Speech and Performance

goldencasket

Focusing on the cultural production of women’s language, Inoue provides historians a wonderful example of sound studies in a historical context. I have been searching for this kind of historical studies for a while and this book does give me some useful tips on how to place sound in a larger context, or to use her term, a network of social, cultural, political factors. According to Inoue, Japanese women’s language is a modern construction coming out of the process of Japanese nationalism and modernization. It is created as an other that undergoes the transformation from being vogue to being elegant as perceived by male intellectuals. In late modern Japan, modern (male) intellectuals start mourning the death of women’s language (as if it used to be alive!!) and hope to bring it back to life since they regard that as a tradition of Japanese culture.
This is a very detailed and very insightful study of language changes at a macro level. Capitalism picks up what intellectuals feel disgusted and transformed it into something desirable. The fact that intellectuals became nostalgic about the imagined heydays of women’s language not only shows how forgetful the intellectuals are, but more importantly, how that forgetfulness is product of their failure in resisting the penetration of capitalism. They take the surface of life (Jameson’s term) as the essence of life and rewrite history of women’s language following the poke of capitalism. And yet, their very act of mourning, at the same time, for them, is a response and resistance to capitalism, paradoxically.
Inoue plays with theories in sophisticated ways, and I think she kind of overplays them. she cites theories that emphasize the overwhelming power of capitalism, nationalism and male gaze (de Certeau, Bhabha, Butler, to name a few) and touches little on the action and responses of school girls and middle and high class women. It’s hard to imagine that when the female gazed read and buy newspapers and magazines that feature themselves speaking a different language and they have no response to that at all! To me, that moment of reading is of great importance to explore women’s active “acquisition” of women’s language. They learn it and perform it. Unlike the passive nature of women in Inoue’s analysis, a Japanese woman as language speaker and performer is a woman of great agency. Through performing that language, they acquire respectable social status and maybe make more money and get their life improved. One can say that’s voluntary surrender to capitalism, but one can also say that’s women’s strategy to take advantage of capitalism. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century witnesses the flood of female migrant workers to factories, department stores and other places to find a job and more importantly, to live a better life. Learning that language is like cultural capital. With women’s language, women have nothing to lose. Women’s active participation in learning that language, I think, might be the reason that it get spread out so quickly with the help of capitalism. So, this is kind of cooperation between the female proletariats and capitalism to exploit nation-state construction? I can understand that Inoue want to emphasize the penetrating power of capitalism in Japan’s modernization process, but I don’t think it is necessary to sacrifice women’s agency to strengthening that point.