queerqueen

Abstract

Abstract Queerqueen examines the editing and writing of queer excess into Japanese popular culture through mediatization of queerqueen styles. The book illustrates how a diversity of gender identifications, sexual orientations, and discursive styles are packaged together as if to form a homogenous character—the queerqueen. In a range of genres from conversational dialogue books to lifestyle television and animations, queerqueen styles are configured as crossing into popular media via the body of the authentically “queer male,” whose “authentic” speech is produced spontaneously without scripting. Editorial interventions enacted through the collaborative language labor of stenographers and record makers, graphic designers and illustrators, and editorial teams (re)trace the sonic qualities of the queerqueen. Through visual mimesis, contemporaneous citational practices, and the mobilization of nostalgia, queerqueen styles are enregistered as talk that is inherently excessive and in need of containment. Editorial acts of containment such as self-censorship simultaneously expose the sexualized nature of gendered norms of talk in Japanese. It is also here that possible spaces for dissent open up through contestation of the limits to excess. The visual and sonic crossings of gender norms unsettle heteronormative mapping of speech styles onto statically gendered bodies. Strategic use of a variety of linguistic resources such as hyper-masculine forms and hyper-politeness exposes the veneers of technologies that seek to regiment excess. Analysis of the inscription of queerqueen styles reveals metapragmatic stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and desire that are essential to the business of mainstream entertainment.

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