Whose Line Is It Anyway? the Diffusion of Discursive Frames in Pride Movements of the South

Whose line is it anyway? The diffusion of discursive frames in Pride movements of the South

Sam Bennett University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań

Pride marches are increasingly common in the ‘global South’ and can be seen as signs of progress towards greater social acceptance of sexual minorities. Such movements often appropriate and mimic semiotic symbols and discursive frames visible in Pride movements in countries in the North, such as rainbow flags and the discourse of human rights. However, there is also a degree of recontextualisation of these symbols and frames in order to deal with specific local social, political, cultural and economic contexts. Though at different ‘stages’ of acceptance of non-heteronormative lifestyles, India and South Africa offer fruit- ful sites for comparative, qualitative research. In analysing the language of print media as a way of gauging how Pride movements are discursively constructed, the paper focuses on nominational and predicational strategies (Reisigl and Wodak 2001) to critically analyse actor representations in a sample of articles from national newspapers from each country.

Keywords: South Africa, India, social movements, frame analysis, recontextualisation, critical discourse analysis, newspapers, social actors

1. Introduction

Pride parades have become annual spectacles throughout the global North; since the 1970s in New York, when they were commemorative parades in response to the Stonewall riots, they have become institutionalised social movements in most major cities and combine political motifs alongside more celebratory activities. Indeed, they often embody a Bhakhtinian (1984) sense of the carnivalesque in that they are at once festivals but also “potential sites of protest” (Markwell and Waitt 2009, 144).

Journal of Language and Politics 16:3 (2017), 345–366. doi 10.1075/jlp.16008.ben issn 1569–2159 / e-issn 1569–9862 © John Benjamins Publishing Company 346 Sam Bennett

Pride movements also continue to become increasingly common and popular in the ‘global South’. In South Africa, even before the passing of a progressive national constitution that enshrined the rights non-hetero sexual South Africans, the first Pride march was held in 1990 in Johannesburg and now attracts over 20,000 annually. In India, Pride marches have been held since 2008 in a number of major cities and have been increasingly well attended despite the generally conservative attitudes in society and politics and the recent decision of the Supreme Court to re-criminalise non-heterosexual relationships. Pride movements in the global South often appropriate and mimic the semiotic symbols and discursive frames visible in Pride movements in countries in the global North, such as the United Kingdom and the United States. These include rainbow flags and the discourse of individual human rights. However, there is also a degree of recontextualisation of these symbols and frames in order to tailor them to specific local challenges. Each pride movement then, though maybe conceptually and discursively connected, exists with a specific geographical space and socio-political, economic, and cultural context. Furthermore, although the growing prevalence of such events can be taken as sign of progress towards greater social acceptance of sexual minorities in these countries, Pride movements are far from uncontested and there is also a tension visible both within these movements and between them and a wider society. Queer knowledge and discourses circulate within the public sphere (Blackwood 2008) not just directly from person to person or movement to movement but also indirectly via the media, which in turn can be a major source of influence on public opinion. Therefore, a potentially productive way to investigate dominant public discourses of Pride movements and how they are mediated, appropriated and contested is to analyse newspaper articles. Such a data source can also provide insight into how non-heterosexual identities are negotiated by relevant social actors. In order to parse the issue of Pride movements in the global South, this paper will focus its critical gaze on the language of print media in two countries – India and South Africa – as a way of gauging how Pride movements are discursively constructed. To provide a robust relevant theoretical framework for this article I will intro- duce a theory of social movement frame diffusion (following McAdam and Rucht 1993) that will partially account for how northern discourses of Pride have been adapted to southern contexts. I will then explain the history of Pride as a social movement and provide context to the analysis by giving a brief overview of the current situation of non-heterosexuals in India and South Africa. In the empirical section I draw on the Discourse Historical Approach (cf. Bennett 2015; Reisigl and Wodak 2001) to Critical Discourse Studies to analyse a systematic sample of articles from three daily national newspapers from each country. Primarily focusing Whose line is it anyway? 347 on strategies of nomination and predication (Reisigl and Wodak 2001) I will highlight how newspaper articles on Pride movements in these two countries adapt and recontextualise symbols and discourses from the North. This happens in three main ways: firstly via nominating Pride events in different ways; secondly by a focus on semiotic items that are symbolic in Pride events and LGBT communities; and thirdly through a universalistic discourse of individual human rights. In presenting such an analysis, the paper hopes to contribute to the fields of (critical) discourse studies, queer studies and analysis of social movements.

