The discursive construction of femininities in the accounts of Japanese women

Abstract

This article presents findings from a study investigating the gendered interpretative repertoires or ‘ways of seeing the world’ that a group of Japanese women drew on as they discursively constructed their gendered identities during semi-structured interviews. The study draws on critical discursive psychology which views language not simply as a window into people’s minds, but as a discursive resource which individuals utilize to perform various discursive functions. Participants assumed a range of subject positions in relation to these repertoires that suggests that Japanese society may be in a state of flux where dominant repertoires are undergoing discursive reformulation and change. Results of this study indicate that while interpretative repertoires constitute cultural ‘common sense’, individuals possess agency to discursively deploy, resist, and sometimes even reconstruct these discursive resources.

Knowledge and Discourse Matters

“…Other studies focus on gender (e.g., Charlebois, 2010;Potter and Edwards, 2003;Stokoe, 2012;Schegloff, 1997;Rhodes and Pullen, 2009), identity (e.g., Benwell and Stokoe, 2012;Locke and Edwards, 2003;Myers, 2010;Condor, 2000;Hobbs, 2003;Ainsworth and Hardy, 2004;Abell and Stokoe, 2001;Davies and Harré, 1990;Crane, 2012b;Rautajoki, 2012;Holmes, 2005;Bucholtz and Hall, 2005;Mieroop, 2005;Brown and Phua, 2011;Wetherell, 2001;Greatbatch, 2009;Gulich, 2003;Giles, 2006;Hutchby, 2001;Whittle, 2005), attitudes and evaluative practices (e.g., Wiggins and Potter, 2003;Potter, 1998a;Potter and Edwards, 2012), occupational roles and good practice (e.g., Marshall, 1994;Wasson, 2004;Svennevig, 2012b;Ford and Stickle, 2012;Housley and Smith, 2011;Nielsen, 2012;Holmes, 2005;Cromdal, Landqvist and Osvaldsson, 2012), and knowing as an interactional accomplishment (Lester and Paulus, 2011;Marra, Moore and Klimczak, 2004;Gulich;Paulus, 2007;…”

“…This is a commonplace pattern of accounting in the text (Charlebois, 2010): a participant indexes consensus agreement to the previous turn, then performs an elaboration which serves both as an account for warranting in-group membership and conjures insufficiency of previous contributions. In the understood sense of a discussion forum, this pattern is the nearest the participants get to in terms of achieving a discussion.…”

“…Here, 'gravitate' serves as scientific discourse with an evaluative inference (Hepburn and Wiggins, 2005) calling on scientific, and in the case of gravity, inevitable fact. According to Charlebois (2010), scientific arguments are rhetorically strong because they refer to things that are unchangeable. In Edwards and Potter's (1992) terms, this utterance would be classed as empiricist warranting which, they argue, bolsters accounts as factual.…”

“…In this way, participants are shown to employ stance-taking (Myers, 2010) or subject positions (Charlebois, 2010) which are wholly reliant on the invocation of others' credibility problems (Silverman, 2007) The importance of in-group construction linked to competitive rivalry has implications for and synergies with group creative abrasion theory proposed by Leonard and Sensiper (2002).…”

Singleness, Marriage, and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinities: Australian Men Teaching English in Japan

“…A naturalised discourse of evolving maturity combines persistent societal expectations of age-appropriate heterosexual behaviour in both Japanese (Charlebois 2010;Dales 2010;Nemoto 2008) …”