Join scholars at the University of Oxford and members of the Oxford Japanese History Workshop to discuss how an attention to queer and trans histories can help us frame histories of Japan.
This seminar, taking place in LGBTQIA+ history month, will feature discussions both of queer theory as a lens and method to examine history, and narratives of historical actors who resonate with these categories from the premodern period to the present.
We will use queer theory to create an alternative timeline for Japan’s history. Each contributor has a varied definition of queer and queer theory, but we can broadly frame it as a ‘thinking sideways’ (Lilith Acadia) or unsettling the ‘common sense-ness’ (Lusing) of dominant narratives of cis heteronormativity in Japan, which centre around fixed gender roles of men and women and their relation to production and consumption in Japan across time.
Taking such a lens to different historical periods – in a sense, queering time – can provide us with a way to bridge gaps which ‘straight time’ have been unable to. These include, crucially, the premodern and the modern, which require different sources and techniques to approach, and have been seen too alien to one another to bring together in a meaningful way. However, we often read the past through a heteronormative and cisnormative lens with little regard for critical considerations of our own modern frameworks. A queer theory approach to embodiment, for instance, is a framing through which historical actors across centuries may begin to converse, as discussions which Tomé Valencia will show. Presenters also incorporate non-human actors, particularly in Honda’s explorations of ‘queer nature.’
The current narratives, which are not in fact as ‘common sense’ or ‘traditional’ as we may imagine, and simply do not reflect a myriad of individuals throughout time, have undermined or underserved lived experiences, as Kilcoyne and Cheng’s work will show. In revealing more approaches to sex and gender, our understandings of our own contemporary world can shift and the socially malleable, historically dependant character of our own classifications, better contextualised.
In seeing how our historical actors have navigated ways to survive, or find and express joy, we can move towards a framework in which people today can live and express themselves as radical without needing to remake reality from the ground up with each generation. O’Reilly’s ethnography of non-binary and gender fluid individuals in Tokyo will provide a link and starting point for reflections of queer and trans records in the contemporary Japan.
Speakers:
Professor Eiko Honda, Aarhus University: 'Queer Nature as the Method of Multispecies Intellectual History'
Sky Cheng, DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford: ‘Underground Theatre and Queer Resistance in Terayama Shuji’s La Marie-Vision (1967)’
Dr Pan Tomé Valencia, University of Oxford: ‘Queering the Premodern Body: Medieval Japanese Literature and Transness’
Hannah Kilcoyne, University of Oxford: ‘Shinjuku Boys: speech, embodiment and onabe identity in 1990s Japan’
Rue O’Reilly, ‘Genderqueer identity in Japan, the articulation of non-binary and non-bainarī gender: Ways of doing and being kuia in Tokyo’
Discussion – Dr Alice Baldock, University of Oxford
