Claire Maree - Böcker

From the twins Osugi and Peeco to longstanding icon Miwa Akihiro, Claire Maree traces the figure of the Japanese queerqueen, showing how a diversity of gender identifications, sexual orientations, and discursive styles are commodified and packaged together to form this character. Representations of gay men's speech have changed in tandem with gender norms, increasingly crossing over into popular media via the body of the "authentic" gay male up to and including the current "LGBT boom" in Japan. In this context, queerqueen demonstrates how commercial practices of recording, transcribing, and editing spoken interactions and use of on-screen text encode queerqueen speech as inherently excessive and in need of containment. Tackling questions of authenticity, self-censorship, and the restrictions of heteronormativity within this perception of queer excess, Maree shows how queerqueen styles reproduce stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and desire that are essential to the business of mainstream entertainment.

From the twins Osugi and Peeco to longstanding icon Miwa Akihiro, Claire Maree traces the figure of the Japanese queerqueen, showing how a diversity of gender identifications, sexual orientations, and discursive styles are commodified and packaged together to form this character. Representations of gay men's speech have changed in tandem with gender norms, increasingly crossing over into popular media via the body of the "authentic" gay male up to and including the current "LGBT boom" in Japan. In this context, queerqueen demonstrates how commercial practices of recording, transcribing, and editing spoken interactions and use of on-screen text encode queerqueen speech as inherently excessive and in need of containment. Tackling questions of authenticity, self-censorship, and the restrictions of heteronormativity within this perception of queer excess, Maree shows how queerqueen styles reproduce stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and desire that are essential to the business of mainstream entertainment.

This book is the first in a unique series drawn from an interdisciplinary, longitudinal project entitled ‘Thirty Years of Talk.’ For 30 years, Okano recorded ethnographic interviews and collected data on the language of working class women in Kobe, Japan. This long-range study sketches the transitions in these women's lives and how their language use, discourse and identities change in specific sociocultural contexts as they shift through different stages of their personal and public lives. It is a ground-breaking, ‘real time’ panel study that follows the same individuals and observes the same phenomena at regular intervals over three decades. In this volume the authors examine the changes in the speech of one particular woman, Kanako, as her social identity shifts from high-school girl to mother and fisherman’s wife, and as her relationship with the interviewer develops. They identify changes in linguistic strategies as she negotiates gender/sexuality norms, stylistic features related to the construction of rapport, the use of discourse markers as she gets older, and the interviewer’s information-seeking strategies.

This book is the first in a unique series drawn from an interdisciplinary, longitudinal project entitled ‘Thirty Years of Talk.’ For 30 years, Okano recorded ethnographic interviews and collected data on the language of working class women in Kobe, Japan. This long-range study sketches the transitions in these women's lives and how their language use, discourse and identities change in specific sociocultural contexts as they shift through different stages of their personal and public lives. It is a ground-breaking, ‘real time’ panel study that follows the same individuals and observes the same phenomena at regular intervals over three decades. In this volume the authors examine the changes in the speech of one particular woman, Kanako, as her social identity shifts from high-school girl to mother and fisherman’s wife, and as her relationship with the interviewer develops. They identify changes in linguistic strategies as she negotiates gender/sexuality norms, stylistic features related to the construction of rapport, the use of discourse markers as she gets older, and the interviewer’s information-seeking strategies.