Power and Affective Attachments at a Hong Kong Gay Bar.

Affect is intrinsic to the expression of voices from the margins (Milani 2017). As a thriving gay bar that owes much of its profit to the patronage of a marginalized community, Café Fabulous infuses affect into its customer service, effectively demonstrating the important influence of empathy on service quality (Parasuraman et al. 1988). Moreover, as the three employees who have the most frequent direct interaction with customers are migrants from either Fujian Province (the owner and manager) or the Philippines (the two waitresses), their positionality comes with a deep awareness of intercultural sensitivity. Informed by this sensitivity, their approach contributes to an inclusive environment at Café Fabulous. Tapping into the “globalization of post-modern gay identities” (Altman 1996: 77), employees’ use of English represents one key aspect of a co-constructed transnational LGBTQ+ identity (Sullivan 2001); however, language choice only represents part of a larger picture of the bar’s affective strategy.
Drawing on Chen and Starosta’s (1997) model of intercultural sensitivity to examine the roles of empathy, open-mindedness, and non-judgement in employees’ interactions with customers, this paper employs an affective-discursive approach (Wetherell 2012) to highlight the lexical and discursive components of these interactions. Analysis considers observations as well as corpora of five semi-structured interviews with employees and three focus group interviews with customers. Results indicate, among others, a heightened role for address terms that signal closeness and appeal to customers’ positive face in addition to social practice that communicates a non-verbal willingness to accommodate both new and long-established customers.

References:
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Chen, G. M., & Starosta, W. J. (1997). A review of the concept of intercultural sensitivity. Human Communication 1, 1-16.
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. London: Routledge.
Parasuraman, A. V.A. Zeithaml, L.L. Berry. (1988). SERQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality. Journal of Retailing 64(1), 12-40.
Sullivan, G. (2001). Variations on a common theme? Journal of Homosexuality 40(3), 353-269.
Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and discourse – What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity 6(4), 349-68.