Social media as communities of practice: stereotype formation in Hong Kong

Abstract

Social media as communities of practice: stereotype formation in Hong Kong M. Agnes Kang, University of Hong Kong Katherine Chen, University of Hong Kong In 2005, an online forum discussion involving a woman, ‘Jenny’, who posted a complaint online about her boyfriend for not paying for their snacks on a date, went viral in Hong Kong. The incident was later described as the “63.8 incident”, the first known public case of a ‘Kong Girl’ when the gender stereotype became more widespread in the years following. Originally a clipping of ‘Hong Kong Girl’, ‘Kong Girl’ has come to epitomize the negative qualities of a materialistic and narcissistic persona that has become an enregistered stereotype. In this paper, we consider online forum discussions as communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992) to show how gender is produced and reproduced differentially in social media. Specifically, we trace the formation of the Kong Girl stereotype by analyzing discussions of Jenny and women like her in local forums before Jenny becomes known as a Kong Girl. Our findings show that men and women expressed gendered anxieties in the online forums through stancetaking (Du Bois 2007), thereby engaging in sense-making practices around a category of undesirable Hong Kong woman. While gender stereotypes have been explained by power structures disadvantageous to women, our study reveals the role of stancetaking in the gendered positioning of participants in a shifting heterosexual marketplace, where men and women contribute to shared meanings through their lived experiences. References Du Bois JW (2007) The stance triangle. In: Englebretson R (ed) Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 139-182. Eckert P (2006) Communities of Practice. In: Keith Brown, (Editor-in-Chief) Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, Second Edition, volume 13. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 683-685. Eckert P and S McConnell-Ginet (1992) Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender, and Power all Live. In: Kira Hall et al. (eds) Locating Power. Proceedings of the 2nd Berkeley Women and Language Conference. Berkeley: WLG, pp. 89-99. Eckert P and S McConnell-Ginet (1992). Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community–based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 461-90. Lave, J and E Wenger (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.