This article examines the placemaking experience of first-generation Chinese gay migrants (18–35 years old) in negotiating their cultural and sexual identities in Sydney and Melbourne. Tongzhi is used as a lingua-cultural reference to their double identity as Chinese and gay. Drawing from interviews and contact with 22 Chinese gay men who initially arrived in Australia on student visas, this article explores how tongzhi migrants use digital/social media to reconstitute their home abroad and to live out their transnational gay identity, politics and desire. Their placemaking practices take place in the intersections of the Internet and outernets, as well as the interzones of one’s gay desires for sexual fulfilment and cultural empowerment.

Racialized descriptions are a constant practice in our societies and a fundamental aspect of racial discourses. This paper uses conversation analytic tools within a Foucauldian perspective on discourse to investigate how discourses of race are (re)produced, and consequently navigated, in talk-in-interaction among speakers of Chinese. Four instances of racialized person description, taken from a larger corpus of 16 hours of casual conversation among Chinese migrants in Melbourne and their acquaintances, are explored in detail. The analysis identifies two interactional sequences, joking and accounting sequences, which allow participants to resist racialized descriptions while still orienting to the interactional preference for sociality in casual conversation. The paper argues that casual and friendly interaction may provide empirical evidence for how discourses of race are destabilized at the level of talk-in-interaction.

This paper examines how disaster-related discourses are produced in storytelling, and whether and in what way these discourses may change in the second telling. We examine two sets of retold stories taken from a corpus of 123 retold stories about the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand. Findings indicate that these storytellers tell structurally similar stories, yet implement subtle linguistic changes which produce different positionings and discourses in the two tellings. We draw on positioning analysis and the ethnomethodological concept of tellability to show how, in the first telling, the storytellers orient to and produce discourses of united togetherness, whereas in the second telling they produce discourses of bravery and heroism. We argue that the positioning and discursive strategies used in disaster stories may change drastically over time, showing how retold stories of the same event change to meet the evolving realities of the teller and their post-disaster community.

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