Stancetaking and the Hong Kong Girl in a shifting heterosexual marketplace

Abstract

A penchant for luxury goods, insistence on a boyfriend who pays, and any opportunity to be the center of attention have all been described as characteristic of a ‘Kong Girl’ since the mid-2000s. In this article, we explore the social relevance of the popular stereotype by examining the role of stancetaking in online forum discussions. Focusing on a 2005 incident involving ‘Jenny’, who was later described as the ‘Kong Girl’ prototype, we show how forum participants try to come to terms with the sociohistorical changes in a late modern Hong Kong society by positioning Jenny and themselves within a shifting heterosexual marketplace. The heated controversy reflects changing gender ideologies that are exerting pressure on both men and women and provides the backdrop for the rise of the Kong Girl stereotype, which has its media prime in the years following 2005.

Keywords

63.8 gender ideologies gender stereotype heterosexual marketplace Hong Kong Kong Girl new media online forums public stance stancetaking

Introduction

Recent research in the area of stance and stancetaking has offered exciting new directions for the understanding of social positioning (e.g. Du Bois, 2007; Jaffe, 2009; Johnstone, 2009). Du Bois (2007: 163) highlights the intersubjective nature of stance in this oft-cited definition:

a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means (language, gesture, and other symbolic forms), through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, position subjects (themselves and others), and align with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimensions of the sociocultural field.

In recent research, stance has been treated as an intersubjective phenomenon by which speakers position themselves and others through alignments and disalignments (Du Bois, 2007; Jaffe, 2009; Johnstone, 2009). Jaffe (2009) describes how stancetaking implicates the speaker’s positionality, that ‘taking up a position with respect to the form or the content of one’s utterance – is central because speaker positionality is built into the act of communication’ (p. 3). The positionality of speakers with respect to specific beliefs, values and ideologies reveals the identities with which such speakers align or disalign. This means stancetaking can provide powerful insights into how public discourses on gender, for example, are shaped through communicative practices. In fact, we may argue that the positionality of individuals is what constitutes the emerging public, defining the public in terms of communicative practices.

Investigation into how intersubjective positioning is accomplished through language and discourse has been a fruitful line of research in the past few decades, and has been of particular interest to those working on new media as a site of evolving discourse genres. In a recent analysis of a popular blog, Walton and Jaffe (2011: 200–201) note that ‘the format of blog commentaries as an increasingly familiar online genre puts stancetaking at the center of the activity’, and that entering a comment requires participants to position themselves with respect to prior comments as well as to the blog itself. New media takes the public act of stancetaking into a domain where individual speakers and hearers form what Gal and Woolard (2001: 1) refer to as ‘larger, imagined and emergent social groupings’, including ‘publics’. The role of stancetaking in the public context of new media is still little understood, however, and offers a rich framework for exploring the complex relationship between participants in the online world and the social consequences lived in the off-line world.

While media and new media have been considered to be public contexts in which public discourses circulate, these contexts have not always been researched from the perspective of social interaction. Somers (1993) offers a definition of public sphere that highlights the importance of participants with multiple identities involved in discussion, debate and disagreement:

A contested participatory site in which actors with overlapping identities as legal subjects, citizens, economic actors, and family and community members, form a public body and emerge in negotiations and contestations over political and social life. (p. 589)

Taking Somers’ definition as a starting point, we investigate how stancetaking in online discussion forums shapes the public discourse on gender; specifically, the construction of a negative female stereotype known as the ‘Hong Kong Girl’ or ‘Kong Girl’. We consider online forums as sites where a significant slice of Hong Kong society discusses issues of contemporary interest, reflecting and shaping the ideologies around gender that come to be associated with women in Hong Kong. As the analysis will show, these posts are uncensored, raw and heterogeneous individual views that contribute to the emergent stereotype of the Kong Girl.

Research in language and gender has long revealed the power structures that influence how women are often cast by others as negative figures (cf. Lakoff, 1975; Sutton, 1995, among others). These views have contributed to the widely discussed notion of the public as a masculine domain (Baxter, 2006; Cameron, 2006; Lazar, 2008). Our analysis of early public constructions of the Kong Girl, however, shows that women and men are both involved in the public construction of the stereotype. By tracing the gendered participation of both men and women in discussion forums, we can address how individuals who position themselves and others through stancetaking participate in wider social processes – including that of gender stereotype formation.

