Description
Book SynopsisProvides a 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, this title considers the history and social effects of this language form.
Trade Review"Miyako Inoue's Vicarious Language is a work of scholarly distinction and cultural insight. She explores the texture of Japanese modernity, its national rituals and social practices, by way of a sustained, semiotic analysis of womens' language - the language of self-expression that women use in intimate and institutional contexts, and the language used to define the gendered roles assigned to women within the powers of patriarchy. This is a work that allows you to participate in the lifeworld of the Japanese language, at the illuminating moment when gender relations are writ large in the social syntax of national life." - Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F.Rothenberg Professor, Harvard University "Inoue has accomplished an extraordinary task, which is without precedent in the East Asian Fields. To my knowledge, no author has ever demonstrated as persuasively as she does that the issues concerning women's Japanese can be explored in such an innovative, engaging way." - Naoki Sakai, author of Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse"
Table of ContentsList 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
