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This article adopts the combined perspectives of critical discourse studies and (critical) intersectionality studies to examine efforts at movement-building by Pink Dot SG, an LGBTQ group, which has developed within the illiberal geopolitical space of Singapore. The term 'intersectionalisation' is introduced to refer to a reflexive meta-discursive strategy which mobilizes the intersectionality of social identities (such as gender, sexuality, race, class, generation, and nationality) to advance particular sociopolitical objectives. The article illustrates three ways intersectionalisation operates in Pink Dot's official videos: (i) to create solidarities within the LGBTQ community; (ii) to advocate for the LGBTQ community by straight allies, and (iii) to forge alliances dialogically between queer and straight communities in Singapore. The analysis of the videos shows that interactions between various assemblages of intersectional identities of privilege and marginality are brought to the fore in building the social movement, and how its discourse navigates a terrain of complicated power dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical language awareness (CLA) has aimed to raise critical consciousness in language education about the social aspects of language use, and especially the relationship between language and power, and is considered to play a significant role in enabling learners to participate effectively in democratic citizenship within and beyond the classroom. With a focus on gender representations in the media, I explain CLA's usefulness in the study of gender stereotyping, while also discussing challenges posed to CLA in the emergence of contemporary global postfeminist media representations that are ostensibly pro-women and feminist. Arguing that such postfeminist representations numb critical consciousness and create a climate of post-critique, the article addresses the need to keep open channels of critical dialog about gender and, particularly, about postfeminism. I present a case study of a peer discussion among six female undergraduate students on an online forum in a local university classroom that shows how these students “do” critical mutually and collectively in purportedly (global) postfeminist times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the power of feminine identity in contemporary advertisements addressed to young modern women in Singapore. Power femininity is a popular assumption that feminist struggles have ended, and that full equality for all women has been achieved. An analysis of power femininity in advertising is presented. Popular postfeminism is media-friendly, consumer-oriented discourse. The relationship between feminism and advertising shows two points: social advertising of this kind is rarely genuinely progressive, and popular postfeminism is a commercially strategic appropriation of certain postfeminist currents.

This paper deals with national public campaigns as a government technology of social change and control. Focusing on Singapore's National Courtesy Campaign, particularly undertaken in the public road and transport field in recent years, the study examines how the operation of this technology reflects current shifts in political practice. Two emerging tendencies within the style of contemporary governance in Singapore are identified: governance-through-community ('communitisation') and the 'softening' of the authorial voice (through 'informalisation'). A semiotic analysis involving the organisational, and especially textual (linguistic and visual design), practices of the 1999-2003 road and transport sector courtesy drive is undertaken to show how these style shifts are manifested, with particular interest in the kinds of social relations and identities that are textually projected, and the implications such a mode of governance has for the regulation of the Singaporean citizenry subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]