We focus on one particular incident in February 2005, known as the 63.8 incident, involving a woman, ‘Jenny’, who posted a complaint online about her boyfriend for not paying for their snacks on a date. The incident was later described as the first known public case of Kong Girl when the gender stereotype became more widespread (Encyclopedia of Virtual Communities in Hong Kong, undated; Yat-Zi, 2007). Originally a clipping of the label ‘Hong Kong Girl’, ‘Kong Girl’ has come to epitomize the negative qualities of a materialistic, narcissistic and demanding persona that has become a socially enregistered (Agha, 2007: 235), or widely recognized, stereotype. Here we analyze 22 entries in a forum discussion on she.com, a popular, local female-dominated website, and trace how the incident was reported and subsequently taken up by three other forums (all complete threads) during the month of February 2005. Within a day of Jenny’s posts, other participants had started threads on numerous discussion forums by reposting Jenny’s posts, including the three we follow here. A summary of the forums we analyzed is given in Table 1.

Table 1.

Database of online discussion forum threads.

Forum	Gender of participants	First post	Last post	Total entries
She.com	Female-dominated	2005-02-11	Unknown	Unknown (22 recovered)
Kungfuboard.com	Male-dominated	2005-02-12	2005-02-14	134
Miniforum.net	Mixed	2005-02-13	2005-02-13	57
Cyberxfiles.com	Mixed	2005-02-24	2005-03-07	22
	Total entries in the database			235

In our analysis, we examine stancetaking in these online forums, where the positioning of participants and stance objects (Du Bois, 2007) creates an arena for the development of a gender stereotype. In the first part of the analysis, we consider Jenny as a stance object and how other participants evaluate her and reposition her as a particular kind of person. We show how Jenny is positioned as a token of a type and the implications this has for creating a category of women in Hong Kong who are compared against other, more positively viewed groups of women. The second part of the analysis considers how the forum participants position themselves through their stances. Both men and women in the forums position themselves according to their gender and according to what they see as their own disadvantaged situation with respect to Jenny as a stance object. Their positionality is seen as contingent on Jenny’s positionality, and both men and women see themselves as disadvantaged stakeholders in the Hong Kong dating market as a result.

The ‘63.8’ incident

On 11 February 2005, at 12:08 pm, a girl named Jenny posted on a female-focused discussion forum, she.com, about an incident with her boyfriend:

(1) jenny 2005-02-11 12:08

我去citysuper買左幾十蚊野，但我男友眼白白睇著我俾錢都唔幫我俾，我覺得佢幾cheap.

<<I went to city super [a supermarket] to buy a few dollars worth of things, but my boyfriend blankly watched me pay instead of paying for me, I think he is rather cheap.>>

Here Jenny complains about her boyfriend’s behavior, taking the stance that he was being ‘cheap’ by not paying for her. The first response from a fellow forum member comes three minutes later, prompting more information from Jenny, who replies with a longer description:

(2) jenny 2005-2-11 12:29

我買左幾包零食，佢都有份食同俾意見，跟著就排隊俾錢喇，咁個cashier話$63.8，咁我就好自然Q埋雙手等佢俾錢喇，點知佢好似無意識咁，郁都唔郁，咁我扮攞銀包出黎等佢醒目下喇，佢都仲係咁，我咪自己俾law…. 雖然買野之前餐飯&買野之後齣戲都係佢俾錢，(d零食都係睇戲時食，佢都有份食ga ma) 我都係同佢開始左無耐，真係要諗清楚同唔同佢一齊呀! 總之$63.8就睇清楚佢喇

<< I bought some snacks, he gave his opinion about what to choose and he would be eating them later too, and then we queued up to pay, then the cashier said it’s [HK]$63.8, so I naturally have my arms folded and waited for him to pay, but he seemed to have no intention to do so, he did not move at all, so then I pretended that I was searching for my wallet and hoped that he would be reminded (and be smart enough to pay), but he still did nothing, so I had to pay myself … although he had paid for the meal and the movie tickets (but those snacks were for the movie, and he would eat them too). I just started dating him for a short while, I really have to think twice if I want to be with him. All in all I see who he clearly is with $63.8.>>

