It may have to do with my very limited background in anthropological linguistics, but I found Inoue’s work to be very complicated, not least because of all the different connections she was trying to make. And overall I have mixed feelings about it. It constantly repeated the loop of being interesting, to dull and plodding,, and then back again. Aside from my personal feelings on it, there are a few additional things that struck me. I think it’s reminiscent of Mol in a few ways. First, there’s the separation of her ethnographic work into the final section of the book, which reminded me of how Mol structured The Body Multiple. Though I’m not sure what Inoue was trying to achieve by parsing the ethnographic from the historical/theoretical/philosophical. I don’t feel like she really tried to link the first two parts with the final one. Was it intentional? Maybe she intends them to be two be viewed as separate things? But to me, relegating the ethnographic to the back of the book makes it seem like an appendix or an afterthought. Perhaps I’m reading to much into it, but I would have preferred that she integrate her ethnographic work into the larger frame she created. The other thing that’s reminiscent of Mol is the amazing number of scholars Inoue cites (as Enis noted above). It reminded me of Mol’s use of Latour, specifically her quote that “everybody relates to it, I might as well” (42). I don’t know the work of these scholars nearly well enough (and in some cases not at all) to judge her motivation for including them, but Mol’s work (and Klima’s talk as well) showed me a bit of the politics involved in writing an academic text. So it made me wonder about Inoue’s motivations too.
And one other thing. Maybe we can talk about space versus place? It seems like Inoue sees space and place differently that Brown. Inoue spends a bit of time in Part Three describing the office space (or is it place?) in which Yoshida-san works, so in that case there’s attention to materiality. But in Part One she also talks about “a social space (of modernity),” “the textual space of reported speech,” and “the liminal or interstitial space where noise and language are neither naturally pregiven nor phenomenologically immanent” (112, 73, 39). What’s going on with all these different spaces?
In reading through this text, I was constantly thinking about Yurchak, and the ways in which both he and Inoue examine language within the context of modernity and political systems. As I read through the book, I found Inoue’s argument to be much more plausible than Yurchak’s. The main problem I had with Yurchak was his lack of bringing the reader to the present day. Inoue not only brings the reader to the present, but she examines women’s language as a history of the present that exists not because of a monolithic “history” but of “histories.” Within this multiplicity of histories, the gaze cast upon schoolgirls places them at the margins of the social body, while situating male intellectuals at the center. This, in turn, creates a gendered modernity in which women’s subjectivity is appropriated at will to serve the needs of social/modern/economic systems to further and secure men’s positions in the center.
Within Inoue’s work, gender, race, and class are discussed in a much different context than I have seen in so many other feminist works. While typically these variables are used to describe the particular series of obstacles faced by oppressed persons, Inoue uses them in an entirely different fashion. Rather than explaining them within a context of oppression, she places them within the context of the production of women’s language and its particular position within Japanese modernity. She teases out these factors using the Foucaultian method of genealogy, which is far different from the other ways in which gender/race/class are typically discussed. Meaning that, rather than starting from the position of assuming that these are important factors that have lead to a particular subject formation, she takes an existing phenomenon (women’s language) and works backwards through the literature and archives to demonstrate how they were embedded in the “histories” that have led us to the present.
So, in thinking about this text within the context of feminist anthropology, I question what makes this text distinctly feminist. This work seems to be a prime example of feminist anthropology, but I question what makes it so beyond the fact that women are the subject matter. In Biehl’s work, a woman was the focus of his text, does that mean that his work is feminist as well? What beyond subject matter, such as references and methodology constitute Inoue’s work as feminist?
I think the problem of this book is not so much about jargons, as others have already suggested. It is more about verbal diarrhea. It seems that the author could not really control herself from citation, quotation, and dislocating and relocating alterity.
The result is, this book becomes an abjection. I'm not making a mockery. I'm very serious. This book is an abjection in Kristeva's sense: it is a mixture of here and there, a thing that one really cannot describe its shape.
Though this book seems to be talking about language and gender, I would suggest it is more about "imported modernity". I think the author start with a very good "object" for her discussion - schoolgirl speech. It is a category loaded with following implications: female vs. male, interior vs. exterior, private vs. public, inexperienced vs. developed, purity vs. contamination, children vs. adult.. etc.
We should not be surprised that there is almost an sexual overtone in those hidden implications. And actually it plays a very important role in female language - "public-ness". What is most interesting about schoolgirls in Meiji era is their "public-ness". This place schoolgirl become a combination (and abjection) of housewife AND prostitute. That is exactly this alterity of erotism makes this women language work. And actually the image of schoolgirl is still pretty much a fetishized erotic symbol in Japanese sex industry today, such as "Enjo kōsai" ("compensated dating") and cam whore.
But we should not simply discard this kind of sexual fetish as "sick behavior". Actually this sick behavior tells much about modernity, or should I say, the distortion of modernity. Fetishism, I can define it as, "giving something a value beyond itself". Then the whole business of women language actually IS an fetishism. It gives that speech MORE meaning than itself. Inoue's answer to this question is the unfittingness of modernity in japanses culture.
