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Paper short abstract

This paper focuses on ways in which LGBTIQA+ rights language travels alongside anti-gender, anti-trans rhetoric in Japan. It critically examines the politics of translation employed in anti-gender and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric that is disseminated and consumed alongside claims for LGBTIQA+ rights.

Paper long abstract

This paper critically examines the politics of translation within claims for LGBTIQA+ rights discourse and by anti-gender and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric with a focus on how these are disseminated and consumed. Building on research on language ideologies, anti-genderism is understood as a register which can be adapted to local contexts yet “circulate(s) translationally with little to no variation” (Borba 2022: 60). Within this register, rhetoric of the sanctity of family, can be adopted to accommodate many different configurations and ideals about the family in different sociocultural contexts and LGBTIQA+ researchers and acitivists framed as "anti-family." This process of fractal recursivity (Gal and Irvine 1995; Irvine and Gal 2000; Gal 2005; 2016), or the (re)production of dichotomies at ever smaller scales, “allows and indeed invites erasures” (Gal 2005: 27). In this talk, I present findings from a multi-modal discourse analysis of promotional materials which traverse both virtual (eg online websites) and actual spaces (eg Pride Parades). The analysis elucidates how key words and phrases translated from a variety of languages and locales are mobilised in claims for LGBTIQA+ rights and in place-making projects. In some instances these are reactive to both global and local anti-trans and anti-gender rhetoric. As activists, advocates and scholars must navigate the tensions which emerge between LGBTIQA+ advocacy discourse and localised anti-genderism, such reactivisation can erase historical trajectories of queer and trans ways of being at the point of dissemination and consumption.