2. Social movements and Pride movements

2.1 Diffusion of social movement frames

There are a number of different approaches to the analysis of social movements. Tilly (2004, 53) argues that social movements combine: a campaign, the em- ployment of a “social movement repertoire” of political action (such as a “public meetings, solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, statements to and in public media, and pamphleteering”), and a concerted public of representation of “worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment”. McAdam (1982, 25) meanwhile writes that social movements are “those organized efforts, on the part of excluded groups, to promote or resist changes in the structure of society that involve recourse to non-institutional forms of political participation”. Very similarly, Tarrow (1994, 4) sees them as reactions to “collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities”. Proponents of New Social Movement theory (cf. Pichardo 1997) argue that there is a difference between pre-1960s movements – which were primarily about economic wellbeing – and post-industrial (or post- material) movements from the mid-1960s onwards, which related more to forwarding human rights and relied on collective identification for political mobilisation. All of these approaches have certain common elements, the main conviction being that social movements are non-state actors that challenge either authorities or other opponents Within social movement theory, a lot of work has been dedicated to the study of the frames that social movements employ when communicating their message (Snow and Benford 1988, 1992; Benford and Snow 2000) and, stemming from this, there is also an understanding that social movements’ activities do not oc- cur in a vacuum, unconnected from wider contexts and other movements (Soule 2004). Activists are aware of other actors and they will often borrow or imitate tactics, frames and slogans that appear useful (Ibid.). This process is known as the 348 Sam Bennett

diffusion of social movements, which is the “flow of social practices among actors within some larger system” (Strang and Meyer 1993, 488). McAdam and Rucht (1993, 58) have argued that social movements “do not have to reinvent the wheel at each place in each conflict. Rather they often find inspiration in the ideas and tactics espoused and practiced by other activists”. As such diffusion is a “mimetic process” (Ibid., 59). The extent to which frame diffusion is successful or even possible depends upon a number of factors. Chief amongst these is the level of identification that the adapter has with the transmitter, or to put it another way, the social construction of similarity (Strang and Meyer 1993). At least at some minimal level adaptors need to identify with the transmitters. This could only be a simple as ‘an activist’ and thus this allows opponents to adopt frames and tactics (McAdam and Rucht 1993). Elsewhere Melluci claims that collective identity is important for the mobilisation of social movements. For him, the collective identity of a movement is an “interactive and shared definition produced by several interacting individu- als who are concerned with the orientation of their action as well as the field of opportunities and constraints in which their action takes place” (Melluci 1989, 34) Snow and Benford (1999) have identified three types of frame diffusion: re- ciprocation – when both transmitters and adopters are “interested in the object of diffusion and are thus actively involved in the process” (1999, 26),accommodation – a process in which the transmitter “adapts the diffusing item to the culture or context to which it seeks to diffuse it” (Shawki 2013, 137) and finally adaptation – which is the flip-side of accommodation, that is “the adopter is the active agent and strategically and purposefully adapts the diffusing item to its local setting or culture” (Snow and Benford 1999, 26). As Shawki (2013, 132) writes, modern social movements’ “repertoires and forms of contention are cosmopolitan and modular”. Indeed, the adaptors are more often than not critical communities of excluded citizens (Chabot and Duyvendak 2002) that have a global frame of reference and are open to drawing on social movements from other countries (Shawki 2013). I understand adaptation here as a process of discursive and semiotic recontextu- alision of social practices. As will become evident from analysis below, adaptation is the predominant form of frame diffusion.

2.2 Pride as a social movement and non-heterosexual rights

This globalisation of queer identities, combined with a focus on human rights as a persuasive discursively constructed social movement frame, has also led in part to a stable, normative, understanding of what Pride movements are (Van der Wal 2012). They include the political (in the sense that there is often a specific message about political recognition of LBGT rights), and they can often be read as a “visual antidote to homosexual oppression and censure” (Van der Wal 2012, Whose line is it anyway? 349

91), but they also include a carnivalesque, celebratory side that plays up to, but also disrupts, a sexualised fixation with the (often male) body. Bhakhtin’s (1984) work constructs carnivals as festivals that are potential sites of protest, resistance and social transgression (Markwell and Waitt 2009). According to Browne (2007) they are an example of Bakhtin’s playful politics. More than just being political carnivals though, they can also be seen as a form of ritualised performance that involve myriad symbolic elements (Kates and Belk 2001): objects (feather boas), colour symbolism (rainbow flags), music, a verbal aspect (slogans, and the discursive frames of Pride), symbolic actions (marching through ‘straight’ streets), spa- tial configurations (a mass gathering of people) and bodies (visible naked flesh). Enguix (2009) terms these “indexes of the gay community”. Many of these indexes, which are also visible in Southern Pride events, originate from the European and North American Prides and so we see the argument for a stable, globally accepted and consumed identity of Pride. The Pride movement started in the 1970s in the USA as a response to, and commemoration of, the Stonewall riots in New York in the summer of 1969. The marches spread rapidly to other countries. The first Pride rally in the UK was held in 1972 and in 1978 the Australia witnessed its first Mardi Gras parade. The Pride movements were not just about being proud to be gay, the demand for recognition of rights and an end to discrimination, but were also linked throughout the 1970s, to the act of ‘coming out’ as means of direct action. In the 1980s and 90s, this ‘coming out’ came to mean coming out as living with HIV/AIDS and this too spread as a form of social movement to those countries where HIV infection became widespread, such as South Africa (Chabot and Duyvendak 2002). Running alongside the annual Pride movements were other forms of activity aimed at changing the status quo. This included direct non-violent action that started with ACT-UP and although the group was short-lived, it had widespread influence on queer social movements around the world. Chabot and Duyvendak (2002) track the spread of ACT-UP’s frames of social action from the US to Western Europe (France) and Latin America (Brazil and Puerto Rico) via relational links. Later the tactics were used in Australia and from there, again via relational and non-relational currents, they were adopted in East Asia. According to Chabot and Duvyendak (2002, 720), “in other words, these homosexual activists recognized the innovative potential of originally American protest styles, but reinvented them to suit their own prefer- ences and situation”. Despite the early focus on discrimination, rights and equality, one recent major criticism levelled at Pride events across the world is that there has been a loss of the political and an increased focus on the celebratory aspect. This appears to be due to two factors, both of which relate to the gradual institutionalisation of the movement: The first is a growing commercialisation of Pride events. During 350 Sam Bennett

