"Potato Seeking Rice":
Language, Culture and Identity in Gay Personal Ads in Hong Kong
Rodney H. Jones
Department of English
City University of Hong Kong
enrodney@cityu.edu.hk
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between language, culture
and identity in a corpus of gay personal ads collected from two publications in
Hong Kong over a three year period. Gay personal ads are seen as an ‘island of
discourse’, whose marginal nature is reflected in the use of language and in
turn reflects issues of marginalization in the larger social context. Using
Fairclough’s (1992, 1993) three dimensional model for critical discourse
analysis, an attempt is made to uncover the relationship between text structure
and issues of power and ideology in the society which produces the texts. On
the level of text, it was found that structural components, particularly the
degree of grammatical elaboration, differs according to the stated race or
cultural background of the authors and their targets. On the level of discourse
practice, authors were found to appropriate a variety of ‘voices’ from the
larger culture arena, the use of which amplifies or limits the participation of
particular classes of individuals. Finally, on the level of social practice,
the ads were found to reflect and recreate both the racial stereotypes and
heterosexist ideology found in the dominant culture.
Key words: critical
discourse analysis, gay and lesbian studies, inter-cultural communication,
personal advertisements, simplified registers
Introduction
An analysis of the language of gay personal ads in Hong
Kong may seem out of place in this special issue of The Journal of the
Sociology of Language dealing with ‘island identities’. Gay Chinese and
expatriates in Hong Kong are not isolated on some outlying island, or even
concentrated in any particular district of the city like the Castro in San
Francisco or Soho in London, nor can they be said to speak any variety of
Cantonese or English peculiar to their group. They do, however, display in
their experiences and social practice many of the criteria of ‘islandness’ set
forth in the introduction to this issue: the qualities of being detached,
isolated, insular, remote, separate, small, weak, subordinate, and unique, and
they reflect these qualities in the way they use language, particularly in
public discourse. At the same time, however, gays and lesbians in Hong Kong
also function as full fledged citizens of the socio-cultural ‘mainland’; they
hold jobs, run businesses, own property, and shop, many, perhaps more than in
contemporary Western societies, never revealing their ‘islandness’ to straight
friends, co-workers and family members. This status of being a member of a
marginalized group and at the same time denying those margins and merging with
the mainstream makes the negotiation of social identity even more problematic.
In this paper I hope to show how the construction of gay identity in personal
ads in Hong Kong not only demonstrates these characteristics of ‘islandness’,
but also how it reflects in important ways the ‘island identity’ of Hong Kong
as a whole, with its unique experiences of geographic isolation and political
subordination.
The aspect of ‘islandness’ that most clearly brings
together all of the characteristics mentioned above is the quality of marginality.
In the case of gay personal ads in Hong Kong, this marginality is manifested on
several levels, from the community which produces the texts, to the texts
themselves.
Gays and lesbians are clearly a marginalized group in
contemporary Hong Kong, legally, socially and culturally. Up until 1991, the
Offences against the Person Ordinance prescribed penalties of up to life
imprisonment for anal intercourse between men. Even after the decriminalization
of homosexual acts in 1991, the penalty of life imprisonment still remains for
males who commit buggery with individuals under the age of 21 (the age of
consent for heterosexuals is 16). In contrast, neither Mainland China nor
Taiwan have ever had laws prohibiting homosexual behavior, though cases of
arrest and persecution have been documented, especially in China (see for
example Ruan 1991).
In recent years homosexuals in Hong Kong have assumed a
gradually higher profile. Several support groups and political organizations for
lesbians and gay men have been established, a magazine for gays and lesbians is
published monthly, and activists have even lobbied the government
(unsuccessfully) for legislation protecting lesbians and gay men from
discrimination in such areas as housing and employment. The number of discos,
bars, saunas and karaoke clubs catering to a primarily gay clientele has also
been steadily increasing. Despite these gains, however, gays and lesbians in
Hong Kong have failed to establish a strong, coherent civil rights movement
like those in Western societies or even other Asian locations like Taiwan and
Thailand, nor have they gained the degree of social acceptance and public
support enjoyed by homosexuals in these other places. One possible reason for
this lies in the strict standards of normality and abnormality in gender roles,
courtship, marriage and sexual behavior in Chinese societies (Wilson 1980, Yang
1993). Homosexuals, writes Ho (1995:72), ‘are often seen as both a challenge
and a threat to the established norms within both a Chinese family and a
Chinese society that rests on the supremacy of male roles.’ Another perspective
suggests that colonial British culture is as much responsible for the
widespread homophobia in Hong Kong society as traditional local culture. Chou
(1996), for example, citing both the strong, indigenous gay rights movement in
Taiwan and relatively tolerant attitudes towards same sex love in traditional
Chinese society (see also Hinsch 1990), insists that much of the distrust of
and discrimination against gays and lesbians in Hong Kong comes from the
association of the discourse of gay rights with Western cultural values.
Lacking a strong indigenous gay culture, gays and lesbians in Hong Kong who
subscribe to the Western individualistic ‘lesbigay’ model of liberation are not
only marginalized from their Chinese roots, but are also marginalized within a
Euro-centric gay culture which often portrays Asians in subordinate roles both
socially and sexually (Fung 1996, Wat 1996).
The prevalence of gay personal ads both in mainstream (HK
Magazine) and gay and lesbian (Contacts) publications is, to a large
degree, a response to this marginality, a strategy for meeting potential
partners and friends in a society which offers little opportunity for public,
face to face negotiation of same-sex relationships (see Jason et al. 1992).
They also provide one of the few places where young gay men can witness gay
identity publicly, albeit anonymously, affirmed.
The second aspect of marginality I want to deal with
applies to the genre itself. Despite the international popularity of personal
ads among both heterosexuals and homosexuals (Bruthiaux 1994), their use
nevertheless carries with it a kind a stigma, an implicit admission that for
some reason or another the author has been unsuccessful in more orthodox forms
of courtship (Coupland 1996, Nair 1992). In academic circles as well, personal
ads and other genres of popular culture suffer a degree of marginalization
(Nair 1992). It is, however, this very marginality that makes specialized forms
of language use like personal ads such rich subjects for linguistic and
sociological analysis. Ferguson (1982:52), writing of simplified registers in
general, claims that the very thing that bears study is the ‘nature of their
marginality’ and what it can tell us about the ways ‘the matrix system may be
restricted, modified, or transcended.’
Finally, there is a sense in each individual ad of
isolation and remoteness, a marginalization of the author’s individuality both
through the anonymity of the genre and the subordination of individual
personality to a set of fairly stable prototypes of ‘desirability’ (Nair 1992).
Personal ads present the small, faceless voices of speakers who are both
cut-off from and totally dependent on the response of an unknown potential
reader. In Nair’s (1992:251) words, they are ‘Beckettian texts, where
individuals are revealed in isolation.’
