Online communities have recently developed a novel genre of performance aimed at triggering Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), a tingling sensation prompted by soft voices and other stimuli. In China, these performances were banned in 2018 due to a rise in sexually charged videos purporting to be ASMR. Through acoustic and content analysis, this study argues that, rather than ASMR being a vehicle for sexual content, conventional and sexual Chinese ASMR performances constitute two separate genres. While all performers index intimate affective stances, conventional ASMR performers construct the persona of a calm, gentle professional, while sexual performers evoke the childish, amateur camgirl and sajiao (“whining”) persona. These performances illustrate Chinese content creators’ juxtaposition of local and non‐local semiotic resources as they participate in transnational online communities. The phenomenon of ASMR also highlights the sensual nature of the voice and underscores the necessity of incorporating sensuality into theorizations of sociolinguistic meaning.
Advertisements employ multimodal configurations of semiotic resources in an effort to lead consumers to draw particular meanings from desired consumption behaviors. This analysis examines the deployment of such resources in advertising during the global Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore. We identify five discourses that offer distinct framings of Covid-19 as a challenge for workers, a wellness issue, a threat to home and family, a challenge for women, and a threat to the Singapore lifestyle. Undergirded by neoliberal notions such as the productivity imperative, these discourses rationalize a range of consumer behaviors as necessary and justified in the struggle to defeat the virus. Advertisements are argued to place the burden of navigating the pandemic primarily on women via the evocation of power femininity. We propose a new framework, crisis commodification, as a means of understanding the ideological mechanisms at play in Covid-19 advertising. (Critical discourse analysis, crisis commodification, semiotic analysis, advertising, public health, Southeast Asia)*
In this article, we extend discourse analytical research that has focused on Pink Dot events in Singapore to events in
Hong Kong. As such we engage queer Sinophone perspectives to examine the simultaneously local and transregional epistemological flows that
converge and diverge within the margins of the Sinophone cultural sphere. Using a multimodal analysis of two Pink Dot Hong Kong promotional
videos, we investigate the extent to which these videos follow the (homo)normative and (homo)nationalist discursive strategies identified in
the literature on Pink Dot Singapore. Our analysis suggests that ambivalences surrounding national identity, citizenship and state-sponsored
national values in the Hong Kong videos bring into question readings of the Pink Dot movement as a (homo)nationalist enterprise, thus
indicating an emergent relocalization of Pink Dot strategies that draws attention to how queer movements in Hong Kong are currently being
shaped within the city’s broader sociopolitical context.
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