Paper short abstract:

While examining "Tsui kinō no koto" (Only Yesterday, 2018), the magnum opus of poet Takahashi Mutsuo, this paper draws on the historical turn in Queer Studies to think through the politics of contemporary writers identifying with sexual minorities in physically and temporally distant societies.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, scholars have argued that people at different moments have thought very differently about sexuality due to the specific ideas circulating in their societies. While this has led to many welcome developments, recent attention to historical detail hasn’t stopped LGBTQ people from searching for historical models as part of their own liberatory politics. As medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw has noted, the desire to identify with others is a reaction against broken, impartial histories, which until recently, have kept non-heteronormative lives out of view, depriving the LGBTQ community of knowledge that might shape its own ways of being. Recent developments in identity politics, such as Black Lives Matter, transgender rights, and the #MeToo movement, have also emphasized the importance of identifying and allying across perceived boundaries of ethnicity, gender, and culture, but what are the dynamics of identification? Who can identify with whom and why?

This presentation draws upon the so-called “historical turn” in Queer Studies, as well as ideas from Translation Studies, to think about what it means for contemporary figures to write about and identify with physically and temporally distant societies. As a case study, this presentation looks at the work of one of Japan’s most important writers, the openly gay poet Takahashi Mutsuo, who has been writing about homoeroticism in bold, unflinching terms since the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, this presentation will look at his 2018 collection "Tsui kinō no koto" (Only Yesterday), which uses ancient Greece as the central motif to organize 150-plus poems about a wide range of contemporary issues, including the place of homoeroticism in Takahashi's own life and postwar Japanese culture more generally. In exploring this collection’s complex, multi-faceted use of ancient Greek motifs, this presentation will examine the limits, problems, and prospects for queer identification, exploring both the pitfalls and productive possibilities of identifying with people across perceived boundaries of culture and time.