Vincent Pak’s (2025) book, Queer Correctives: Discursive Neo-Homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore, examines Christian discourses of sex and sexuality in Singapore to argue how metanoia has become a discursive tool of neo-homophobia. Drawing significantly from Foucault’s (1976, 1985, 1986, 1988, 2021) work on the genealogy of sex and sexuality, truth-telling, metanoia, and technologies of the self, Pak introduces the notion of discursive metanoia to describe how an aspirational change of state is achieved through confessional truth-telling, particularly for and by queer individuals. Pak explores this concept through the analysis of digital-multimodal and ethnographic data collected from 2018 to 2023. This data includes promotional materials and testimonies from Christian ministry TrueLove.Is and interviews with queer Singaporeans who are currently or formerly religious. Well-organized and accessible, Queer Correctives provides important contributions to sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological conversations about agency, identity, heteronormativity, and neo-homophobia, making this monograph relevant to inquiries beyond the context of Christianity, sexuality, or Singapore. After tracing the historical development of ideas of sex and sexuality, Pak revisits confessional discourses, metanoia, and technologies of the self from Foucault's (1976, 1985, 1986, 2021) volumes of The History of Sexuality with an interest in generating a queer linguistics paradigm. While metanoia is ordinarily used as a theological concept to describe the alignment of oneself with Christianity by sinning less and worshipping more, Chapter 1 makes a linguistic intervention by theorizing how the process of transformation discursively occurs for the queer subject. Discursive metanoia may not contain overtly hateful or homophobic language. Instead, Pak argues that metanoic discourses coax the queer subject into course-correcting their deviations from heteronormativity, and therefore, can constitute a dangerous form of neo-homophobia. Pak's framework of discursive metanoia sets up his analysis of language use by TrueLove.Is, a non-denominational Christian ministry with the slogan “Come out, Come home.” Founded in 2018, this ministry centers its work around the conversion of people with “unwanted same-sex attraction” (USSA) to Christianity. TrueLove.Is strategically contrasts itself from previous religious anti-gay movements in Singapore by presenting the ministry as a LGBTQ+ friendly “home” for Christians. Pak cautions that the ministry's “welcoming” front allows for homophobia to covertly operate as discursive metanoia. He writes, “from the perspective of metanoia, home is a mental state… and at home lives the inverse of queerness: straight, established lines of sexual practices and reproduction and, most crucially, an unquestioning devotion to a Christian faith” (Pak, 2025, 33–34). In Chapter 2, Pak explores how the contrasting figures of “queer sinner” and Christian with “unwanted same-sex attraction” (USSA) are discursively produced through language and semiosis by analyzing 29 video testimonials on the TrueLove.Is website. Pak argues that identities of the queer sinner and Christian with USSA hinge upon defining agency as non-action—or one's capacity to not act upon one's same-sex desires. Furthermore, Pak illustrates how these testimonies characterize the queer sinner as non-agentive due to their unsuccessful restraint from indulgence in same-sex desire. In contrast, the Christian with USSA is unconventionally envisioned as having agency through successful non-action upon sin. Pak elucidates how discursive metanoia provides the linguistics tools for the queer sinner to aspirationally correct themselves into a Christian with agency and power. He makes this argument through a compelling multimodal analysis, drawing from a combination of spoken word and the semiotic information provided by lighting, text, and objects. For instance, I was particularly struck by an example where a Mandarin speaker was intentionally mistranslated through English subtitles to introduce additional negative meanings to the English-speaking audience's idea of the queer sinner. This analysis opens further questions for sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists to consider how translation subtitles unevenly mediate images of subjects across language, especially if the language is “foreign” or the non-dominant language. Using Bakhtin's (1981) chronotopic framing to analyze patterns of storytelling in the video testimonials: Chapter 3 examines how ordering past, present, and future chronotopes of sexuality make it possible for TrueLove.Is to produce anti-queer stories. Each story contains the following chronotopes: a traumatic history, an unsatisfied adulthood marked by non-normative sexuality, a reorientation towards Christianity, and an aspirational state of peace. Pak proposes the constructive framework of chronotopic straightening, or the chronotopic ordering of signs in space and time to invoke a positive and desirable change from queerness to heterosexuality. Drawing