My chief interest in looking at gay personal ads in Hong
Kong, however, is for what they can tell us about larger issues of identity and
marginalization in the territory as a whole, and about the effects of cultural
hegemony on the construction of both individual and group identities, what
Shotter (1989) calls the ‘ethical logistics’ in the social construction of
meaning. Personal ads do not just convey the meanings which people attach to
their sexuality (Davidson 1991), but also the meanings they attach to their
age, their socio-economic class, their culture and their race. Even within
unique and marginalized communities, personal ads both reflect and act in the
service of the larger social ideology (Nair 1992), an ideology which in Hong
Kong has produced a rather unique linguistic, cultural and political reality.
The most obvious way this reality is reflected in my data is the use of English
as the medium of communication by authors most of whom are native speakers of
Cantonese, a reflection of the ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1991) granted to
English not just in the gay community but in the society as a whole, and the
corresponding marginalization of both Chinese language and Chinese cultural
identity (Lin 1996b). Other areas where social ideologies and cultural
presuppositions are embedded in the ads are in the high symbolic value granted
to Western cultural products, the recreation of colonial relations of dominance
and paternalism in the portrayal of Asian and Western authors and targets, the
fetishization of Asian culture and the Asian body, and the confirmation of
heterosexist hegemony.
Background and Methodology
The data for this project came from personal ads
collected from both HK Magazine, a free entertainment newspaper which
publishes both gay and straight personal ads, and Contacts, a gay and
lesbian publication available by subscription and for sale at various
bookstores and gay venues, from July 1993 to July 1996. After discarding
duplicate ads and ads not seeking partners, two corpora, one of 820 ads from HK
Magazine, and the other of 220 ads from Contacts, were assembled
(see Appendix). In addition, a corpus of 100 ads randomly selected from the
October 4, 1994 issue of The Advocate Classifieds, an American gay
publication devoted almost entirely to personal ads, was collected for purposes
of comparison.
Most of the previous studies on personal ads have been in
the area of social psychology, where researchers, seeing the ads as simple
representations of psychological reality, have used them to measure the
supposed desirability of certain traits and trait types in relation to gender
and sexual orientation. Most of these researchers have concluded, based on
quantitative analysis of traits offered and sought by authors of these ads,
that physical characteristics are more important than personality
characteristics for men in general and especially for gay men (Deaux and Hanna
1984, Gonzales & Meyers 1993, Hatala & Prehodka 1996, Laner & Kamel
1977, Sitton & Rippee 1986). These studies, while interesting, are based on
a limited view of personal ads as ‘straight-forward declaration(s) of what one
has and what one wants’ (Duaux & Hanna 1984:363), ignoring the importance
of textual constraints, discursive practice, and socio-cultural relations of
power reconstructed in the texts. In other words, while searching for the
psychological reality behind the ads, they deny their discursive
reality.
Others have taken a more strictly linguistic approach to
personal ads. Bruthiaux (1994a, 1994b), for example, sees classified ads in
general and personal ads in particular as constituting definable linguistic registers
(which he dubs CAR and PAR respectively), with similarities to other simplified
registers like ‘baby-talk’ and ‘foreigner-talk’. Along with pointing out
certain unique characteristics of these registers, Bruthiaux (1994b) attempts,
through an analysis of the frequency of ‘non-essential’ function words and
other features like abbreviations, to posit a relationship between linguistic
features and communicative function, particularly, following Biber (1988), in
relation to the dimensions of involved vs. informational and implicit
vs. explicit. While this study owes much to Bruthiaux’s approach, it takes
issue with his suggestion that ‘social identity’ has little effect on text
construction, and that ‘social variables (are) largely factored out in the writing
process by the exigencies of an identical language purpose, stringent spatial
constraints, and powerful stylistic conventions’ (140).
Other linguistic approaches which attempt to take social
and cultural variables into account in their reading of personal ads include
Nair (1992), who, in her comparison of Indian and American ‘matrimonial ads’
combines a feminist critical perspective with a close grammatical analysis,
always insisting that ‘uncovering social ideologies must follow the discovering
of linguistic structures’ (250). Among the differences she points out between
Indian and American ads are that Indian ads tend to be more formal, indirect
and grammatically complex while American ads tend to be more informal, more
direct and grammatically simpler.
Coupland (1996), in her study of British personal ads,
takes a similarly broad, sociological perspective, seeing dating advertisements
as products of a discourse of commodification and marketization characterisitc
of modernism. At the same time, however, she points out the personalizing potential
of dating advertisements and the linguistic strategies individuals use to
express uniqueness within a set of fairly narrow textual and generic
constraints
Finally, Davidson (1991) uses
personal ads as a way to examine how language is used by gay men to refer to
their sexuality and HIV/AIDS related issues. Focusing on ‘keywords’, he
analyzes lexical items in three categories: ‘health related terms’ (healthy,
health-conscious, HIV-negative), terms ‘referring to sexual-exclusivity’ (monogamous,
exclusive. 1-to-1), and terms ‘expressing rejection of the stereotypical
presentations of self within the gay community’ (straight-acting, non-scene,
non-stereotypical). In his corpus of ten years of American personal ads for
gay men he notes an increase in the incidence of terms in all three categories
from 1978 to 1988, which he attributes to a change in relational strategies of
gay men in response to the AIDS crisis.
This study aims to combine a close textual analysis of
the ads which focuses on the relationship between linguistic form and
situational characteristics (Biber 1994) with a broader sociolinguistic
perspective which takes into account issues of power and ideology. The model I
have chosen is based on Fairclough’s (1992, 1993) three-dimensional conception
of discourse, which views language use as social practice, both shaped by and
shaping social identities, social relations and systems of knowledge and belief.
According to Fairclough, analysis of texts can be divided into three
interrelated and interacting dimensions: the dimension of text, the dimension
of discourse practice, and the dimension of social practice. Textual analysis
includes the kind of close attention to vocabulary, grammar, cohesion and
textual structure practiced by Bruthiaux (1994a, 1994b). Analysis of discourse
practice widens the perspective to examine how norms of production and
interpretation foreground or background different aspects of the social
identity of the participants, more along the lines of the approaches taken by
Nair (1992) and Coupland (1996). It also acknowledges the dialogic the heteroglossic
(what Fairclough calls intertextual and interdiscursive) nature
of texts (Bakhtin 1981), and how authors draw upon various cultural resources
or ‘voices’ to construct them. In this respect, the insights of socio-cultural
practice theory (Wertsch 1994, 1995, Penuel and Wertsch 1995), which sees
language as ‘mediated action’ in which participants appropriate and adapt
various cultural tools (including languages, discursive formations,
official histories and ideological positions) which in turn either amplify or
limit participation, are particularly useful. Finally, an analysis of social practice
seeks to examine the social relationships between the participants in terms of
ideology and hegemony and to uncover the ways the texts serve to establish or
maintain relations of domination. In the case gay personal ads, analysis of
social practice will focus on both the relationship between the gay community
and the dominant heterosexual social order, and power relations within the gay
community itself drawn along cultural, racial and economic lines.
