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.

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9780520245846

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"""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"""

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

Author Information

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

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