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This book examines "women's speech" as a policy of constructs expressed in official and unofficial discourse from the 1880s to the 1920s in Japan. It analyzes specific language policies that were incorporated through governmental gender policy to perpetuate "women's speech," asymmetrical gendered speech styles and concepts in the Japanese language. It also seeks to develop cross-cultural approaches to language and gender theories initiated in the United States and Europe by proposing new concepts of language policy. This work contributes to ongoing interdisciplinary scholarship on gender, language, and policy by reconsidering the relationship between the Japanese "national language" and "women's speech."
List of contents
Acknowledgements - Prologue: Theorizing Women's Speech and Covert Language Policy - Modernizing Variegated Japanese Speech - Systematizing Women's Active Agency in Nation Building - Conceptualizing Women Through Instructive Texts - Resisting the Gendered Style of Women's Writing - Epilogue - Appendix - Index.
About the author
Rika Saito (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University. Her research interests include feminist literary criticism in modern Japanese texts, language and gender, and language policy. She published several articles, including "Writing in Female Drag: Gendered Literature and a Woman¿s Voice."
Summary
This book examines "women's speech" as a policy of constructs expressed in official and unofficial discourse from the 1880s to the 1920s in Japan.
