Abstract
Moore presents a case study of a gay-identifying assistant language teacher from the United States navigating the complex social networks of “Asagawa,” a small town in Japan. Moore analyses the accounts “Dale” produced through the interview interaction, and shows how various factors shaped Dale’s identity management decisions, including his formative years in the United States, his interactions with members of Asagawa’s community, and the lack of legal protection against discrimination on the grounds of one’s sexual or gender identity in Japan. Simultaneously, Moore lays the foundations for a theorisation of identity in which it is understood as the dynamic and emerging product of the complex human social ecology.
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Notes
- 1.
Another piece of insider evidence that Dale seemed to marshal in his account of Matsui-san as being potentially queer-friendly was the fact that she insisted on him using the generally polite suffix of “-san” as opposed to the expected “-sensei,” normally afforded those in a teaching or expert position. Matsui-san’s rejection of a social norm that typically indexes expertise and hierarchical power within the social setting of a classroom worked alongside the other forms of norm-defying insider evidence to suggest to Dale that she might be someone with whom he could safely share information about his identity as a gay man.
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Appendix
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Transcription Key
Example | Meaning |
|---|---|
… | Data from the same turn omitted |
[Sufi] | Information added to aid comprehension |
(1.0) | Timed pause of one second or more |
{Matsui}-san | Disguised information |
one- one | False start or syntactic shift |
@that@ | Spoken with a laughing intonation |
describe= =yeah | Latching |
@@@ | Syllables of aspirated laughter |
<yes> | English translation of preceding non-English data |
[@yeah@ [and | Overlapping speech |
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Moore, A.R. (2022). “It Feels Like I’m Stuck in a Web Sometimes”: The Culturally Emergent Identity Experiences of a Queer Assistant Language Teacher in Small-Town Japan. In: Mielick, M., Kubota, R., Lawrence, L. (eds) Discourses of Identity . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11988-0_14
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