Stancetaking and the Making of the ‘(Hong) Kong girl’

Abstract

A penchant for luxury brand-named goods, insistence on a boyfriend who carries her bag and pays for her shopping, and any opportunity to look cute and be the center of attention have all been described as characteristic of a ‘Kong girl’ since and be the center of attention have all been described as characteristic of a ‘Kong girl’ since the mid 2000s. In this paper, we analyze the publically co-constructed persona of ‘Kong girls’ by examining the role of stancetaking (Jaffe 2009) in constructing and contesting gender ideology. At once a critique of traditional notions of femininity and ‘modern’ notions of gender equality, the critiques offer multiple takes on a negatively charged ‘type’ of Hong Kong woman while at the same time intimating what a Hong Kong woman ‘should’ be. ' We explore the particular subject position occupied by Kong girls as constructed by lcoal speakers' self-positioning by examining what stances individuals convey in the media and new media: television and radio programs, discussion forums, blogs, Facebook pages, and print publications. Using Agha’s (2006) notion of emblem, we trace the relationships between diacritics, interpretants and persona and how these aspects of emblem work to establish ‘Kong girl’ as a publicly debated persona non grata. Since clear public sanctions of behavior come in the form of negative stances, this is a rich source of information on how new gender identities are being publicly debated and negotiated.

We propose that the heated controversy reflects the socioeconomic shifts in the heterosexual marketplace that are exerting pressure on both men and women in Hong Kong society today, and that this tension is manifest in the heterogeneous stancetaking that can be found in the Hong Kong media.