the 1990s, local governments realised that the events were growing in popular- ity (Markwell and Waitt 2009) and were a lucrative way of attracting the ‘pink Pound’ in Brighton, the ‘pink Dollar’ in Sydney or the ‘pink Rand’ in Capetown. In Sydney the timing of the parade was changed from June 28th (the day of the Stonewall riots) to the Australian summer time to enable more bare flesh and an increased sexualisation of the event (Ibid.). Commercialisation also occurred because of the growing reliance on corporate sponsors to pay for larger and larger events. In South Africa there was widespread consternation when Jacaranda FM withdrew its sponsorship in 2012 and in India lot was made of the presence of global corporations such as Microsoft participating in Rainbow Parades in the same year. Though providing much needed funds, such commercialisation can lead indirectly to a depoliticisation of Pride because of the fear of losing sponsors (Browne 2007). According to Rand (2012, 77), the Gay Shame movement in the US began to protest against the “neoliberal, assimilationist politics and corporate selling-out of Gay Pride”. The second reason for the loss of the political is that many participants in Pride events feel that the political battle has been won (although, of course, institutional recognition of rights does not immediately eliminate discrimination or change social attitudes, which are rooted a narrow heteronormative worldview). In the Spanish context, Enguix (2009) notes that after non-heterosexual associa- tions were legalised in the 1980s and later, when marriages were allowed, participants felt there was nothing else left to ask for. Similarly, Browne’s ethnographical work with Pride participants in Dublin found that for some because their individual rights had been won, “angry marches that seek to advocate gay rights are no longer needed” (Browne 2007, 71). There is therefore often a tension in the aims and experiences of Pride participants. Between the activists who still call for a politically conscious Pride and other participants who see it as a time for celebration of their identity. Due to this tension, Pride events throughout the world are a mixture of the two: a combina- tion of radical protest and celebration. As will be shown in the analysis below, such tensions are evident in the South African public discourse, but to a much lesser extent in the Indian context.

3. Pride in Southern contexts: India and South Africa

India and South Africa are both countries that would be traditionally located conceptually as in the global South. They fit into this bracket geographically, eco- nomically and in terms of their colonial histories. They both also provide good example of the ‘north of the south’, and the ‘north in the south’; global cities such as Whose line is it anyway? 351

Mumbai, Bangalore, Durban and Capetown with burgeoning ranks of middle class professionals that consume both local and international culture. They offer too, of course, views of the ‘south of the south’ – extreme poverty and inequality – and the ‘south in the south’ as centres for continental migration that have occurred over centuries. Yet despite this crude, surface-level similarity, their social and legal contexts which provide a backdrop for respective Pride movements are very different. The first Pride events were used to protest against LGBT discrimination and, later to celebrate equality under the constitution. As such the key participants in the public debate were activists on the one hand, and Apartheid government and much of society on the other. Johannesburg was the location for the first Pride event in South Africa in 1990, indeed it was the first Pride parade on the African continent, a fact often foregrounded in newspaper reports on more recent Pride events. The Johannesburg Pride now attracts upwards of 20,000 participants annually. Since 1990, annual Pride events have been held across South Africa in Durban, Capetown (which welcomes many tourists to the Pride events) and Soweto. The explosion and increase in participation in the 1990s and 2000s was partially possible due to the drawing up of South Africa’s constitution in 1994 and ratifica- tion in 1996. In particular, Section 9 prohibited discrimination on the grounds of, amongst other things, sex, gender or sexual orientation. Van Zyl argues that the South African constitution has been used as an “enabling tool” (2005, 235) for those self-represent as LGBT or queer. Despite this progressive legal framework though, Reid and Dursuweit (2002) claim that there has been a much slower change in social attitudes and non-hetero sexual South Africans still suffer from discrimination and marginalisation (van der Wal 2012). Two issues stand out here, one is of the dominance of heteronormative discourses that question black African queer identities (Ibid.) and the second is the practice of ‘corrective rape’ and its mediatisation so that it has become a salient national and international issue. Furthermore, as in northern countries, there is a tension between Pride participants over whether the events are becoming depoliticised. This came to a head in 2012 when the 1in9 organisation staged the die-in that disrupted that year’s Pride in protest that the parade ignored the realities of life for non-heterosexuals in some of Johannesburg’s townships (Milani 2015). As such the participants in the public debate have changed over the twenty-five years of Pride marches to the extent that now it is more between different activists and LGBT participants rather than against the government. India is still largely socially and legally conservative although it is more lib- eral in larger, more cosmopolitan cities. Support for wider LGBT rights comes from the governing BJP, the opposition Congress party, national and international NGOs, mainstream Hindu religious leaders, and global companies, such as Microsoft, who now operate in India and often sponsor Pride events. Opposition 352 Sam Bennett

