Gender, Language, and Modernity: Toward an Effective History of “Japanese Women’s Language”

要旨

Abstract Japanese women’s language” is a socially powerful truth. I mean by this not that the phrase refers to the empirical speech patterns of women. Rather, I mean that “Japanese women’s language” is a critical cultural category and an unavoidable part of practical social knowledge in contemporary Japan. The phrase names a space of discourse in which the Japanese woman is objectified, evaluated, studied, staged, and normalized through her imputed language use and is thus rendered into a knowable and unified object. Doxic statements, such as “Women speak more politely than men” and “Women are not capable of speaking logically,” are commonly heard in daily conversation. Scholars, too, have produced a highly reflexive and abstract—therefore privileged—knowledge of how women speak (differently from men); they have systematically located female-male differentiation at all levels of the language: phonology, semantics, morphology, syntax, speech acts, discourse (in the technical linguistic sense), as well as prosodic features such as pitch, and they have explained how female-specific values, attributes, and social roles are registered in speech forms and in the management of conversation.

主題