Mie Hiramoto
Biographic Data
| ID | 137133 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mie Hiramoto |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mie |
| FAMILY NAME | Hiramoto |
| SIGNATURE | HIRAMOTO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6090-6873 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 190 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
From Global Expansion to Localization: Recontextualization of the Korean Wave
Hallyu , or the “Korean Wave,” has evolved from a regional phenomenon into a global force shaping media, consumption, and international perceptions of South Korea. As Korean cultural products circulate worldwide, they operate as instruments of soft power while being reinterpreted through local histories of race, gender, class, and nation. Moving beyond media and cultural studies approaches, this special issue foregrounds language and semiotics as…
Gender and Sexuality in Applied Linguistics
This entry provides an overview of the evolving field of language, gender, and sexuality within applied linguistics. Early research predominantly explored linguistic differences between male and female speakers, often reinforcing binary perspectives. Over time, the field has shifted to emphasize gender diversity and the performative nature of gender identity, influenced by Judith Butler's concept of performativity. Scholars now critically examine…
Hailing, Voicing, and Masturbation Abstention: NoFap’s Role in Socializing Young Men into the Right-Wing Politics of Ressentiment
Digital ethnographic and linguistic anthropological analysis of the far right is an invaluable resource for explaining the gradual processes of socialization through which individuals are recruited into right-wing extremism. This article examines online masturbation abstention programs in three linguistic contexts (English, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese) as potential sites that mobilize gender and sexual norms to draw subjects into anti-femi…
Something’s Got to Go: Contrasting Ideologies of Masculinity in Discourse around Men’s Intimate Hair Removal in Japan
The current study examines the mobilisation of social ideologies surrounding men’s gendered behaviour within discourse around men’s intimate hair removal in Japan (known as VIO datsumō ), contrasting the language of advertisements promoting a new concept of kaigo datsumō (hair removal for assisting late-in-life caregivers) to men against online discussions of men’s VIO datsumō on the popular Japanese forum Girls Channel. While both data sets show…
Stubborn Futures: Caring Against Anaesthetic Time
In this farewell essay, the coeditors of Gender and Language reflect on leading the journal through a 6-year period marked by escalating global crises and rising hostility toward feminist, queer, and trans scholarship. Drawing from their previous Editorials on refusal, hope, and potency, the coeditors explore yet another affect that animated their tenure: stubbornness. This essay suggests that stubbornness, as more than mere obstinacy, must be re…
Statement on the Importance of Sexuality and Gender Research
Making Society a Better Place: Interview with Momoko Nakamura
In this interview, Momoko Nakamura reflects on her pioneering contributions to Japanese sociolinguistics, particularly in the study of language, gender, and sexuality. She highlights her research on the ideological construction of Japanese women's language, the importance of metapragmatic discourse analysis, and the role of historical perspectives in understanding language ideologies. Nakamura-sensei discusses her efforts in bridging academic res…
Clause-Final Adverbs in Colloquial Singapore English Revisited
Many scholars consider clause-final adverbs (CFAs) like already, also, and only to be a prominent feature of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), but little is known about their use in present-day CSE. Using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), we investigate patterns of variation involving CFAs and examine whether they are sensitive to factors such as speaker age and gender. We find that clause-final already and only has in…
Adverbial confirm in colloquial Singapore English: Insights from a text message corpus
Despite its innovative, salient, and robust usage in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), the adverbial use of confirm has largely gone unnoticed. In this paper, we provide morphosyntactic and semantic evidence to show that adverbial confirm behaves like a strongly subjective speaker-oriented adverb (SpOA). We argue that adverbial confirm developed as a result of contact with the Mandarin adverbial kending, likely due to English–Mandarin bilingual…
Address terms in Chinese popular music fandom: Exploring stancetaking in social media discourses
Sociolinguistic variation in Colloquial Singapore English sia
Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), also known as ‘Singlish’, features a wide range of sentence‐final particles (SFP) influenced by local languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin and Malay. This study focuses on the SFP sia , a relatively new and less‐explored particle with Malay roots. We examine sia and its variants ( sia, sial , siak and siol ) using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages, a 6.9‐million‐word text‐message corp…
The beginning of despair: Aggressive Retsuko and the Sanrioization of women’s ‘transgressive rage
In 2016, Sanrio debuted a series of shorts featuring Retsuko, a cute lesser panda with a penchant for bursts of death-metal infused violent rage.The shorts, eventually transformed into a full show on Netflix, were a comedic look at Retsuko's anger at unfair treatment in the Japanese workplace, casting a critical eye on issues of sexism, harassment, and overwork.But while Retsuko has been explicitly positioned as counter cultural, what does it mea…
