Jul 2026· The International Journal of Asian Studies· 0 citations· 38 references
Abstract
This article examines the gendered politics embedded in Chinese–English lexicographical translations of footbinding terminology from the nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on feminist translation studies and critical lexicography, the study demonstrates that dictionaries function as culturally determining discourses rather than neutral linguistic repositories. Through a diachronic analysis, the research identifies three discursive mechanisms: structural silence, aestheticized objectification, and static reconfiguration. Early missionary lexicography displayed a systematic absence of footbinding terminology produced by gendered spatial segregation and a reliance on elite Confucian linguistic standards. From the late nineteenth century, the introduction of terms such as “golden lilies” leveraged the dictionary’s scientific authority to recontextualize bodily suffering into romanticized symbols for the Orientalist gaze. In modern dictionaries, the shift to seemingly neutral renderings like “bound feet” further attenuates violence through the nominalization of dynamic coercion into a static condition, thereby erasing agency and lived pain. The study concludes that the transition from aestheticization to scientific neutrality masks a persistent patriarchal discourse within the lexicographical record. It calls for a feminist lexicographical ethics that exposes the unilateral perspectives hidden behind the veneer of neutrality, restoring corporeal reality to women’s experiences in cross-cultural knowledge production.
This article conceptualizes the “unsayable” not as a fixed prohibition but as a dynamic dispositive that structures confession across paratexts, spaces, voices, and regimes of the gaze. It proposes a replicable analytic matrix aligning a mediation axis — ellipsis → avowal → mise en scène — with a contextual vector comprising the institutional eye, spatial configuration, vocal modality, and narrative tempo. The study applies scene-level coding to seven modern Arabic novels and engages in a calibrated counter-comparison with Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint to broaden the comparative scope. The analysis demonstrates that degrees of disclosure depend less on authorial boldness than on the nature of the surveilling eye — symbolic, communal, or procedural — and the permeability of its spatial membrane (sacred/urban; closed/open). The findings show how legal, religious, and market institutions modulate confessional discourse, and how literary texts convert taboo into an aesthetic architecture that redistributes voice, visibility, and agency for both artistic and political purposes.
This paper investigates the sociolinguistic phenomenon of semantic pejoration in English, specifically examining why terms denoting female authority and occupation consistently undergo semantic derogation while the male equivalents do not. Focusing on three case studies mistress, spinster, and dame, this study utilizes diachronic data from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to trace their semantic evolution from the Middle English period to the present. The analysis reveals a systematic pattern where words originally signifying power (mistress as head of household), economic independence (spinster as spinner of wool), or high rank (dame as female knight) were redefined through sexualization, trivialization, or social stigmatization. In contrast, male counterparts such as master and lord retained or elevated their prestige. This paper argues that these semantic shifts are not random linguistic accidents but driven by patriarchal social structures that linguistically unstable female power, reinterpreting it as either sexually illicit or socially deviant. The findings contribute to historical sociolinguistics by demonstrating how language change serves as an archive of gendered social hierarchies.
Chen-Ying Pan· Literature Language and Cult...· 0 citations
This article examines how a Turkish ‘classics’ edition can structure reception through peritextual design. Using the İletişim Klasikleri’s 2019 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a case study, it argues that this edition constructs an ‘authority architecture’: a sequenced threshold that allocates interpretive power, frames authorship, and produces canonicity. Methodologically, the article combines close reading with feminist critical discourse-analytic attention to voice allocation, epistemic stance (hedges, rumour markers, evaluative verdicts), and nomination/relational naming across the cover, author biography and chronology, Murat Belge’s preface, and Walter Scott’s afterword. The analysis shows that the cover’s authority line (with Belge’s preface and Scott’s afterword) installs male, allographic voices as the first and last interpretive anchors, borrowing prestige to authorize ‘proper’ reading as part of classics-series value. While the peritexts appear to canonize Shelley, they simultaneously constrain her authorial authority by scripting her life through romance-tragedy and certification frames and by managing attribution politics through calibrated uncertainty. From a feminist perspective, the edition does not activate the interpretive resources made available by its own starting configuration (a woman author, a woman translator, and a reception history shaped by gendered doubt). I conceptualize this pattern as paratextual guardianship and propose it as a portable analytic for tracking gendered canonization in classics publishing in Turkey and beyond.
