Unqueer queers—drinking parties and negotiations of cultural citizenship by female-to-male trans people in Japan

Abstract

In the last twenty years, Japanese transgender people have acquired increased visibility in mainstream Japanese society. Notwithstanding that, female-to-male (FTM) trans people continue to be misunderstood by the Japanese public, and largely underrepresented in Anglophone academic scholarship. This paper therefore seeks to account for one aspect of FTM cultural life in present-day Japan that has largely remained invisible to mainstream society. Drawing on my fieldwork at FTM drinking parties in Tokyo between 2013 and 2019, I demonstrate how seemingly trivial drinking events not only play an important role in fostering a sense of community among their participants, but also enable the claiming of transgender cultural citizenship in a conservative state like Japan, which only recognizes a narrowly defined notion of transgender.

Keywords:

• FTM
• transgender
• scene
• drinking
• cultural citizenship

Notes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Fran Martin, Audrey Yue, Sabine Frühstück, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I also benefitted greatly from Kirsten Janene-Nelson’s careful and professional editing. My gratitude also goes to my informants in Japan who so generously welcomed me into their community and their lives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I was first introduced to the editor of Laph in early 2012 by a prominent Japanese FTM activist/writer/entrepreneur, and the editor promptly agreed to my request to research on Laph and its events. At Laph’s events, the editor always made sure that the participants—who tended to assume that I was one of the cisgender female participants accompanying their FTM partners to the events—knew about my position as a researcher. This introduction of me—as someone from Singapore (then) based in an Australian university writing a “graduation thesis” on FTM in Japan—to the participants by the editor, rather than relegating me to the status of an “outsider” (as non-Japanese and non-FTM), on the contrary eased my entry into the FTM scene. Asking or offering details about my background became a conversation starter, and my perceived foreignness—both to Japan, and to FTM culture—spurred the eagerness among many of my informants to share some aspects of their culture (Japanese and/or FTM) with me. At the same time, my familiarity with the Japanese language and cultural practices (and my ability to physically pass as a Japanese person) allowed me to quickly develop a rapport with my informants. In fact, on many occasions, my informants would stop in mid-sentence as they had suddenly remembered that I was not Japanese, and attempted to speak slower or explain certain terms that they thought I did not understand, only to “forget” my non-Japanese status and supposed unfamiliarity with in-group slang within minutes. In this sense, the border between outsider and insider was never a clear one for me. While there was not a single moment when I felt unwelcomed by my informants, and while I eventually participated in Laph’s events as a staff member (rather than as a “guest” as in the early days of my field work), I was mindful that I could never speak of my informants’ experiences from their position. I also did not directly ask them highly personal questions, especially those relating to their personal history and gender transition. Most of my informants, however, were more than willing to share their personal stories with me, and I tried, to the best of my ability, to present their thoughts and views in an accurate and ethical manner.

2 In recent years, the term sex-reassignment is increasingly replaced by gender reassignment, gender confirmation, or gender affirmation in many English-speaking countries. Although the term sex-reassignment has come under critique for reinforcing the notion that the truth of one’s gender lies in one’s body/genitals, it remains the dominant term in Japan (used by trans people and medical providers alike) to refer to the family of surgical procedures that trans people are required to undergo in order to change their legal gender. As such, while I acknowledge the problems with this term, in this article, I refer to sex-reassignment rather than its more recent variants in light of the context of my discussion—that is, contemporary Japanese society.

3 Under the Exceptional Treatment Law (2008 revision), one needs to fulfill the following five conditions to change one’s legal gender in the family register, a civil registration system that records information such as birth, death, marriage, divorce, adoption and dissolution of adoption of individuals in the family for up to two generations: (1) to be above 20 years old, (2) to be unmarried at the time of application, (3) to have no child below the age of 20, (4) to be deprived of gonad or gonad function, and (5) to have genitalia that resemble the sex to which they have been reassigned. For more detailed discussion on the Exceptional Treatment Law, see Taniguchi (2006).

4 In this article, I use the term queer as an umbrella term for non-normative configurations of gender and sexuality. I also use the term in a deconstructive sense to refer to (gendered) practices and positionalities that may have the potential to destabilize or challenge normative ways of being and knowing. For a brief discussion of the different understandings of the term queer, see Sullivan (2003, 37-56)

5 Cisgender individuals are those who identify with their gender assigned at birth.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Research Fellowship (2012–2013).

Notes on contributors

Shu Min Yuen

Shu Min Yuen teaches gender and sexuality at the Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include transgender studies, Asian queer studies, and contemporary Japanese society. Her works have appeared in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (forthcoming), Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media (2018), and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2011). She is currently working on her monograph on FTM history, media and community in Japan.