The Gay Games, a mass-scale international sporting and cultural LGBT+ event, established in the USA in the early 1980s, is travelling to Asia (Hong Kong) for the first time in its history. As such, it is expected that the event will be constructed and promoted via a consideration of the local. That is, the Games, conceived in the West and defined by its core messages of modernity, e.g. inclusivity and diversity, will be redefined as it crosses into the more 'traditional' Hong Kong space; a local space which, like all spaces, is intimately linked to broader phenomena including discourse, identity, and politics. However, this redefinition also brings with it the potential for transformation vis à vis social justice for marginalised groups in the region. In this paper, I address these broader concerns through an ethnographically grounded discourse analysis of talk emerging from interviews I have been conducting with volunteers on the Hong Kong Games organising committee. Specifically, I explore how participants, in their organisational roles, grapple with the limitations and potential exclusivities indexed by the Gay Games brand, as they redefine the event for a local Asian audience. These actions are primarily manifested in their metapragmatic reflections (Jaworski et. al., 2004; Pérez-Milans, 2016) and actions, geared towards language strategies of diversity and inclusivity that 'move beyond', or 'queer', the 'gay' of the Gay Games brand. On the one hand, such strategies include rebranding the event through the use of specific Chinese characters to ambiguate the (controversial) politics of sexual identity and citizenship represented by the word 'gay' in this socio-political context. On the other hand, the language choices and strategies they discuss are aimed at breaking down gender binaries carried over from previous iterations of the games, as well as in competitive sports and their organisations more generally. In this way, the volunteers speak of, for example, how trans-inclusivity can be achieved through the language used in registration forms for the event, and in signs that mark out spaces of inclusivity in sports and cultural venues. Finally, I also attend to how these volunteers speak of their own developing awareness and understanding of a (queer) language of diversity and inclusivity that helps them integrate their own perspectives with this community of Gay Games volunteers. This queer applied linguistic study of the Hong Kong Gay Games therefore aims to provide beginning insights into how queer linguistic approaches, as negotiated and used by non-specialists, are impacting language choices and actions on the ground, with respect to public facing LGBT+ events in Asian spaces.
References
Jaworski, A., Coupland, N., & Galasiński, D. (2004). Metalanguage: Why now? In A. Jaworski, N. Coupland & D. Galasiński (eds.), Metalanguage: Social and ideological perspectives (pp.3–8). De Gruyter.
Pérez-Milans, Miguel. (2016). Reflexivity and social change in applied linguistics. AILA Review 29, 1–14.
