QUEER JAPANESE: Gender and Sexual Identities Through

Q J This page intentionally left blank Q J Gender and Sexual Identities through Linguistic Practices Hideko Abe QUEER JAPANESE Copyright © Hideko Abe, 2010 All rights reserved. Portions of chapter 1 originally appeared in “A Community of Manners: Advice Columns in Lesbian and Gay Magazines in Japan,” Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, eds., Manners and Mischief: Gender and Power in Japanese Conduct Literature. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in “Lesbian Bar Talk in Shinjuku, Tokyo,” Shigeko Okamoto and Janet (Shibamoto) Smith, eds., Japanese Language, Gender and Ideology. Reprinted by permission of the Oxford University Press. Cover Illustration: Takabatake Kasho¯’s Nakayoshi (Best Friends, 1927), reprinted with permission by Yayoi Museum. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62236–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abe, Hideko. Queer Japanese : gender and sexual identities through linguistic practices / Hideko Abe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–62236–4 (alk. paper) 1. Gay men—Japan—Tokyo—Identity. 2. Gay men—Japan—Tokyo— Language. 3. Lesbians—Japan—Tokyo—Identity. 4. Lesbians—Japan— Tokyo—Language. 5. Anthropological linguistics—Japan—Tokyo. 6. Gender identity—Japan—Tokyo. 7. Tokyo (Japan)—Social life and customs. I. Title. HQ76.2.J37A24 2010 306.76Ј60952135—dc22 2009031189 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. For Tony This page intentionally left blank C Acknowledgements ix Notes on Japanese Names and Words xi Introduction 1 1 Queer Etiquette?: Advice Columns with a Difference 17 2 Lesbian Bar Talk 33 3 Cross-dressing Speech: The “Real” Womanhood of Men 53 4 Performing the Performative in the Theater of the Queer 77 5 Queen’s Speech and the Playful Plundering of Women’s Language 97 6 Queen’s Speech as a Private Matter 135 Notes 153 Bibliography 179 Index 195 This page intentionally left blank A This book was a long and involved process. It began with a number of fateful personal interactions. They included a statement by Watanabe Mieko (“O-nē-kotoba is an insult against women”), an ada- mant denial by Nancy Kersten (“I reject the use of women’s speech in Japanese”), criticism from my mother (“Hideko, don’t talk like a boy!”), and a simple question from my husband (“Why won’t you let me use boku in the house?”). These questions initially led to my first book on the speech of powerful women, and subsequently to the present project. Initial stabs were completed with the kind help of Okamoto Shigeko, Janet (Shibamoto) Smith, and Jan Bardsley. I want to give special thanks to Laura Miller, who read various itera- tions of the manuscript and whose comments (and vigorous cheer- leading) made this a much better book. It has been a very fun book to write, beginning with the initial research in the bars of Shinjuku Ni-chōme. I treasure my conversations with Claire Maree, who took me to Ōtsuka Takashi’s bar for the first time. After my first visit, Ōtsuka always welcomed me to his bar and was happy to answer all the questions I had about gay life, language use, and his play. I must thank my husband, Mark, who has been the endless supporter of this book; and I would be remiss if I did not also thank my son, Fumiya, who loves the sound and playfulness of o-nē-kotoba in the TV show Kureyon Shinchan. Much of my research on queer entertainers was facilitated by my niece, Tsuboi Sachiyo, who recorded countless Japanese TV variety programs. Special thanks to Sakaguchi-san at the astounding Gordon W. Prange Collection at the University of Maryland for her help for collecting newspaper and magazine articles on danshō. I am also indebted to Takabatake Sumie and her daughter Asako of the Kashō Museum, who helped me choose Nakayoshi (“Best Friends,” 1927) for the cover of my book. The Yayoi Museum has kindly given me permission for its use. Finally, I also want to offer thanks to Palgrave Macmillan editor Brigitte Shull, whose enthusiastic embrace of the book was wonderful; editorial assistant Lee Norton’s help has certainly made for a better book. x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have reserved two friends for special mention. Sekiguchi Yōhei deserves special thanks for introducing me to many of his gay friends in Tokyo. He kindly answered all of my many questions about gay men and their use of o-nē-kotoba with great frankness and even greater intelligence. It was so meaningful to find a consultant friend who took an intellectual interest in the core questions of my project. Finally, Queer Japanese would never have been possible without the