'Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women’s language' Momoko Nakamura (2014) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 253. ISBN 978-90-272-0649-7 (hbk)

Abstract

Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women's language Momoko Nakamura (2014) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 253. ISBN 978-90-272-0649-7 (hbk)Women's language is a highly salient category in Japan, which most large Japanese language dictionaries define as the style of speech spoken by women since ancient times. For a long time, it has been assumed that this 'speech peculiar to women' is naturally derived from nyooboo kotoba (court-women's speech), the speech created by women in the imperial palace since the fourteenth century, and also from yuujogo (play-women's speech), the speech used by women in the licensed quarters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Japanese society, there is a widespread notion that women have always spoken differently from men, and that these differences are the result of their feminine nature.In this book, Momoko Nakamura emphasizes the heterogeneity of women's linguistic practices in Japan and defends the notion of women's language as an ideological construction, closely linked to historical, political and economic processes. In opposition to the common assumption of women's language as women's actual speech and as a reflection of 'innate femininity', she provides a historical-discourse analysis of written documents, such as conduct books, school textbooks, dictionaries, grammar books and commentaries by intellectuals, in which women's language is prescribed, marginalized and conceptualized in different ways, depending on the historic and political context. This genealogy of women's language in Japan is of great interest for both researchers on Japanese language and language and gender, as it illuminates the importance of history, discourse and ideology in order to deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language. To this end, the author discusses the implications of the analysis in each chapter from this general perspective. The book comprises ten chapters that are organized into four parts, chronologically ordered, from the premodern period of the thirteenth century to the immediate post-WWII (1945-1952).Part 1 addresses how norms of feminine speech are constructed in the discourses of conduct books (etiquette manuals) from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Strongly influenced by the androcentric view of Confucianism dominant in this age, these conduct books establish appropriate ways of speaking for women, thus treating women's speech as an object of regulation, control and normalization. Chapter 1 shows that these normative discourses include not displaying intelligence and not using Chinese words, but are specially focused on limiting women's right to speak, regarding their talk as a dangerous act that can bring trouble to families. It is worth mentioning that these historical discourses on silence or 'not speaking too much' as an ideal for women, and on women's talk as malicious gossip, have also been documented by studies with reference to Spanish (Lozano Domingo, 1995; Acuna Ferreira, 2015) and to many other languages (Spender, 1980; Romaine, 1999).Chapter 2 focuses on the establishment of court-women's speech as another norm of feminine speech in a large number of conduct books which appeared from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Court-women's speech was created by women serving in the imperial palace since the fourteenth century and it consisted of creative word formation to refer to domestic items such as food, kitchen utensils and clothes. Nakamura analyses funny stories and dramatic comic novels in which court-women's speech is represented as a symbol of being upper-class, a way of speaking that servant women refused but probably needed to attain employment at samurai mansions, and even as a style of speech that was also used by men, though this was later prohibited. Conduct books in this period, however, redefined court-women's speech as a norm of feminine speech, as a list of words that all women should use. …