Communicating Inclusion Through Affective Practice at a Hong Kong Gay Bar

Affect is intrinsic to the expression of voices from the margins (Milani 2017; Borba 2020). At a thriving gay bar on Hong Kong Island that owes much of its profit to the dedicated patronage of a marginalised community, Café Fabulous infuses affect into its customer service to make its customers feel included, demonstrating empathy's influence over service quality (Parasuraman et al. 1988).

Recognising affect as inherently multimodal (Westberg 2021), this seminar employs an affective-discursive approach (Wetherell 2012) to examine employees' discursive constructions of their interactions with customers, placing particular emphasis on the specific multimodal forms of affective practices that function as emotional labour to convey inclusion.

Results, based on observations and interviews with the bar's three female front-line employees, highlight the importance of agentive acts to convey love and respect for the customer. Moreover, a relationship between skillfully affective emotional labour and power at Café Fabulous suggests the high value of delivering this type of service within this setting.

Date

Friday 16 May 2025

Time

1 to 2 pm

Location

Online via Zoom

Speaker

Associate Professor Anne Ambler Schluter
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China

Suggested pre-reading

Borba, R. (2020). Disgusting politics: Circuits of affects and the making of Bolsonaro. Social Semiotics.

Milani, T. (2017). The multi-semiotic and affective politics of the margins. In C. Kerfoot & K. Hyltenstam (Eds.), Entangled discourses: South-North orders of visibility (pp. 173-188). London: Routledge.

Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1988). SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality. Journal of Retailing, 64(1), 12–40.

Westberg, G. (2021). Affect as a multimodal practice. Multimodality & Society 1(1), 20–38.

Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and discourse – What's the problem? From affect as excess to affective or discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6(4), 349–368