Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan / Edition 1

by Miyako Inoue

Overview

This highly original study provides an entirely new critical perspective on the central importance of ideas about language in the reproduction of gender, class, and race divisions in modern Japan. Focusing on a phenomenon commonly called "women's language," in modern Japanese society, Miyako Inoue considers the history and social effects of this language form. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a contemporary Tokyo corporation to study the everyday linguistic experience of white-collar females office workers and on historical research from the late nineteenth century to 1930, she calls into question the claim that "women's language" is a Japanese cultural tradition of ancient origin and offers a critical geneaology showing the extent to which this language form is, in fact, a cultural construct linked with Japan's national and capitalist modernity. Her theoretically sophisticated, empirically grounded, interdisciplinary work brilliantly illuminates the relationship between culture and language, the nature of power and subject formation in modernity, and how the complex nexus of gender, language, and political economy are experienced in everyday life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520245853
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/05/2006
Series:	Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes , #11
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Miyako Inoue is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables
Acknowledgments
Note on Japanese Names and the Romanization of Japanese Language

Introduction: Women’s Language and Capitalist Modernity in Japan

part one: language, gender, and national

modernity: the genealogy of japanese women’s language, 1880s–1930s

1. An Echo of National Modernity: Overhearing “Schoolgirl Speech”

2. Linguistic Modernity and the Emergence of Women’s Language

3. From Schoolgirl Speech to Women’s Language: Consuming Indexicality in Women’s Magazines, 1890–1930

part two: the nation’s temporality and the death of women’s language

4. Capitalist Modernity, the Responsibilized Speaking Body, and the Public Mourning of the Death of Women’s Language

part three: re-citing women’s language in late modern japan

Introduction

5. “Just Stay in the Middle”: The Story of a Woman Manager

6. Defamiliarizing Japanese Women’s Language: Strategies and Tactics of Female Office Workers

Afterword: This Vicarious “Japanese Women’s Language”
Bibliography
Index