Focusing on a Hong Kong online discussion involving ‘Jenny’, who was later described as the ‘Kong Girl’ prototype, we demonstrate a method to study gender stereotype as both semiotically and discursively constructed. We trace the perceivable signs in online posts as demeanor indexicals (Goffman 1956, Agha 2007), and discuss how forum participants collectively develop Jenny’s public persona as a woman who is materialistic and has an entitlement attitude, qualities that later become emblematic of the Kong Girl stereotype. Our analysis proposes a framework for how interpretive discourses mediate between the situated social media context and gender ideologies, and contributes to an understanding of the role of demeanor indexicals in the construction of a stereotype that is not associated with a linguistic register. We provide insights into local gender dynamics and illustrate how a private dispute becomes entangled in a public consensus building process that is necessarily selective, emergent, and positioned.
1998Stereotypes and registers of honorific language. Language in Society 271: 151–193.
Agha, Asif
2007Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bucholtz, Mary
1999“Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society 28(2): 203–223.
Bucholtz, Mary & Hall, Kira
2005Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4-5): 585–614.
Butler, Judith
1990Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Cameron, Deborah
2005Language, gender and sexuality: Current issues and new directions. Applied Linguistics 26(4): 482–502.
Eagleton, Terry
1991Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso.
Eckert, Penelope
2000Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Oxford: Blackwell.
Edley, Nigel
2001Analysing masculinity, interpretative repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions. In Discourses as Data – A Guide for Analysis, Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor & Simeon J. Yates (eds), 189–228. London: Sage.
Gilbert, Nigel & Mulkay, Michael
1984Opening Pandora’s Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientists’ Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, Erving
1956The nature of deference and demeanor. American Anthropologist 58(3): 473–502.
Haviland, John B
2005‘Whorish old man’ and ‘one (animal) gentleman’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 81–94.
Herring, Susan
2003Gender and power in on-line communication. In The Handbook of Language and Gender, Janet Holmes & Miriam Meyerhoff (eds), 202–228. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Inoue, Miyako
2004What does language remember? Indexical inversion and the naturalized history of Japanese women. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14(1): 39–56.
Johnstone, Barbara
2002Discourse Analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Kang, M. Agnes & Chen, Katherine
2014Stancetaking and the Hong Kong Girl in a shifting heterosexual marketplace. Discourse & Society 25(2): 205–220.
Kendon, Adam
2004Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, Robin
1975Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper & Row.
Macrae, C. Neil, Stangor, Charles & Hewstone, Miles
(eds)1996Stereotypes and Stereotyping. New York: Guilford Press.
McGarty, Craig, Yzerbyt, Vincent & Spears, Russell
(eds)2002Stereotypes as Explanations: The Formation of Meaningful Beliefs about Social Groups. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, Laura
2004You are doing burikko! Censoring/scrutinizing artificers of cute femininity in Japanese. In Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People, Shigeko Okamoto & Janet S. Shibamoto Smith (eds), 148–165. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miller, Laura
2007Those naughty teenage girls: Japanese Kogals, slang, and media assessments. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14(2): 225–247.
Page, Ruth
2012Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction. New York: Routledge.
Pateman, Carol
1989The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders
[1902]/1955Logic as semiotic: The theory of signs. In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, Justus Buchler (ed), 98–119. New York: Dover Publications.
Potter, Jonathan & Wetherell, Margaret
1987Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage.
1993Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, John A. Lucy (ed), 33–58. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Silverstein, Michael
1998Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 271: 401–426.
Silverstein, Michael
2003Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3): 193–229.
Spender, Dale
1980Man Made Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Stangor, Charles
(ed)2000Stereotypes and Prejudice: Essential Readings. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.
1995Bitches and skankly hobags: The place of women in contemporary slang. In Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, Kira Hall & Mary Bucholtz (eds), 279–296. New York: Routledge.
Tajfel, Henri
1982Social psychology of intergroup relations. Annual Review of Psychology 33(1): 1–39.
TVB
2009星期日檔案: 港男.講女 播出日期: 2009.03.08 (日) [“TVB (2009) Sunday Report: Kong Men talk about women. Broadcast 2009.03.08 (Sunday)”].
Vaisman, Carmel
2011Performing girlhood through typographic play in Hebrew blogs. In Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, Crispin Thurlow & Kristine Mroczek (eds), 177–196. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Warner, Michael
2002Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.
Yip, Yat-Zi
2007Kong Girl Bible. [葉一知 (2007) 港女聖經]. Hong Kong: FLY Media Ltd.
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Peng, Chun-Yi
2020. The effects of media exposure and language attitudes on grammaticality judgments. Global Chinese 6:1 ► pp. 69 ff.
Peng, Chun-Yi
2021. New Masculinities in Online Discourse: A Text-Mining Approach. In Mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin [Sinophone and Taiwan Studies, 2], ► pp. 81 ff.
Peng, Chun-Yi
2021. Media Effects on Language Perceptions. In Mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin [Sinophone and Taiwan Studies, 2], ► pp. 35 ff.
Peng, Chun-Yi & Nicholas Garcia
2020. Mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin: A Text-mining Approach to Speaker Stereotypes. Open Linguistics 6:1 ► pp. 611 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.