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    Varying orientations to sharing life stories: A diachronic study of Japanese women's discourse
    Nakane, I ; Okano, K ; Maree, C ; Takagi, C ; Tanaka, L ; Iwasaki, S (Cambridge University Press, 2022-09-06)
    Language change across the lifespan is relatively underexplored in sociolinguistics. While studies of individuals' language across life stages are often considered to complement large scale studies of community-level language change, this study aims to explore how changes to family environment and social mobility interact with individual speakers' stylistic practice across life stages. It examines ethnographic interviews of five women, originally from the same area in western Japan, the same high school, and similar socio-economic background, conducted by a single researcher eleven years apart. The chronological and inter-participant comparisons reveal a complex pattern of stylistic practice and stance taking as the women share stories about career, family and relationships with the researcher. The study also discusses audience design in language variation and explores how the participants utilise their discursive repertoires in their interaction with the researcher, whose background is significantly divergent from theirs. (Language across the lifespan, stylistic practice, Japanese)
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    Japanese Women's Speech through Life-Transitions (1989-2000): An Analysis of Youth Language Features
    Tanaka, L ; Okano, K ; Nakane, I ; Maree, C ; Iwasaki, S ; Takagi, C (WILEY, 2021-05)
    This study analyses four women’s speech from Kobe who were interviewed by the same researcher in 1989 and in 2000. We focused on highly indexical pragmatic youth language features (discourse markers and end‐rising intonation) to understand about societal pressures that young women in Japan face when transitioning into adulthood. The analysis reveals a complex picture; some women use them more as time goes by, while others use them less. The vast ethnographic information helps us to understand their persona style (Eckert 2008), and to have an insight into their linguistic capital (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1978, Woolard 2008).
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    Phase one of the Longitudinal study of Kobe women's ethnographic interviews 1989-2019: Kanako 1989 and 2000
    Okano, K ; Maree, C ; Maree, C ; Okano, K (Routledge, 2018)
    This chapter introduces the first phase of the Longitudinal Study of Kobe Women’s Ethnographic Interviews 1989–2019, a real-time interdisciplinary study which examines changes in discourse of the same group of women in Japan. It explains the nature of the ethnographic interviews to be analysed and the merits of the multi-analytical discourse (MAD) approach for an interdisciplinary study like this. By locating it in the existing literature on language variation and changes, and on the Japanese women’s discourse, the chapter argues for the book’s innovative significance. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book expands the longitudinal studies in the field of traditional sociolinguistics to analyze change that occurs within situated discourse across differing life-stages. Variations exist in the vernacular discourse of daily lives. Language is also in constant change, as are the life-courses and speech of individuals. The book makes original contributions to our understanding of Japanese language use by illuminating variations and shifts in women's discourse over a period of a decade, in a study that spans three decades. The sharing of Okano's ethnographic data between the team also gives rise to unique ethical issues. The focus on discourse, and multi-layered analysis, advances people's knowledge of changes and shifts beyond a conventional diachronic linguistic analysis of the single-feature, whether phonetic, grammatical or lexical.
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    Writing Identity onto the Screen
    Maree, C (International Institute for Asian, 2017)
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    Writing sexual identity onto the small screen: seitekishoosuu-sha (sexual minorities) in Japan
    Maree, C ; Darling-Wolf, F (Routledge, 2018-02-01)
    This chapter examines how the term “LGBT” is inscribed onto the screen in mainstream news and currenta affairs programming in Japan. Analysis of captioning and flip-cards illustrates how the term “LGBT” is visualised to augment the hyper-visibility of ‘sexual minorities.’ Mediatized hyper-visibility, however, is produced alongside corporate expansion into lucrative ‘rainbow markets’ and a proliferation of political discourses pertaining to LGBT rights. Histories of representations and advocacy for LGBT issues and rights are rendered invisible within this process. Critical examination of text in the media offers one way to analyze complex citational practices in which discourses of tolerance/acceptance and in/visibility become entangled.
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    Weddings and white dresses: Media and sexual citizenship in Japan
    MAREE, C (SAGE, 2017)
    Representations of gender and sexuality in mainstream media operate to both shape the contours of, and contest the limits to, sexual citizenship. The ‘citational practices’ of media representations mould contemporary understandings of these limits. In this article, the author examines mainstream and social media reports of two separate same-sex wedding ceremonies in Japan; the first at a queer community event in 2007 and the second at a major theme park in 2013. Through citations and quotations, a multitude of voices are embedded in the media texts. In the 2007 case, increased media visibility is mitigated by citational practices that clearly mark the same-sex wedding as devoid of legal standing. Whereas media reports situate the 2013 ceremony in the context of marriage equality trends internationally, an instance of possible discrimination is emphasised as being a ‘misunderstanding’. Similarly, a microanalysis of a light news documentary of the ceremony uncovers citational practices that highlight the importance of ‘forgiveness’ or ‘tolerance’ for ‘mutual coexistence’ in society. Furthermore, the reporting confines the ceremony to a ‘fairytale’-like ‘foreign’ domain. The process of ‘othering’ issues of sexual citizenship is linked to a cyclical process since the 1950s wherein representations of queerness are posited as ‘new’ forms of being in Japan. Discourse surrounding sexual citizenship is thereby projected into a non-domestic, non-specific future time.
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    Australia’s ‘Asian Century’: Time, Space and Public Culture
    Martin, F ; Healy, C ; Iwabuchi, K ; Khoo, O ; Maree, C ; Yi, K ; Yue, A (Japan Focus, 2015-02-10)
    In this essay we consider ongoing public-cultural discussions about Australia’s situation in ‘the Asian century’ as symptomatic of a conjunctural moment in Australian social life: a historical phase that is given distinctive shape by the convergence of the discourses of paranoid nationalism and free-market (inter)nationalism. We argue that the co-existence of these two (deeply contradictory) imaginaries as the dominant available rubrics for configuring ‘Australia’ and ‘Asia’ in relation to each other results in a profoundly impoverished understanding of current conditions. We propose that an account of some very differently configured relationships between ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia,’ drawn from people’s material experiences of everyday cultural life, can provide resources for those interested in thinking beyond the hyperbole of economic opportunism and the paralysis of paranoid nationalism. We begin by briefly considering ostensibly progressive innovations in governmental and public-cultural framings of the Asia-Australia relationship since the late twentieth century–– ‘Asia as market’ and ‘Asia literacy’––before turning to some stories that we argue offer much richer resources. These stories include our remembered experiences of late 20th-century Australian children’s media––always-already infused with a certain Japanese flavor. We also consider the contemporary translocal experiences of Asian Australians, Chinese international students in Australian cities, and Asian-Australian media and research collaborations. Such phenomena, we argue, constitute Australian social life as translocal and inter-cultural, thereby fundamentally challenging the presumed radical separateness of ‘Australia’ from ‘Asia’ on which currently dominant framings of Australia’s situation in the ‘Asian century’ are founded.
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    Queer
    Maree, C ; Ogawa, A (Routledge, 2018)
    The Routledge Handbook of Civil Society in Asia is an interdisciplinary resource, covering one of the most dynamically expanding sectors in contemporary Asia.