Gendered Metapragmatic Evaluation of Women's Institutional Participation: The Mori Controversy in Japan

Wiwik Retno Handayani

doi:10.18326/jopr.v8i3.1027-1054

Authors

Wiwik Retno Handayani Language and Literature Department, Faculty of Cultural Studies, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia1

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18326/jopr.v8i3.1027-1054

Keywords:

Metapragmatics; sociopragmatics; language and gender; institutional discourse

Abstract

Women’s institutional participation can become an object of metapragmatic evaluation concerning communicative efficiency, speaking behavior, and appropriateness. This study examines how women’s participation was evaluated and contested in the controversy surrounding Yoshiro Mori’s 2021 remarks about women and institutional meetings in Japan. It asks how participation was evaluated, what norms and gendered social meanings were indexed through these evaluations, and how the evaluative categories were subsequently contested and redirected toward Mori’s own discourse and institutional position. The study employs qualitative sociopragmatic documentary analysis of ten publicly available documents covering 3–24 February 2021, comprising six core and four contextual materials. Metapragmatics provides the primary analytical framework, supported by indexicality and language ideology, while face and repair are used specifically to interpret the apology sequence. The analysis shows how women’s participation was associated with meeting duration, competitive speaking, and a reported orientation toward speaking-time regulation. In contrast, particular women were positively evaluated when their speech was represented as concise, focused, and bounded. This evaluative distinction was subsequently contested through #wakimaenaionna #わきまえない女, after which attention shifted toward Mori’s own discourse and institutional position. The study contributes to sociopragmatics by showing how gendered conditions of legitimate institutional participation can be constructed through successive evaluations and contested through recursive shifts in the object of evaluation. The findings are interpreted within the evidentiary limits of the documentary corpus.

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