to greater rights is largely found in less urbanised areas of the country, as well as some Christian and Muslim religious leaders. The country’s first Pride was held only in 2008 in Delhi to protest about Section 377 of the country’s penal code which criminalised non-heterosexual relationships. The first Delhi Pride was held in June to coincide with Pride parades around the world that commemorated the Stonewall riots. Since then Pride events have begun to be held in Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and Kerala. Mitra (2010) contends that this points to a kind of internationalisation of gay politics and identity. In 2009 the Delhi High Court repealed Section 377 and thus decriminalised non-heterosexual sex although a decision by the Supreme Court of India recriminalized sex, stating that such changes in law were a matter for Parliament. Because of the illegal nature of non-heterosexual relationships and wider public attitudes, Pride events are often also ‘coming out’ events as they were for many participants in northern Prides in the 1970s and 80s. This social conservatism notwithstanding, the Hijra community points to the presence of what Jackson (2000, 405) has termed ‘erotic diversities’1 in Indian society that does not fit Northern discursive frames of homosexuality and which provide a specific Southern element to Pride movements.

4. Methodology and data collection

4.1 Critical approaches to Discourse Analysis

When analysing the data, I employed analytical tools from Critical Discourse Studies. Critical discourse analysts concern themselves with investigating how ideology (subjective knowledge) and power relations these are discursively realised and how these discourses serve to maintain socio-political inequalities. There are many understandings of what ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ constitute and these debates are not just in the field of linguistics (cf. De Beaugrande and Dressler 1981; Crystal 1987) but also sociology and philosophy (i.e. Foucault 1972). However, the most appropriate, and succinct definition is that from Lemke (1995, 7): When I speak about discourse in general, I will usually mean the social activity of making meanings with language and other symbolic systems…On each occasion when the particular meaning characteristic of these discourses is being made, a text is produced…When we want to focus on the specifics of an event or occasion, we speak of the text; when we want to look at patterns, commonality, relationships that embrace different texts and occasions, we can speak of discourses.

1. Jackson (2000) writes about queer identities in Thailand, but his concept of ‘erotic diversities’ is applicable to many Asian countries. Whose line is it anyway? 353

At the core of the CDA is the tenet that discursive practices are specific forms of social practice (Reisigl and Wodak 2001; Fairclough and Wodak 1997). CDA re- searchers employ different methodologies to investigate a number of fields includ- ing gender issues (Lazar 2005), racism (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2008; van Dijk 1991), immigration (Bennett 2015, 2016), political discourses (Reisigl and Wodak 2001), communication in European institutions (Krzyżanowski 2010), and media discourses (Richardson 2009). For this analysis I specifically chose to employ elements of the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) as forwarded by Reisigl and Wodak (2001). As with all CDA approaches, a core tenet of DHA is that discourses are constitutive of and constituted by social practices and situations, institutional frames and social structures. Therefore, in order to gain a more complete picture, DHA practitio- ners should study a certain discourse by employing not just linguistic, but also historical, political and social, dimensions. The approach can therefore be said to be interdisciplinary and multi-methodological. The DHA relies on an expansive understanding of ‘context’ which includes: 1. The immediate, language or text internal co-text (functional grammar [cf. Halliday 1985]); 2. The intertextual and interdiscursive relationship between utterances, texts, genres and discourses; 3. The extralinguistic social/sociological variables and institutional frames of a specific ‘context of situation’ (middle range theories); 4. The broader socio-political and historical contexts, which the discursive practices are embedded in and related to (‘grand’ theories) (adapted from Wodak 2001, 67). From here it becomes obvious that one of the advantages in using the DHA to analyse the corpus of articles about Pride events from South Africa and India, is the ability to analyse longer-term, diachronic shifts in discourse usage and by taking being able to situate these discursive strategies within local socio-political and historical contexts, such as the 1in9 protest at Johannesburg Pride in 2012 or section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Reisigl and Wodak (2001) suggest five key discursive strategies that can be analysed: referential/nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivisation/ framing and intensification/mitigation. For the analysis of the articles I am specifically concerned with two of these strategies: nomination (how people and processes are named and referred to linguistically), and predication (what traits, characteris- tics, qualities and features are attributed to them). These strategies are employed to construct social actors (both individual and collective) in a certain way and linguistically rendered through, for example, pronouns, actors’ attributes, verbs, 354 Sam Bennett