In this second post, Jenny expresses her stance more clearly and projects an image of a girlfriend with a strong sense of entitlement by using specific linguistic resources, from choice of colloquial expressions to sentence final particles. For example, in (1) she positions herself as a girlfriend who is unjustly treated with the stance-laden Cantonese colloquial expression, ‘眼白白’ (‘staring blankly/motionless’), to describe the boyfriend’s state of inaction. Readers of the post can readily understand Jenny’s critique of her boyfriend through her choice of this ‘condemning’ expression. In her detailed narration of the event in (2), her choice of the sentence final particle in its romanized form ga ma in ‘佢都有份食ga ma’ (‘and he would eat them too’) emphasizes a sense of entitlement. Matthews and Yip (1994) describe this particle as epistemic in that it ‘provides an explanation that the speaker should already know’ (p. 352). Its usage here expresses Jenny’s stance that since her boyfriend would eat the snacks too, he (obviously) should have paid for them. In these two entries, Jenny is confiding to other women on she.com and pitching for sympathy for having to endure a boyfriend who is ‘cheap’, according to her account. However, instead of getting sympathy from other forum participants, Jenny’s second post was met with an avalanche of negative responses against her, both on she.com and other forums.

The heated discussions in the various public forums reveal the dynamic negotiations taking place in the heterosexual marketplace in Hong Kong. The woman who is scrutinized here presents herself as a young woman of marriageable age, and much of the criticism against her comes about as a result of her posting of her experiences in dating. While expectations around dating and qualities of ideal mates serve as topics of individual posts, the ideologies of desirable and undesirable women become the focal point around which forum participants position themselves and others, including Jenny and other women who are perceived to be like her.

Positioning Jenny as the stance object

Casting Jenny as an undesirable woman

The attacks on Jenny range from critiques of her character, intelligence, maturity and (imagined) appearance to attitudes in the context of judging her suitability as a potential girlfriend or wife. The posts tend to focus on two main traits – that of being materialistic and having a take-it-for-granted attitude. These two negative traits are attributed to Jenny and women like Jenny through the stancetaking act, which allows participants on these forums to pick out the objectionable aspects of Jenny’s character, as well as to reflect on their own positioning and how Jenny affects this positioning.

A major criticism of Jenny, one with the strongest response among the respondents, centers on perceptions of her being materialistic:

(3) Taurus~Gemini (female, from HK)

都未見過一個咁物質的女人,影衰我地d女仔呀…

<<(I’ve) never seen such a materialistic woman, what a bad reflection on us girls…>>

(4) q埋手等人俾錢?不如你搵人包起你算啦

<<folded your arms to wait for him to pay? Why don’t you become a kept woman.>>

(5) 這位小姐一定是拜金主義者

<<This Miss must be a gold worshipper>>

(6) jenny, […] 嗰少少錢都同你bf計, 唔怪得之d男人覺得香港d女人貪錢啦! […] 個個月LV Gucci咁買比個gf 你去搵過嗰d男人做bf啦

<<jenny, […] that little amount of money and you’re bean-counting with your boyfriend, no wonder those men think that Hong Kong women are greedy for money! […] (Some men) buy LV Gucci for their girlfriend every month, you should find those men to be your boyfriend.>>

In (3), for example, Taurus~Gemini positions herself against Jenny with ‘(I’ve) never seen such a materialistic woman’, which achieves two aims: (i) to link the stance object, Jenny, with a well-known stereotype of ‘a materialistic woman’, and (ii) to intensify the link with her own personal experience of having ‘never seen’ a woman like that. Once the idea of Jenny being ‘materialistic’ is established, she then further comments that a woman like Jenny is ‘a bad reflection on us girls’ and takes the stance of a fellow female commenting on a bad apple that can spoil the whole bag. We will discuss more about self-identified female respondents in the second part of the analysis. Example (3) is only one of many that demonstrate how forum participants connect Jenny with the image of an undesirable woman, using details from Jenny’s original post against her.

In the preceding examples, forum participants criticize Jenny by evoking well-known types of women (e.g. ‘gold worshippers’ and ‘kept women’) who are financially compensated by their men for sexual or dating favors and therefore lacking in virtue. Such characteristics of consumerism become hallmarks of the later stereotype of the Kong Girl. We note that although Jenny’s original posts in the 63.8 incident do not involve any luxury brands or expensive items, name brands such as LV and Gucci are mentioned and repeatedly recur in these forums as well as in other public media in Hong Kong in association with the materialistic Kong Girl.

Many of the respondents also focus on Jenny’s ‘take-it-for-granted’ attitude and her sense of entitlement to her boyfriend’s money, casting her behavior as irrational, ‘supreme’ (meaning ‘best’, but used here sarcastically) and demanding.

