Organizer and Chair: Timon Screech, SOAS, University of London
Discussant: Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Columbia University
To the best of our knowledge, no AAS panel has dealt with inter-male desire. But this is a field of wide-ranging implications. We propose four papers on the theme of homoeroticism, and how definitions, prohibitions and both inward and external pressures within that discourse shaped a Japanese modernity, and continue to shape the emerging Japanese politicized gayness.
This is a new area of study, and it will be apparent from this proposal that the members are all in their early careers: it is normal for at least the discussant to be a more senior scholar, but we have felt this panel required a different structure.
We are most anxious that historicity be taken seriously. It is to this end that we limit ourselves to a single period-Kansei to early Showa, or 1789-1930. This is not a standard periodization in historical study, but it works in this instance, cutting out at one end the 'Golden Age' of nanshoku in mid-Edo, and at the other the pathologization of homosexuality. This allows us to address the modernity that lies between.
As the enclosed resumes show, Screech will define the opening of the period in Kansei in a need to characterize inter-male sexuality as 'foreign' or 'historic.' Driscoll will terminate with the intertwining of regulated sexuality with the 'patriotic Japanese male subject.' Vincent and Saeki will address Meiji, the former considering linkages between language and representation, and homoeroticism, and the latter looking at changes in attitudes to male homosexuality in Meiji literature.
The Boys of Kansei
Timon Screech, SOAS, University of London
This paper defines a moment when forceful reassessment of inter-male eroticism occurred, in tandem I suggest, with the beginning of Japanese modernity. The Kansei Reforms (eponymous with the era, 1789-1800) are symptoms of an anxiety over fuzoku, in which inter-male sexuality played a major part: it was widely discussed, or expunged from discussion. Strategies were two:
1) The 'Golden Age' of nanshoku ('man-boy' sexual activity) is now identified as Genroku, but did later Edo accept this? I propose that what is today located in Genroku was thought of as received behavior throughout early Edo, but was then forced back during Kansei into earlier history, especially Sengoku, removing nanshoku from the Tokugawa dispensation. Wakashu portraits, for example, formerly popular, disappear from Kansei art, likewise fuzoku paintings suggesting a normalcy for same-gender eroticism; onna-girai (exclusive same-sex orientation, including adult) was utterly submerged in the inequality of adult-child nanshoku.
2) These expulsions relate to Kansei readings of Japanese history. There is also the intriguing phenomenon of discussions of same-sex eroticism in Rangaku (Dutch Studies). Hardly a commentator omitted it. Yet discussion pointed out that such activity was illegal in Europe and its colonies. This expelled inter-male sexual activity out of even the polities of foreignness.
The Kansei experiment did not necessarily last, but it provided a defining moment, and one from which the study of a gender modernity can sensibly start.
Genbun'itchi and Modern Sexuality
J. Keith Vincent, Columbia University
It has become virtually axiomatic among the new queer theorists from Foucault on that modernity is an age characterized by an unprecedented convergence of gender identity with sexual behavior. Interpreted in a narrow sense, this generates what has been called the system of compulsory heterosexuality, according to which it is considered abnormal for people to be attracted to members of the same sex. In a broad sense, however, this convergence points to a connection between identity and behavior which I believe to be linked to a new way of thinking about language and representation. I see in the anxious privileging of the spoken above the written language that went by the name of genbun'itchi in Meiji Japan an example of this new way of thinking. In this paper I will examine polemic texts arguing in favor of several versions of genbun'itchi as interpreted by Yamada Bimyô, Mozume Takami, and Wakabayashi Kanzô, one of Japan's first shorthand practitioners. It will be my objective to demonstrate the ways in which these writers' phonocentric privileging of the spontaneous speech act [the voice] as a momentary crystallization of identity and behavior is complicit with the creation of a new regime of identity. That regime of identity will be shown to be explicitly national but to derive its naturalized authority from that convergence of identity and behavior that is most paradigmatically expressed and enforced by the coupling of gender and sex.
Male Homosexuality in Meiji Literature: Its Traditional Aspects and Change
Through Meiji Modernization
Junko Saeki, Tetzukayama Gakuin University
Before the Westernization and modernization in the Meiji period, Japanese society had shown a great tolerance toward male homosexuality. Unlike in most Western societies, male homosexuality was considered neither a sexual perversion nor a sin in Japanese cultural tradition. It flourished in medieval Buddhist temples, which excluded women, and its tradition was succeeded in the early modern period by samurai society and kabuki theatre, which both consisted of all males. Traditional Japanese male homosexuality had a religious aspect that considered beautiful boys as sacred. It also resulted from the discrimination against women which kept men away from women who were considered as the "inferior sex" or "dirty sinful beings" from the male point of view.
Male homosexuality in Meiji society retained these traditional characteristics to some extent. The popularity of boy love among shosei (young male students in Meiji period) is often mentioned in Meiji literature such as Tsubouchi Shoyo's Tosei Shosei Katagi or Mori Ogai's Vita Sexualis. Not a few young men at that time still considered that women were not worth loving and preferred boys as their lovers because they believed that they could improve their strength as "real men," both emotionally and intellectually, through homosexual love. However, under the influence of the Western ideal of love and Western psychiatry, both of which only justify heterosexual relationships, Japanese intellectuals began to think that male homosexuality is "unnatural" and "immoral." I would like to examine how this change in attitude toward male homosexuality is seen in Meiji literature.
Seventy Years of Japanese Homosexuality? On "Compulsory Nationality"
Mark Driscoll, Cornell University
It has been powerfully demonstrated by Michel Foucault, David Halperin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick that one of the effects of the production of the category of the homosexual in Euro-American modernity has been the postdated introduction of the category "heterosexual." This homo/hetero matrix is contemporaneous with the violent installation of a homosociality whose salient features are the absolute requirement of an exclusively male group responsible for the maintenance and proliferation of the socio-political power of patriarchy. But what subtends this new homosociality is the absolute taboo for this homosocial continuum to "tip over" into male homoerotic acts. The requirement for men-only groups to regulate social power within a power knowledge regime that has newly created the stigmatized category of the male homosexual and thus the centrality of a homosexual/heterosexual divide, rests fundamentally on the taboo of men making love to other men. The modes of stigmatizing homoerotic acts between men, contradictorily produce the category of the male homosexual, and this new category called "the homosexual" can then be re-valorized by gay political movements. This stigmatization and reversal of male homosexuality is called by Halperin "100 Years of Homosexuality"-taking place in Western Europe around the 1890s-and is crucial for what Foucault calls "the history of sexuality."
But this queer studies analytic of a "compulsory heterosexuality" grounded on gay abjection, will only go half way towards analyzing the sex-gender system that became dominant in Japan in the late 1920s. For in that historical conjuncture, the normative scripts for straightness whose hetero-normative identity is dependent on the a priori abjection of homoeroticism (Japanese sexology or seiyokugaku), will be shown to be in bed-although nervously and ambivalently-with an astonishingly gay positive discourse (Iwata Jun'ichi) in the production of modern Japanese masculinity. My argument will try to demonstrate that in the case of the production of modern Japanese masculinity, homoeroticism will be in some cases positively represented and can be shown to not only interfere with the production of male heterosexuality, but to actively contribute to the hegemonic construction of an aggressively erotic and intensely patriotic Japanese male subject. I will call this operation "compulsory nationality" and show how it points to serious limitations when the Euro-American emphasis on "compulsory heterosexuality" is applied to Japanese sexual modernity.