Text
As stated above, the purpose
of textual analysis is to identify core lexical and grammatical features in the
texts. On the whole, the ads from the Hong Kong corpora are consistent with
Ferguson’s (1982) description of simplified registers and Bruthiaux’s (1994a)
description of ‘personal ads register’ (PAR), displaying smaller, generic
rather than specific, vocabulary, and a large degree of grammatical
simplification including relatively few subordinate clauses and instances of
parataxis, as well as fewer personal pronouns and fewer function words like
articles, prepositions, copula and relative pronouns. They also demonstrate the
kind of conventialized structure observed by Nair (1992) and Coupland (1996):
1.advertiser
2. Seeks 3.target 4.goals 5. (comment) 6.reference (Coupland 1996:193)
Sincere,
good-looking Chinese,
30. Enjoys music, travel, movies and quiet evenings.
Seeks
caring, honest and mature Chinese for friendship or long-lasting relationship.
Letter
with
phone and photo appreciated. Contacts
4-5/96
Another characteristic also
noted by Bruthiaux (1994a) is the prevalence of strings of adjectives, and
nouns:
Sincere Chinese professional, 29, slim,
boyish-looking, gentle, dedicated, romantic, naughty,
non-scene; Interested in reading, classical music, movie
going, travelling, developing genuine
friendship; seeks a sincere Western soulmate, 30-42,
caring, non-scene, hopefully leading
to 121. Photo appreciated, Confidence guaranteed. ALA Contacts 8/93
There are also many cases
where authors exhibit a high degree of creativity (Bruthiaux 1994a, Coupland
1996) within the relatively strict constraints of the genre, making use of
literary techniques such as alliteration, rhyme, puns, parallelism, metaphors
and humor:
JAPANESE,
JAPANESE, attention
please! Japanese-speaking, very young-looking, 32-years old, cute, Chinese,
wants to meet you…
HKM
19/7/96
GYM-LOVER looks for dreamlover. Chinese, 25,
butch, sporty. Seeks similarity (below 35) for friendship or more. Let’s work
(it) out together. Photo/phone appreciated.
HKM
26/7/96
I
SUPPLY CHINESE tea.
You’ll bring your white cream.
HKM 6-19/2/95
FRIENDS
SAY, all tall, nice
and caring WM are married, dead or gay. Please tell this tall, well-educated
and discreet Chinese guy where they are. Those who are married or dead need not
reply.
HKM 12/95
There are, however, also important differences in text
structure between the ads in the Hong Kong corpora and those from studies done
in the West, as well as my own corpus of American personal ads from The
Advocate Classifieds.
First of all, there seems to be greater variation in
rhetorical patterning. Along with the ‘author-seeks-target’ pattern noted by
Nair (1992) and Coupland (1996), there are also several other common patterns.
One of these, particularly popular in ads authored by Asians, makes use of
passivization:
A
DOMINANT, CARING,
healthy, well-built, below 35 person is needed for a slim, good-looking, 27
year old Chinese. To explore a true love relationship and share feelings. Full
size photo and phone no. appreciated.
HKM
2/94
Interestingly, Nair (1992)
notes that this structure is actually the unmarked choice in Indian authored
matrimonial ads, a feature which she sees as a function of indirectness.
Another popular strategy found in the Hong Kong ads is
subordination, particularly beginning with an if-clause:
IF
YOU ARE A Westerner
living in Hong Kong, who is looking for that special someone who makes you feel
happy, loved, appreciated, enjoys eating out, movies, travel, working out, romantic
evenings; and wants to share all of the above with an overseas-educated, fit,
attractive, independent, early 30s, Chinese, we should meet. Discretion assured
and expected.
HKM
5/7/96
If
you are Chinese,
short, hairy & Chubby. I want you for my teddy bear.
Contacts
10-11/95
A third popular alternative structure found in the Hong
Kong ads, and one not found at all in my corpus of American ads, typically
begins with a comment or request, followed by the structure: Me: (description),
You: (description).
WOULD
YOU CARE to share
your life with me? Me: Chinese, 30, straight-acting, slim, educated, frank and
supportive. You: Westerner/Chinese, around 35, straight-acting, honest,
sincere, well-built. Photo and phone number appreciated.
HKM 19/9-9/10/93
KINDRED
SPIRIT WANTED - for
passion and romance, fun and adventure, intellectual stimulation and great sex!
Me: Western-educated Chinese. You: Whatever. Us: good-looking, bright, trim,
defined, 24-36, non-smoking, clean, healthy. Photo would be great! NO VOICEMAIL
HKM
6-19/6/94
FIRST
TIME! Come on out for
a pleasurable experience. You: young. Me: mature. Together: a special caring
union.
HKM 8-21/8/94
BISEXUAL,
22, GWEILO, designer,
seeks similar any nationality. Me: Gemini, honest, into fun & frolics. You:
just as you are! Photo (preferably of you!) and letter appreciated.
HKM 26/4/96
The prevalence of these different structures may be due,
as Nair (1992) suggests, to different cultural preferences regarding
directness. Passivization and subordination, for example, seem more consistent
with inductive rhetorical strategies sometimes favored by Asians in
interaction with new acquaintances (Scollon and Scollon 1995, Young 1982). The
most important thing about these alternate forms, however, is that they suggest
that the structure of personal ads in Hong Kong is relatively less
conventionalized than in the West, and that social or cultural forces may have
an effect on text structure.
Perhaps the most important
difference between the Hong Kong ads and Western ads, specifically those from The
Advocate Classifieds and those analyzed by Bruthiaux (1994a, 1994b), is in
the degree of elaboration in the language. Abbreviations, for example,
particularly descriptive acronyms like GWM (gay white man), are very rare in
the Hong Kong ads. In Bruthiaux’s corpus abbreviations account for over 10% of
the tokens, and in The Advocate Classifiieds, over 15%, with some ads
made up almost entirely of abbreviations:
Mouth
gear! Vry ht guy wnts 2 mt othrs w/nto brcs, mthgrds, retnrs evn dntrs! Im hot
n really n2 it! Dnt B shy, Im not! 0000 Morningside #122, Houston, TX00000 I
will travel!!! Or call personals box #0000
Advocate
4/10/94
One important reason for this
difference has to do with the policies of different publications regarding the
calculation of rates. Whereas The Advocate Classifieds charges by the
character, making abbreviations which shorten words (e.g. masc. for masculine)
more economical, both Hong Kong Magazine and Contacts charge by
the word, eliminating the economic advantage of word-shortening abbreviations.4
This does not explain, however, the relatively few (though occasional)
instances of word-saving acronyms (e.g. GAM for Gay Asian Male; ASA for All
Letters Answered) in the Hong Kong ads. Furthermore, just as the frequency of
abbreviations in The Advocate Classifieds (a gay publication) exceeds
that in Bruthiaux’s (1994a) heterosexual corpus, the prevalence of
abbreviations in Contacts (a gay publication) exceeds that in gay ads
from HK Magazine (a mainstream publication which publishes both straight
and gay personal ads).
Another significant
difference relating to degree of elaboration is the number of function words.
In Bruthiaux’s (1994b) comparison of four kinds of classified ads he notes that
the occurrence of articles, pronouns, relative pronouns, copula and
prepositions are greater in personal ads than in ads for autos, apartments and
jobs, leading him to posit a relationship of co-variance between degree of
elaboration (as measured by the number of function words used) and the
communicative function of the ads. Following Biber’s (1988) dimensions of
communicative functions, Bruthiaux (1994b) argues that indefinite articles,
relative pronouns, and prepositions are related to the dimension of implicit
vs. explicit, with a higher occurrence indicating a higher degree of explicitness.
