The Discourse on “Love Between Men” in Interwar Japan: Iwata’s History of Homosexuality
March 1993
Between 1920 and 1945, Iwata Jun’ichi carried out an unprecedented, extensive research project on the history and literature of homoeroticism in Japan. Iwata used the Tokugawa period word nanshoku (a compound of the character for “male” and the character for “sexual love”) almost exclusively in reference to his topic; however, the more recent coinage doseiai (literally “same-sex-love”), a translation of “homosexuality,” was also current. The mapping of these two terms onto the binarisms East/West and Traditional/Modern, oppositions that represent axes of social conflict and cultural confrontation during the interwar years in Japan, promise an insight into the puzzle of what Iwata was doing when he was writing history.
A PDF of the file is available for download.
[Although not directly relevant to my art practice, this text is included here as background and because it might be of interest to some. The research it describes was to have become the basis for my PhD thesis at the University of Chicago, a project which, sadly, I never completed. Nevertheless, the interests which motivated the work–in modernity, globalization, sexuality, gender, and language–are consistent with those which motivate my current practice.]
Posted August 19, 2007
