Japan's progressive sex: male homosexuality, national competition, and the cinema.
This essay serves as a broad investigation of the origins of what came to be called the "gay boom" in 1990's Japanese cinema: a culmination of print media, television, and especially films which made the gay male not merely a visible (political) subject but also the site of displaced contestations of gendered (female) desire. The most visible transnational signifier of the "gay boom" was the 1992 film Okoge, a film which, in keeping with a Japanese trend which relocates the gay male as a safe displacement of female desire, posits the heterosexual female as the audience's point of identification in a film about the lives of gay Japanese men. Using this as a starting point, this essay seeks to explore how male homosexuality and gender construction operate within both Japanese nationalism and the transnational discourse of Japanese cinema's dissemination.
Hall
J M
JM
Department of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz 95064, USA.
D001154:Art; D005260:Female; D018452:Homosexuality, Female; D018451:Homosexuality, Male; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007564:Japan; D008297:Male; D009040:Motion Pictures; D011057:Politics; D012723:Sex