Similarly, he claims definite articles, first/second person pronouns, and
copula are related to the dimension of involved vs. informational, with
a greater occurrence of these classes of words indicating a higher degree of involvement.
Thus, writers of personal ads, as opposed to those selling automobiles, for
example, are much more likely feel a need both for explicitness and for greater
interactional involvement with the reader based on ‘culturally sanctioned’
demands of the domain (Bruthiaux 1994b:36).
In the ads from the Hong Kong
corpora, a greater occurrence of all classes of function words is noted,
particularly in the category of prepositions where the average number is more
than double both that in Burthiaux’s corpus and in the corpus from The
Advocate Classifieds. If the correlation Bruthiaux suggests between
different classes of function words and communicative strategies is valid, it can
be said that the authors of gay personal ads in Hong Kong use significantly
more strategies of both explicitness and involvement than authors in the
available American corpora.
The most
interesting aspect of the degree of elaboration in the Hong Kong ads is that
there seems to be significant variation in elaboration based on the identities
of the author and target. The greatest degree of elaboration occurs in ads
which seek specific individuals by describing past encounters with them.
WE
MET ON 5 APRIL, (Fri)
at the HK Convention Exhibition Centre Theater-"Celluloid Closet."
We’re 2 seats apart. You: short-haired Westerner, sitting on the seat near the
centre corridor. Me: Chinese in brown leather jacket, black pants. I found you
looking at me, but I didn’t dare look at you directly. I’d like to see you
again. Please contact me.
HKM 19/4/96
In ads of this type over 13%
of the tokens were prepositions, and 12% were personal pronouns. It is not
suprising that such ads, recounting specific events and directed towards
specific individuals, would show greater degrees of both explicitness and
involvement.
What is perhaps more interesting is that in the HK
corpora there seems to be a relationship between the degree of elaboration and
the stated racial or cultural identity of authors and their targets. Ads
authored by Asians in both HK Magazine and Contacts show a lesser
degree of elaboration than those authored by Westerners. Furthermore, in both
of the Hong Kong publications, ads authored by Asians seeking Asians are
grammatically less elaborate than those authored by Asians seeking Westerners.
If we accept Bruthiaux’s assignment of specific kinds of function words to
particular communicative purposes, we can posit that in Hong Kong gay personal
ads Western authors tend to produce texts that are more explicit and involved
than Chinese authors, and Chinese authors seeking Western companionship tend to
produce texts that are moreexplicit and involved than those seeking partners of
their own race. On the dimension of involvement, this observation is supported
by the fact that both ads authored by Westerners and ads by Asians seeking
Westerners tend to be longer than those authored by Asians seking Asians,
volubility also being a common involvement strategy (Scollon and Scollon 1995).
Figure one shows the relative occurrence of function words associated with
explicitness and those associated with involvement (expressed as percentages of
total tokens) in the two Hong Kong publications as well as in The Advocate
Classifieds and Bruthiaux’s (1994b) corpus of personal ads from the L.A.
Timesand The Recycler.
HK Magazine
Contacts Western Sources
Fig. 1
There are several possible reasons for these difference,
including different cultural models of self and communication (Scollon 1997),
different expectations regarding face strategies held by members of different
‘discourse systems’ (Scollon and Scollon 1995), different perceptions of shared
context and how much elaboration is deemed necessary, the influence of implicit
notions about how members of different groups respond to either expressive or
instrumental presentations of the self (Koestner and Wheeler1988), and varying
degrees of language proficiency among the authors. Whatever the reasons, such
observations lend support to the position that, even given identical
constraints, social and cultural factors do seem to have some effect on text
structure in ‘personal ads register’.
Discourse Practice
Analysis
of discourse practice focuses on the norms participants make use of in
producing and interpreting the texts, as well as ‘which discursive practices
are being drawn upon and in what combinations’ (Fairclough 1993:136). The most
important aspects of this dimension are 1) the dialogic nature of the
texts, the acknowledgement that they are in a sense co-constructed by both
author and receiver based on a set of shared expectations about the
circumstances of production and consumption, and 2) the polyvocal nature
of the texts, the fact that they are produced by participants’ drawing upon a
wide range of texts and discourse types available within the culture.
In terms of norms of production and interpretation, personal
ads are a particularly unique form of interpersonal communication in that
authors typically violate many of the most fundamental ‘maxims’ and ‘felicity
conditions’ observed in most other forms of linguistic behavior between
strangers, or even between potential sexual partners. One way they do this is
in the kind of information offered and expected. While in face to face
conversation between new acquaintances (even those who hope to become better
acquainted), one would not expect interlocutors to reveal intimate information
(Berger and Bradac 1982), authors of personal ads routinely announce not only
personal particulars like height, weight, occupation and interests, but also
details like personal habits, sexual fantasies, romantic history and the size
or shape of sexual organs.5 Even the lexicon used for describing
physical and personality traits is one more commonly used to talk about other
people rather than oneself except in very specialized situations such as
conversations with doctors or therapists. Thus, self-presentation strategies
for authors involve an unusual degree of self-consciousness and
self-objectification. Paradoxically, the one piece of information almost
universally exchanged in other encounters between new acquaintances, the speakers’
names, is usually withheld in personal ads.6
Perhaps
the most important condition influencing the production and interpretation of
personal ads is the constraint on their length governed quite literally by the
principal of economy. Authors in HK Magazine pay HK$50 for the first ten
words, and HK$5 for each additional word, while Contacts charges HK$50
for the first fifteen words, and HK$2 for each additional word. There are also
additional charges for placing one’s ad within a boarder or renting a box
number for replies. Under such conditions, Coulmas’s (1992:258) ‘Maxim of
Economy’ appears particularly relevant:
Given a desired end—a minimal purpose—make that
linguistic action which most
effectively and at least cost attains that purpose.
Put another way, authors of
personal ads must ‘covey a maximum amount of maximally appealing information’
about themselves in a minimal amount of space (Burthiaux (1994a:139).
At the same time, there is another constraint operating
against the principle of economy, the prohibition, found in most cultures
(Berger & Bradac 1982) but particularly strong in Chinese culture (Bond and
Hwang 1986), against presenting oneself in a directly positive light. Many ads,
therefore, more often in the Hong Kong corpora than the American corpus, resist
the strictly informational approach called for by the ‘Maxim or Economy’ in
favor of more indirect, transformational language:
HOW
ARE YOU? I guess
nothing is better than a simple dinner, fulfilling conversation and a warm
cuddle before a good movie. Hope there’s a sincere, humorous Caucasian,
20’s-30’s, who wouldn’t mind a slim, educated Chinese, early 20’s, for
friendship and hopefully relationship. Photos appreciated.
