Since the turn of the millennium, Japanese variety television has witnessed a revival in onê-kyara (queen personalities). In contemporary lifestyle media, the trans-gendered onê-personality figure is demonstrative of how suitable consumption and personal effort can bring forth the transformational happiness of the individual. The transgressive, radical potential of the figure of transformative non-normative gender is muffled by the onê-personality's positioning within variety television as a friendly expert of extraordinary and often comical proportions. Language is one of the key sites where the tensions of critical expertise and queerness are negotiated via synthetic friendship and comic relief. In lifestyle media, onê-kyara-kotoba (queen-personality-talk) is juxtaposed with conventional Japanese and emerging practices of digital orthography. This social practice of writing effectively facilitates the contemporary fetish of the onê (queen), and the consumption of homosexual and trans-gendered lifestyle experts selling the promise of heteronormative romantic love.
Representations of gender and sexuality in mainstream media operate to both shape the contours of, and contest the limits to, sexual citizenship. The 'citational practices' of media representations mould contemporary understandings of these limits. In this article I examine mainstream and social media reports of two separate same-sex wedding ceremonies in Japan; the first at a queer community event in 2007 and the second at a major theme park in 2013. Through citations and quotations, a multitude of voices are embedded in the media texts. In the 2007 case, increased media visibility is mitigated by citational practices that clearly mark the same-sex wedding as devoid of legal standing. Whereas media reports situate the 2013 ceremony in the context of marriage equality trends internationally, an instance of possible discrimination is emphasised as being a 'misunderstanding'. Similarly, a microanalysis of a light news documentary of the ceremony uncovers citational practices that highlight the importance of 'forgiveness' or 'tolerance' for 'mutual coexistence' in society. Furthermore, the reporting confines the ceremony to a 'fairytale'-like 'foreign' domain. The process of 'othering' issues of sexual citizenship is linked to a cyclical process since the 1950s wherein representations of queerness are posited as 'new' forms of being in Japan. Discourse surrounding sexual citizenship is thereby projected into a non-domestic, non-specific future time.
Chapter 2 examines the entextualization of queerqueen Japanese into multimodal texts that endeavor to (re)create sonic qualities through visual means. It examines five books published in 1979–1980 by twin brothers Osugi (Sugiura Takaaki, cinema critic; 1945–) and Peeco (Sugiura Katsuaki, fashion critic; 1945–) that employ the taidan (conversational dialogue) format and incorporate illustrations from leading graphic artists. In a “boom” of popularity, Osugi and Peeco were renowned for their playful banter and were labeled the okama (pejorative slang for “fag/faggot/poofter”) twins. The rich textual fields of the books combine layout and graphic design with metalinguistic annotation and nonconventional orthography provided via stenography, transcription, and editing. Through visual mimesis and orthographic stylization, the “excessive” nature of the talk is visually highlighted. Censorship tropes visually mark that which must be contained. Spoken interactions emergent in “actual” conversations are thus entextualized and function as precursor for later articulations of queerqueen booms.
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