Producing Gayness: The 1990s “Gay Boom” in Japanese Media

Abstract

This dissertation examines the gay boom in the Japan, where various media from magazines, novels, television shows, to feature films reported on and represented male homosexuality in scale that was unprecedented and is unmatched to the present. The number of reports and narratives on male homosexuality reached its peak during 1991 to 1994, when Japan was facing numerous social changes such as the burst of the economic bubble, recognition of social stratification, shifts in women’s roles in the family, and increased promotion of Japan’s internationalization. The Japanese media’s production of gay male images was shaped by these social changes and the anxieties, producing an idealized gay subject who can respond to these situations and produce a new set of norms that govern the alternative social formations. This is not to say that gay men were universally accepted in the Japanese media, but through various conflicting representational modes of exoticization, celebration, abjection, and domestication of gay men, the Japanese media defined which subjects would be granted visibility for straight consumers. The gay boom’s grafting of the gay man’s lifestyle into matters of the family, class, and the national body were comprised of a complex set of negotiations, which often obscured and alleviated the issues faced by recessionary Japan. This process of commodification of gay images championed the fashionable, hybrid gay subject, which resulted in the exclusion of the unfashionable, uneducated, uncultured, rural lives, and the less wealthy.