HKM 2/94
Other ways Hong Kong authors
reconcile the conflicting demands of economy and modesty are by presenting
qualified self-assessments like ‘not bad looking’, ‘presentable’ and ‘decent’
or attributing positive self-evaluations to third parties:
CHINESE,
27, 5’9", 145
lbs, told good-looking and sweet, travel alot for work and leisure. Seeks a
sincere, Western top guy, with similar or bigger frame, as a companion for fun,
traveling, and hopefully more. Age not important. Letter with photo and phone
please. Very sincere and discrete
HKM 6/96
Finally, some authors resort
to negative self-assessments, perhaps in the hopes that self-deprecation will
imply certain positive traits like honesty or modesty:
CHINESE,
20, STILL YOUNG, but
not good-looking, not attractive, not sexy, not hairy, not fit, not tall, not
experienced, not mature, not very intelligent but Thoughtful and Sincere,
looking for friendship and love.
HKM 17/6/96
Another important aspect of discourse practice is the
manner in which authors appropriate and adapt different texts and discursive
formations from the wider cultural arena, what Fairclough (1992, 1993) calls intertextuality
and interdiscusivity, and how these choices either amplify or limit
participation by individuals. Wertsch (1995) following on the work of Bakhtin (1981),
notes that a multitude of ‘social languages’ and speech genres exist within a
national language, and that, when individuals speak, they are, in effect,
‘rent(ing) meanings that belong to groups (in the case of social languages) or
to standard, recurring situations (in the case of speech genres)’ (144). This
process of ventriloquation not only defines participants’ social
identity (Penuel and Wertsch 1995), but also defines which individuals are
permitted to participate, and in what capacities. Furthermore, according to
Fairclough (1992, 1993), unravelling the intertexuality and interdiscusivity in
texts can help us to uncover the larger orders of discourse operating
within texts and within societies.
The most powerful cultural tool appropriated in gay
personal ads in Hong Kong is the English language itself. The fact that
Chinese, the native language of most of the participants, is simply not an
available choice,7 not only limits participation by individuals
without the requisite proficiency in English, but also strengthens the
association between gay culture and Western culture and values (Ho 1995), in
the same way the use of English in education in Hong Kong creates a symbolic
link between the language and certain types of knowledge (Lin 1996a). The power
of language to amplify or limit participation can perhaps be seen more
dramatically in the only ad in the corpora which does not use English:
ON
PEUT PARLER,
s’amuser, manager, jouer ensemble. Moi, Chinois, 26, sage, beaucoup d’idees.
Toi, independent, romantique. Nationalite pas importante.
HKM 11/94
Even though the author states
that the nationality of his target is unimportant, the use of French not only
strongly suggests that he is seeking a Frenchman or at least a French speaker,
but also excludes readers who do not understand French. Furthermore, like the
use of English, the use of French carries with it symbolic connotations
regarding the author’s identity, images of ‘romance’ and ‘sophistication’,
connotations also evident in another ad which appropriates French:
Venus
de l’ouest, seek for
handsome guy for friendship. Photo and letter appreciated
HKM
7/93
The only time Chinese is
appropriated in the ads is the use of the term gweilo (‘foreign devil’)
mostly by Westerners to describe themselves. One possible aim of this
particular appropriation is to invoke the identity of the ‘local expat’ already
initiated into the workings of Chinese language and culture.
Along with the English language, the ads also make wide
use of references to Western popular culture, particularly contemporary
Hollywood films and American songs:
CHINESE
FORREST GUMP seeks
Caucasian Forrest Gump for stable, serious, long-term relationship. Me: 38,
mature in mind, young at heart, honest, humorous, into music, movies, drama.
You: 25-45 possesses similar qualities. Please write with photo. those who like
one night stands or short-term relationships please do not reply.
HKM 20/2-5/3/95
IF
YOU ARE CHINESE OR CAUCASIAN, sincere, straight-looking, in your mid-twenties, professional man,
outgoing, intelligent, confident, believe in " Sleepless in Seattle"
but not in "waiting for the right guy", you are invited to a dinner
party to meet 3 of my good fans with similar background. Please write. All
letters will be replied. This is not a commercial business.
HKM 4-10/9/1995
"I’m
gonna rock your world!" If you’re big-framed with a big heart, this chubby chaser is ready
for you. And if loving you is wrong, I don’t wanna be right. Write now, don’t just
think about it. (No serial killers or sick insects) please.
Contacts
11-12/95
MISSION
IMPOSSIBLE??? Date:
this past Thursday 13th June. Time: 8:00pm. Place: Pacific Place II, Taxi Line.
You: Chinese (I think) happy and singing in jeans, black and white Reeboks.
Kept looking at your pager and giving me by code on your fingers your number.
Me: American, white shirt, khaki pants, lots of shopping bags. Mission: did not
pick up on your signals-hope you pick up on this one! If not I will self destruct
in 5 seconds!
HKM 28/6/1996
Ads also frequently
appropriate literary motifs, most commonly that of the ‘quest’:
DO
I DREAM the
impossible never ending story? Am I chasing rainbows? Chinese, 28,
straight-acting, medium-build, 5’7", not-bad-looking. Very lovable,
romantic, considerate, sincere. Looking for one-to-one relationship. You:
23-36, medium-build, kind, caring and mature. Looking for long-term committed
relationship. If any of this sounds interesting and you feel that we can have a
happy ending, please write together with a photo
HKM
16-22/10/95
Discourses of therapy and
psychoanalysis also occasionally appear:
WHERE
THEY LOVE, they don’t
desire, and where they desire they don’t love. Never mind about what Freud
says. Here I am looking for desirable and loveable love. Me: 30, 5’6",
125lbs, boyish Chinese. You: 30-42, caring, intellectual, cuddly-bearish
Westerner. Letter and photo and genuineness appreciated.
HKM 20/2-5/3/95
Finally, some individuals
appropriate language from particular occupations or fields of study:
BRITISH
ACADEMIC: 30, seeks
Western-educated Asian man to explore the theory and practice of sexual
dissidence over a bottle of red wine.
HKM
5/7/96
The colonization of Hong Kong personal ads by primarily Western
cultural texts (and the corresponding absence of references to non-Western
culture) mirrors the wider colonization of the territory both politically and
culturally. Western culture is the implied, taken-for-granted shared reality
between author and reader, and Western cultural knowledge is one of the primary
‘symbolic resources’ in this aspect of gay interaction in Hong Kong, limiting
participation by those who lack this resource.
Another powerful discourse that has colonized the ads is
the ‘discourse of commercialism’. Insofar as personal ads are rather unashamed
exercises in self-advertisement, it is not surprising that advertising
techniques are commonly used. Authors of the Hong Kong ads, however, seem to
borrow from this discourse both more widely and more explicitly than in my
American corpus:
MADE
IN HK. Trendy, lovely
and long-lasting, suitable for any occasions. Seeks a suitable SWM buyer,
sincere and generous. Write with photo to
HKM 20/2-5/3/95
"SATISFACTORY
GUARANTEE" for
athletic/bodybuilder, 27, 1.7m, well-build, easy going Chinese guy seek
friendship/long-lasting relationship. Photo appreciated.
