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akujunkanThe beautiful nerdcore GS/Japanese conversation I'm having with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sara_tanaquil here has fed into recent thoughts I've been having about foreign language learning and context.
For instance, I like Japanese guys because androgyny is a huge kink for me, and here we have a nation of men who wear floral print shirts, tight pants, tweeze their eyebrows, remove excess body hair, and spend copious amounts of time on their personal appearance every morning. So feminine! And yet, when they open their mouths it's all 'ore' and 'zo' and 'ze' and 'yagareh', and that's so masculine!
Only, as far as these guys are concerned, there's no androgyny at all, because things like floral shirts and hair mousse are not gendered feminine in this society. My cultural context construes them in that fashion; theirs does not. (Of course, this can cause problems. Androgynous masculinity in the West carries all sorts of associated concepts about sensitivity and subtlety; try treating a masculine!Japanese guy like that and see how far you get.)
Likewise, I like Japanese men because they giggle. It's adorable. Only, I realised the other day that the Japanese men giggling away in my office weren't laughing any differently from the Western guys I hung out with later that night. Only, what I call giggling from a Japanese man I would call chuckling or guffawing from a Western guy. Not that the sound is quantifiably different; it's just that 'giggle' is such an obviously feminine word, and of course you can't apply it to a guy...until you remove the familiar cultural context. Japanese men giggle because, thanks to the unfamiliar cultural context, I'm not unconsciously gender-qualifying everything they do the way I would with Western guys.
Interesting stuff.
That will be all.
sara_tanaquil here has fed into recent thoughts I've been having about foreign language learning and context.For instance, I like Japanese guys because androgyny is a huge kink for me, and here we have a nation of men who wear floral print shirts, tight pants, tweeze their eyebrows, remove excess body hair, and spend copious amounts of time on their personal appearance every morning. So feminine! And yet, when they open their mouths it's all 'ore' and 'zo' and 'ze' and 'yagareh', and that's so masculine!
Only, as far as these guys are concerned, there's no androgyny at all, because things like floral shirts and hair mousse are not gendered feminine in this society. My cultural context construes them in that fashion; theirs does not. (Of course, this can cause problems. Androgynous masculinity in the West carries all sorts of associated concepts about sensitivity and subtlety; try treating a masculine!Japanese guy like that and see how far you get.)
Likewise, I like Japanese men because they giggle. It's adorable. Only, I realised the other day that the Japanese men giggling away in my office weren't laughing any differently from the Western guys I hung out with later that night. Only, what I call giggling from a Japanese man I would call chuckling or guffawing from a Western guy. Not that the sound is quantifiably different; it's just that 'giggle' is such an obviously feminine word, and of course you can't apply it to a guy...until you remove the familiar cultural context. Japanese men giggle because, thanks to the unfamiliar cultural context, I'm not unconsciously gender-qualifying everything they do the way I would with Western guys.
Interesting stuff.
That will be all.