Organizer and Chair: Margherita Long, Princeton University
Discussant: Asada Akira, Kyoto University
The panel brings feminist and queer theories together in an investigation of "aberrant" modern Japanese masculinities. United by our interest in a maleness that stands in resistance to the "unmarked" and "ungendered" position with which patriarchy elides it, we aim to expand our fields of inquiry beyond the specific female and homosexual subjects to which they are sometimes limited.
Cornyetz locates her reading of Nakagami at the site of one of queer theory's fundamental questions: what does it mean for a man who is removed from a position of privileged masculinity to aspire to that position, or to perform it? Inversely, Long explores why Tanizaki has had such difficulty convincing readers that his masochistic protagonists really do mean to disown their claims to phallic power. Both are concerned with the feminist implications of male dalliance in feminine-coded positions. Meanwhile, Vincent argues that it is exactly the complicating effects of such dalliances that are absent from Mishima's and Oe's accounts of male homosexuality. Proposing that homosexuality and homosociality have been conflated in post-war Japan, he works to separate male-male desire from its overdetermined relationship to state patriarchy. Finally, Hall introduces Inagaki Taruho, a fascinating but little-known theorist of homosexual desire who relocates the pre-modern tradition of boy-love within a psycho-sexual discourse, outlining how the concept of desire was modernized in Japan.
As our discussant we are pleased to have Asada Akira, preeminent as a cultural critic, and recently instrumental in introducing queer theory in Japan.
The Body in Nakagami Kenji: Deformities, Nasty Blood, and Battered Genitals
Nina Cornyetz, Rutgers University
Nakagami Kenji's (1946-1992) male protagonists are often burakumin (outcasts). A repeated reduction of these male bodies to their "physicality" and phallicism appears to merely mimic dominant social discourses on the bestial nature of burakumin. However, as Judith Butler has argued in Gender Trouble, "to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. [There is also] . . . the possibility of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation but its displacement."(30)
The talk interprets the theatrical performances of masculinity by Nakagami's protagonists as a type of parodic repetition of the so-called heterosexual "original" that functions to displace the law rather than consolidate it. The social and sexual activities of the men in Nakagami's texts-the bisexual Yves of Sanka (Paean, 1987-1989), Hanzö of Sennen no yüraku (A Thousand Years of Pleasure, 1982), the hijiri of the Kumanoshü (The Kumano Tales, 1984)-are marked by vacillating relationships to positions of dominance. These men inhabit complex sites that co-mingle conventionally defined "female" and "male" positions. Through the narrative incorporations of, for example, sadomasochistic role reversals, anal sex between men, or simply the abject status of the outcast, the hyperbolic phallicism of Nakagami's male protagonists is complicated by varied descents into conventionally feminized positions of submission. Such submissions, by "feminizing" the phallic subject, constitute cleavages in the fabric of phallic dominance itself.
What Does the Masochist See? Tanizaki's Shunkinshö and Readerly Disavowal
Margherita Long, Princeton University
Gilles Deleuze has argued that Freud's definition of fetishistic disavowal goes a long way toward describing male masochism: choosing not to see that his partner is castrated, the masochist reinvests her with the phallus and simultaneously disavows his own claims to modern masculinity. Tanizaki's Shunkinshö (1933) seems to offer a textbook example of this gesture, as the woman Shunkin's blindness becomes a metaphor for female ''lack," and the man Sasuke, insisting that his lover is not "fugu" (deformed), casts himself as the partner who is "fukanzen" (incomplete). Yet despite his vehement acts of disavowal, the masochist emerges as a figure who sees the binaristic foundations of modern sexuality all too clearly.
In fact, the greatest tendency toward disavowal is attributed here not to the masochist but rather to public sentiment, which refuses to see the masochistic fantasy as antithetical to a normative, sadistic "male" one. Dissenting voices are loud within the text, and they also seem to comprise the narrator's imagined readership. In sly resistance, the narrator appropriates the conventions of the Taisho watakushi-shösetsu to make the couple's "unimaginable" relationship seem indisputably real. Nevertheless, the credibility of the masochistic fantasy, and particularly Sasuke's credibility as a truly "unphallic" man, have met with stubborn resistance in their struggle against readerly disavowal. A strong current in Shunkinshö studies, initiated by Kono Taeko, posits Sasuke himself as the sadistic culprit who disfigures Shunkin at the end of the tale. My paper analyzes this critical tradition, exploring the feminist implications of discrediting Sasuke's attempts to elide maleness with "lack."
Reading the Politics of Male Homosexuality in Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo
James Keith Vincent, Columbia University
Through a close reading of selected texts by Oe Kenzaburo ("Seventeen," 1961) and Mishima Yukio (Hagakure nyümon, 1967) this talk will address the problematic way in which male homoeroticism has been read in relation to politics in postwar Japan. I will argue that whereas Oe tends to mobilize homophobia to lend force to his critique of the excesses of the right, Mishima mobilizes misogyny to privilege homosexual desire as a critique of the hypocrisies of post-war "democracy." Oe's homophobia and Mishima's misogyny keep both authors trapped within a gender binary that reverberates with the political binary of left and right. The result is that male homosexuality becomes a site where sexual and political energies are cast in an intractable relation of mutual determination. This dilemma will be read as symptomatic of the conflation of homosexuality and homosociality endemic to post-war Japan, a conflation which mandates that sex between men may only be read either as an inherent threat to modern patriarchy or as its ultimate expression. Using what Gayatri Spivak has called a "strategically essentialist" gay reading, this paper will introduce a provisional distinction between the homosocial and the homosexual. I will argue that only in this way is it possible to escape this "double bind" and formulate a progressive critique of modernity that is simultaneously feminist and anti-homophobic. Ultimately, I hope to contribute to a better understanding, not of what male homosexuality means in Japan, but of what it has been made to mean, and why.
The Aesthetic Sexology of Inagaki Taruho: Rethinking the Politics of Sublimation
Jonathan Mark Hall, University of California, Santa Cruz
This paper examines the idiosyncratic correlation between sexology and aesthetics in two works by essayist and novelist Inagaki Taruho (1900-1977). In his 1954 essay, "The A-Sensibility and the V-Sensibility," Taruho argues that an "anal sensibility," associated with homosexuality, is creatively superior to the normative or heterosexual "vaginal sensibility." His aesthetic sexology is developed further in a 1969 book-length study, The Aesthetics of Boy-Love, which links a modern psycho-sexual discourse to Japanese traditions of pederasty. Initially, Taruho's work may seem troubling from a feminist perspective because it aligns cultural value with male homosexuality. Similarly, it may seem troubling from a queer theoretical perspective because it "redeems" male homosexuality by homophobically displacing it to a de-sexualized beauty.
But to trace only these misogynist and homophobic tendencies risks ignoring Taruho's important contribution to the theory of sublimation: how the vicissitudes of the "drive" end in cultural production. Although his work maintains a close dialog with Freud, particularly the 1909 Leonardo essay, Taruho avoids one of Freud's major perceived shortcomings. Refusing the teleological placement of the aesthetic as the mere end-product of a repressed or sublimated drive, he suggests that the "anal sensibility" is itself a cultural "product." Thus, the paper is able to situate Taruho's work in opposition to the normative containment of the sexual that typified post-war Japanese psychological theories. Drawing psychoanalytically from Jean Laplanche and Leo Bersani, it argues that Taruho's innovative location of the aesthetic at the site of the drive's origin amounts to a de-essentializing "history" of male-male desire in 20th-century Japan.