(7) 為甚麼一定要男性付錢，還要那一派老奉的態度

<<Why men must pay? And with that take-it-for-granted attitude.>>

(8) 你都傻既．．幾十蚊你出都唔得你係唔係路你極品女友？？？你真係幾極品喎個男仔都出左咁多錢啦邊個話出街一定男仔俾架

<<You’re silly … A few tens of dollars and you won’t pay. Are you in your right mind, supreme girlfriend??? You are really quite supreme. The boy has already paid quite some. Who said going out the boy must pay?>>

While many respondents commented on Jenny’s take-it-for-granted attitude in demanding her boyfriend pay on dates, the material aspect of the dating practice was not the main issue. Several women in forums admitted that they, too, expected their boyfriends to pay, and some men also admitted that they felt men should pay on dates. What was offensive to the forum participants, however, was Jenny’s attitude, her air of entitlement, which could be read, from the details of her original posts, as clearly assuming (mistakenly) that she was posting to a sympathetic audience.

The criticisms of Jenny as a materialistic girl with a take-it-for-granted attitude reveal the ideologies that inform the local construction of undesirable and desirable women. Forum participants use these ideologies of women to position themselves and others in a local heterosexual marketplace in which such ideologies play a vital role in negotiating dating practices, expectations and mores.

Casting Jenny as a token of a type

While many of the forum respondents criticize Jenny directly as an individual, there are also some who target their critiques at an extended group: women in Hong Kong, or women in general. In other words, Jenny is not considered just as an individual, but as a token of a type of woman. This type of woman, who is materialistic with a take-it-for-granted attitude towards men, is a known type circulating in the community in the guise of a ‘gold worshipper’ and a ‘supreme girlfriend’, as seen in the previous sections. All it takes is for the forum participants to link Jenny with this known type and Jenny’s trivial dating scenario is easily blown out of proportion as the participants co-construct Jenny as an example of this ‘type’. The criticism that Jenny and the extended category of ‘women’ have a take-it-for-granted attitude is vividly captured in the following post:

(9) 世上有許多女性認為在自己男友面前有很多的特權，例如私家搬運工人，人肉提款機，人肉沙包，發洩情緒木偶公仔………….等等

<<On this earth many women believe that they have many special rights on how they treat their boyfriends, for example as a private mover, a human ATM machine, a human punching bag, a puppet for releasing/venting their emotions… etc.>>

Comments like the one above detail the unreasonably demanding attitude associated with women like Jenny, expressing a stance against the type of woman rather than targeting Jenny alone. That so many of the comments target Jenny as a token of a type, including posts from self-identified women (discussed in detail in the next section), is worthy of note and shows that the stance object does shift in the course of the online forum discussions.

Positioning selves: Forum participants

Making gender relevant: Female participants

As we saw in previous examples, many of the posts are made by female participants who self-identify as female in their post and/or in the handle they use to identify themselves in the post. In casting Jenny as an undesirable woman, the participants express anxiety that Hong Kong women like themselves are being perceived in a negative light. Not only are the women concerned that Jenny will give Hong Kong women a bad reputation, but that this will result in very real consequences for them in the heterosexual marketplace.

That women on these forums so readily position themselves as women who could possibly be evaluated in the same way as Jenny is striking, and provides even further evidence that Jenny is perceived as a token of a type rather than an inconsequential individual. The women in the forums could just as easily dismiss Jenny as a misguided woman, but they do not. Instead, they appear to recognize her behavior as not atypical and are perhaps aware of a growing backlash against such perceived behaviors and attitudes in women. What we are able to access in these posts, then, are some possible reactions by women in the policing of women’s behavior in society in general. Women like Jenny have been sanctioned before, and the women posting above make efforts to disalign themselves from women like her, thus highlighting gender as a relevant category in the public sanctioning of one individual’s behavior. We found a series of similar criticisms from female respondents who expressed concern that Jenny was reflecting badly on all women.

(10), same as (3)

都未見過一個咁物質的女人,影衰我地d女仔呀…

<<(I’ve) never seen such a materialistic woman, (you) reflect badly on us women…>>

(11) Woman 2005-2-11 12:31

睇清楚你添呀唉丟哂我地女人既架食飯睇戲佢都比錢你仲想點呀小姐.

