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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Shōno Yoriko's trans-exclusionary turn as a logical consequence of her feminist writing. Drawing on Biddy Martin, I trace how Shōno's defense of a habitable "place" for female subjectivity slides from an embodied critique of the gender binary into exclusionary gatekeeping.

Paper long abstract

Shōno Yoriko is one of Japan’s most celebrated feminist writers, known for fiction that interrogates gender binaries through non-human protagonists, gender-ambiguous narrators, and bodies in constant transformation. Yet since 2020, Shōno has become vocal in trans-exclusionary discourse, framing trans women as threats to women's safety and denying the validity of gender self-identification. This paper examines the apparent contradiction between Shōno's seemingly gender-fluid fictional worlds and her exclusionary politics by tracing a common logic that underlies both: the struggle to secure a habitable "place" (ibasho) for female subjectivity.

Beginning in the 1990s, Shōno situated her literary practice within a struggle to carve out this ibasho—a concept resonating through works like Ibasho mo nakatta (1993) and her polemical defense of "pure literature" in the 'Don Quixote debate.' Central to this project is her notion of "ultra-private" language: a fiercely individualistic mode of writing that resists the gendered norms and capitalist logic of the literary establishment. The body occupies an ambivalent position in this framework: Shōno mobilizes it as the foundation of authentic writing, yet her fiction repeatedly figures the female body as something to transcend or inhabit only provisionally—something one cannot leave behind yet struggles to fully occupy.

I argue that Shōno's trans-exclusionary turn represents not a betrayal of her feminist project but a logical consequence. Literary portrayals of intransigent gendered bodies do not necessarily lead to transphobia; there is no necessary causal link between not transcending the gendered body and excluding trans women. Suspicion of gender-fluidity can itself be a queer-feminist position: As Biddy Martin (1994) argued, celebrations of gender-crossing can project 'reactionary' fixity onto gender-conforming embodiments of femininity. Traces of such a critique can be found in Shōno's engagement with Matsuura Rieko.

However, the feminist framework Shōno ultimately reached for—Japan's Women's Liberation movement—was not equipped to hold this critique. It offered her a language of embodied first-person experience, but had its own history of excluding queer bodies. This paper traces Shōno's engagement with feminist thought to show how her pursuit of an ibasho slides from an embodied critique of the gender binary into trans-exclusionary gatekeeping.