and adjectives as well as through modality, time and space (van Leeuwen 1996).2 Furthermore, following Reisigl and Wodak (2001, 45), it should also be noted that referential and nominational labels are reliant on synecdochisation which is “a specific feature, trait or characteristic is selectively pushed to the fore as a ‘part for the whole’, as a representative depictor”. Further to this, the authors claim that: Because of the descriptive quality of such referential categorisations, linguistic identification is already related to strategic predication and thus very often in- volves evaluation. This is especially the case with exclusionary discourses or those that aim to separate the inside from the outside…Thus, once a social actor is constructed, predicational strategies are used to imbibe “evaluative attributions. (Ibid.) The aim of such strategies is often exclusion of minority groups, which is clearly highly relevant to discussions of the representation of Pride movements and participants, and indeed wider critically discursive studies of LGBT discrimination.

4.2 Data collection

Given the geographical size and different media landscapes of each country there is a greater prominence of local or regional newspapers. However, in order to cre- ate some level of comparability between the two national contexts, articles in the corpus were taken from three English language daily, nationally distributed print newspapers. In South Africa these were the Sowetan (left leaning), the Star (left leaning), and the Times (populist free newspaper). Samples from Indian newspapers were taken from the Hindustan Times (centre-right), New Indian Express (previously anti-establishment, but now centrist), and the Times of India (centre- right). As the intention was to focus on dominant public discourses, LGBT newspapers or magazines were not included. The data collection period spanned three calendar years for South Africa (2010, 2011 and 2012) and two calendar years for India (2011 and 2012). The third year was included for South Africa because of the very small number of articles. Indeed, even with this inclusion there were considerably more articles in the Indian corpus, although this was skewed by the number of articles from the Times of India. The articles were found using the LexisNexis digital newspaper archive and were searched for using key words: ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘LGBT’ and ‘Pride’. After collection the corpus was downsized for articles deemed irrelevant i.e. when any of the keywords were not used in the context of Pride events.

2. Reisigl and Wodak note that their focus on these strategies is based, at least in part, on Van Leeuwen’s Social Actors Analysis (1996). Whose line is it anyway? 355

Table 1. Sample and collection details Publication 2012 2011 2010 Total South Africa The Star 9 7 7 23 The Times 6 7 5 18 The Sowetan 7 5 2 14 South Africa Total 20 19 15 55 India Hindustan Times 11 7 – 18 New Indian Express 2 5 7 Times of India 31 19 – 50 India Total 44 31 – 75 Total 64 44 15 130

5. Empirical evidence of frame diffusion: Discourse topics in media representations of Southern Pride movements

Three key discourse topics were the most evident and most relevant to this research: a process of normative negotiation as to what Pride was or represented; a focus on participants via the deployment of (semiotic) indexes of the gay community; and thirdly, explicit use of the discourse of individual human rights. These discourse topics are relevant to discussion of diffusion of social frames because they have clearly been adapted from existing Pride movements and often mirror similar challenges that such movements have had to address.

5.1 Naming Pride

The nomination and predication strategies used in constructing Pride can point to how they might be experienced by participants and seen in the dominant public discourse. In the South African articles, there was a general consensus in the nominative strategies employed to talk about the event, but only in the sense that a number of different terms were used by all of the newspapers. Pride was variously constructed as a ‘parade’, ‘march’ or ‘event’ and these words were used interchange- ably in all of the newspapers. ‘Event’ appears to be the most neutral of these words but the other two have quite differing semantic loads. The use of ‘march’ implies that the event is more political whereas ‘parade’ could conjure up carnivalesque images. Such an interchangeability in the usage of nouns in the South African 356 Sam Bennett

