Radical homoscapes: The linguistic landscape of a gay sauna in Africa

Abstract

This article examines the linguistic landscape of a homosexual space (homoscape), specifically a gay sauna located in a major city in South Africa – one of the two openly homosexual male bathhouses in Africa. By using the embodied type of an autoethnographic method and couching the observations within the broader scholarship of linguistic landscapes, the author demonstrates that the South African homoscape complies with several characteristics of the homoscapes located in other countries and analysed in scholarship thus far. That is, signage indexes homosexual semiotics and produces a homospace/identity; signage has a restrictive effect on the homosexual landscape/identities; signage is multimodal (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile); English entertains a leading position in the signage; and graffiti is the most transgressive orthographic signage type used. Nevertheless, certain differences between the South African homoscape and the other documented homoscapes can also be observed. The most important of them is the absence of glocalization and any references to local African cultures and indigenous languages and, overall, a barely noticeable extent of multilingualism. The author concludes that the researcher’s body can form part of a homoscape and argues for the ethically driven inclusion of researchers in their research as the objects of their study.