The representations of Kong girls and Kong boys through gendered discourses in reality television shows in Hong Kong

Abstract

Two media labels Kong Girls (Hong Kong Girls) and Kong Boys (Hong Kong Boys), which take on pejorative meanings, are constantly circulated by the local media. This research looked into the representations of these two emergent stereotypes in the reality shows Bride Wannabes and Bachelors at War in light of their explicit focus on gender relations and the substantial press coverage received. Since literature on gender and media discourses in Hong Kong has been dominated by qualitative and interpretative analyses from the sociology perspective, there exists a research gap in quantitative linguistic studies to unveil latent gendered ideologies (Fung & Yao, 2012). Therefore, this dissertation adopted an analytical framework integrating Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2003) and the experiential metafunction of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1985), for a provision of a sociocultural study that is rooted in linguistic methodology. Drawing upon the Visual Social Semiotics model (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), a multimodal analysis was conducted to examine how textual and visual resources co-articulate gendered discourses in the reality series. The findings identified a range of gendered discourses which simultaneously confirm or contest conventional gender stereotypes, embodying how Kong Girls and Kong Boys shape their multiple gendered selves. Implications can be drawn from the results that both language and visuals tend to be manipulated by the media to perpetuate unfavourable gender stereotypes, it is thus crucial to raise the public’s awareness of the ideological impacts of different semiotic choices through media literacy education.