HKM 16/2/96
NEW
ARRIVAL:
Italian-style looking, 28, seeks Asian beauty, "Ryuichi
Sakamoto-style", to "share peaches",8 and have fun.
HKM 28/6/96
The obvious effect of such
discourse is to heighten the sense in the ads that both author and targets are
products in some sort of sexual shopping arcade. Coupland (1996) might argue
that such techniques offer individualization rather than commodification as
authors use humor and irony to actually contest the discourse of promotion and
assert their non-commodified personalities. While this may be true up to a
point, the important aspect of the appropriation of this kind of language is
not so much the commodification of the individual but what this appropriation
can tell us about the ideology of the larger order of discourse in which
terms like ‘satisfaction guaranteed’ and ‘New arrival’ have very particular and
universally recognisable meanings, whether applied to Italian suits or Italian
people.
Social Practice
The ultimate project of critical discourse analysis, and
the most relevant to the aspects of ‘islandness’ mapped out in the introduction
to this paper, is the uncovering of aspects in the texts which reflect and
reconstruct hegemony and hegemonic struggle within the larger social arena.
Personal ads offer not just accounts of individual identity, but also versions
of what is prototypically desired and desirable in the socio-cultural context that
produces them. Harre (1983) sees social identity as a process through which
individuals appropriate various ‘theories’ about what is ‘right’, ‘good’,
‘healthy’ or ‘valuable’ from society. Other sociologists like Traub and Lenger
(1984) see social identity in relation to ‘folk taxonomies’, classification
systems that grow out of group interaction and create a commonly constructed
ontology of the self and a language (argot) for speaking about it. Bourdieu
(1991) sees these processes of appropriation and classification in terms of
market forces. Physical, behavioral and personality traits as well as ways of
expressing them are ‘symbolic resources’, unequally invested with varying
degrees of ‘cultural capital’ and available to individuals in unequal proportions.
Insofar as personal ads offer ‘commodified versions’ of both the authors and
targets (Coupland 1996), a closer look at the attributes that are being offered
and sought can help us to reconstruct the symbolic marketplace presently
operative in the gay community in Hong Kong, and how relations in this
marketplace mirror the workings of power and ideology in the larger
‘mainstream’ marketplace.
Like other advertisements, personal ads promote not just
their ‘products’, but entire ‘lifestyles’ (Fairclough 1993), chiefly the
‘promotional culture’ of industrial capitalism (Fairclough 1993, Giddens 1991).
Not only do potential partners and relationships become commodities, but
consumerism in general, from ‘movies’ to ‘dining out’ to ‘enjoying the good
life’ and ‘owning property to spend time in’, is promoted as a necessary
accruement to romance. In Hong Kong personal ads, this aspect is even more
evident than in the American corpus, not just in the use of ‘commercial
discourse’ mentioned above, but also in the prevalence of ‘brand names’
mentioned in the ads. Some authors even define their hobbies not in terms of
what they do, but in terms of where they shop:
CAREER
MAN SEEKS career man.
Aged 32, physically fit slim. Manager. Into Times Bookstore, HMO, gym, KPS
& traveling. photo & letter appreciated.
HKM 15/3/96
In addition to consumerism, the ads also promote a
particular ‘repertoire of self-commodifying attributes’ (Coupland 1996), a kind
of ‘argot’ (Traub & Lenger 1994) of symbolic resources with currency in
this particular market. Analyzing this ‘argot’ in the form of frequently
occurring attributive words can help us to understand both relations within the
gay community, and how it sees itself in relation to the straight community.
Almost all previous studies of personal ads, from those
using the psychological approach to those using the sociolinguisitc approach,
have measured frequencies of words denoting traits and trait types. Some, like
Coupland (1996), isolate a number of ‘dimensions’ that constitute the
conventional types of information usually included in dating advertisements
(including, in order of occurrence in Coupland’s data, gender, age, appearance,
personality, interests, career, marital status and ethnicity). Others, like
Gonzales & Meyers (1993), measure attributive words used by authors of
different genders and sexual orientations in terms of content categories
(attractiveness, security, expressiveness, instrumentality, sincerity and sex).
Still others, like Davidson (1991), isolate particular constellations of
lexical items they believe act as ‘code words’ for certain personality or
behavior traits within the community that uses the ads (in the case of
Davidson’s study, HIV risk-related behavior).
The most striking thing about the attributive dimensions
and keywords found to be most common in the Hong Kong corpora is how
dramatically they diverge from the findings in these previous studies. While,
for example, gay men are found to be the least likely to either offer or seek
‘sincerity’ (as compared to straight men and women and lesbians) in Gonzales
and Meyer’s (1993) study, the word ‘sincere’ is the second most popular
attributive used by gay men in the Hong Kong corpora (second only to ‘Chinese’).
Sincerity seems particularly important to authors who identify themselves as
Chinese or Asian, with 19% using the word ‘sincere’ to describe themselves and
nearly 13% seeking a ‘sincere’ partner. Furthermore, words denoting
socio-economic status, rare among gay men in Western studies (see for example
Laner & Kamel 1977), are much more prominent in the Hong Kong ads,
especially words like ‘professional’ and ‘educated’ (particularly ‘Western’ or
‘over-seas educated’), but also more explicit references to economic status
like ‘well-off’ and ‘successful’.
Another important difference between Hong Kong and
Western gay personal ads is the relative lack in the Hong Kong corpora of
attributive words relating to health in general and to HIV/AIDS in particular.
In Davidson’s (1991) study of HIV/AIDS related language in American gay
personals, he notes that in 1988 over a third of the ads contained health
related language. In Hatala and Prehodka’s (1996) corpus of 396 American gay
and lesbian personal ads, 31% of the men in the sample stated their HIV
sero-status, and, in my own corpus from The Advocate Classifieds, HIV
sero-status is mentioned in 17% of the ads, health in 10% and ‘safe sex’ in 9%.
In contrast, out of 1040 gay personal ads collected over a three year period in
Hong Kong, only one mentions HIV, and none mention safe sex. When
the word ‘positive’ is used, it is meant in the emotional rather than the
medical sense, creating unfortunate potential for misunderstanding by readers
coming from Western gay communities:
CHINESE,
27, POSITIVE,
natural, simple, sporty, good heart, want relationship.
HKM
12/1/96
One reason for the
conspicuous absence of AIDS related discourse in the Hong Kong ads might be
that, up until now, the incidence of HIV infection in Hong Kong is relatively
low9 (though, as in the West, gay men are disproportionately
represented). Another reason might be a tendency in Hong Kong for people to
distance themselves from the issue of HIV/AIDS, particularly in public
discourse (Jones 1996a, 1996b).
