Introduction

Abstract

This book is about the social construction of gender in relation to linguistic practice and performance by Japanese sexual minorities, including bisexuals, lesbians, gays, and transgendered and transsexual people. It attempts to demonstrate that gender and gender identities are not something we own but rather achieve through various resources available to us. The main resource here is language; I examine not only how we use language to express ourselves linguistically, but also how the language we use in social and political interaction constructs our reality and its gendered and sexual dimensions. I see language as an ideological as well as a material practice in the Bakhtinian sense, where it is constituted by and through subjects. The language I discuss in this book is dialogic; three components¯ speaker, interlocutor, and the relation between the two¯produce, interact, and negotiate with one another. In this book, the speakers are queer, interlocutors are both queer and non-queer, and the relation between the two positions is unknown and negotiable.