Joseph Comer

Across the contemporary world, neoliberalism operates as an anticipatory regime through which mediatised conceptions of the future are aligned to an aggressive (absolute) marketisation of social life. Alongside a critical, queer-theoretical attention to homonormativity, this article uses multimodal critical discourse studies techniques to analyse how such a neoliberal future for LGBTQ people is envisioned in #HoldTight, a pride campaign by an Australian and New Zealand bank. #HoldTight focused on how the act of holding hands can be turned from a source of shame to a joyful, powerful tool for social action: ‘if you feel like letting go, hold tight’. My cultural-phenomenological analysis of #HoldTight demonstrates how this imbrication of LGBTQ rights discourse and mediatised capitalism engaged embodied, hopeful affects as semiotic resources. In this way, I argue that the bank enshrined a speculative, anticipatory chronotope of a future better world, while validating neoliberal governmentality as a benevolent form of LGBTQ agency. (Neoliberalism, multimodal critical discourse studies, queer linguistics, affect, embodiment, cultural phenomenology)

This paper underscores how articulations of/about affect establish the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of what is authorized, encouraged, redeemed, or prohibited within discourses that legitimate neoliberal governmentality. Through an exemplary analysis of LGBTQ diversity discourse data, I demonstrate how institutionalized ‘endorsements’ of diversity frame employees’ selves entirely as resources for capital, and legitimate ways that LGBTQ workers conduct themselves as feeling actors (and productive workers). This has implications far beyond the realm of LGBTQ inclusion. Building upon descriptions of discursive legitimation suggesting that strategies function in combination with one another, the process I describe, ‘affective legitimation’, is one where they cohere. Financial, bureaucratic or political-economic concerns are imbued with emotion, becoming something ‘more-than’. Diverse subjects’ authentic selfhood, innermost desires, productivity, personal and professional fulfilment, and idealized self-sufficient citizenship are grafted together – treated as equivalent, thus affirming rationales of corporate profitability and entrepreneurial self-actualization. As one speaker quoted here remarks, ‘for business it boils down to one thing’. It is vital to apprehend how contemporary discourses about workers’ capacity to feel entwine with discourses about how it feels to have ones’ labour rewarded: how sanctioned outcomes endorse certain ‘feeling rules’, and how such rules strengthen the authority and legitimacy of capitalist exploitation.

Orienting to theoretical descriptions of 'affective-discursive practices' (Wetherell) and linguistic/semiotic landscapes as 'affective regimes' (Wee), this paper accounts for (some of) the complex ways in which the experience of pandemic and lockdown was articulated and felt across the landscape of Melbourne. I employ a novel combination of autoethnographic and citizen sociolinguistic approaches as self-re exive research techniques. Working more-or-less chronologically, from the lowest ebbs to feelings of (relative) joy, importantly, this paper does not focus solely on negative articulations such as sadness or anxiety. Rather, it examines the a ective resonance of expressions of love, kindness, and resilience in the landscape, and these a ects' intersection with chronotopes during and since isolation; from being locked down, to keeping spirits up, from top-down to bottom-up. This paper concludes with an orientation to hope: to Melburnians' rejoicing in what they've achieved, and the belief that there can be an end to crisis.

In this paper, I examine LGBTQ tourism discourse about Cape Town, South Africa, which is often declared the ‘gay capital of Africa’. The paper considers the implications of such claims and how, in the specific case of Cape Town, apparently playful rhetorics obscure deep-seated inequalities under the guise of visibility, equality and globality. Using a multimodal critical discourse analysis informed by queer theory, my analysis examines the recurrent linguistic and visual production of these rhetorics in a range of LGBTQ tourism marketing materials, before focusing on the website of one key agent: Out2Africa. Ultimately, I demonstrate how, contrary to the superficially progressive and cosmopolitan discourses of LGBTQ tourism, equality is increasingly represented in consumer media as an individual attainment typified by privileged mobility rather than any true social condition. Under the sway of neoliberal capitalism, mobility is a commodity, identity, and metonym for pride, and equality becomes a slogan.

This book critically unpacks the why and how around everyday rhetorics and slogans promoting global LGBTQ equality. Examining the means by which particular discourses of progress and hope are circulated globally, it offers unique insights into how LGBTQ livelihoods, relationships, and social movements are legitimated and valued in contemporary society. Adopting an innovative critical discourse-ethnographic approach, Comer draws on scholarship from the sociolinguistics of global mobility, queer linguistics, and digital media studies, offering in-depth analyses of representations of LGBTQ identity across a range of domains. The volume examines semiotic linkages between LGBTQ tourism marketing; Cape Town, South Africa, as a locus for contemporary ideologies of global mobility and equality; diversity management practices framing LGBTQ equality as a business imperative; and humanitarian discourses within transnational LGBTQ advocacy. Autoethnographic vignettes and principles from within queer theory are incorporated by Comer's critical discourse-ethnographic approach, giving voice to personal experience in order to sharpen scholarly understanding of the relationships between everyday 'social voices', globalized neoliberal political economy, and the media. Taken together, the volume expansively (if queerly) maps what Comer refers to as 'the mediatization of equality', and will be of interest to graduate students and scholars in critical discourse studies, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, as well as those working across such fields as media studies, queer studies, and sociology.