This paper, based on a longitudinal research at a Japanese junior high school, analyzes how Japanese girls wove non-traditional metapragmatic interpretations and indexicalities about their gender-crossing first-person pronouns and how these girls shifted traditional gendered language ideologies at school. Based on post-structuralist theories, which help us analyze language as being constructed moment to moment in a specific context, this paper examines how girls severed the taken-for-granted indexical connection between female and feminine language and created gender independent indexicalities, through daily activities of non-traditional metapragmatic meaning making. The detailed descriptions of how gakkyuu-houkai (collapse of classrooms) proceeded through linguistic and bodily power negotiations between girls and their teacher revealed a shift in the traditional gendered language ideologies in the calssroom. This example shows that linguistic anthropological concepts provide an excellent tool to understand the interactions of social structure and agency, and macro and micro.
