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Miyako Inoue, Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, April, 2006, 340 pp.
More than a mere debunking of cultural assumptions about Japan, language, gender, and modernity, Vicarious Language is a scrupulous study of how these assumptions penetrate contemporary social life in Japan and beyond as a productive site of subject formation. Inoue's historical-cumethnographic investigation searches for the semiotic foundation of the "discourse of Japanese women's language," a "socially powerful truth" (1). Why does this "language" appear transparent to the social actors who invest it with cultural values? Her aim is to render this transparency visible.
Or rather audible. Inoue starts her discussion by arguing that "the modern Japanese woman came into being as a culturally meaningful category in and through her imputed acoustic presence" (39). This is an intriguing move. While existing research on modern sociocultural forms tend to privilege visuality-"gaze," "spectacle," "hidden" history, etc., lnoue here opens up a critical perspective for the study of the modern that gives silence, loquacity, overhearing, echoing, and other semiotic qualities of the "acoustic presence" due analytic attention (41).
Reverberating in and out of this book, then, are the overtones, to use one of Bakhtin's metaphors for language in society, that constitute this "language." It is clear that this book avoids simply repeating a modern liberatory desire of revealing hidden histories of the underrepresented. The overtones are all too present rather than hidden, working their way into the habitus of a listener, even when she doesn't "hear" them. Inoue's task is thus to ethnographically locate women's language with respect to the historical sedimentation of these overtones immersed in cultural consciousness and to undo the discourse of women's language to articulate the moments of its failure.
Two vectors of demonstration may be identified here: how women's language as a new register, a new norm of language-in-society and a new way of regimenting social life, can be generated at various historical conjunctures in Japan's national and capitalist modernity; and how such a semiotic creature comes to mobilize sign users toward varying interests in its subsequent sociopolitical life.
Inoue's retelling (and undoing) of this story of enregisterment introduces a complexity that has been taken for granted in previous research, a complexity that it has...