Gendered Disease Iconography through the Lens of COVID-19 in Hong Kong

Amidst the rampancy of COVID-19, the news media and academics have emphasized men’s gendered vulnerability. Many examine the risks individuals or communities are exposed to, implying the need to reconsider gendered stereotypes that victimize people at work and at home. In this short commentary, rather than interrogating the risk-related agenda, I reflect on genders as imagined sources of disease by studying strategies adopted by administrators in health communication for the purpose of disease control. Using AIDS and syphilis as examples, Sander Gilman (Gilman 1988) notes that the construction of various boundaries of disease, of images of the patient as the vessel and transmitter, depends on our moral sense and consequent desire to insulate those we define as ill. COVID-19 exposed people’s speculations about the reservoirs of pathogens. In a post-conflict society, Hong Kong is an ideal looking glass, magnifying the process through which symbols of disease are portrayed. On the one hand, this short essay aims to examine how gendered sources of COVID-19 manifest in a society within a specific geopolitical context. On the other hand, through the new iconography of disease, I identify the challenges of modernity “Asia’s world city” has been experiencing. I explore these questions through an examination of specific aspects of Hong Kong’s response to COVID-19: gendered Sinophobia toward police officers’ wives; reactions to retired women who sought out younger men as dance partners during COVID-19; failure to recognize and protect foreign domestic workers as a vulnerable group during the pandemic; government actions that draw on “toxic masculine” traits and values; the city’s response to queer communities’ involvement in COVID-19 outbreaks; and the government’s deliberate de-emphasis on gender issues as compared with China. Each of these examples encapsulates how both gendered and cross-border conceptions of disease iconography were geopolitically formed regarding the recent tension between Hong Kong and China.