Writing sexuality: Heteronormativity, homophobia and the homosocial subject in modern Japan

This dissertation aims to chart the emergence of heteronormativity and homophobia in Japan and to show how they have colluded with the construction of the modern Japanese subject. Chapter One combines epistemological and psychoanalytic inquiry to show how the crisis of representation and language brought on by modernity's demand for a transparent signifier (genbun' itchi) and an interiorized subject (shutai) initiated paranoid and fetishistic psychic structures with profound social consequences. Chapter Two reads texts on poetry and illness by Masaoka Shiki (1867--1902) to show how this collusion of paranoia and fetishism brought a projection of both homosexual desire and sexual difference onto the deadly deficiencies of writing itself. Chapter Three shows how the same paranoid border policing born to maintain the modern homosocial order in Shiki's time has gravely affected Japan's response to AIDS in the 1980s and 90s.; If the fetishizing of the letter as both signifier and signified at once was what saved the Meiji subject from being homosexual and initiated the paranoid structure of modern Japanese homosociality, the contradictions inherent in this structure seem to have returned with full force in the postwar. Chapter Four argues that the postwar association of fascism with homosexuality in the work of writers like Oe Kenzaburo (1935--) and in the specularized figure of Mishima Yukio (1925--1970) marks the return with a vengeance of the materiality of the signifier. Mishima's choice to literalize the metaphor of the kokutai---the body of the nation---and to love it in the figure of the Emperor---threatened to interfere with homosocial disavowal. By loving the fetishist's "maternal penis" in the figure of the Emperor, Mishima put the homosexual on parade and thus threatened to give the lie to modern Japanese paranoid homosociality. The final Chapter examines recent discourse on homosexuality in Japan to explore the potential for a reverse discourse of gay subjectivity.