The term ‘queer’ was once replete with memories of abuse and discrimination against homosexual people. Since the 1990s, however, many activists and academics alike, particularly in North America, have started to redefine the notion of ‘queer’ and use it as a critical paradigm through which to call into question the hegemony of heterosexuality in society. Similar to other academic disciplines which arose from equal rights movements, the development of queer studies, too, parallels the increasing number of social critiques and activism against sexual norms (Jagose 1996: 42-43).
More often than not, the subjects of queer studies are members of sexual minorities, including lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people. However, what separates queer studies from lesbian and gay studies, for instance, is that queer studies does not limit its scope to specific, narrowly defined identity categories. In other words, the strength of queer studies, and by extension queer theory, lies in its ability to examine discriminatory social phenomena through a wide range of factors including the intersections of gender, sexuality, ‘race’, ethnicity, class, nationality, religious affiliation and able-bodiedness. In this regard, queer studies can be understood as a study of the multiplicities and diversities of our subjectivity. In her book Queer Theory: An Introduction, Annamarie Jagose states that ‘to identify it [queer theory] as a significant school of thought … is to risk domesticating it, and fixing it in ways that queer theory resists fixing itself’ (1996: 2).
In the last two decades or so, queer theory has continued to be deployed in many academic disciplines across national and regional boundaries. Japan is no exception in terms of developing academic research on queer cultures. Key texts which represent queer theory, such as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, were both translated into Japanese in 1999. The Japan Association for Queer Studies (JAQS) was established in 2007 by a collective of academics in Japan. JAQS holds an annual conference and publishes the annual Journal of Queer Studies Japan (Ronso kuia). In the inaugural address at the first conference meeting of JAQS, its founding members stated that although there was little agreement on what queer studies could do, and although it continues to learn from preceding lesbian and gay studies and feminism, what is essential for queer studies is that it should engage ‘a critical imagination through which to understand the past, and the present, and even the future in ways never before conceived’ (Ishida et al. 2008: 9-10).
In the remainder of this chapter, I introduce several studies that rely on queer perspectives to take account of a broad range of intersectional factors such as gender, ethnic identity, religious affiliation, and able-bodiedness, when thinking about sexual minorities in Japan.