Pride in Asia
Negotiating Ideologies, Localness, and Alternative Futures

This Element highlights the significance of semiotic practices in Asian Pride events that relocalize globalizing LGBTQ+ discursive flows.

Benedict J. L. Rowlett (Author), Pavadee Saisuwan (Author), Christian Go (Author), Li-Chi Chen (Author), Mie Hiramoto (Author)

9781009415798, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 13 February 2025

104 pages
22.9 x 15.1 x 0.6 cm, 0.18 kg

This Element provides a transregional overview of Pride in Asia, exploring the multifaceted nature of Pride in contemporary LGBTQIA+ events in Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This collaborative research that combines individual studies draws on linguistic landscapes as an analytical and methodological approach. Each section examines the different manifestations of Pride as a discourse and the affordances and limitations of this discourse in facilitating the social, political, and cultural projects of LGBTQIA+ people in Asia, illustrating both commonalities and specificities in Asian Pride movements. Analyzing a variety of materials such as protest signs, t-shirts, and media reports, each section illustrates how modes of semiosis, through practice, intersect notions of gender and sexuality with broader social and political formations. The authors thus emphasize the need to view Pride not as a uniform global phenomenon but as a dynamic, locally shaped expression of LGBTQIA+ solidarity.

1. Introduction
2. Male femininity, citizenship, and democracy in the linguistic landscape of a 'pride' protest in Bangkok
3. Landscaping identity politics and class struggle in the Metro Manila pride march
4. Challenging heteronormativity and reifying tai-ness: the linguistic landscape of Taiwan LGBT+ pride
5. 'Asia's world city' as Homotopia? Surveying tensions in the linguistic landscape of the Hong Kong gay games
6. Conclusion
7. Navigating Asian pride from sexual citizenship and governmentality perspectives: commentary by Mie Hiramoto
References.

Subject Areas: Sociolinguistics [CFB]