The Language of Feminine Beauty in Russian and Japanese Societies

Natalia Konstantinovskaia

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030414320
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030414337
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book conducts a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural study of 'women's language' as it pertains to feminine beauty. It examines the ideological constructs of beauty and femininity in the cultures of Japan and Russia, as embodied through televised beauty ads, and relates them to the real-world language practices of Japanese and Russian women. The author traces the reciprocal connection between women's real and imagined language in the construction of ideals of beauty and femininity, revealing the complex ways women respond to ideological expectations regarding language use: assimilating, transforming, and subverting ideologized language and the assumptions implicit in it. She also demonstrates ways in which women alter the texture of language by appropriating 'masculine' language for their own purposes, shifting the meaning and correlates of linguistic items and structures. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, language and gender, cultural andmedia studies, and Russian and Japanese culture. 

© The Author(s) 2020

N. KonstantinovskaiaThe Language of Feminine Beauty in Russian and Japanese SocietiesPalgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexualityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41433-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Gender and Language Research and Perceptions in Japanese and Russian Societies

Natalia Konstantinovskaia¹

(1)

Busuu, London, UK

Natalia Konstantinovskaia

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1.1 Motivations, Structure, Scope, and Objectives

In recent years, the concept of ‘women’s language’ has become a focal point of discussion and contention for scholars interested in gender, language, and culture—as well as for the broader public. Discarding traditional assumptions of innate differences in women’s and men’s language use, contemporary research has begun to elucidate the ways in which gendered language is socially constructed among communities of speakers, and how gendered expectations can subsequently be maintained, transformed, or even subverted. For speakers embedded in a culture in which gender is pervasive and uniquely charged with meanings, licenses, and prohibitions, gendered language is a crucial means of expressing attitudes, affiliations, desires, and other stances connected with gendered roles and identities. These processes are inextricably tied to the changing positions and possibilities of women in different cultures and contexts, and reveal tensions in gender ideologies and in individuals’ lived experiences. Thus, far from being innately fixed and harmless, ‘women’s language’ (and ‘men’s language’) is a site of struggle, both contested and further contestable.

Despite the increasing awareness that gendered language is constructed through mechanisms that are culturally and historically both heterogeneous and specific, most studies have limited themselves to the investigation of a single language and a single cultural context (usually English). In part, this is reasonable: languages and cultures differ, and it is difficult to examine the encodings and implications of gender with care even for a single language. Yet the emphasis on single-language studies also imposes serious limitations: effects of political, cultural, and economic forces on language use (and vice versa) are conflated and impossible to disentangle. Only through a comparative analysis of ‘women’s language’ in different cultural and linguistic contexts can the relationships between these factors be clarified.

In the present work, I aim to explore the role of ‘women’s language’ related to feminine beauty in two distinct linguistic and cultural contexts: Japanese and Russian. Feminine beauty constitutes an essential aspect of gender-based ideals in both Japanese and Russian societies, and demarcates a field in which conflicts within and between ideologies and identities are visible and significant. As such, it is a fruitful space within which to examine the intersections of traditions and expectations with women’s self-concepts, and to observe how these junctions evolve in the face of social change. Of course, ‘women’s language’ pertains to many domains of discourse beyond feminine beauty, and it is my hope that the present focus will encourage readers to engage in comparative analysis and readings of gendered language in these other areas. However, a comprehensive analysis of ‘women’s language’ in other areas of Japanese and Russian language and culture is beyond the scope of this project.

Interestingly, Japanese and Russian contexts have never been explicitly compared and contrasted. Analysis of these two geographically neighboring, yet culturally and linguistically different, societies is fascinating because both of these countries have been undergoing major transformations in their perception of gender and their expectations of men and women’s speech. In the 1990s, Japan adopted a series of laws and regulations, which aimed at improving women’s work conditions, leading to a pronounced shift in the treatment of women in Japanese society. However, despite decades of reforms aimed at improving women’s position in society, in 2018 Japan still occupied 110th place out of 149 countries in the “Global Gender Gap Report” of the Economic World Forum (p. 21). In the same report, Japan and Russia have a similar ranking on the issue of female political empowerment, occupying 125th and 123rd place in the world. In Russia, the concept of gender has also experienced radical changes in recent decades. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the era of communism in Russia, leading to a traditionalist realignment in perceptions of women and femininity in the country. The recent bill decriminalizing domestic violence (2017) in Russia is one extreme example of this resurgence of conservative, patriarchal values. In this book I trace the impact of these societal changes on the perception of gender in Japan and Russia, exploring the media-circulated images of femininity, the agency of Japanese and Russian women in their twenties, and their actual language use. I believe that these types of well-informed cross-cultural comparisons are very productive, as they generate findings that may otherwise escape the attention of the researcher, exposing differences and similarities in how various societies create and maintain gender discourses.

