Gender, neoliberalism and distinction through linguistic capital delivers in-depth individual narratives of the life trajectories of four young Taiwanese women, all of whom have strived to achieve distinction at least partly by cultivating linguistic skills and multilingual selves before, during, and after their studies at a junior college specializing in foreign languages. Relying on the Bourdieusian insight that individuals’ dispositions, resources, and particular cultural contexts interact to produce practices of capital conversion, the book translates these sociological categories into narrativized individual experiences, highlighting multilingualism as a particularly desirable, gendered form of cultural capital in neoliberal Taiwan.
Chapter 1 to 4 set up the sociopolitical context, theoretical background, as well as methodology of the work. Chapter 5 to 8 present the stories of four focal participants, each of whom is given a narrativized persona: the intellectual, the social butterfly, the ideal neoliberal subject, and the competitor; the stories are generated primarily from interview data. Chapter 9 concludes the book by tying these four stories as well as fragments of nonfocal participants’ stories back to the themes of capital conversion in neoliberalism, gender and intersectionality, and multilingualism.
In this book, neoliberalism manifests to a Taiwanese individual as the incessant drive to develop skills that others lack in order to compete in the marketplace. The book zooms in on the English language as a particularly salient skill, which in government-sponsored discourses of competitiveness and internationalization is both the solution for Taiwan's political-economic challenges as well as a necessity for individuals’ personal success. The study's participants thus find themselves learning and practicing English not only in their studies at the junior college, but also in cram schools, online and offline international communities, and personal relationships. Although participants voice different feelings about how multilingualism affects their personal identities, they all subscribe to the ‘language ideology’ that English is essential for internationalization, in addition to performing linguistically in relevant indexical fields—classes, the job market, or simply a high speed rail station—to their advantage.
Chapters telling the life stories of participants do not focus on interrogating why they expended the amount of time and effort they did to study English, but rather present in detail how they did so. A common aspect was their tremendous success in befriending foreign interlocutors, who sometimes become romantic partners. The chapter of integration and analysis points out that although it may not have been a conscious choice, the participants’ being ‘young and physically attractive’ females has served as a kind of ‘feminine capital’ that is an exceptionally desirable complement to their linguistic capital because of the normative expectation in Taiwan that females have more aptitude to learn languages.
The book ends by noting that language learning has contributed to class stratification in Taiwan's context. Affirming the belief that individual practices, such as asserting the legitimacy of strongly Taiwanese-accented English and denaturalizing neoliberal ideologies in the classroom, could potentially initiate ‘habitus change’; however, the study ultimately asks readers to imagine an alternative ideological field of language learning in Taiwan and elsewhere.