<<(We) see you clearly too. Sigh, you are a shame to us women, meal and movie tickets are paid by him, what more do you want, Miss?>>

(12) iloveilove 2005-2-11 13:05, same as (6)

jenny, […] 嗰少少錢都同你bf計, 唔怪得之d男人覺得香港d女人貪錢啦! […] 個個月LV Gucci咁買比個gf 你去搵過嗰d男人做bf啦

<<jenny, […] that little amount of money and you’re bean-counting with your boyfriend, no wonder those men think that Hong Kong women are greedy for money! […] (Some men) bought LV Gucci for his girlfriend every month, you should find those men to be your boyfriend.>>

In the posts above, those respondents who self-identify as female express their view that Jenny is not only materialistic, but also a source of shame to all women. Examples of women making gender a visible aspect of public sanctioning can be found particularly in the she.com forum, which is female-dominated. Some even emphasize this through the use of their handle (‘Woman’ in (11), and ‘I am a girl too’, among others), implying that the identity of being a female respondent should add even more force to the criticism.

What we also need to recognize is that the casting of Jenny as a ‘bad’ token of a type because she expects her boyfriend to pay is itself a construction. Much of the data analyzed in this section show that the negative evaluations of Jenny are motivated by the perceived implications for the speaker herself as a stakeholder in the heterosexual marketplace. But such associations are constructions that are variable, which makes it all the more striking to note how biased the forum discussions appear to be against Jenny. One participant, Miss Lui, offers a rare post defending Jenny and her expectation that her boyfriend would pay:

(13) Miss Lui 2005-2-11 16:05

jenny, 算啦, 佢地唔明我地why 會介意??? 唔係貪金錢,,, 而係想體驗佢有幾緊自己… 仲有, 唔好再係呢度講啦,, 會激死自己…..blessｕ.

<<jenny, forget it, they wouldn’t understand why we would mind. It’s not about being greedy for money … but to test/check how much he cares for me … and, don’t talk about it here, you’ll only be upset (by others) … bless u.>>

While many more voices have linked the expectation that the boyfriend would pay with being ‘greedy’, a ‘gold-digger’ or too demanding, Miss Lui offers another interpretation, that of ‘testing/checking how much he cares for me’. This example illustrates that stancetaking is a selective and intersubjective process that links the public act to negotiated social meanings, including ideologies of desirable and undesirable women.

Both men and women position themselves with respect to women like Jenny and how this type of woman is relevant to them as stakeholders in the local dating market. In the following sections, we explore how both women and men position themselves specifically as disadvantaged stakeholders. The discussions reveal that participants are responding to the 63.8 incident with a mind to the current sociohistorical situation in Hong Kong and, in particular, the shifting heterosexual marketplace characterized by changing dating and marriage practices, expectations and mores.

Women positioning themselves as disadvantaged stakeholders

In the previous section, we discussed how women made their gender visible as part of their stancetaking against Jenny. Their concern that Jenny’s behavior would reflect badly on them as Hong Kong women demonstrates how women see their position in the local heterosexual marketplace as precarious, if not disadvantageous. The concern that Jenny is reflecting badly on women in Hong Kong is also reinforced by posts that refer to the group of women ‘up north’ who are in competition with them for Hong Kong men.

(14) 本人是女性-有這種像jenny的人,影衰晒d香港女性… 難怪香港男性上大陸找女伴…

<<I am a female. With people like jenny, (she) reflects badly on Hong Kong women … no wonder Hong Kong males went to the mainland to look for female partners…>>

(15) 呢個女人簡直丟晒我o地同性o既面~點解仲夠膽post出o黎? 香港有部份女士到今時今日仲自視過高，唔怪之男士們開始北上尋妻啦~

<<This woman (Jenny) has totally made us females lose face – why does she have the guts to post it? Today there are still some women in Hong Kong who see themselves too highly, no wonder men start to search for wives up north (in mainland China)~>>

The repeated syntactic construction, translated with variations of ‘no wonder + Hong Kong men go to the Mainland to search for women’, can be found throughout these kinds of comments, where women express concern that Hong Kong men are looking for girlfriends and wives in mainland China. This sociological fact becomes deeply relevant to the discussion about Jenny and also adds to the anxiety expressed by Hong Kong women that those like Jenny are contributing to women’s disadvantaged position in the local dating marketplace.

