Abstract
Through a cross-cultural investigation of gender in contemporary Japanese and Russian, I focused on media representations in beauty ads, women’s perceptions, and women’s real language practices. The confluences and divergences between the different forces shaping the expression of gender in language have become increasingly apparent. On the one hand, gender ideologies continue to have a normative influence, promulgated through beauty advertisements and instilled in women from an early age. On the other hand, women’s growing autonomy increasingly allows them appropriate language for their own purposes—accommodating, evading, or even straightforwardly rejecting traditional expectations regarding gendered language in the service of their own self-expression and stance-marking. In between these forces lies the still-contested ground of collective and personal ideals. In the consonance and clash of ideology and autonomy, women form their ideals in distinct ways, with diverse implications for their use of language and their response to other people’s language use.
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Konstantinovskaia, N. (2020). Conclusion. In: The Language of Feminine Beauty in Russian and Japanese Societies. Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41433-7_5
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