Khari’s Reviews > Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People > Status Update

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...