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For many Japanese women, the English language has never been just another school subject. For them, English is the tool of identity transformation and the means of obtaining what they passionately desire – mobility, the West and its masculinity. Language Learning, Gender and Desire explores Japanese women's passion for learning English and how they negotiate identity and desire in the terrain of racial, sexual and linguistic politics. Drawing on ethnographic data and popular media texts, the book offers new insights into the multidirectionality of desire and power in the context of second language learning.
Kimie Takahashi's investigation of the desires that lead Japanese women to learn English interrogates and ultimately challenges all kinds of stereotypes - Asian and Western, racial and sexual, cultural and linguistic. Original and thought-provoking, this book opens up important questions about second language learning, and makes a novel contribution to ongoing discussions of language, identity and difference.
Kimie Takahashi is Lecturer at the Graduate School of English at Assumption University of Thailand. Her research interests centre on gender, second language learning and social inclusion in the context of transmigration. She is co-founder of the sociolinguistics website Language on the Move (www.languageonthemove.org).
1. Introduction
2. Language Desire
3. Ryugaku
4. Desired Interlocutors
5. Agency
6. Going Home
7. Conclusion