M. Süren· Çeviribilim ve Uygulamaları...· 0 citations
This study: “Verses of Regret in the Holy Qur’an: A Grammatical and Semantic Study” investigates the structures, vocabulary, and stylistic devices associated with regret in the Qur’an through a descriptive-analytical and inductive approach. It analyzes the grammatical constructions and semantic implications of regret, focusing particularly on eschatological scenes depicting the terrors of the Day of Judgment and the futility of late remorse. The findings indicate that regret extends beyond explicit lexical items, manifesting through diverse structures that derive significance from Qur’anic context and grammatical synergy. Notably, the negated present-tense verb la yanfa‘u (does not avail) underscores the impossibility of undoing past actions within scenes of divine reckoning. Regret frequently collocates with stylistic modes such as wishing, direct speech, and rhetorical questioning, vividly capturing psychological distress through imagery like the biting of hands. Furthermore, the analysis reveals an interplay between syntax and rhetoric; grammatical shift (iltifāt), syntactic displacement, passive voice, and variations in indefiniteness—ranging from magnification to minimization—synergize with semantics to emphasize the profound nuances of Qur’anic regret.
Samiah Bint Moammes Asiri· UB Journal for Humanities· 0 citations
This article does a comparative study of the narrative strategies of O.V.Vijayan (1930-2005) and R.K.Narayan (1906-2001), two towering figures in Indian Literature who worked in fundamentally different linguistic registers and with divergent aesthetic and political commitments. Vijayan, writing primarily in Malayalam, is positioned here as a practitioner of vernacular modernism whose linguistic experimentation with dialect, myth, and indigenous oral forms constitutes a form of decolonial praxis. His self-translations into English, rather than smoothing the rough edges of the vernacular, are read as acts of rewriting that negotiate the politics of translation and postcolonial representation. R.K. Narayan, by contrast, operated exclusively within the English literary tradition, adopting what might be termed a domesticated realism shaped in part by his relationship with Western publishing and mentorship. This paper argues that while Narayan’s Malgudi fiction performs a subtle resistance to colonial epistemologies through irony and humor, his narrative form remains embedded in Eurocentric realist convention that limits the scope of his decolonial critique. The paper subjects that claim to rigorous factchecking, nuancing the comparison where necessary, and situates both writers within the broader frameworks of postcolonial theory, Global South literary studies, and the politics of literary language.
N. Bhavani Singh, S. Singh· Social Science Journal for A...· 0 citations
This article investigates the semantic evolution of the lexeme qatyn in Kazakh from an originally respectful designation for a married woman to a socially marked, often pejorative label. Drawing on historical dictionaries, early Kazakh texts, Old Turkic inscriptions, and contemporary media discourse, the study combines methods of historical lexicology, etymological analysis, and sociolinguistic interpretation. The analysis systematizes competing etymologies that derive qatyn from Old Turkic qatun and from internal Turkic word-formation, and relates them to cultural models of marriage, kinship, and social hierarchy. Particular attention is paid to the role of Soviet-era language policy, purism, and ideological regulation of public discourse in shifting the evaluative profile of the word, as well as to the continuing coexistence of respectful and pejorative uses in present-day Kazakh. The paper argues that the semantic degradation of qatyn is not the result of purely internal linguistic change, but reflects broader transformations in gender ideology, urbanization, and the reconfiguration of Kazakh–Russian bilingual practices. By tracing micro-level changes in collocations, phraseology, and genre distribution, the article demonstrates how a key element of the Kazakh kinship lexicon has become a site where issues of linguistic correctness, national identity, and gendered respectability are negotiated.
Sherubay Kurmanbaiuly, M. Adilov, G. Alimbek et al.· Theory and Practice in Langu...· 0 citations