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 conceptu- ally and discursively connected, exists with a specific geographical space and so- cio-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 high- light 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 communi- ties; 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 for- warding 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

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