context points to an ongoing negotiation within the public discourse as to what Pride is or should be, especially in 2012 (see Excerpts 1–5, below), when a counter demonstration by the 1in9 group, blocked the path of the parade in Johannesburg. Indeed, that event seemed to open up the possibility for a mediatisation of this normative struggle. The Times’ coverage points towards a depoliticised Pride that is open to not only queer participants. (1) “Pride is no longer just for the LGBTI [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex] community,” said Joburg Pride board member Thami Kotlolo. “People are getting to understand it more.” (Times, 5 Oct 2012) (2) Johannesburg Pride started out as a political march in 1989 but its nature has changed with the dawn of democracy and an all-inclusive constitution in 1994 (Sunday Times, 9 Sept 2012) (3) The 1 in 9 campaign further criticised the march, describing it as just a big party that has lost its focus and has failed to tackle real issues such as that of black gays in townships who continue to be gang raped and killed (Sowetan, 8 Oct 2012) In (1), the article uses embedded quotes from a Pride organiser to reinforce their argument that Pride has a wider appeal than previously. Firstly, the use of officials for sound bites is a common strategy that can reinforce an argument because of the social standing and respect as an expert or specialist afforded to the speaker (van Dijk 1995). Secondly, the choice of verb and tense, the present simple of ‘to be’’ without any modality that could mitigate it serves to reify the process and takes away the possibility to call the existence of the process. In (2), by connecting the changes in Pride temporally with South Africa’s democratisation is reminiscent to Fukuyama’s (1993) claim that the fall of communism led to the ‘End of History’ to the extent that democratisation has meant an end to inequality and discrimination for non-heterosexuals. This excerpt, as possible proof of a depoliticisation frame, also takes on a greater importance when understood in the context of the whole article, which focuses on growing corporate interest in Pride as a commer- cial venture. The excerpt from the Sowetan (3) indicates this normative argument even more strongly. The use of the adverb ‘just’ works to diminish the importance of Pride in its current configuration and this delegitimising effect is enhanced by claim that what occurs in Townships are ‘real issues’, with the elliptical implication that what occurs outside townships are not ‘real issues’. In contrast, coverage of Pride in the Star provides counter arguments to its depoliticisation: (4) Yet this year’s events have a political edge, and one which points to the unending battle not only for gay rights activists, but human rights activists Whose line is it anyway? 357

in general. If rights are left to languish, they can be swept away, so the fight for liberation never dies (Star, 5 Oct 2012) In this article, an op-ed piece, the writer firstly foregrounds and reifies the political nature of Pride first in terms of the declarative theme of the sentence and secondly, with the choice of unmitigated verb. Two war metaphors, ‘battle’ and ‘fight’, are used to reinforce the importance of the event in forwarding the cause of non-heterosexuals in South Africa. The Star also references the tension between LGBT community members in Soweto and more widely in Johannesburg after the 1in9 protest: (5) There was politics inside the gay movement, too, with some black gays and lesbians feeling increasingly undermined by the broader Pride movement being dominated by middle-class white gay people (Star, 4 Oct 2012) In India, Pride was similarly constructed via nominative strategies as both political and celebratory in all papers. On the more political side, ‘march’, ‘demonstration’, ‘protest’ and ‘rally’ were all used but synonyms for party such as ‘carnival’, ‘celebration’ and ‘parade’ were also frequent and the presence of ‘mela’ in some articles points to the recontextualisation of northern Pride frames to the specific Indian context. However, where Indian coverage did differ from the South African is that in the Indian media discourse, Pride was more frequently constructed un- problematically as a positive event: (6) Prof R Raj Rao, author and Professor of English at University of Pune, says the pride march was a welcome event but hoped that it would not just be a symbolic one… (Indian Express, 8 Dec 2011) (7) The second anniversary of decriminalisation of homosexuality, which was celebrated in the city on Saturday, was a subdued affair though (Hindustan Times, 3 Jul 2011) In (6) the political nature of the Pride event in Pune is made clear and is positively constructed via the predicate ‘welcome’. Likewise, in Excerpt (7) the verb ‘celebrate’ is employed as a lexical choice to positively frame the event. Although there is less of a pattern of normative tension within the Indian corpus, there are some indications that this may not be far off: (8) Five years on, it’s heartening to see that the Delhi Queer Pride Parade is a regular part of the Delhi events calendar. (Times of India, 27 Nov 2012) (9) “We’ve celebrated our sexuality enough. I think pride should be more political than it is” (Times of India, 2 Dec 2012) 358 Sam Bennett

Excerpt (8) initially continues the positive framing evident in (6) and (7). However, the construction of Delhi Pride as part of the ‘events calendar’ of the city is more ambiguous. On the one hand, it can be construed as positive that it is a regular event, but from a different perspective it also potentially depoliticises Pride by placing it in a category that also includes polo tournaments, exhibitions and awards evenings. (9) provides an example of modality that leaves readers with a clear idea of the normative nature of the quote. The use of different nominative strategies and the normative struggle that is evident in both the South African and Indian corpora then, indicates what I will call ‘the polysemy of Pride’. By this, I mean that Pride is a ‘semantic container’ (Mehlman 1972) the contents of which constantly being negotiated within public discourse. This mirrors historical developments of Pride movements in the global North too. Enguix (2009) has noted that in Spain Pride participants used different nouns depending on their ideological position. Activists preferred manifestación (demonstration) whereas those who were happy with the assimilation of non-heterosexuals into the wider community were more inclined to use desfile (parade). Similarly Hughes (2006) found that in Ireland there was a change over time in the naming of the Pride event in Dublin that coincided with greater civil rights and greater social acceptance of non-heterosexuals. Whereas previously they had been termed marches, now they are more commonly referred to as parades.

