ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis of data drawn from the websites, social media and digital outreach of six transnational LGBTQ rights organizations. I interrogate the seemingly positive nature of this discourse (which until recently has received relatively little critical sociolinguistic analysis) and build upon the previous chapter’s description of affective legitimation by identifying three further discursive strategies operating in the discourse of transnational advocacy: audience design, materialization and mobilization, and scalar work. The institutional communication of LGBTQ advocacy organizations increasingly serves as guidance for how and why pride matters, and the means by which LGBTQ equality can be achieved. Although there is much to laud in this discourse, I demonstrate how LGBTQ advocacy institutions working toward sociopolitical change around the world can peripheralize the very communities they mean to support. This is because the styles, stances and mediatized, materialized expression of Western allyship and individual LGBTQ identity are foregrounded in narcissistic and corporatized expressions of cosmopolitan solidarity (cf. Chouliaraki 2013). All in all, although these organizations praise the transformational power of love, they also obliquely undermine it; ‘thingifying’ love, and other defiant, joyful affects, as well as the condition of equality itself. Such are the imperfect scales of progress they build. It is thus important to take note of what is absent, mitigated or otherwise lost in the sloganized discourse of progress LGBTQ rights organizations build, asking: who truly progresses via these scales of solidarity?
