Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith, PhD
Professor,
Anthropology
Office: 325 Young Hall
Telephone: 530-752-7388
Keywords: Japanese language, gender, and ideology; discourse analysis; sociolinguistics
Home Page: http://www.anthropology.ucdavis.edu/anthro/fprofile/facultyprofile_s.cfm?id=10
Office: 325 Young Hall
Telephone: 530-752-7388
| Email: | jsshibamotosmith | @ | ucdavis.edu |
Keywords: Japanese language, gender, and ideology; discourse analysis; sociolinguistics
Home Page: http://www.anthropology.ucdavis.edu/anthro/fprofile/facultyprofile_s.cfm?id=10
Languages:
Japanese, English
My research includes three areas: 1) language and gender, 2) linguistic ideology and speaking practice, particularly as they relate to emotional expressivity and narratives of self, and 3) Japanese writing practices.
Gender, as an aspect of social identity, is performed and, in this sense, is role-relationally inhabited by participants in interaction. Like all such categories, it is locked into the dialectic of orders of indexicality and is also frequently tropically performed. My work shows the indexically layered ways in which, and degrees to which, women and men inhabit particular interactional stances as they are encoded in particular linguistic forms in Japanese and how these are related to everyday gender-display by such linkages.
Dominant models of Japanese linguistic practice stress uniformity, harmony, and consensus. They also stress the gendered nature of Japanese linguistic practices. Real Japanese people who are not -- by virtue of their regional, gender, or other identities -- identifiable as “average” speakers and real speaking choices which are not accounted for by the specified language usages of the normative speaker in normative situations are, thus, effectively erased from the record. My most current work illustrates ways in which language-gender ideology as a cultural model is utilized in literature and mass media, particularly in popular romance narratives.
WECOL 2008 to be held at UC Davis