The construction of desire: young gay men and media in Japan

Many studies have investigated the discourses of gay identity appearing within Japanese media, focusing upon the relationships between gay and gendered identity categories. However, very few studies have specifically examined the affects that consumption of media has on individual gay men’s understandings of their desires and identities. This thesis examines how young gay men in Japan engage with the media landscape anchored to Shinjuku Ni-chōme and explores how identity categories known as “Types” act as a semiotic system that influences understandings of sexuality, desire and identity. The study engages with desire as a social construct that influences processes of identification, investigating how individuals articulate their gay desires in the wider heteronormative social system, where homosexuality is constructed as unnatural and perverted. The study draws upon two interrelated sources of data: case studies of six young Japanese gay men’s consumption of media and content analyses of gay media. Data were collected through ethnographic participant observation conducted in Shinjuku Ni-chōme, intervention interviews with 50 young gay men, a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with six principal informants, and quantitative and qualitative content analyses of gay magazines, pornographic videos, news sites and online dating services. The data were interpreted reflexively through the application of a Social Realist approach to research which posits that structural forces and an individual’s agency affect an individual’s discursive engagement with the world. To investigate the roles structure and agency played in the reflexive and historical process of meaning-making, the thesis drew upon Layder’s Domain Theory (1993, 1997) as a conceptual framework. This study found that Typing dominated how gay desire was presented in Shinjuku Ni-chōme and the Japanese gay media. The six principal informants consumed a wide variety of this gay media, expressing that it allowed them to explore their desires in ways that challenged wider society’s conceptualisation of homosexuality, with consumption of pornography being particularly prevalent. Through their consumption, they learnt about Typing and viewed it as a method to understand individual and personal identity. However, as a classificatory system, Typing reduced desire to normative modes of consumption and identity was consequently reduced to the ascription of physical appearances and associated gendered performances. The study established that Japanese gay media promoted heteronormative understandings of masculinity as desirable, privileging hegemonic masculinity and youth whilst marginalising effeminacy. In particular, the figure of the heterosexual male was fetishized throughout Japanese gay cultural production, situating discourses of desirability within a heteronormative gendered binary. This privileging inculcated in some informants the normalcy of hard, rough masculinity and caused anxiety to those who felt they could not live up to such gendered ideals. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the dominance of Typing in Japan’s gay sub-culture limits the agency of young gay men in Japan, forcing them to fit their identities within its system in order to become desirable to others. Through this discussion, the thesis expands our knowledge of Japanese conceptualisations of sexuality, gender, masculinity and race, challenging dominant, Western-centric understandings of sexuality that underpin much queer studies research.