Homonationalist discourse as a politics of pragmatic resistance in Singapore's Pink Dot movement: Towards a southern praxis

Abstract

Pink Dot SG is a non‐profit social movement launched by LGBTQ Singaporeans to rally support for Singapore's LGBTQ community. Every year, since its inception in 2009, it organises a free‐to‐all public event, which attracts increasingly larger crowds. In this article, I undertake a critical multimodal analysis of one of its official promotional videos, in order to show how a discourse of homonormative nationalism, or homonationalism, is constructed within it. Although from a radical queer perspective especially of the North, homonationalism is construed as problematic in that it leaves heteronormativity unchallenged and appears to be depoliticised, in the case of the Pink Dot movement, I argue, the discourse works tactically as a form of ‘doing’ a politics of pragmatic resistance within an illiberal sociopolitical context. Therefore, although it appears assimilationist and complicit with wider heteronormative and state structures, from the perspective of a southern praxis it can be re‐conceptualised as a contextualised form of resistance that demonstrates the resilience, creativity and agency of a queer subaltern constituency in Singapore.