Regimes of transcultural assemblage: Erased histories and forgotten boundaries in a festive shopping mall installation
This article explores relations between transcultural processes and historical boundaries. Drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblage, it examines the selection and organisation of cultural elements in a Japanese-styled Chinese New Year installation at a Hong Kong shopping mall. The article presents three affective regimes produced in this transcultural assemblage: New Year festivity, simulated tourism, and partial historicity. We ar…
Tell Me What Happened: Pragmatics of Affect in Legal Communication
The monolingual borrowers: Reconciling the success and failure of English in Japan
This article discusses Japan’s idealization and adoration of English language while at the same time being an insular monolingual nation. English has been an imperative foreign language in Japan from the mid-1800s; today, English is regarded as one of the most important school subjects . However, most Japanese people hold anxiety about their English learning experiences. The average person lives with a dilemma of not being able to use English des…
Is it in Colloquial Singapore English: What variation can tell us about its conventions and development
Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population), the Malays (13.43%), and the Indians (9%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). It is one of the best known post-colonial varieties of English and has been documented since the emergence of the field of worl…
The Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM)
This article introduces the first version of the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a 3.6‐million‐word monitor corpus of online text messages collected between 2016 and 2019, compiled and managed by a group of scholars who share an interest in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) research. The paper explains the motivations behind developing a new corpus for the investigation of CSE. It also documents the process of compiling and organiz…
Sticky Raciolinguistics
Singapore’s postcolonial multiracialism is held together by state policies that categorize its citizens into four major race groups ordered according to their size: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. This postcolonial framework—with its colonial logics of statal race management and categorization—governs social life in Singapore. Recent race talk has birthed a contentious term— Chinese privilege —that has found its way into common parlance and i…
Is dat dog you’re eating: Mock Filipino, Hawai‘i Creole, and local elitism
This paper explores both racial and socioeconomic classification through language use as a means of membership categorization among locals in Hawai‘i. Analysis of the data focuses on some of the most obvious representations of language ideology, namely, ethnic jokes and local vernacular. Ideological constructions concerning two types of Filipino populations, local Filipinos and immigrant Filipinos, the latter often derisively referred to as “Fres…
Change of Tōhoku dialect spoken in Hawaii
This study investigates changes in Tōhoku dialect speakers' phonology after their immigration to Hawaii, specifically concerning intervocalic voicing and alveolar/palatal mergers. Tōhoku dialect is known for its unique phonology compared to other Japanese dialects and, for this reason, it is often stigmatized. Previous studies of second dialect acquisition have suggested that older speakers tend to retain the phonological features of their origin…
Ethnic and gender variation in the use of Colloquial Singapore English discourse particles
Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to another. This study uses the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a large-scale corpus of texts composed by Singaporeans and sent using electronic messaging services, to investigate gender and ethnic factors a…
Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research
This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley confere…
Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research: Special focus: Politics
This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley confere…
Relocating power: The feminist potency of language, gender and sexuality research
As we began preparing this issue of Gender and Language, news broke of events that simultaneously show the recalcitrance of patriarchy and the resolution of contemporary forms of feminism, painting a vivid portrait of our contradictory times. In early December 2020 in Argentina, Buenos Aires's streets were thronged with hundreds of thousands of women and allies wearing green scarves. The demonstrations pressured legislators to pass a law allowing…
Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research
This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley confere…
Complicating raciolinguistics: Language, Chineseness, and the Sinophone
This special issue explores the contested notion of Chineseness through an examination of the language ideologies and practices of those who are arguably on its margins. The six ethnographic cases presented in this issue not only shed light on how language mediates the relationship between race, ethnicity, and nationality, but also reveal the myriad ways in which ideologies of language, race, and nation work together to produce a variety of racia…
Feminist refusal meets enmity
