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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.

This commentary comprises two parts. In the first part, different ways 'ideological manoeuvres' performed in and around Pink Dot discourses in Singapore and Hong Kong, as evinced in this special issue, are highlighted. 'Ideological manoeuvres' refer to the ideological actions and skilful management undertaken by social actors, explicitly or implicitly, to bring about or secure a tactical end in support of, or in opposition to, the Pink Dot LGBT social movement. In the second part, how the ideological manoeuvres are on-goingly shaped by, and shape, the geopolitics of gender/sexuality in Singapore and Hong Kong are discussed. In this regard, two areas are highlighted: the politics of Pink Dot's expressed apoliticism; and the transnational purchase of Pink Dot's mode of political organising. Both of these areas 'speak to' a critical project on the decolonisation of gender/sexual knowledge-making and practice in these two Asian contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pink Dot SG is an LGBTQ social movement in Singapore, which since its inception in 2009 organizes an annual free‐to‐all public gathering in the Speaker's Corner at Hong Lim Park. Over the years, the gathering has grown in size, and has gained national and international visibility. Prior to the event each year, a set of official YouTube promotional videos is released on its website in order to announce the event and garner support for the movement and participation at the event. In this article, I examine the politics of language performances in the videos from 2009 to 2019, which seeks to blend social legitimacy and authenticity in strategic ways in achieving a 'linguistic homonationalism'. Linguistic homonationalism, in this study, refers to the harnessing of language ideological choices to align with nationalistic values in the promotion of LGBTQ interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Singapore, top down public education campaigns have long been a mode of governance by which the conduct of citizens is constantly regulated. This article examines how in two fairly recent campaigns, a new approach to campaign communication is used that involves media interdiscursivity, viz., the mixing of discourses and genres in which the media constitute a significant element. The present approach involves the appropriation of a popular local television character, ‘Phua Chu Kang’, in order to address the public through educational rap music videos. Media interdiscursivity is based on an attempt to engage the public via a discourse of the ‘lifeworld’. The present article analyzes the ‘lifeworld’ discourse in terms of a combination of two processes, ‘informalization’ (the use of informal and conversational modes of address) and ‘communitization’ (the semiotic construction of a community of people). The dual processes are examined and discussed in relation to the choice of Phua Chu Kang as an ‘ordinary’ and almost ‘real’ person, including his informal register and speech style; his use of Singlish; and his construction of ‘community.’ The presence of Singlish, in particular, is interesting because (despite the official disdain for the language) it is included as part of PCK’s public performance of the lifeworld. The article concludes by considering this form of media interdiscursivity as the government’s shrewd way of achieving its social governance goals. [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]

In this article, I introduce the concept of ‘strategic egalitarianism’ in relation to women's co-optation into nationalist projects in Singapore. By strategic egalitarianism, I mean the granting of equality to women that is contingent upon meeting particular pragmatic nationalist objectives. For example, the granting of equal educational and employment opportunities by the government in the 1960s was necessitated by Singapore's economic survival as a newly emerging nation. By the 1980s, another pragmatic national concern dealing with rapid decline in population growth emerged, requiring that women prioritise the role of motherhood. A complicating factor in the procreationist discourse is the government's eugenic policy that favours the ‘right’ kind of women, in particular, to bear the ‘right’ kind of babies for the continued vitality of the nation. In the course of this article, I examine the problem with strategic egalitarianism, which shifts its ground depending on the nationalist goals of the day, and the implications this has for Singapore women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, an issue that has received plenty of national publicity in Singapore is the growing trend for well-educated women to remain single. The oft-cited reason for the trend is male dispreference for marrying women of an equal or higher educational standing than themselves. Arising from this situation, a series of `educational' ads was launched by the government. In this study, two such ads are closely analysed within a critical discourse analysis approach which draws upon M.A.K. Halliday's functional grammar. I argue that although one of the ads contains potential ingredients for correcting male chauvinism and promoting true gender equality, the ads taken as a set are really concerned with maintaining the social status quo between the sexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]