A cross-cultural approach is also essential because it allows for a nuanced understanding that avoids potential pitfalls and over-generalizations. In a single cultural context, correlated aspects of historical change in ideologies regarding gender, femininity, and beauty can make it difficult to disentangle the underlying causal processes. Intercultural, cross-linguistic comparisons can therefore help to (a) reveal underlying similarities in the construction of ideological notions and the ways in which they are processed by women in language, and (b) expose dis-analogies that reveal the importance of cultural idiosyncrasies. In the absence of cultural comparisons, it would be impossible to determine which aspects of gendered representations and language use (if any) are likely to remain invariant and which are most likely to develop in response to historical and social change. Moreover, within a single cultural context, it is difficult to disambiguate the correlated effects of economic, political, and social transformations in order to properly trace the causal relationships underlying changes in language use.

The book consists of five chapters and explores three types of data. In this first (introductory) chapter, I concisely introduce the body of research on gender and language, focusing on the type of theoretical foundations that are at the core of my analysis. I then introduce the scholarship on beauty advertising, femininity, and ‘women’s place’ in Russia and Japan, addressing the main terms and concepts in this area. In the second chapter, I examine televised advertising as the source of circulating gender stereotypes (Goffman, 1979a) in order to investigate the idealized femininity features in Japan and Russia. This chapter focuses on media-circulated depictions of women and feminine beauty, and explores the gender ideologies that underlie these depictions in their cultural and historical context. In the third chapter, I analyze conversations among Japanese and Russian women to elucidate their perceptions of ideal womanhood, examining the modes of behavior and speech revealed in their personal interviews. Thus, in contrast to the second chapter, the third chapter engages directly with women’s own language about feminine beauty and their ideals regarding their lives as women. In so doing, this chapter assesses the penetration of gender ideologies (such as those promulgated by the media materials examined in the previous chapter) into the women’s non-scripted discourse, as well as their own articulations of gendered self-concepts and identities. Finally, in the fourth chapter, using a Japanese blog database and a Russian spoken corpus, I explore the use of conventionally male language by Japanese and Russian women, and analyze the contexts in which this occurs. This chapter thus considers ways in which women explicitly violate or subvert traditional norms regulating gendered speech and writing. In Chap. 5, I summarize and discuss my findings further, addressing the different mechanisms of gender-construction in Japanese and Russian societies. The three-layered structure of the book engages with feminist linguistic theories in a variety of ways, analyzing the differences between Japanese and Russian women’s scripted discourses in advertising, their perceptions of their ideal selves, and their real voices.

Categories such as ‘women’s language,’ ‘femininity,’ and ‘Russian/Japanese women’ vastly oversimplify the complex and diverse attributes of women and their behavior, both as individuals and as groups. Unfortunately, however, these concepts have been frequently grouped together without sufficient differentiation in some earlier scholarship.

An extensive ideology of ‘women’s language’ has been developed in Japan, associated with essentialist notions that stereotypical lexical choices reflect immutable properties that are innate to the essence of women. In fact, this “women’s language” is socially constructed, the fictive product of grammar books and state propaganda (Inoue, 2006; Nakamura, 2014). One of the main goals of the book is to problematize the notion of women’s language in Japan by contrasting the uses of language in women’s spontaneous conversations with the ideological prescriptions regarding language use implicit in media messages. Similar considerations apply to ‘women’s language’ in Russia, although the precise coordinates of women’s language within the ideological space of Russian gender norms are different. Especially in analyzing Russian women’s usage of stereotypically ‘male’ language in spontaneous communication, I critique prevailing notions about the parameters that define ‘women’s language’ and ‘women’s voices’ in Russia.

‘Femininity’ is also a complex concept both in Russia and in Japan. One of the main reasons for exploring these cultures and linguistic communities together, juxtaposed to one another, is the desire to show how modern national cultures with different social and economic histories encode expectations about gender in alternative ways. In the course of this exposition, I will elucidate the underlying similarities in the way patriarchal systems of power shape conceptions of ‘femininity,’ but also highlight the culture-specific manifestations of ideological distinctiveness. In addition, for a variety of reasons, women accommodate, resist, and transform ‘femininity’ in different ways in Russia and Japan, based in part on the self-presentation strategies and stances that are most readily afforded to women by the lexical expectations of Japanese and Russian language communities. In these comparisons, it becomes more evident how the construction of femininity represents a sequence of strategic choices and responses, conditioned on the history and culture in which these femininities are embedded and in which they are confronted.

‘Womanhood’ can take on different valences and significations in different national ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Gender and Language Research and Perceptions in Japanese and Russian Societies
• 2. Women’s Voices in Russian and Japanese ‘Beauty Ads’
• 3. Russian and Japanese Women’s Perceptions of Feminine Beauty
• 4. Russian and Japanese Women’s Real Language Practices
• 5. Conclusion
• Back Matter