Masculinity and Femininity in Yuriko Koike's Speech Style

This study aims at describing Yuriko Koike’s speech style in conducting verbal interaction in public in relation to her profession as a politician and the Governor of Tokyo. In relation to gender stereotypes, women have a feminine speech style while men have a masculine speech style. The activities as a woman politician and leader will indeed affect Yuriko Koike’s language use in public communication, whether she fully incorporates a feminine style or also employs a masculine style. The data of this study is Yuriko Koike’s utterances in verbal interaction taken from YouTube, comprising informal talk shows, formal talk shows, and press conferences. The data are analyzed with the theories of gender and language, as well as speech style, proposed by Holmes and Stubbe (2003) and Talbot (2003). From the data obtained, it can be deduced that Yuriko Koike’s speech style is androgynous, which combines masculine and feminine speech styles. Her speech style, therefore, does not reflect the stereotypical style of the traditional Japanese women, which is polite, soft, unassertive, and indirect. Instead, Yuriko Koike is the depiction of the deconstruction of Japanese women’s communication today, by which she shows herself as a respected leader to her political opponents. Koike generally has a communication style of a leader, that is public, report, lecturing, referentially oriented, problem-solving, dominating, and task/outcome-oriented. Specifically, her masculine speech style includes direct, competitive, independent-autonomy, and dominant, while her feminine styles were effectively oriented-sympathy, rapport, intimacy-connection, collaborative, and supportive feedback.Keywords: speech style; feminine; masculine; Yuriko Koike

THE FEMININE STYLE OF MANAGEMENT AND SUCCESS IN ORGANIZATIONS AS EXEMPLIFIED BY TECHNOLOGY STARTUPSPS

The article contains considerations on the identification and verification of the impact of gender, and especially the feminine style of management on the success of an organization, with particular emphasis placed on technology startups. It presents examples confirming that women are better equipped to cope with problems in running this type of organization, as compared to men in the same positions. In the course of analysis, it was possible to identify the distinguishing features and characteristics of the female (modern) style of management in the context of startups.

El estilo retórico femenino en la entrevista política. Una década de aplicación en Telva

This research aims to explore how the features of the so-called ‘feminine style rhetoric’ condition the way in which male and female politicians speak to the citizenry. We start with the premise that the traits of the feminine style are accentuated when audience includes more women. And so, consequently, this paper studies 25 interviews of politicians that have been published in Telva magazine, because is the most prolific Spanish glossy in this regard (from 2011 until 2020). The content analysis allows us to check that both men and women can apply strategies to introduce women´s issues and soft politics in the discourse (feminisation of the political agenda), in addition to the recourse to the inductive structures, appeal to the audience, use emotional power words and bet on the ethics of care.

Transgender Narrative in Public Service Announcement

After changing its city branding several times, Semarang now has a new city branding, namely "Semarang Variety of Culture." However, the city branding reaped contra from academics and cultural figures because Semarang was considered not sufficient yet in terms of representing its cultural diversity. Responding to this, the Semarang City Government and the Semarang City Public Works Department created a public service advertisement on CCTV socialization for flood control in the city of Semarang with a transgender figure as the ad star. This research was qualitative research designed with Seymour Chatman's Narrative Analysis. The research found a commodification and objectification of transgender people who imitated the feminine style of women in the advertisement. In other words, the public service announcement of Semarang CCTV socialization lowered the femininity, which is synonymous with women.The public service advertisement also violated the moral codes adopted by the majority of the Indonesian people.