3 Comments:
At 9:06 PM,
melinda said…
It may have to do with my very limited background in anthropological linguistics, but I found Inoue’s work to be very complicated, not least because of all the different connections she was trying to make. And overall I have mixed feelings about it. It constantly repeated the loop of being interesting, to dull and plodding,, and then back again. Aside from my personal feelings on it, there are a few additional things that struck me. I think it’s reminiscent of Mol in a few ways. First, there’s the separation of her ethnographic work into the final section of the book, which reminded me of how Mol structured The Body Multiple. Though I’m not sure what Inoue was trying to achieve by parsing the ethnographic from the historical/theoretical/philosophical. I don’t feel like she really tried to link the first two parts with the final one. Was it intentional? Maybe she intends them to be two be viewed as separate things? But to me, relegating the ethnographic to the back of the book makes it seem like an appendix or an afterthought. Perhaps I’m reading to much into it, but I would have preferred that she integrate her ethnographic work into the larger frame she created. The other thing that’s reminiscent of Mol is the amazing number of scholars Inoue cites (as Enis noted above). It reminded me of Mol’s use of Latour, specifically her quote that “everybody relates to it, I might as well” (42). I don’t know the work of these scholars nearly well enough (and in some cases not at all) to judge her motivation for including them, but Mol’s work (and Klima’s talk as well) showed me a bit of the politics involved in writing an academic text. So it made me wonder about Inoue’s motivations too.
And one other thing. Maybe we can talk about space versus place? It seems like Inoue sees space and place differently that Brown. Inoue spends a bit of time in Part Three describing the office space (or is it place?) in which Yoshida-san works, so in that case there’s attention to materiality. But in Part One she also talks about “a social space (of modernity),” “the textual space of reported speech,” and “the liminal or interstitial space where noise and language are neither naturally pregiven nor phenomenologically immanent” (112, 73, 39). What’s going on with all these different spaces?
At 9:11 PM,
Jenny K. said…
In reading through this text, I was constantly thinking about Yurchak, and the ways in which both he and Inoue examine language within the context of modernity and political systems. As I read through the book, I found Inoue’s argument to be much more plausible than Yurchak’s. The main problem I had with Yurchak was his lack of bringing the reader to the present day. Inoue not only brings the reader to the present, but she examines women’s language as a history of the present that exists not because of a monolithic “history” but of “histories.” Within this multiplicity of histories, the gaze cast upon schoolgirls places them at the margins of the social body, while situating male intellectuals at the center. This, in turn, creates a gendered modernity in which women’s subjectivity is appropriated at will to serve the needs of social/modern/economic systems to further and secure men’s positions in the center.
Within Inoue’s work, gender, race, and class are discussed in a much different context than I have seen in so many other feminist works. While typically these variables are used to describe the particular series of obstacles faced by oppressed persons, Inoue uses them in an entirely different fashion. Rather than explaining them within a context of oppression, she places them within the context of the production of women’s language and its particular position within Japanese modernity. She teases out these factors using the Foucaultian method of genealogy, which is far different from the other ways in which gender/race/class are typically discussed. Meaning that, rather than starting from the position of assuming that these are important factors that have lead to a particular subject formation, she takes an existing phenomenon (women’s language) and works backwards through the literature and archives to demonstrate how they were embedded in the “histories” that have led us to the present.
So, in thinking about this text within the context of feminist anthropology, I question what makes this text distinctly feminist. This work seems to be a prime example of feminist anthropology, but I question what makes it so beyond the fact that women are the subject matter. In Biehl’s work, a woman was the focus of his text, does that mean that his work is feminist as well? What beyond subject matter, such as references and methodology constitute Inoue’s work as feminist?
At 12:59 AM,
Jason Lau said…
I think the problem of this book is not so much about jargons, as others have already suggested. It is more about verbal diarrhea. It seems that the author could not really control herself from citation, quotation, and dislocating and relocating alterity.
The result is, this book becomes an abjection. I'm not making a mockery. I'm very serious. This book is an abjection in Kristeva's sense: it is a mixture of here and there, a thing that one really cannot describe its shape.
Though this book seems to be talking about language and gender, I would suggest it is more about "imported modernity". I think the author start with a very good "object" for her discussion - schoolgirl speech. It is a category loaded with following implications: female vs. male, interior vs. exterior, private vs. public, inexperienced vs. developed, purity vs. contamination, children vs. adult.. etc.
We should not be surprised that there is almost an sexual overtone in those hidden implications. And actually it plays a very important role in female language - "public-ness". What is most interesting about schoolgirls in Meiji era is their "public-ness". This place schoolgirl become a combination (and abjection) of housewife AND prostitute. That is exactly this alterity of erotism makes this women language work. And actually the image of schoolgirl is still pretty much a fetishized erotic symbol in Japanese sex industry today, such as "Enjo kōsai" ("compensated dating") and cam whore.
But we should not simply discard this kind of sexual fetish as "sick behavior". Actually this sick behavior tells much about modernity, or should I say, the distortion of modernity. Fetishism, I can define it as, "giving something a value beyond itself". Then the whole business of women language actually IS an fetishism. It gives that speech MORE meaning than itself. Inoue's answer to this question is the unfittingness of modernity in japanses culture.
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