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queerqueen examines the editing and writing of queer excess through the constructed character of the queerqueen. Through Japanese print, digital, and audiovisual media, Claire Maree demonstrates how collaborative practices of commercial language labor configure queerqueen styles as crossing into popular media via the body of the "authentically" queer male. Maree shows how this process then (re)produces stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and desire that are essential to mainstream entertainment.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Queerqueens: An Introduction
- Chapter One
- Booms: Recycling the Visual and Sonic Image of the Queerqueen Figure
- Chapter Two
- Excess in Print: (Re)tracing Conversational Dialogues
- Chapter Three
- Queen-personality talk: Writing queens on the Small Screen
- Chapter Four
- Linguistic Chaos: Hybrid Animation and the Queerqueen
- Chapter Five
- Beeping Deluxe: Staging Self-censorship and the Limits of Excess
- Chapter Six
- Heave-ho: Radical Recontextualization
- Chapter Seven
- Cyclical Movements or Writing Excess
About the author
Claire Maree Maree is Associate Professor & Reader at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. Her research spans the areas of gender, sexuality and language studies, media studies, and queer studies. She is co-editor of Discourse, Gender and Shifting Identities in Japan and author of two research monographs in Japanese.
Summary
From the twins Osugi and Peeco to longstanding icon Miwa Akihiro, Claire Maree traces the figure of the Japanese queerqueen, showing how a diversity of gender identifications, sexual orientations, and discursive styles are commodified and packaged together to form this character. Representations of gay men's speech have changed in tandem with gender norms, increasingly crossing over into popular media via the body of the "authentic" gay male up to and including the current "LGBT boom" in Japan. In this context, queerqueen demonstrates how commercial practices of recording, transcribing, and editing spoken interactions and use of on-screen text encode queerqueen speech as inherently excessive and in need of containment. Tackling questions of authenticity, self-censorship, and the restrictions of heteronormativity within this perception of queer excess, Maree shows how queerqueen styles reproduce stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and desire that are essential to the business of mainstream entertainment.
Additional text
What linguistic anthropologist Miyako Inoue did for Japanese women's language, Maree has done for onē-kotoba and onē-kyara—the language of queerqueen personalities. While Maree draws on examples from Japanese media, the book is a must-read for anyone working on media of any sort. Maree lays bare the manipulations at play and the heteronormative norms that undergird social media today.
