Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan, and: A Cultural History of Women's Language (review)

The two books under review differ in their approaches to the subject of women's language, but are united in their opinion that "women's language," far from being a static category in existence since early times, is actually a construct developed quite late in response to perceived political and social imperatives. Inoue situates the emergence of this construct at the beginning of the modern period, Endō at the end of the medieval period.

Inoue's book adds to a body of studies attempting to offer new perspectives on "women's language" in Japan, most recently Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People (Shigeko Okamoto and Janet S. Shibamoto Smith, eds., Oxford University Press, 2004), to which Inoue also contributed. Vicarious Language has been written for an academic audience with a strong background in the jargon of (largely French) critical theory. For that reason it is not an easy book to read, but perseverance rewards, as it contains many gems of interesting data, observation, and analysis.

Inoue argues that "women's language" in Japan is not an ancient cultural tradition but rather an entirely modern invention, the product of the desire of a rapidly modernizing nation-state to construct a gendered subject position for half its citizens. In her own words, "by using the phrase women's language, I refer to a space of discourse—understood as a complex ensemble of practices, institutions, representations, and power—in which the Japanese woman is objectified, evaluated, studied, staged, and normalized through her imputed language use and is thus rendered a knowable and unified subject both to herself and to others" (p. 1). Through its usual presentation as a cultural category with both national and transnational implications, "women's language" functions as an indicator of the gap between tradition and modernity.

As Inoue points out, however, the accepted cultural construct of how women should speak bears little relation to how most women in Japan—particularly those outside Tokyo—actually do speak. Further, as her fieldwork shows, when it suits them women themselves use the delimited parameters of "women's language" actively and often subversively in a variety of performative ways. The title of the book derives from the vicarious language use imputed to women that purports to speak for them as a unitary whole but in fact does no such thing.

"Women's language" is explained as emerging from the interstices of modernity, gender, and language use: through its gendering of the experience of modernity, "women's language is one of the key differentiations—if not the key differentiation—that marks the specificity of Japan's modernity on the global stage" (p. 5). In Inoue's view, the construction of this category was necessary in order to mobilize women as good wives and mothers, as consumers and as citizens. As such, "women's language" has little to do with women's lived realities and everything to do with the aims of the state and of capitalism.

The book is organized into three sections. Part 1 consists of three chapters that trace the gradual evolution of "women's language" as a discourse, first from the denigration in print by men of overheard schoolgirl speech of the 1880s, then through the manner in which women's speech was cited in the modern novels that as a part of the genbun'itchi movement contributed greatly to the emergence of modern written Japanese, and finally through the language found in women's magazines during the first fifty years of the modern period. The author's concern here is with the construction of the modern gendered subject from the 1890s to the 1930s. She discusses the manner in which what was originally considered scandalously vulgar schoolgirl speech came over time...