Presenter(s): Jacqueline Huaman − Japanese, Asian Studies
Faculty Mentor(s): Kaori Idemaru
Oral Session 1SW
Research Area: Humanities
Funding: HURF (Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship), UROP Mini-Grant
The goal of my honors thesis is to explore how gendered language, or lack thereof, is utilized in Japanese society to perpetuate feminine ideals in the media. Specifically, I want to focus on how the ideal female romantic partner is portrayed in modern media through the use of language. Japanese has been considered a very gendered language. However, more recent research has questioned whether the description of gendered features in Japanese reflects language ideology or language reality.
For example, in 2004, Janet Shibamoto-Smith investigated language and its use as a cultural model for romance, specifically looking at how language was used by the protagonists of romance novels in the 1980s and 1990s in Japan. Similarly, I want to explore how idol music and popular television shows serve as models for romance and ideal female partners in contemporary society. Following the methodology set up by Shibamoto-Smith, I will develop a retrospective study and a corpus study to investigate language use in the media of the 2000s and 2010s in order to analyze the linguistic representations of an ideal female partner. I expect to find the use of gendered markers, and lack thereof, to correlate with the type of ideal being portrayed in the media, as substantiated by the society in which this media exists.