The positioning of others and selves in stancetaking acts is further informed by Hong Kong’s gender imbalance in population changes, as well as the increasing number of cross-China border marriages between Hong Kong men and Mainland Chinese women. According to Yip et al. (2005: 3), in the period from 1981 to 2001, the median age for women’s first marriage increased from 24 to 28, and for men from 27 to 30; and due to cross-border marriages, ‘a total of some 200,000 Hong Kong men could have been married in Mainland China during 1990–1999’, leaving a surplus of single women in Hong Kong. Yang and Lu (2010: 15) report that

In Hong Kong, the number of cross-border marriages between Hong Kong residents and Mainland Chinese has risen ten-fold from 1995 to 2005, accounting for more than one-third of registered marriages involving Hong Kong residents in 2005.

The sociological face of dating and marriage in Hong Kong has been shifting for some time, and discussions of the gender imbalance in Hong Kong have been circulating as well. This understanding, no doubt, places particular pressures on young people in Hong Kong who are looking to find suitable marriage partners.

Men positioning themselves as disadvantaged stakeholders

Through stancetaking with respect to undesirable and desirable women, men also position themselves and reflect on their own positioning within the heterosexual marketplace. While women express concern that Jenny would reflect badly on all women, some men express anxiety that they would be taking the role of Jenny’s boyfriend:

(16) 可唔可以介紹比我識呀? 好想識佢防下都好嘛, 一陣追個個係佢咪弊?

<<Can (someone) introduce her to me? I really want to meet her. Just for prevention, what if the one I’m courting is her, that would be terrible!>>

(17) 有時真係好驚 d女仔同你拍拖究竟真係鍾意你定為左你d錢?!

<<This is such a scary feeling. Those girls who date you, do they really like you, or your money?!>>

In (17), this man has taken away from the forum discussion a clear anxiety that local Hong Kong women are looking to men as a means of financial gain. Some take the situation described by Jenny and extrapolate it to more extreme examples of consumerism. One forum participant describes an acquaintance whose girlfriend demands an expensive handbag from him for every special occasion:

(18) Ali 2005-02-12 15:30

好少事啦～～～～有D男仔仲大條，剛出來做野，條女要佢買５，６千蚊手袋，仲係唔係一年一次喎．．．生日，情人報，聖誕＆more)

<<((What Jenny has done is a) small matter~~~~ Some boys are in more serious trouble, (I’ve met a boy who) just started working, his girlfriend wants him to buy a five- or six-thousand-dollar-handbag, not only once a year … (He has to buy a bag for her) every birthday, Valentine’s day, Christmas and more>>

(19) Ali 2005-02-12 15:44

有次再撞到個男仔．．．．我問：〔點呀個袋跑成點？〕按：因為佢唔係跑山，係跑袋佢搖搖頭無出聲我再問：〔跑到手袋手抽未．〕佢話：〔只夠買條拉鏈～～～～〕

<<I ran into this boy (recently) … I ask him: so how far are you on (in getting enough money to buy) the bag? He shakes his head and says nothing. I ask again: have you gotten far enough for the bag handle yet? He said: just enough for the zipper~~~~>>

The two posts above (two of many found in this forum discussion) illustrate the anxieties that men express regarding the perceived materialistic nature of Jenny and women like her. In fact, Ali in (18) explicitly notes that Jenny’s incident is a small matter compared to the more extreme example of materialism that he recounts. The posts reveal that these Hong Kong men position themselves as potential victims of Hong Kong women’s consumerism. One participant nostalgically recalls a time when women in Hong Kong were less materialistic, unlike the present where ‘women measure love by money’ (女性是用金錢來量度愛情):

(20) 真懷念讀書時貧窮、簡單但真實、純樸的愛，無需LV袋，NIKE波鞋，愛，可能只是冬天的一枝熱鮮奶，夏天的一個價值2元的軟雪糕

<<(I) really miss the days when I was still at school – (we were) poor, (but we had) simple but true, pure love. No LV bag, Nike sneakers, love can be just a bottle of hot milk in winter, a $2 soft ice-cream in summer…>>

In the previous sections, we found that casting Jenny as an undesirable woman provided the opportunity for female respondents, in particular, to position themselves as disadvantaged stakeholders in the heterosexual marketplace. While men did not highlight their male identities in expressing a stance against Jenny, what they did do, especially in the male-dominated forum kungfuboard.com, was to contrast Jenny and women like her with what they perceived as categories of desirable women. Jaffe (2009: 9) notes that ‘personal stance is always achieved through comparison and contrast with other relevant persons and categories’, and this is one strategy used by men to help each other deal with the precarious position they find themselves in as single men in Hong Kong.

