Japanese? Language? and Gender?

This essay offers an overview of language and gender research as it unfolded in a particular ‘Place’: Japan. In the past thirty years, Japanese language and gender/sexuality relations have been characterised both domestically and globally as special, sometimes as unique, due to the existence of distinct joseigo ‘women’s language’ and danseigo ‘men’s language’. A preferential focus on the surface-segmentable forms (pronouns, sentence final particles, etc.) over discursive features and a limited focus on Standard Japanese in the early years of Japanese language and gender research has led to a tendency to view ‘the’ Japanese language as a homogeneous unity and to the reification of the three critical categories, ‘Japan’, ‘language’ and ‘gender’. In this essay, I discuss the problematic nature of the three critical terms, and suggest ways in which Japan-as-Place might profitably be renarrated as the complex place it is and Japanese language, gender and sexuality relations revisited as they operate within that complexity.

A Literature Study Investigating the Relationship between Language and Gender

Present the literature review focused on the true pictures of language and gender research conducted by scholars abroad and home. The current thesis aims at the differences and similarities in presenting female and male from lexical perspective and through lexicon related discourse analysis explores the connection between the vocabulary and the dominant gender ideologies of the magazine. There are differences and similarities in lexical choice. Reports on men and women both tend to use words, such as children, spouse, and business. Female images constructed by target lexicon differ from men’ and female were regarded as the second gender which is sealed in discourse.

Mužskosť ako diskurzívna konštrukcia. Nemecké literárnovedné analýzy mužskosti v 21. storočí

The first studies which introduced the category of masculinity into German literary science in the context of contemporary interdisciplinary gender research, perceiving it as a social and cultural construct, were published shortly after the turn of the century. The paper lays out the basic theoretical approaches to masculinity in literary texts presented in relevant German literary works of the second decade of the 21st century. In contemporary literary analyses, it is not only a question of revealing masculine power structures in literary texts, but also of criticising one-sided and stereotypical constructs of male identity. Attention is focused on the combination of masculinity and emotionality, but also on the relationship between masculinity and fatherhood or on the literary reflections of the changes in the conventional status of man as a breadwinner, public actor and creative intellectual. Literary masculinities are understood as products of literary narratives.

Countering Negative Effects of Hate Speech in a Multi-Agent Society

Hate speech expresses prejudice and discrimination based on personal characteristics such as race or gender. Research has proven that the amount of hateful messages increases on online social media. If not countered properly, the spread of hatred can overwhelm entire societies. This paper proposes a multi-agent model of the spread of hatred. We reuse insights from previous research to construct and validate a baseline model. From this, three countermeasures are modelled and simulated to investigate their effectiveness in containing the spread of hatred: (1) The long-term measure of education is very successful, but it still cannot eliminate hatred completely; (2) Deferring hateful content has a similar positive effect with the advantage of being a short-term countermeasure; (3) Extreme cyber activism against hatred can worsen the situation and even increase the likelihood of high polarisation within societies.

Teaching Gender Research Methods for Leadership: Reflections from Rwanda

This chapter discusses teaching and research undertaken by the author in Rwanda between 1997 and 2011. The author draws on her experiences of establishing and running an institution in Rwanda from 1997 to 1999, undertaking research for her PhD in 2000, visiting the country in 2007 to gain further insights into the reconstruction of education and in 2011 teaching at the Centre for Gender, Culture and Development. Using a gender lens, the author reflects on teaching gender research methods, the interactions with an amazing first cohort of students and the immense leadership potential shown by the students. The chapter concludes with some recommendations and implications.