friendship and guidance of Tony Demko, who offered a “base camp” for my fieldwork over the past decade. He also guided me through his favorite bars in Shinjuku and, most importantly, helped me discover my project through invariably delightful discussions over sake back at his home. It is to him that I dedicate this book and look forward to presenting a warmly inscribed copy over a bottle of Yukimanman. N J N W I have followed the Japanese name order, family name first, for Japanese who reside and work in Japan (as in Endō Orie). However, I have used the English name order for Japanese who live and publish outside of Japan (as in Shigeko Okamoto). Transliteration follows the Hepburn style, with macrons for long vowels except for ii. Macrons are not used for Japanese words that are commonly accepted without them (such as Tokyo). Transliteration for spoken utterances follows the idiosyncratic rules of linguistics that strive to transcribe the actual sounds of speech rather than the char- acters on a page; for example, “female” uttered in actual conversation will be rendered “josē” rather than the Hepburn system’s “josei.” With the exception of public personalities, the names of consul- tants and friends used in the book are pseudonyms. This page intentionally left blank Introduction This book is about the social construction of gender in relation to linguistic practice and performance by Japanese sexual minorities, including bisexuals, lesbians, gays, and transgendered and transsex- ual people. It attempts to demonstrate that gender and gender identities are not something we own but rather achieve through various resources available to us. The main resource here is language; I exam- ine not only how we use language to express ourselves linguistically, but also how the language we use in social and political interaction constructs our reality and its gendered and sexual dimensions. I see language as an ideological as well as a material practice in the Bakhtinian sense, where it is constituted by and through subjects. The language I discuss in this book is dialogic; three components— speaker, interlocutor, and the relation between the two—produce, interact, and negotiate with one another. In this book, the speakers are queer, interlocutors are both queer and non-queer, and the relation between the two positions is unknown and negotiable. In my analysis, I reject the essentialist notion that there are two dis- tinctive categories of sexes, women and men, which are constituted by separate social roles and responsibilities. The same goes for similarly essentialist categories dividing homosexuality from heterosexuality. I treat gender and gender identities as fluid, unstable and negotiable, as I investigate linguistic choices. In other words, I believe that speakers manipulate their linguistic resources as they negotiate their identities and desires. Choices speakers make are socially compelled (at a macro-level) and constantly negotiated (at the micro-level), all to their advantages. Needless to say, this positioning has a history. Four decades overflowing with sociolinguistic studies and femi- nist interventions have taught us many things about the relationship between language and gender. We have come to understand that gender is one of many social identities and cannot be studied separately from other identities. Therefore, we cannot assume that gender is the most important social category for speaker’s identities. Moreover, gender is no longer seen as a static category, but as something constantly 2 QUEER JAPANESE realized in interactional form. Gender is “motile and locally invoked”1 and “a local production rather than an enduring category.”2 By exten- sion, many studies demonstrate how separate linguistic categories for women and men reinforce the social myth that women and men are fundamentally and categorically different (notably Bing & Bergvall 1996). Thus, researchers now feel compelled to find answers for “how particular linguistic practices contribute to the production of people as women and men,” rather than simply searching for linguistic behavioral differences among people based on their sex.3 This is why context-dependent research holds the key for understanding how individual speakers “negotiate the norms, behaviors, and discourses that define masculinity and femininity for a particular community at a particular point in history.”4 Japanese language is often claimed to feature two separate linguistic genres for women and men, something codified into academic discourses in the initial work on Japanese language and gender in the 1970s and 1980s.

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