In the male-dominated forum, participants bring up ethnic Chinese women from outside of Hong Kong who they perceive as being more ideal. Hong Kong men participating in this forum discussion have taken their view of Jenny as an undesirable mate to the next (logical) level in suggesting where their imagined desirable mates may be found. They focus attention on the positive qualities of Chinese women outside of Hong Kong and encourage other men to seek a desirable mate elsewhere.

(21) 我既愛妃乃香港溝台灣種既 ….. 溫柔賢淑係絕佳妻子 ……..係澳洲識既大家真係咪係HK 溫食la …… 上大陸la ….包你地有意外收穫 …..我有好多朋友都係上邊識到D非大戶出身但行出來氣質絕不差於大家閨秀ge女子最重要係唔單止有心去相夫打點家頭係直頭專業地識服侍老公專業既管家 …..同埋很知足不貪慕名牌 ….. 基本上拒地係靚到咩著係身都係名牌

<<My wife is a mix breed between Hong Kong and Taiwan … gentle and virtuous, the best wife material … I know her from Australia. You all should stop finding food in HK … go to Mainland China … I guarantee you will find good catches. I have many friends who met women in mainland China who are not from a rich family, but they are presentable and their manner is no worse than women from rich and proper families. The most important thing is, they are not only good at helping the husband, taking care of the house, they professionally know how to serve their husbands and they are professional head housekeeper. And they know to be contented and are not greedy about brand names … in fact they are so beautiful whatever they put on becomes brand name goods>>

(This translation retains the derogatory comment about women as ‘species/breed’ and ‘food’ expressed in the original post.)

(22) 小弟內子乃緬甸華僑, 各位有興趣試試東南亞女子, 小弟覺得佢地相對比較純同溫柔體貼, 而且通常華僑都有d米, 但係又唔會話好好名牌, 仲會同你慳家

<<My wife is a Burmese Chinese, I recommend you all to try Southeast Asian (Chinese) women, I think comparatively they are more pure, gentle and caring. Often overseas Chinese have some money (meaning those women are from families of wealth), but they wouldn’t get a lot of brand name goods, they’ll save money for you>>

The Mainland Chinese and Southeast Asian Chinese women described in the posts above are constructed as being desirable because, contrary to the imagined construct of Jenny and Hong Kong women like her, Chinese women outside of Hong Kong are represented as knowing how to serve a husband and as not being obsessed with brand-name goods. They are also described using normative feminine qualities such as being ‘gentle and virtuous’, ‘pure, gentle and caring’, ‘presentable’ and with good manners; in other words, qualities perceived as desirable for a wife.

The ways that Hong Kong women and Chinese women from elsewhere are spoken of in these forums serve as points of contrast by which Chinese women in the heterosexual marketplace are judged. Davis (2011) reports that Hong Kong, Mainland China (especially urban areas of China) and Taiwan share a long history of movement of women between these societies through the institution of marriage. But in the 2000s, the topic of concern for young men and women in Hong Kong revolves around the movement of men across borders to find wives. The intersection of heterosexual markets in these geographic locations persists and influences the availability of and competition for marriage partners in Hong Kong. The discussions in these forums give rise to categories of persons reminiscent of Constable’s (2003) ‘character types’ in global romance that provide the cast of characters relevant to the local heterosexual marketplace. ‘Hong Kong women’ and ‘Hong Kong men’ are established in the discussions as relevant character types, as are ‘Mainland women’ and ‘Southeast Asian (Chinese) women’. The creation of social categories of women of marriageable age is driven by perceived geographic distinctions that serve to reinforce the opposition between Hong Kong women and other women. This distinction is discursively constructed by the forum participants who create a system of gendered, geographic and ideological categories relevant to the local heterosexual marketplace.

Discussion

The discussions taking place in the online forums reveal anxieties in the heterosexual marketplace, where issues of what constitutes a desirable mate and where she can be found are highly salient for young people in Hong Kong, both male and female. In our analysis of the forum discussion data, we have shown that the criticisms of Jenny revolve around dating practices, expectations and mores. Participants share their views on what constitutes acceptable behavior, and reflect sensitivity to the sociohistorical changes taking place in Hong Kong, by positioning themselves as disadvantaged stakeholders in the local dating scene. Social participants use gender ideologies of desirable and undesirable women to position themselves and others in a shifting heterosexual marketplace in which female consumerism, cross-border marriage and the dwindling ratio of single women to single men in Hong Kong are hotly debated topics.

