Questioning what’s queer

Posted on | August 24, 2005 | No Comments

Tomorrow we’re hosting an exciting event, it’s my colleague’s book launch and beforehand he’s giving a lecture which will summarize a lot of the amazing work he’s been doing over the past few years. Mark’s in his final few months working here at the Centre so I reckon it will be a bit of a send off to mark his contribution. If you’re even slightly interested in queer studies or the history of sexuality I’d urge you to come along. Mark’s work has been under increasing pressure since some very ambiguous laws have come into force, which makes it really important to publicly support it. Read on for the blurb:

Dr Mark McLelland, ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies

“The Emergence of Queer Culture in Postwar Japan”

Date: Thursday 25 August 2005
Place: The Mayne Centre, St Lucia Campus, The University of Queensland
Time: 5.30pm – 6.30pm; 6.30pm – 7.00pm (Book Launch)

The Second World War has been identified by scholars as a pivotal period for the development of lesbian and gay identities and communities in the Anglophone west. Not only did the mass mobilisation of young men and women and their segregation into homosocial environments facilitate same-sex intimacy but the US military’s official policy of identifying and expelling ‘inverts’ from its ranks promoted the visibility of homosexuals, many of whom, unable to return to their old closeted lives, migrated to large cities in search of community. But what of Japan, also a combatant in the war? Did Japan’s Pacific War produce similar effects in Japanese society that led to the establishment of analogous categories to the west’s ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’?

Drawing upon extensive archival research into a genre of early 1950s ‘perverse magazines’, Dr McLelland will show in this presentation that the development of sexual minority identity and community in Japan’s postwar period followed a very different trajectory than that apparent in the US or Australia. Rather than the emergence and consolidation of new and distinct sexual categories such as ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘straight’, early postwar Japanese culture was characterised by a polymorphous perversity much closer to contemporary understandings of ‘queer’ culture in which a wide range of sexual and gender diversity was available for appropriation and representation. Through elucidating the local material conditions and circuits of understanding that made such ‘queer’ appropriations possible, Dr McLelland will inquire whether contemporary ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ identities are evolutionary end-points, or simply the effects of specific culture-bound ways of configuring gender and desire.

About the Presenter
Mark McLelland is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on the connections between the media, new technologies and sexual and gender identity in Japan. Major publications include the monographs Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan (2000) and Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (2005) and the co-edited volumes Japanese Cybercultures (2003) and Genders, Transgender and Sexualities in Japan (2005). He is currently writing a queer history of Tokyo.

Book Launch
After the lecture, Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age, Dr McLelland’s latest book, published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, and funded by the ARC will be launched by Professor Peter Cryle of the Centre for the History of European Discourses.

Category: Events

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