Miyako Inoue

Speech without a speaking body: "Japanese women's language" in translation

Abstract Central to the way in which “womens language” is experienced in the Japanese everyday is a profound cognitive dissonance: The majority of women do not speak “womens language” and, yet, they recognize it as their own language. This article seeks to understand how metalinguistic devices—such as reported speech and quotation—and the intertextuality that they create serve both to produce and at the same time to normalize such dissonance, and thus womens language as language ideology. To make my point, I will focus on reported speech in interlingual translation, and its role in the reproduction of the idea of womens language.

Where has “Japanese women’s language” gone?: Notes on language and political economy in the age of control societies

During the 1990s Japan’s economy, inflated by speculation, collapsed and a decades-long recession began. Contributing to this special section that revisits the paradigm of language and political economy, this essay discusses the new semiotic condition that has emerged in postbubble Japanese society. Taking a cue from Gilles Deleuze’s notion of control societies, I will specifically focus on the fate of “Japanese women’s language,” or a set of speech forms exclusively associated with femaleness. This essay will ask what has happened to “women’s language” as the society shifts from disciplinary society (Foucault) to control society (Deleuze).

Things That Speak: Peirce, Benjamin, and the Kinesthetics of Commodity Advertisement in Japanese Women's Magazines, 1900 to the 1930s

Commodity advertisements in Japanese women’s magazines published and circulated from the first decade of the 1900s through the 1930s, especially advertisements for feminine commodities like cosmetics, were new, modern forms of print media deeply imbricated in what was to become Japan’s Fordist political-economic and cultural formation of mass production and mass consumption that paralleled developments in the United States, Germany, and England.1 David Harvey persuasively demonstrates that Fordism