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Article published In: Who’s really normal? Language and sexuality in public space
Edited by Mie Hiramoto
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 4:2] 2015
► pp. 223–253

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Heteronormative love makes a house a home

Multimodal analysis of luxury housing ads in Singapore

Published online: 18 September 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.4.2.03hir
This study investigates how luxury apartment housing advertisements in Singapore function as meaning-generating institutions through visual and textual discourse. Advertisements are designed to ascribe a set of attitudes, values, and preoccupations to a group and to imbue their audiences with the idea that they belong to that group. Human models in advertisements represent idealized people and lifestyles, displaying aspirational images of men and women as consumers of products. Under the influence of Confucian patriarchal ideology, the Singapore government has promoted a narrow, heteronormative definition of family in its pro-family policies since 1987. In the advertisements for two different types of luxury apartments — one regulated by the government and the other not — we see two different ways of engaging with pro-family policies that suggest what is expected from ideal members of society in Singapore.
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