Editorial. Social media has facilitated the rise of a new transnational feminism that refuses to accept silence surrounding violence against women. Often associated with the #MeToo movement, this form of feminist refusal continues to evolve as small-scale grassroots movements are transformed into global icons through the internet’s participatory power
Inclusion, exclusion, and racial identity in Singapore's language education system
The multiethnic population of Singapore speaks a wide variety of languages, only four of which hold official status. We consider sociolinguistic issues that arise in connection with Singapore's Mother Tongue (MT) education policy, in which children are assigned a course of language study based on their racial heritage. A survey of Singaporeans from various backgrounds indicates that those of mixed and/or minority heritage do not identify strongly…
Sticky Raciolinguistics
Singapore’s postcolonial multiracialism is held together by state policies that categorize its citizens into four major race groups ordered according to their size: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. This postcolonial framework—with its colonial logics of statal race management and categorization—governs social life in Singapore. Recent race talk has birthed a contentious term— Chinese privilege —that has found its way into common parlance and i…
Heteronormative love makes a house a home: Multimodal analysis of luxury housing ads in Singapore
This study investigates how luxury apartment housing advertisements in Singapore function as meaning-generating institutions through visual and textual discourse. Advertisements are designed to ascribe a set of attitudes, values, and preoccupations to a group and to imbue their audiences with the idea that they belong to that group. Human models in advertisements represent idealized people and lifestyles, displaying aspirational images of men and…
Relocating power: The feminist potency of language, gender and sexuality research
As we began preparing this issue of Gender and Language, news broke of events that simultaneously show the recalcitrance of patriarchy and the resolution of contemporary forms of feminism, painting a vivid portrait of our contradictory times. In early December 2020 in Argentina, Buenos Aires's streets were thronged with hundreds of thousands of women and allies wearing green scarves. The demonstrations pressured legislators to pass a law allowing…
Media intertextualities: Semiotic mediation across time and space
Preview this article: Media intertextualities: Semiotic mediation across time and space, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ps.1.2.00int-1.gif
You don't ask me to speak Mandarin, okay: Ideologies of language and race among Chinese Singaporeans
Don't think, feel: Mediatization of Chinese masculinities through martial arts films
Slaves speak pseudo-Toohoku-ben: The representation of minorities in the Japanese translation of Gone with the Wind1
Statement on the Importance of Sexuality and Gender Research
For family, for friends, for (true) love: Negotiating discourses of love within the LGBTQ community in Singapore
We examine promotional materials produced by two organisations in Singapore, TrueLove.Is and Pink Dot, to investigate how these two groups employ discourses of love to support their opposing views regarding the reconcilability of Christianity and same-sex desire. TrueLove.Is is a Christian ministry that encourages LGB Christian Singaporeans to "come out, come home", while Pink Dot is Singapore's largest and foremost LGBTQ movement. We identify si…
Kawaii' in the semiotic landscape
The Japanese word kawaii means ‘cute’, ‘lovable’ or ‘adorable’ and is used to express the quality of cuteness or kawaiiaesthetics in the general context of Japanese culture. This concept has become prominent in many aspects of Japanese modern culture, including clothing, personal appearance, food, toys, behaviour and mannerisms. While entities culturally characterized as kawaii are considered adorable and delicate, they also tend to appeal to peo…
Racializing heterosexuality: Non-normativity and East Asian characters in James Bond films
This article investigates how naturalized models of hegemonic masculinity affect race and sexuality in the James Bond film series. Through close analysis of film dialogue and paralinguistic cues, the article examines how the sexualities of East Asian female and male characters are constructed as oversexed and undersexed, respectively. The analysis therefore affirms Connell's (1995) conception of white heterosexual masculinity as exemplary: East A…
Mediatization of East Asia in James Bond films
Itching to make an impact”: Constructing the mobile Singaporean voluntourist in Instagram travel narratives
This study investigates voluntourism activity directed by a local university in Singapore. The phenomenological experience of participating in voluntourism is captured in the form of reflective Instagram posts where voluntourists often report attaining a sense of personal growth and development, centering their experiences at the expense of their underprivileged counterparts. By conducting a text and visual analysis of their Instagram posts, we v…
Hey, you’re a girl: Gendered expressions in the popular anime, Cowboy Bebop
The popular anime series, Cowboy Bebop, was originally created and released in Japan in 1998 and later gained an intense overseas following. The show owes its phenomenal international acclaim to successful conventions of hegemonic masculinity represented by the imaginary characters. The social semiotics of desire depicted in Cowboy Bebop cater to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe characters are represented by archetypes of hete…
Pragmatics of the sentence-final uses of can in Colloquial Singapore English
