Status Updates From Japanese Language, Gender, ...

You're damned if you make the sex of a woman, you're damned if you don't.

Feminist linguistic studies, the ultimate expression of the phrase 'shifting the goal posts'.

I can't wait to read one that says having a gender system is the ultimate franchisement of women.

Gosh. You cannot win.

This is one book about feminism "She identified several conventional sexist practices, including (1) unnecessarily marking women 'female company president' etc."

The other feminist book, about erasing women from data sets gets made because they just say 'doctor' or 'president' instead of 'female doctor' because obviously everyone just imagines a male if you say 'doctor' or 'president.'

Wow. I found something I agreed with in this book!

to paraphrase: Not enough linguists go out and look at actual language use.

So true!

The difference is that I find this in all linguists, she seems to only find it among those she disagrees with. I wonder if she disagrees with...oh, who was it that wrote the entire book on questionnaires of what women think is gendered language? Maynard?...no...Takemaru!

"topics chosen specifically for a female audience. Women's magazines are filled with articles on fashion, homemaking, and the private affairs of celebrities."

Yes. Is this because they are chosen specifically for a female audience, or is it because this is what female audiences are interested in?

"(3) an abundant use of the second-person pronoun anata 'you' instead of ellipsis to directly address the reader, which -being a typical feature of advertisements-treats women as if they were more susceptible to insincere seduction."

I wonder if she considered genre or register at all, because I think mine is showing the opposite, more pronoun usage in male targeted speech. But, maybe not.

"(2) a smaller number of proper nouns, which implies that women are less interested than men in learning about the world,"

...how? That's a seriously big jump.

"The first component of onnarashii kotoba is language used with a female audience in mind. Jugaku's quantitative study of women's magazines had revealed some distinctive stylistic features, including (1) a greater percentage of exclamatory and uncompleted sentences, which reflects a belief in women's emotionality and lack of logical thinking..."

It could also reflect a belief in women's superior ability to decode

...choices and their social meanings."

...to establish solidarity among local people. but this does not mean that they are either rejecting conventional gender or sexual norms or trying to express masculinity. The meanings of ore and boku are, we see, highly context-dependent. In like manner...only a close examination of language use in real contexts enables us to fully understand the complex and dynamic relationship between specific linguistic...

...to reject traditional femininity, or to be nonconformist, bur they are not indexing masculinity. Women at lesbian bars may use ore to establish solidarity with the interlocutor, while at the same time rejecting the dominant gender and sexual norms, but again their use of ore does not index masculinity. Farm women in rural areas of Tohoku may use ore regularly...as part of their regional dialect, which can serve...

For example, the pronouns boku and ore are both typically characterized as 'masculine' first-person. However, the meanings conveyed by these pronouns in specific contexts are far more complex than this characterization offers. For example, high school boys use ore to index relative powerfulness rather than simple male speakerhood and boku to index relative powerlessness. High school girls may also use ore (or boku)..

particles to index (traditional) masculinity (although they may resort to other means to do so). Rather, they use sentence-final particles to express a variety of pragmatic meanings; for example, 'masculine' or forceful, expressions are used to signal camaraderie, authority, anger, and so on."

Her analyses of the use of sentence-final particles in their conversations exhibit not only individual and regional differences but also considerable 'deviation' from the normative usage, which undermines the idea that there is a single 'Japanese men's language.' Based on her finding that all speakers used 'masculine' forms relatively infrequently Sturts concludes that these men do not utilize sentence-final...

"Miyazaki demonstrates how the students use pronouns to index a multitude of pragmatic meanings that concern not only femininity and masculinity but also levels of formality, power, and solidarity."

"[Lesbian] speakers shift speech styles [in pronoun usage] depending on the context (e.g., interlocutors, speech act types)."

"They examine actual speech data closely with regard to the use of linguistic features that are normally associated with gender, such as self-references and address terminology....The results reveal impressive variation and extensive 'deviations' from normative or stereotypical usage, suggesting that 'deviant' uses are meaningful choices rather than mere exceptions or anomalies."

"...young women or young men into the discursively constructed "magazine community"- and to attact, thereby, a regular subscriber and purchaser base."

"Nakamura asks how a specific gender identity not preestablished...in gender ideologies is "invented" in discourse practices. Her argument starts with the magazine writers' and producers' need to construct a specific identity for a specific set of targeted readers as they are imagined to be. Using speech styles that are, again, imagined to appeal to targeted readers, magazine discourse attempts to draw real...

"In a variety of ways, print and other media have the power to establish ideas about what constitutes desired femininity and masculinity with respect to personal traits, behaviors, and so on. These ideas may not always be internally coherent but can provide alternatives to the ideas provided by dominant institutions." Unless the print is itself a dominant institution.

"Through an extensive interrogation of the linkages between politeness, honorifics, and gender made by linguists and other researchers, on the one hand, and purveyed as social norms to the public via education and media, on the other, Okamoto demonstrates the remarkable consistency of messages to women that , in order to be onnarashii 'feminine', they should speak in ways that are gentle, polite, and refined."