upon Sara Ahmed's (2004) work on the sociality of emotions in The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Wee's (2016) understanding of affective regime, Pak explains how the success of chronotopic straightening relies upon manufacturing affective contrasts and regimes through the strategic use of semiotic, linguistic, and audio-visual resources. Moreover, chronotopic straightening is a useful analytical tool for understanding how chronotopic ordering of space and time produces heteronormative figures and identities. Chapter Four examines the metapragmatics of truth-telling, truth-telling as discursive practice, and how truth-telling is “intended as a language-based solution for the ‘problem’ of queerness” (Pak, 2025, 130). Taking inspiration from Foucauldian theorizations of Christian confessional truth-telling in Technologies of the Self (1988), Austin's (1975) speech acts, and Isin's (2008) theorization of political acts, Pak explores the significance of truth-telling as a linguistic act that takes place prior to material doing. Ultimately, Pak argues that truth-telling serves the goal of (re)orientation—the straightening of one's lifeline—and penance—confessions of wrongdoing and repentance. In this section, Pak analyzes ethnographic interview data from 2021 with 20 queer interlocutors who are currently or formerly religious. Although the majority of interlocutors had association with Christian beliefs, other religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam were also represented; Pak committed his analytical attention to interviews with interlocutors who identified as currently or formerly Christian. Though likely out of scope for Pak's research, I think there was an opportunity to theorize how acts of truth-telling, discursive metanoia, or chronotopic straightening emerged (or did not) in interviews associated with Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam. In the final chapter, Pak demarcates the sociopolitical grounds that have allowed homophobia and discursive metanoia to thrive in Singapore and considers what kind of home Singapore really is for the queer subject. This inquiry is pursued by tracing the historical relationship between the church and state. Despite Singapore's secularism and multireligious population, Pak demonstrates how the state's neoliberal slant on socioeconomic matters of social reproduction has engendered moral alignment between the church and state on issues of family, marriage, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. He further considers how Singapore's relationship to truth-telling might contribute to the emergence of discursive metanoia by linking the state's political philosophy of pragmatism—which prescribes necessity, rationality, and practicality as pivotal to national prosperity—with Singapore's commitment to telling the pragmatic “hard truths” of nation building. An example of these “hard truths” is the state's reiteration that Singapore cannot legalize gay marriage because its (religious) population is not ready to fully embrace queer people. Pak concludes with the provocative analogy of homophobia as a moral homecoming to heteronormativity in Singapore, where heteronormativity is enfolded into the nuclear family, church, and state. I found this book extremely accessible and think that it would be a generative read for linguistic specialists and non-specialists alike to consider the role of discursive metanoia in the ideological reproduction of prejudice, exclusion, and domination. Although few scholars of linguistic anthropology have addressed homophobic discourse in Singapore, Pak joins conversations on the political precarity of the Singaporean queer subject. These include key works in queer Singaporean studies: Yue's (2012) Singapore Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures, Chua's (2014) Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State, and Oswin's (2019) Global City Futures: Desire and Development in Singapore. Research on homophobia and LGBTQ+ surveillance continues to be valuable even as Singapore gradually loosens restrictions around queer Singaporean civil participation and cultural growth over the last couple of decades. Now that LGBTQ+ Singaporeans are more visibly integrated into society, there has been far less academic discussion on the ways homophobia and surveillance of queerness have persisted and evolved through language, signs, or otherwise. However, far from being confined to Singapore, discursive metanoia has broad applicability to contexts where neoliberal heteronormativity, homophobia, and nationalist religiosity have gained greater ideological traction. This puts Queer Correctives in fruitful dialogue with recent anthropological works like Shirinian's (2024) Survival of a Perverse Nation Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia and Zengin's (2024) Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World. Queer Correctives therefore offers a timely and significant contribution to linguistic anthropological conversations on heteronormativity and neo-homophobia.
Erika Cao (Sun,) studied this question.