Got-interrogatives and answers in Colloquial Singapore English
This paper investigates the use ofgotin interrogative sentences and their corresponding answers in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Lee, Ling, and Nomoto analyze CSEgotas a realis marker from which several different meanings are derived, including temporal location, aspect, and emphasis. While following in their essential claims, we propose that the acceptability of thegot-interrogatives and their answers depends on the inherent lexical aspect…
Regimes of transcultural assemblage: Erased histories and forgotten boundaries in a festive shopping mall installation
This article explores relations between transcultural processes and historical boundaries. Drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblage, it examines the selection and organisation of cultural elements in a Japanese-styled Chinese New Year installation at a Hong Kong shopping mall. The article presents three affective regimes produced in this transcultural assemblage: New Year festivity, simulated tourism, and partial historicity. We ar…
Her soul is Japanese”: Naomi Osaka, mediatization, and intersectionality
Colloquial Singapore English in advertisements
Throughout the history of Singapore, Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) has been treated as an obstacle to Singaporeans' acquisition of standardized English. The Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) was launched in 2000 to promote standardized English while discouraging the use of CSE. Nonetheless, CSE is increasingly used in local commercial advertisements by private companies. Recently, the state has also changed its firm anti-CSE position, and b…
Powerfully queered
This paper investigates representations of castrated male characters in Chinese martial arts films. In my data, without exception, the castrated kungfu practitioners are villainous, powerful and extremely tenacious. After careful examination of the characterisations of these sexually unorthodox male martial artist characters in mainstream films, I find a strikingly simplistic equation that links the castrated male characters and their visual and …
Media articulations of gender and sexuality
Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research: Special focus: Politics
This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley confere…
Slaves speak pseudo-Toohoku-ben: The representation of minorities in the Japanese translation of Gone with the Wind1
Dialect contact and change of the northern Japanese plantation immigrants in Hawai‘i
This paper investigates changes in the dialect of a group of northern Japanese immigrants from the Tôhoku dialect speaking areas who migrated to Hawai‘i. The speakers moved to Hawai‘i as sugar plantation workers between 1899 and 1923 and the data were recorded between 1972 and 1975. Being latecomers to the plantations as well as a linguistic minority in the Japanese community in Hawai‘i, Tôhoku immigrants experienced dialect discrimination by oth…
Utterance Final Position and Projection of Femininity in Japanese
Japanese female speakers’ frequent use of suprasegmental features such as higher pitch, longer duration, rising intonation and wider pitch ranges compared to male speakers, are often recognized as key prosodic cues of Japanese women’s language (JWL). Although many existing studies on JWL focus on the use of gender-related pragmatic features such as sentence final particles (SFP), most of these do not take detailed prosodic information into accoun…
Media intertextualities: Semiotic mediation across time and space
Preview this article: Media intertextualities: Semiotic mediation across time and space, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ps.1.2.00int-1.gif
Consuming the consumers: Semiotics of Hawai‘i Creole in advertisements
Previous sociolinguistic research concerning the use of Hawai‘i Creole (HC) in public discourse has posited a link between a negative public image and subsequent discouragement of its use by government and media (e.g. Romaine 1999; Sato 1989, 1991, 1994), except in some limited venues. This paper reports on the emerging trend of HC use in media discourse, presenting data from local television advertisements and discussing the role of language the…
Media intertextualities
Anime and intertextualities: Hegemonic identities in Cowboy Bebop
Cowboy Bebop , a popular anime series set in the year 2071 onboard the spaceship Bebop , chronicles the bohemian adventures of a group of bounty hunters. This paper presents how the imaginary characters and their voices are conventionalized to fit hegemonic norms. The social semiotic of desire depicted in Cowboy Bebop caters to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe characters represent the anime archetypes of heterosexual normativi…
Don't think, feel: Mediatization of Chinese masculinities through martial arts films
Pragmatics of the sentence-final uses of can in Colloquial Singapore English
Got-interrogatives and answers in Colloquial Singapore English
This paper investigates the use ofgotin interrogative sentences and their corresponding answers in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Lee, Ling, and Nomoto analyze CSEgotas a realis marker from which several different meanings are derived, including temporal location, aspect, and emphasis. While following in their essential claims, we propose that the acceptability of thegot-interrogatives and their answers depends on the inherent lexical aspect…
Hey, you’re a girl: Gendered expressions in the popular anime, Cowboy Bebop
