Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Online First

The study examined how LGBTQ individuals negotiate their identities in the Malaysian heteronormative society using the Discourse-Historical Approach. In-depth interviews were carried out with 13 LGBTQ individuals to find out the discursive strategies they used in describing the triggers for coming out, their experiences, and the reasons for their struggles. The analysis of the interview data showed that the participants used the “destiny” and “rights” arguments to counter the “legal”, “religious” and “traditional values” arguments used by heterosexuals to reject them. Referents and personal pronouns were selectively used by LGBTQ participants to present different perspectives, “us” versus “them” (heterosexuals), “I” and other LGBTQ individuals, and “I” versus “they” or “you” (other sexual orientations). The findings have implications that are relevant to mitigation of LGBTQ identities in contexts which have strong heteronormative norms due to legal, religion and traditional values.

This case study focuses on the educational materials created by an NGO drop-in centre for the queer/questioning community in a Cambodian city. These materials consist of bilingual posters (English and Khmer) on display at the centre which provide explanations to those who make use of this space about diverse gender/sexual identities (LGBTQ+), as well as online resources featured on the NGO’s website/social media that raise awareness of these issues at both local and global levels. The study seeks to gain critical insight into the use of certain linguistic resources for sexuality education at this site of instruction. To do so, we present a multimodal discourse analysis of a sample of the materials, together with an analysis of metapragmatic reflections drawn from interviews conducted with the centre’s director. We therefore attend to how multilingual linguistic resources, and other semiotic forms, are being used to foster and shape knowledges about gender and sexualities at this site of community engagement, and how a metapragmatic negotiation of these knowledges in the interview reveals identity work that impacts these linguistic choices and their potential effects.

This study adopts three-level narrative positioning to analyze the construction of the closet and integrate the identity- and desired-centered approaches to language and sexuality. In two coming-out narratives, the same-sex desiring Indian immigrants in the U.S. portray their heterosexually married counterparts as ‘deceiving and hiding’. In their recounts (level 1), the narrators position themselves opposite these story characters to create an ‘open and honest’ self. In the interaction (level 2), they evoke shared cultural knowledge with the interviewer regarding the pressure from family. Against the socio-historical context (level 3), the narrators’ outness is accentuated through such authenticating conditions as one’s marital status and nationality. Such coming-out binarism reinforces a normativity that validates ‘out’ homosexuality while/by discrediting its ‘closeted’ form. The theoretical integration highlights the interviewer’s role in coming-out research and illustrates the exclusionary force of coming out that reconfigures same-sex desires into hierarchized, intelligible sexual identities.

This paper is a sociolinguistic study of the linguistic landscape of signboards in Singapore hawker centres. It examines the language(s) displayed on the signboards of 2,145 stalls in the 20 largest hawker centres in Singapore. Hawker centres in Singapore are open-air eating places patronised by thousands of people each day. With less government intervention in the languages that can be displayed on hawker centre signboards, the signs reflect the languages used and identities adopted by the masses in a multilingual setting. This language ecology enables us to observe how languages interact at individual and societal levels in hawker centres and how linguistic diversity is maintained despite the apparent widespread use of English in Singapore. We examine how besides the monolingual, bilingual and multilingual and hybrid signboards, hawker centres are unique habitats in this language ecology where non-Mandarin dialects are preserved, and traditional Chinese characters are commonly seen, in a globalised Singapore. The hawker centres showcase a linguistic landscape of identity, diversity, and continuity.

Medical tourism industry is currently viewed as one of the lucrative sources of income for some countries and in essence, owes much of its reputation and success to private hospitals and the Internet ( Connell, 2006 ). However, how these private hospitals discursively present themselves to prospective health tourists in order to entice them to use their medical services rather than their rivals’ still remains under-researched. Following the ESP genre school, this study seeks to explore the “About Us” sections of private hospitals’ websites and aims to see how such sections are rhetorically designed and constructed. Using Bhatia’s ( 1993 , 2004 ) move structures for promotional texts, this study examines the rhetorical structure of the constituent webpages of the “About Us” sections of forty-one Malaysian private hospitals’ websites. Our study demonstrates how Malaysian private hospitals utilize a number of cognitive structures to present and promote themselves in their “About Us” sections. Our findings are, in general, beneficial for the private hospitals in Malaysia or elsewhere in the world, and in particular, are helpful for novice medical website designers.