoked for the First Time over Facebook Post.
[URL] (
October 12 2020)
Stubbs, Michael
1996 Text and Corpus Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tan, Chris
2015 Pink Dot: Cultural and sexual citizenship in gay Singapore.
Anthropological Quarterly 88(4): 969–996.
Thio, Li-Ann
2003 Singapore: Regulating political speech and the commitment ‘to build a democratic society.’
International Constitutional Law Journal 1(3): 516–524.
Today Online
2017 Only Singaporeans and PRs allowed to attend Pink Dot 2017: Organisers.
[URL] (
October 12 2020)
Wang, Guofeng & Ma, Xueqin
2021 Representations of LGBTQ+ issues in China in its official English-language media: A corpus-assisted critical discourse study.
Critical Discourse Studies 18(2): 188–206.
Wilkinson, Mark
2019 ‘Bisexual oysters’: A diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis of critical representation of bisexuals in The Times between 1957 and 2017.
Discourse & Communication 13(2): 249–267.
Yanita, Selly Rizki & Suhardijanto, Totok
2020 Corpus-based analysis of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender representations in Republika.
Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities 28(1): 143–160.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
García León, Javier E. & Mónica Rodríguez-Castro
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 march 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.