Journal of Language and Sexuality - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2015

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.

This study investigates how luxury apartment housing advertisements in Singapore function as meaning-generating institutions through visual and textual discourse. Advertisements are designed to ascribe a set of attitudes, values, and preoccupations to a group and to imbue their audiences with the idea that they belong to that group. Human models in advertisements represent idealized people and lifestyles, displaying aspirational images of men and women as consumers of products. Under the influence of Confucian patriarchal ideology, the Singapore government has promoted a narrow, heteronormative definition of family in its pro-family policies since 1987. In the advertisements for two different types of luxury apartments — one regulated by the government and the other not — we see two different ways of engaging with pro-family policies that suggest what is expected from ideal members of society in Singapore.

This paper addresses the question of what potential queer pornography has to subvert hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality. In particular, it engages in the analysis of transitivity and metaphor in an example of queer written online pornography and links this textual analysis to a discussion of the role of text distribution and consumption in realising any subversive potential. The analysis shows that in terms of participant representation, the text reinforces rather than challenges hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality: Although the main protagonists are both ambiguously sexed, patterns of transitivity and use of metaphor construct largely binary gender identities for them, allocating sexual activity to the first-person narrator while casting the Other as passively desiring. In terms of its distribution and consumption, however, the text maintains its subversive potential as it sexualises a public online space and can turn offline public space into a sexual place.

Despite recent claims that (public) gay spaces as we know them no longer need to exist (Aguirre-Livingston 2011), many queer scholars have shown that this is not historically the case (e.g. Manalansan 2003). In order to examine the issue of language and sexuality in public spaces, this paper uses ethnographic data collected among members of a university queer group in southern California to demonstrate role and regulation of ‘inclusive language’ — language that seeks to remain gender-neutral and non-exclusionary for personal identity labels — in the attempts to create what are known as safe spaces, both private and public. While a need for such spaces comes from a reaction to social privilege and normative expectations commonly found in public spaces, in many respects, the material reality of safe spaces would not be possible without regulating language used in this setting.