By far the most significant difference between the Hong
Kong gay personal ads and personal ads analyzed in Western studies is the
importance of the dimension of race10 in the Hong Kong corpora. In
Coupland’s (1996) study of British dating advertisements, of the eight
dimensions she isolates, ethnicity is the least prominent in her corpus, used
to describe the author in only 7% of the ads, and the target in only 5%. Race
seems to be a more salient feature in Western ads for gay men, with 43% of the
authors referring to their own race and 11% referring to the race of their
ideal partner in my corpus from The Advocate Classifieds. These figures
do not even come close to the Hong Kong ads in which 93% of the authors state
their own race and 41% state the race of their target. Race in the Hong Kong
Ads is a more frequently cited dimension for both author and target than
weight, height, occupation or any other physical, behavioral or personality
trait except age. That relatively exclusive preference for one race or another
is an unmarked expectation in the sexual marketplace of Hong Kong’s gay
community is further seen in the fact that the majority of those who do not
seek specific racial characteristics in their targets feel the need to make
that explicit with phrases like ‘all nationalities welcome’ or ‘seeking
Westerner or Asian’. This commodification of race is also prominent in
the ‘argot’ of the gay community in Hong Kong, whose two most prominent ‘types’
are the ‘Rice Queen’ (a Westerner who prefers Asian men) and the ‘Potato Queen’
(an Asian who prefers Western, usually Caucasian, men), and several of the ads
make use of this argot rather than more traditional ways of referring to race:
.
GOD
SAVE THE Rice Queen
who should be cultivated or interested in Chinese culture. A sincere student
will meet you in the Promised Land.
HKM 4-17/4/94
POTATO
SEEKING RICE. Has
lots of love to give. And you? Let’s share quiet nights for fun only.
HKM 1/3/96
WHERE
IS MY ANOTHER half.
I’m STR8 & young-looking, medium-built, 30, professional, considered
good-looking as told by potatoes like you, Christian, happy fellow. Just
"divorced" my 8 years, love 2 years ago. My dream is a pavarotti
face, not too tall, late 30s, been stable here, not keen to scenes but
outgoing, family type, able to talk anything and share w/ my/your ‘O’ of STR8
& GAY. Please make up your mind and write if you think we’re the right
match. Must reply.
HKM 12/4/96
Not only is race the primary dimension of
self-commodification in Hong Kong gay personal ads, but the characteristics
offered by and sought from members of particular racial groups reveal a number
of prevalent stereotypes and expectations about the roles individuals in
inter-racial pairings are meant to assume, stereotypes and expectations that
mirror both reports of racism in Western gay communities and the relationships
of dominance in Hong Kong’s colonial history.
Western authors seeking Asian partners, for example, tend
to be older men looking for younger companionship, and in describing themselves
they often use words denoting social, economic or sexual dominance like
‘mature’, ‘caring’, ‘professional’ and ‘well-endowed’. In their descriptions of
their Asian targets, on the other hand, they are more likely to use words
denoting dependence or passivity such as ‘slim’, ‘young’ and ‘boy’:
LONELY
PROFESSIONAL WESTERNER,
50+, considerate, caring and well-off. Seeks a cute slim Chinese guy under 21
to form a sort of "father-son" or "big-brother"
relationship (not exactly sugar-daddy).
HKM 9/94
MATURE
KINDLY GWEILO, a bit
chubby but otherwise desirable. Seeks a very young slim & handsome Chinese
or Asian boy who should have enough English to communicate well: for outings,
dinner, travel, sailing etc, but most of all for loving. Photo please with
phone.
HKM 1/12/95
Over 50 Well-off professional kind straight
acting gweilo. Seeks Asian under 22, must be
slim & good-looking. Please send photo and phone no.
Contacts
2-4/96
In some ads there is even the
veiled offer of financial reward:
I
AM LOOKING for a
slim, handsome Chinese boy under 23. Please reply to this improbable request if
you would like to know a kind, mature Westerner, who would like to help you in
other ways.
HKM
2/95
MATURE
GWEILO SEEKS YOUNG CHINESE
boy as adopted son. Must be of pleasant personality as well as slim and
gorgeous! I am a professional person-no ties, kindly, a bit fat, enjoy the good
life and able to help the right boy. Please write with photo soon.
HKM 21/8-3/9/95
GENEROUS
EUROPEAN BUSINESSMAN.
Seeks young, slim, sexy loverboy. Send photo with letter.
HKM 16-22/10/95
Kind,
sincere, Western, mature guy,
generous to the right person, looking for a handsome, slender and cute Chinese
boy over 21 for ongoing relationship. Maybe I can help you through college.
ALA, but please send photo.
Contacts
1-2/95
A similar but complimentary trend can be seen in Asians
seeking Westerners. While Asians seeking other Asians typically offer and
solicit similar traits, mostly having to do with personality or behavior like
‘sincere’, ‘mature’ or ‘straight-acting’, Asians seeking Westerners are more
likely to offer physical traits like ‘slim’, ‘good-looking’, ‘young’ and
‘boyish’, along with personality traits that promise a certain degree of
‘Westernization’ like ‘professional’ and ‘Western’ or ‘overseas educated’.
Among the most popular words for describing their Western targets are ‘mature’,
‘masculine’ and ‘caring’:
YOUNG,
GOOD-LOOKING, SMALL,
passive type, Chinese. Seeks masculine, educated, athletic, strong type
"Westerner for developing monogamous relationship
HKM 3/5/96
Chinese
cute 21+, slim (Your
prisoner, sonny, toy) desires WM 30+ father, cowboy, coach, cop
Contacts 3/94
Lonely
Chinese, cute, shy
and submissive. Enjoys travel abroad, films, music and French. Seeks a gentle,
sincere, caring and straight acting man for 121 fatherly relationship or more.
Phones and photos appreciated
HKM 12/93
NICE,
CHINESE, BOY,
pleasant-looking, 5’10", decent, educated. Wants to share love and life
with a caring professional Westerner, whom I can look up to
HKM 1/3/96
Stereotypes of the dominant,
paternalistic white man and the gentle, sexually submissive Asian have long
been part of both the homosexual and the heterosexual imaginations in both the
West and the East, part and parcel of what Said (1978) calls Orientalism,
the process through which the Westerner creates (and the Easterner complies
with) an image of an oriental ‘other’, mysterious, backward and exotic, against
which he defines himself.
Fung (1996), for example, in
his analysis of Western gay pornography, finds Asians ‘fetishized’ according to
an established racial hierarchy which consistently presents them in the role of
the ‘bottom’, ‘a caricature of passivity’ (186). ‘In the fantasies of gay,
white, male culture,’ writes Wat (1996:73) ‘the role of servitude is more often
than not assigned to Asian men.’ The prevalence of these role expectations even
outside of Asia can be seen in the few ads from The Advocate Classifieds
authored by Asians or Caucasians seeking Asians, which follow the same pattern:
Chinese-American
M Very cute and young 24yo, 5'10" 145#, lean and smooth, graduate student,
friendly and healthy. Seeks 20-36yo WM for friendship/penpal. Prefer someone
attractive, tall, masculine and healthy. I live in Chicago. Photo appreciated.
Please write.
Advocate
4/10/94
USA
anywhere. Very young (18+) goodlooking Asian invites aged 50+ Wmen for
friendship, possibly relationship. Will relocate for the right person. NS
preferred. Pic a must. Write! You will be pleasantly surprised.