5.2 Indexes of Pride

The second discourse topic is the focus on indexes of the gay community. Though evident in both South African and Indian corpora, it was more prevalent in the Indian. By foregrounding specific semiotic and discursive symbols, which amounts to a fetishisation and exoticisation of participants, might point to the newness of Prides as a phenomenon in India. (10) The participants went out with pride to speak up for themselves, some wearing colourful masks, some in bright costumes, and others with painted faces. A man in a black, white and red mask held a heart-shaped placard that read, ‘I wanna marry my guy’ (Time of India, 27 Jun 2011) (11) The multi-hued feathers will be out (Indian Express, 10 Nov 2011) (12) Amidst feather boas, sequined saris and rainbow wigs that came out for the Queer Azaadi March yesterday (Indian Express, 30 Jan 2011) In all three of the excepts above, there is a focus on colours and clothing that have become synonymous with Pride events around the world. For example rainbows (12) and feather boas (11) – both semiotic symbols of Pride – and in (10) the Whose line is it anyway? 359 reporting of the presence of a ‘heart-shaped’ placard all place the political nature of this event in the background. This focus on clothing and colours is also present in (12), where ‘saris’ can be read as a recontextualisation of the ‘riot of colours’ of northern Pride events to India. Additionally, in (11) and (12) these symbols of Pride movements are used as metonyms for the participants. Though a normal method of reporting, it can also serve, unintentionally, to depersonalise participants and delegitimize political claims by reducing their presence to the physical. The above excerpts not only indicate that Pride participants have adopted indexes of Pride from the North, but they also show that these indexes are salient frames for reporting on Pride and are therefore an important part of the discursive repertoire within the public sphere when talking about Prides in the South. In South Africa, the same discursive frames were also present, especially the rainbow flag which has become thesine qua non of Pride events globally, but they were also sometimes deployed in the Times in negative or sarcastic situations: (13) It’s amazing to see thousands of people, some wearing high heels, some in bikinis…sequins, latex….and that’s just the men (Times, 1 Oct 2010) (14) The Bulls should go back to blue instead of looking as if they are leading a gay pride carnival (Times, 3 Apr 2012) Though Excerpt (13) is an example of the paper bringing a sense of levity to the reporting, it also fetishises both the clothing and the participants. In effect they become something to laugh about and not take seriously. Excerpt (14) is from a letter to the editor pertaining to the Blue Bulls rugby union team in Pretoria who changed their kit colour to pink. In this excerpt participating in Pride (and the colour pink) are used as negative reference points against which the team’s tradi- tional colours are juxtaposed.

5.3 Human rights

The final discourse topic that is most relevant to discussing diffusion of frames is the frequent use of human rights as a discursive frame and its recontextualisation into southern Pride reports. Excerpt (4), above, is a very good example of human rights language being used in the South African context because it conceptually links non-heterosexual rights to wider human rights concerns. This serves to bridge a gap and make the argument more attractive to those outside the LGBT movement. In the second sentence from that same Excerpt (15), the author uses a temporal causal conjunc- tion and the second conditional to warn against not continually supporting rights. (15) If rights are left to languish, they can be swept away (Star, 1 Oct 2012) 360 Sam Bennett

(16) Joburg Pride is the largest and longest-running gay and lesbian event on the continent, and will be celebrating its 21st birthday tomorrow with a pertinent theme that aims to highlight the deteriorating human rights landscape for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people across Africa. (Times, 1 Oct 2010) Excerpt (16) similarly adapts human rights frames into wider, here pan-African, contexts by using the intransitive verb ‘deteriorating’ to mark the process as ongoing. It also foregrounds the importance of Johannesburg Pride not just to South Africa but the whole continent and especially Uganda, where the government in- troduced harsher laws against sodomy. Thus, human rights here are rights that have previously been enjoyed but are now in danger. As is to be expected human rights also appear in the Indian newspapers, although, in comparison to South Africa, they have not yet (or in some cases only just) been granted. As such, whereas in South Africa there is a risk of already enjoyed rights being infringed, for the Indian Pride movement there is arguably more at stake, to the extent that the ‘battle has not yet been won’. (17) Parents, siblings and friends marched to demand equal rights and non- discrimination against their loved ones who were gay or transgender (Times of India, 27 Jun 2011 (18) )”This is a day to celebrate our freedom and rights. The judgement helped me to come out of the closet,” said Richa, a student of Amity University in Noida (Hindustan Times, 3 Jul 2011) Both of the excerpts from the articles above (17 and 18) link Pride with individual human rights. Interestingly though, the choice of verb highlights again the above- mentioned polysemy of Pride. In the first, equal rights are ‘demanded’ whereas in the second they are ‘celebrated’. It is also worth noting that in (18) the decision to repeal Section 377 is constructed as a causal factor for ‘coming out’ and thus, shows again how pre-existing discourses that have been part of Pride movements in the north are adapted and used in relation specific local contexts.

