This book analyses a rich archive of cultural texts from gay male subcultures in the postwar period, depicting moments of contact between Japanese and Western queer cultures. The author demonstrates how ideals about the West impacted processes of identity formation, and challenges and reworks existing models of the East/West binary paradigm. The instances examined range from the perverse magazines in the 1950s and their depiction of men who had sex with foreign men (mostly American servicemen); the depiction of race in the gay magazine Barazoku; John Whittier Treat's memoir of his sabbatical i ... More

This book analyses a rich archive of cultural texts from gay male subcultures in the postwar period, depicting moments of contact between Japanese and Western queer cultures. The author demonstrates how ideals about the West impacted processes of identity formation, and challenges and reworks existing models of the East/West binary paradigm. The instances examined range from the perverse magazines in the 1950s and their depiction of men who had sex with foreign men (mostly American servicemen); the depiction of race in the gay magazine Barazoku; John Whittier Treat's memoir of his sabbatical in Japan and his depiction of his own Orientalism; the writings and strategies of OCCUR and Fushimi Noriaki in the 1990s; and the queer oriented news portal site Gay Japan News. Each chapter demonstrates that the binary discourses of Japan and the West do not always fix the character of Japan's queer culture in the context of cross-cultural contact, but rather that they also facilitate the emergence of new forms of identity and desire that transgress pre-existing sets of categories. In other words, binaries are often deployed to express identities in motion. The author further argues that the binaries of East/West and local/global will continue to be not only a means of reinvigorating the binary but also a critical tool to dismantle the binary itself in the context of queer globalisation.