Gender orientations to outward appearance in Japanese conversation: A study in grammar and interaction

This article employs `grammar and interaction' ? a new strand of conversation analysis ? to contribute to the debate concerning the utility of conversation analysis for feminist research by exploring methods for making gender orientations accessible for analysis. We examine mixed-sex conversations in Japanese, in which participants discuss each other's outward appearance in general, and body weight in particular. We propose that certain `breaches' of conversational organization can usefully be explained in terms of a possibly competing, normative `gender constraint' involving orientations towards a man's expanded rights to topicalize, assess, demand and dictate standards of women's outward appearance. It is further suggested that this constraint may cut across a plethora of rudimentary organizations of conversation. The proposed constraint is shown to be oriented to or resisted by participants through the contingent mobilization of grammatical, prosodic and semantic resources to constitute themselves and others as `men' or `women' vis-�-vis this constraint.