Linguistic Chaos

Chapter 4 illustrates how, as an enregistered style, queerqueen talk is co-opted into popular culture. It analyzes the Mori Mori Cooking segment of the animated series The World of GOLDEN EGGS (Plus Heads, Inc.) which is hosted by Rose and Mary—animated characters and mascot-like queen-personalities who traverse into the hyper-connected world of media-mix products. The sonic qualities of the okama (fag)-twins as embodied by twins Osugi and Peeco in the late 1970s, and the transformational powers of the queen-personality emanating from makeover genres of the early 2000s are laminated onto the voice performances of Rose and Mary. The highly stylized ventriloquism of queerqueen talk is emblematic of the chaotic language that permeates the Golden Eggs series. Within its multi-platform incarnations, the queerqueen mascot functions as a conduit of knowledge and culinary skills who looks onto the “real world live action” of cooking yet consistently flaunts the dictates of contemporary television broadcasting.

Bleeping Deluxe

Chapter 5 examines the visual and sonic mapping of excess onto the queerqueen figure through layering of censorship tropes such as redaction characters (fuseji) and pixelization onto audiovisual media. Censorship tropes index complex histories of the use of language and images in the public sphere. Manipulation of censorship tropes exposes discourses of discrimination that shape language use in the media. This chapter analyzes the use of censorship beeps in the late-night television show Matsuko no heya (Matsuko’s Room; Fuji Television Network) hosted by Matsuko Deluxe, a contemporary queerqueen superstar who gained mainstream popularity in the early 2000s. The show pivots on staged (im)politeness and a pretense of low-cost production and minimal editorial effects. In Matsuko no Heya, self-censorship edited into the footage (re)creates Matsuko’s image as a sharp-tongued, honest-speaking, entertaining personality. It simultaneously (re)creates Matsuko’s linguistic performance of gender and sexuality as that which already exceeds the limits of respectability.

Excess in Print

Chapter 2 examines the entextualization of queerqueen Japanese into multimodal texts that endeavor to (re)create sonic qualities through visual means. It examines five books published in 1979–1980 by twin brothers Osugi (Sugiura Takaaki, cinema critic; 1945–) and Peeco (Sugiura Katsuaki, fashion critic; 1945–) that employ the taidan (conversational dialogue) format and incorporate illustrations from leading graphic artists. In a “boom” of popularity, Osugi and Peeco were renowned for their playful banter and were labeled the okama (pejorative slang for “fag/faggot/poofter”) twins. The rich textual fields of the books combine layout and graphic design with metalinguistic annotation and nonconventional orthography provided via stenography, transcription, and editing. Through visual mimesis and orthographic stylization, the “excessive” nature of the talk is visually highlighted. Censorship tropes visually mark that which must be contained. Spoken interactions emergent in “actual” conversations are thus entextualized and function as precursor for later articulations of queerqueen booms.

Heave-ho

Chapter 6 examines nostalgia and dissent as contradictory companions to queerqueen excess. It provides a critical analysis of Miwa Akihiro’s performances at the annual New Year’s Eve songfest (NHK) in the context of post-3/11 Japan. A queer icon and renowned chanson artist performing since the 1950s, Miwa is said to experience his sixth media “boom” following his songfest performance in 2012. This “boom” is contingent on a strategical recontextualization of Miwa’s philosophy of aesthetics, which is informed by his wartime experiences and the atomic bombing of his hometown of Nagasaki. Nostalgic invocation of motherly love and a visual distancing from his television persona enables a performance of dissent. The performative voice of the iconic “original” queerqueen is distanced from heteronormative imaginations of queer excess and from the ongoing post-3/11 nuclear crisis. Recontextualized, the queerqueen voice is mobilized in a call for a return to the “normality” of pre-crisis familiarity.

Queen-Personality-Talk

Chapter 3 explores shifting processes of enregisterment through analysis of onē-kyara-kotoba (queen-personality-talk) as written into impact-captions in lifestyle television during the queen-personality boom (middle of the first decade of the 2000s). In makeover media of this period, queen-personalities were proof that readers and viewers alike could remake themselves into a newer and better “me” by applying hard work and dedication to fashion, cosmetics, culinary skills, and interpersonal relationships. Manipulation of language resources and metapragmatic stereotypes of femininity and masculinity are fundamental to processes through which the desire to transform is created. Taking the lifestyle variety television show onēMANS (NTV) as the main focus, the chapter analyzes how the look and the sound of the queerqueen is recontextualized into a heteronormative framework through manipulation of font, animation, color, and orthographic stylization in impact-captions. Editorial interventions inscribe the sonic qualities of queen-personality talk in ways that simultaneously celebrate their transformational power and threaten to expose their (in)authenticity.

Cyclical Movements through Popular Culture

Chapter 7 elucidates the main arguments of the book: First, that practices of transcription and media technologies that facilitate the (re)tracing of recorded speech have been central to the process of boom-making through which queerqueen styles cross from the subcultural to the mainstream. Furthermore, that queerqueen styles are configured as “authentic” speech that is produced spontaneously without scripting and then “faithfully” (re)traced into text. Such packaging elides collaborative processes of writing and editorial interventions practiced by producers, editors, stenographers, and professional writers, while also maintaining their trace in the text itself. The queerqueen in mainstream media is curtailed by transphobic and homophobic discourses through which their desire is reproduced as excessive. Tropes of self-censorship regiment what can be heard and/or seen and that which must be muted and/or covered. To limit queerqueen figures to heteronormative respectability is to expose the sexualized nature of gendered norms of talk in Japanese.

Booms

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to this book’s central argument that speech and/or writing produced by queerqueen personalities is ventriloquilized and entextualized by transcribers, ghost writers, editors, and/or producers through language-labor practices. The chapter traces the recycling of the visual and sonic image of the queerqueen figure in contemporary popular culture from the 1950s. It proposes that, though processes of mass commodification, the trope of the (sometimes) cross-dressing (sometimes) cross-speaking queerqueen has been recycled in print, audiovisual, and digital media through recurring cultural “booms.” These “booms” position queerqueen speech as a new phenomenon and shape the commodification of it within the historical and cultural context that forms the background to Japanese popular cultural productions. This chapter outlines how one can trace the entextualization of “queer linguistic excess” and its containment through analysis of the (re)production of “actual” conversations by “authentic” queerqueens as written text.

Queerqueens

In June 2003 on a JR train station platform in Tokyo I noticed a large advertisement featuring popular soccer player Nakata Hidetoshi (Figure 0.1) positioned over a row of plastic seats. Wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the word “queen,” a smiling Nakata had his head tilted as though looking to someone in the distance. On the other half of the poster David Beckham was shown smiling while looking down to his mobile telephone (...