Part of: Queer Places and Spaces
Abstract:
Over the past decade, LL scholarship has increasingly investigated public street demonstrations (or alternative forms) for LGBTQ+ rights across Global South and North contexts (e.g., Rollett et al., 2024; Milani & Levon, 2016). Building on this work, the study explores how the Chinese LGBTQ+ community in UK materializes queer activism and diasporic experience in a transnational semi-public space. Focusing on the collage works exhibited in the 2024 Community Residency for LGBTQIA+ East and Southeast Asians at Queer Britain Museum in London, the study aims to unravel how meanings are mediated through recontextualized protest placards in new semiotic, material and spatial relations.
Collage refers to the art technique with which fragments of pre-existing materials (such as images, texts, and objects) are rearranged to create a new configuration. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of assemblage, the analysis moves beyond the representational accounts of LL but, instead, reflects on the relation between heterogenous elements in the collection. In this sociomaterial assemblage (Pennycook, 2024), language is not privileged as central to meaning making but functions alongside bodies, objects, institutional spaces, and regimes of signs. The collage art program was facilitated by Chinese queer artists in response to their Pride protest memories. Protest slogans, paper textures, display arrangements, absent creators, curators, museum space configuration, and viewers who may or may not belong to the community form a relational network in which meanings emerge. From this perspective, the analysis is informed by field visits to the exhibition and draws on the photographic data of collages, field observations, and conversations with participating artists, curators and viewers. My three years of ethnographic engagement and positionality as a member of the Chinese queer diaspora in the UK inform the analysis. Rather than occupying an interpretive centre, my viewing body and reflexive interpretation are treated as elements within the assemblage.
The study has two key arguments: Firstly, through processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, protest signs are detached from their original context and reorganized within a more personal and self-expressive form of activism. Secondly, the collage art entangles bodies of multiple temporalities and spatialities, such as past Pride marches, moments of artistic production, and present encounters in the museum. By presenting a relational rather than representational reading of linguistic landscape, the paper shows how collage functions as a material archive of diasporic queer experience and activism that reinforces in-group queer belonging and visibility.
Key words: linguistic landscape, Pride, collage, assemblage theory, queer diaspora
Reference
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Milani, T. M., & Levon, E. (2016). Sexing diversity: Linguistic landscapes of homonationalism. Language & Communication, 51, 69–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.07.002
Pennycook, A. (2024). Language assemblages. Cambridge University Press.
Rowlett, B. J., Saisuwan, P., Go, C., Chen, L. C., & Hiramoto, M. (2025). Pride in Asia: Negotiating ideologies, localness, and alternative futures. Cambridge University Press.