The popular anime series, Cowboy Bebop, was originally created and released in Japan in 1998 and later gained an intense overseas following. The show owes its phenomenal international acclaim to successful conventions of hegemonic masculinity represented by the imaginary characters. The social semiotics of desire depicted in Cowboy Bebop cater to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe characters are represented by archetypes of hete…
Hey, you’re a girl: Gendered expressions in the popular anime, Cowboy Bebop
I Am the Invincible Sword Goddess: Mediatization of Chinese Gender Ideology through Female Kung-Fu Practitioners in Films
The media are avid portrayers of gender binarism and the belief in male-female distinctions, which are mainly attributed to perceived differences of a physical nature. In this paper, we investigate representations of female kung-fu practitioners (nuxia) in films to discuss how processes of mediation and mediatization depict their femininity, so as to mitigate their appropriation of Chinese martial arts masculinity. Often, nuxias are portrayed as …
Wax on, wax off: Mediatized Asian masculinity through Hollywood martial arts films
This paper examines the mediatization of Asian masculinity in representative Hollywood martial arts films to expose the essentialism on which such films rely. Asian martial arts films are able to tap into viewers’ familiarity with idealized images of Asian masculinity; such familiarity is an essential part of the pleasure provided by these films and hence of their economic success. This study focuses on non-Asian (that is, western) protagonists’ …
Inked nostalgia: Displaying identity through tattoos as Hawaii local practice
Almost a century after the end of the period of Japanese immigration to Hawaii plantations, the Japanese language is no longer the main medium of communication among local Japanese in Hawaii. Today, use of the Japanese language and associated traditional images are often used symbolically rather than literally to convey their meanings, and this is becoming more prevalent among locals through the medium of tattooing. Furthermore, tattooed texts an…
Heteronormative love makes a house a home: Multimodal analysis of luxury housing ads in Singapore
This study investigates how luxury apartment housing advertisements in Singapore function as meaning-generating institutions through visual and textual discourse. Advertisements are designed to ascribe a set of attitudes, values, and preoccupations to a group and to imbue their audiences with the idea that they belong to that group. Human models in advertisements represent idealized people and lifestyles, displaying aspirational images of men and…
Who's really normal: Language and sexuality in public space
Preview this article: Who's really normal?: Language and sexuality in public space, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jls.4.2.01hir-1.gif
Sentence-final adverbs in Singapore English and Hong Kong English
Available corpus data show that adverbs with modifying meanings,already,also, andonly, occur at the clause-final or sentence-final position more often in 'Asian Englishes' (Hong Kong English and Singapore English) than British English and Canadian English. This paper posits a link between the motivation of sentence-final adverbs in Asian English and substrate transfer due to linguistic (both grammatical and pragmatic) structures of influential no…
Mediatization of East Asia in James Bond films
Powerfully queered
This paper investigates representations of castrated male characters in Chinese martial arts films. In my data, without exception, the castrated kungfu practitioners are villainous, powerful and extremely tenacious. After careful examination of the characterisations of these sexually unorthodox male martial artist characters in mainstream films, I find a strikingly simplistic equation that links the castrated male characters and their visual and …
Media articulations of gender and sexuality
Building a body of followers: Neoliberalism and online discourse of fitness and masculinity
In 2014, a British journalist coined the termspornosexualto account for the emergence of a body-obsessed version ofmetrosexuality. While metrosexuals practice beautification rituals, spornosexuals are men obsessed with developing muscular bodies and self-objectifyingly flaunting them online. In an age of neoliberalism and globalization, this form of masculinity has now spread worldwide, including to Singapore, as a hegemonic ideal male figure. Us…
Inclusion, exclusion, and racial identity in Singapore's language education system
The multiethnic population of Singapore speaks a wide variety of languages, only four of which hold official status. We consider sociolinguistic issues that arise in connection with Singapore's Mother Tongue (MT) education policy, in which children are assigned a course of language study based on their racial heritage. A survey of Singaporeans from various backgrounds indicates that those of mixed and/or minority heritage do not identify strongly…
Her soul is Japanese”: Naomi Osaka, mediatization, and intersectionality
Kawaii' in the semiotic landscape
The Japanese word kawaii means ‘cute’, ‘lovable’ or ‘adorable’ and is used to express the quality of cuteness or kawaiiaesthetics in the general context of Japanese culture. This concept has become prominent in many aspects of Japanese modern culture, including clothing, personal appearance, food, toys, behaviour and mannerisms. While entities culturally characterized as kawaii are considered adorable and delicate, they also tend to appeal to peo…
Sociology (44 works) · Linguistics (32 works) · Gender Studies (26 works) · Political science (26 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Art (20 works) · Gender Studies (20 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (20 works)