The qualities of an undesirable woman contribute to the widely circulating stereotype of the Kong Girl that arises soon after the forum discussions analyzed here take place. There are multiple ‘lists’ of Kong Girl attributes from various sources. While TVB’s (2009) Sunday Report, a local news magazine program, lists seven traits, author Yip Yat-Zi (2007) recounts 81 ‘sins’ of the Kong Girl, and other lists posted online advertise up to 101 sins. In fact, the sins of a Kong Girl are so renowned that a Google search for ‘港女罪’ (‘Kong Girl’ and ‘sin’), at the time of writing, turns up 9,620,000 results.

For the sociolinguist and gender researcher, however, the Kong Girl does not present a cut and dry picture of a negative female figure. In some ways, the Kong Girl persona can be seen as a form of resistance to stereotypical gender norms that require women to be silent and submissive, but in other ways the Kong Girl reinforces normative femininity by her attention to physical attractiveness and cuteness, her dependence on men – both financially and emotionally, and the desire to find a good provider as a future spouse. Upon closer inspection of the discussions in Hong Kong, we see that, in fact, very different gender ideologies become the locus of critique by different individuals. The Kong Girl is not a unitary figure, but one that takes on heterogeneous attributes that become the object of negative criticism. The rise of the Kong Girl also coincides with a rapidly changing heterosexual marketplace about which men and women express anxieties from gendered perspectives. The situated practice of stancetaking that indexes this particular sociohistorical context, we propose, provides fertile ground for the development of a negative female stereotype.

Our analysis reveals that gender stereotypes are not created in a vacuum, but rather emerge from within a particular sociohistorical context in which social participants position themselves and others in salient ways. The anxieties expressed by women and men in these forum discussions are (necessarily) gendered, and while both view Jenny as an undesirable woman, it is important to note that these anxieties are channeled into creating a negative female stereotype that ultimately places blame for the developing challenges in the heterosexual marketplace on a category of local women. That gender stereotypes are constructions situated in the sociohistorical context can be seen in the various representations of Mainland women, for example, that can be found in the media. While our data have presented a particular view of Mainland women as not materialistic, other recent events in the media have spawned harsh criticism of Mainland women as materialistic (see Zhang and Kramarae, 2012), providing two contrasting examples of how stereotypes are locally constructed, both spatially and temporally.

Our analysis of the local discursive construction of desirable and undesirable women has highlighted the intimate relationship between situated practices, like stancetaking, and macro sociohistorical processes. In particular, forum participants take note of the perceived consumerism of women and its role in dating and marriage practices, the attitudes and behavior of women in relation to these practices, and the consequences of these gendered perceptions within a shifting heterosexual marketplace. Thus, we show how gender ideologies circulate through the social positioning of participants who express specific anxieties about the sociohistorical context in which they live, date and share their experiences.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this article was presented at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 19 in Berlin in 2012. We would like to thank the participants of the panel we organized for that conference, especially Alexandra Jaffe, who commented on an early draft of the article. We also wish to express our gratitude to Adam Jaworski and Adrienne Lo for detailed comments on later drafts. Any remaining inconsistencies are our own.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biographies

M Agnes Kang is a principal lecturer in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on areas of discourse and identity, including gender and discourse, and interactional sociolinguistics. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Politeness Research, Pragmatics, Journal of Sociolinguistics and Text, and she has contributed chapters to several volumes, including Femininity, Feminism and Gendered Discourse (edited by Holmes and Marra, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) and Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America (edited by Reyes and Lo, Oxford University Press, 2008). Some of her publications can be downloaded from: .

Katherine HY Chen is an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong. She is a sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist, specializing in language ideologies, language and identities, multilingualism, ethnography and sociolinguistic documentary film. She is also the producer of Multilingual Hong Kong: A Sociolinguistic Case Study of Code-switching, a film which explores issues of bilingualism and prejudice. Her current research includes the language and identity of return migrants in Hong Kong; a study of the multilingual and multicultural Indonesian Chinese diaspora in Asia; and a co-authored project on gender stereotypes of Hong Kong women. See her research and publication at

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