Fashioning Postfeminism

This book concerns young, class-privileged women in the Nigerian city of Lagos who dress in a “spectacularly feminine” style characterised by the extravagant use and combination of normatively feminine technologies of dress: cascading hair extensions, false eyelashes and nails, heavy and immaculate makeup, and so on. Based on interviews with such stylized women, the book offers a critical consideration of the kinds of feminine subjectivities that they are performing and desiring. Tracing the repertoires of individualist choice, pleasure, entitlement and “can do” that run through the women’s talk, it argues that they subscribe passionately to the notion, or what the book frames more specifically as the “postfeminist promise,” that immaculate and spectacularized feminine beauty now constitutes and signals feminine power. Seeing themselves as “already empowered,” then, what the women do not see is the need for cultural critique, nor for feminism in the form of collective political struggle. The first book on postfeminism both as a cultural formation in the global South and as it interpellates black women, the work offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the culture as performative and transnationally mobile, and a richly theorised account of how women live, embody, and to some extent suffer it, in the flesh.

Choosing It All

This chapter explores the women’s accounts of why they dress in spectacularly feminine style. It shows that they insist on “choice,” positioning themselves as thoroughly agentic, self-regarding and self-pleasing in what they represent as a pleasurable and empowering yet also laborious, disciplined and policed, and sometimes physically painful dress practice. Teasing out the content and contradictions of the women’s said choice, the chapter argues that what they are choosing is spectacular feminine beauty, and ultimately because it promises a subjective and embodied sense of self-confidence.

“I’m Working, You Know”

This chapter concerns the practicalities of how the women achieved or attained their spectacularly feminine style, from how they shopped for the look to how they managed its myriad elements and afforded it all. The chapter argues that the women took a rationalized and calculative or, in a word, entrepreneurial approach to their self-fashioning, including by risk-managing their use of dress and beauty technologies deemed potentially harmful. It argues also that the women’s claims that they paid for their expensive style by themselves were less an assertion of postfeminist independence than a repudiation of local moral suspicions that young Lagos women consume via engagement in transactional heterosexual relationships.

Feminine Praxis

Dresses and skirts are emblematic of a feminine style and also of women’s subordination to men. But the fashion these days for what is erroneously called gender-neutral or unisex clothing is neither a sign of progress nor of victory of feminists against patriarchy. For while in protest of their physical and symbolic impositions women were abandoning feminine affect and apparel, without the political motive and under no pressure to do likewise, men enacted no equivalent abandonment of masculinity. With femininity subtracted out, the style men are habituated to wearing became gender neutral by default and nothing was or is sacrificed by men to achieve it. The process of becoming a man is an aversion therapy in anything held as feminine. This article centres on what I call a ‘feminine praxis’, a practice of thought and action with the aim of ending masculine domination. The idea, and what it entails, is unpacked through a range of theoretical sources and interventions germane to the topic, including Marxist, feminist, and queer theory.

The Vagina Apocalypse

Intrauterine devices (IUDs) have been the subject of contentious debate on all sides of the political spectrum. In response, many have created various IUD-related texts that are not only controversial, but allude to apocalyptic themes. Apocalyptic discourse has previously been studied in relation to religion, mass media, the environment, and masculinity. The feminist or even feminine style apocalypse, however, has yet to be explored. Widespread feminist movements use the apocalyptic genre to communicate dystopian urgency about women's reproductive rights. Simultaneously, alternative medicine movements are a source of persuasive texts that both co-opt feminist themes while making use of apocalyptic genre to deter women from certain birth control methods. This chapter analyzes feminist texts in the alternative medicine movement through the Instagram accounts positioned against IUDs to evidence how the feminist apocalyptic genre functions. Greater implications for apocalyptic genre, medical discourse, and feminist symbolism will be addressed.

PERFORMA PEMIMPIN PEREMPUAN DI PARLEMEN

This research aims to seekthe performance of women leaders in the Regional House of Representativesof Bengkulu City in communicating politics and representing themselves as leaders in a "masculine" world that is considered cruel to women. This research used a descriptive qualitative method. Data were collected by using in-depth interview and observation to three women leaders.Based on the results, it could be concluded that the female parliamentary leaders conducting political communication feminine style leadership such as engaging and directing parliamentarians they led in carrying out their duties. However, when it’s needed, they remain firm, but not arrogant.