6. Discussion and conclusion

In this paper I have set out an explanation of the discursive topics employed by Pride movements in South Africa and India via a systematic analysis of newspaper articles. The paper has attempted to add to the literature on the diffusion of social movement frames and non-heterosexual subjectivities in the South as well as ap- plying CDA to southern contexts. Whose line is it anyway? 361

The identified discourse topics are, to a large extent, adopted from northern Pride contexts. However, this diffusion is not a simple ‘copy and paste job’, but rather a process of recontextualisation of social movement frames. To briefly summarise the findings, firstly there was a process of normative negotiation as to what Pride was or represented. In South Africa this is reminiscent of the trajec- tories of many established pride movements in the Global North whereby there is now a counter movement against what many see as a de-politicisation of Pride. Secondly there was a focus on participants via the deployment of indexes of the gay community. By and large these carnivalesque semiotic symbols have been transposed intact from northern Pride spaces. Thirdly, there was explicit use of the discourse of individual human rights. This too seems to be evidence of the diffusion of political strategies used by Pride movements in the past in, for example, the US and Europe, albeit strategies that have been adapted to reflect context-specific issues. A majority of countries now have constitutions based on universally accepted individual human rights that originated in Europe in the 18th century (often enforced via colonialism). The almost global acceptance (at a political level at least) of the primacy of individual human rights means that it should come as no surprise that such discursive frames are employed; they are already part of the local repertoire of political actors, both state and non-state.3 Individual human rights are thus used as a powerful universalist discourse in local contexts because they provide activists with a language that enables them to “present eas- ily understandable problems which stir the emotions…(H)uman rights language allows its speakers to concretise universalism in a manner conducive to activism and in a language attractive to their public” (Landy 2013, 418). Likewise, Levitt and Merry (2009) argue that local human rights discourses are interpretations of global norms that are recontextualised so that they resonate with, and are relevant to, local situations. To borrow Altman’s term, the Pride movements in South Africa and India are not examples of “rupture or continuity” (Altman 1996, 77) but of rupture and continuity. It is continuity first because of the fact that many of the same discursive frames that have been successful in promoting messages in the North have been employed in southern contexts in order to combat similar issues. It is also continuity because of the historical roots of the discourse in Europe and its transposition

3. Though there is no space to discuss this in detail, it is nonetheless worth pointing out that the concept of individual human rights is particularly controversial. Firstly, there is still widespread debate as to whether such rights are truly universal; secondly, there is a question over whether universal rights are always positive (i.e. they can be used as a justification for armed intervention); and thirdly the common misconception that individual human rights are a solely Western construct. 362 Sam Bennett

via colonialism to southern countries. The diffusion of frames is not smooth and total though, but is a form of rupture of the northern queer narrative. They have, then been adapted (Snow and Benford 1999), that is, Pride activists in India and South Africa have strategically and purposefully recontextualised existing social practices, discourses and semiotic symbols of existing Pride movements in order to meet context-specific challenges. That they have adapted, rather than constructed new frames possibly speaks to a high level of similarity and identification with the original users. I would not go so far as to term this a global queer solidarity, but to lesser or greater extents they are all part of a “network of excluded citizens” (Chabot and Duyvandak 2002, 76) in which there are often overlapping goals and socio-political contexts. In summary, collectively and individually, all three of the discourse topics found in the sample point to a diverse ‘polysemy of Pride’ in both national contexts. That is, that Pride can be seen as an empty semantic container that absorbs meanings and symbolism from its participants and those who comment on it. Moreover as the analysis has shown, there is an ongoing struggle over what Pride means and to whom.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tomasso Milani (Wits University) and Michelle Lazar (National University of Singapore), who commented on an earlier version of the article and allowed me to partici- pate in the Discourse, Gender, and Sexuality: South-South Dialogues conference, held at Wits University in November 2013.

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Author’s address Sam Bennett Department of Sociolinguistics and Discourse Studies Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Collegium Novum, Al. Niepodeg»osci 4 Poznań, 60–874 Poland

Biographical notes Sam Bennett is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Working within the frame of critical discourse analysis, his research centres around migration, integration, exclusion and right wing populism and takes a special interest in online discourse (re)production. 366 Sam Bennett

Publication history

Date received: 9 May 2016 Date accepted: 6 March 2017 Published online: 5 April 2017 Copyright of Journal of Language & Politics is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.