Advocate
4/10/94
attractive
nice WM 36yo 5'10" bld/bl seeks slim young asian or WM POB 92 Aurora
Advocate
4/10/94
The most important aspect of Orientalism
is that it makes a connection between the political beliefs and actions of
nations, in the form of imperialism and colonialism, and the personal actions
of individuals, including ‘private’ actions like sexual behavior. This
intersection between racism, imperialism and sex has also been pointed out by
Hwang (1986), who, in the afterword to his award-winning play M. Butterfly,
dubs Western imperialists and colonialists ‘the Rice Queens of realpolitik’
(99). In the neo-Colonialist ideology that pervades both Western politics
and Western sexuality, he writes, ‘good’ Asians of both sexes, ‘because they
are submissive and obedient…necessarily take on "feminine’ characteristics
in a colonialist world’ (99). Therefore, although similar stereotypes of white
dominance and Asian passivity exist throughout the world, they have a special
significance in Hong Kong with its colonial history. One ad from HK Magazine
illustrates perfectly the nexus between colonialism and sexual domination by
actually making a connection between the immanent British political retreat
from Hong Kong and the author’s apparent sexual retreat: .
SMALL,
SLIM, ASIAN boy
wanted (21+). Active, British, slim, blue-eyed, non-smoker,
over
40, seeks loving companion. Let’s enjoy these 500 days (and nights!). Photo
appreciated,
ala.
HKM
1/3/96
The prevalence of racial
hegemony in the ads is perhaps the most important (and disturbing) aspect of
their ‘islandness’, for it reveals a community marginalized from the mainstream
creating marginalized islands within itself, recreating the very bigotry it
hopes to escape, and naming it liberation. As hooks (1992:23) writes:
When
race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of
specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals can be seen as
constituting an alternative playground where members of the dominating races,
genders, sexual practices affirm their power over in intimate relations with
the Other.
Another important site of hegemonic struggle in the ads
occurs in the ways the authors portray homosexuality itself. One of the most
frequently occurring attributives found in Hong Kong gay personal ads, exceeded
only by the words ‘Chinese’ and ‘sincere’, is the word ‘straight-acting’ (or,
occasionally, ‘straight-looking’), which occurs in more than a quarter of the
ads. There is also a relatively high frequency of similar terms indicating a
low level of ‘overtness’ (Traub and Lenger 1984) about ones sexuality like
‘discreet’ (or ‘discretion’), occurring in 7% of the ads, and ‘non-scene’,
occurring in 6% of the ads:
WOULD
YOU CARE to share
your life with me? Me: Chinese, 30, straight-acting, slim, educated, frank and
supportive. You: Westerner/Chinese, around 35, straight-acting, honest,
sincere, well-built. Photo and phone number appreciated.
HKM
19/9-9/10
CHINESE,
32, DOCTOR, seeks
Caucasians for discreet friendships. Photo, phone appreciated. Under 40s.
HKM 18-24/9/95
NON-SCENE,
WILL NOT BE SEEN
U-student, 20, everything OK, seeking classmate to discuss homework or room
mate to share life. Serious. Letter and photo appreciated. Reply all.
HKM 1/12/95
HANDSOME
MODEL LOOK, educated
Chinese, 28. Seeks nice and closet Caucasian for sincere friendship.
HKM 21/8-3/9/95
Though Davidson (1988) also
finds a high occurrence of words ‘expressing rejection of stereotypical
representations of self within the gay community’ like ‘straight-acting’,
‘non-scene’, ‘no clones’, and ‘non-stereotypical’ in his corpus of American gay
ads from 1988, in my 1994 corpus from The Advocate Classifieds I found
very few such terms. The word ‘straight-acting’, for example, appears only
twice in one hundred ads.
The prevalence of terms like
‘straight-acting’ in Hong Kong gay personals, a term that implies not just that
certain types of behavior are inherently straight or gay, but that ‘straight’
behavior is inherently superior, says much about both the level of overtness
about homosexuality acceptable in Hong Kong society and about the gay
community’s assessment of its own identity. Davidson (1988:135) suggests that
the prevalence of such words in his data constitutes an ‘internal critique of
the way in which gay men present themselves’ which he suggests reflects a
‘heightened societal reaction as a result of AIDS.’ In the Hong Kong context,
with its lower incidence of HIV and higher social demands for conformity, such
terms are more likely to reflect, if not ‘internalized homophobia’, at least
the colonization of gay personals by the dominant heterosexist discourse. Some
authors are, in fact, quite open about their homophobia:
I
HATE the majority of
people, especially the majority of gay. But I want to be tortured by a jealous,
passionate man who is artistic and artless. Is anyone brave enough to talk
about mass media, traveling, literature, personal politics etc. With a 22
Chinese student? Remember: I hate people to be artful, especially arty. Welcome
to punish extremist or suffer fool gladly.
HKM
21/8-3/9/1995
The fact that
‘straight-acting’ and ‘sincere’ occur in approximately the same high
frequencies, often in the same ads, in a way sums up the ‘island’ identity of
gay men in Hong Kong, an identity constructed within the conflicting demands of
artifice and authenticity, in some ways perfectly at home in personal ads which
offer simultaneously the security of anonymity and a public affirmation of ones
sexuality.
Conclusion
‘Members of
oppressed and socially marginalized groups,’ writes the lesbian critic Kitzinger
(1989:82) ‘have, for a long time, recognized the ways in which the accounts we
give of ourselves can serve to reproduce and legitimate the very social order
that oppresses us.’ Gay personal ads in Hong Kong are an example of this
phenomenon. While they provide an avenue for interaction in a society that
limits opportunities for expression of homosexual identity, at the same time
they support the very social order which imposes these limitations. Gay
identity as it is expressed in personal ads often recreates the worst
stereotypes of gay men found in heterosexist discourse: anonymous, furtive,
materialistic and pre-occupied with sex. Furthermore, the ads also reinforce
racial stereotypes already powerful both outside and within the gay community. In
fact, the reliance of personal ads register on generic vocabulary and
caricature seems to make this linguistic form particularly susceptible to
stereotyping.
Finally, the ads support an economic hegemony which
marginalizes working class gay men and strengthens the association between gay
culture and both capitalism and Western culture. ‘Entering the 90’s in Hong
Kong,’ writes (Ho 995:87) ‘we see male homosexual identity becoming a more
"marketable" label and product...It is associated with being western,
liberal, avant-garde, members of a special-minority—although there is still the
price of social stigma.’ This commodification of gay culture has also been
observed by critics like Warner (1993:xvi-xvii) who points out that ‘In the
lesbian and gay movement (in the West) to a much greater degree than any
comparable movement, the institutions of culture building have been market
mediated: bars, discos… newspapers, magazines.’ The result of this, he goes on
to say, is that ‘the institutions have been dominated by those with capital:
typically, middle-class white men.’
Personal ads in Hong Kong constitute a prototypical
‘island discourse’ in that they are both marginal and marginalizing. Their
reconstruction not only of racially determined role expectations, but also of
the symbolic value of certain cultural, educational and economic
characteristics creates not just a commodification of the individuals who
author or answer the ads, but the ‘commodification of queer space’ in general
(Binnie 1995), limiting participation by gay men who deviate from these role
expectations or who lack the material and symbolic resources necessary to
successfully ‘sell’ themselves.
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