From this position, some anthropologists have sought a return to the more scientific business of ethnography, while others have turned decisively toward the politics of cultural production. It has become an increasingly common view among anthropologists that ethnography must move away from the debates of ethnographic representation and theorization of culture. By these two terms I refer to the very actualization, conduct, realization, and corporeal doing of the activities and practices that comprise and constitute ethnographic fieldwork.
This article is a conceptual exploration of what Hernández calls the "performativity" and Wolcott the "doing" of fieldwork.
In this essay, I discuss the problematic nature of the three critical terms, and suggest ways in which Japan-as-Place might profitably be renarrated as the complex place it is and Japanese language, gender and sexuality relations revisited as they operate within that complexity.Īnthropological Quarterly 79.1 (2006) 75-104 A preferential focus on the surface-segmentable forms (pronouns, sentence final particles, etc.) over discursive features and a limited focus on Standard Japanese in the early years of Japanese language and gender research has led to a tendency to view ‘the’ Japanese language as a homogeneous unity and to the reification of the three critical categories, ‘Japan’, ‘language’ and ‘gender’. In the past thirty years, Japanese language and gender/sexuality relations have been characterised both domestically and globally as special, sometimes as unique, due to the existence of distinct joseigo ‘women’s language’ and danseigo ‘men’s language’. This essay offers an overview of language and gender research as it unfolded in a particular ‘Place’: Japan. Overall, this ethnographic research highlights the enduring difficulty of radical coalition among diverse populations, as I spotlight Ni-chōme volleyballers by discussing what has been in Japan in relation to the Euro-American resistance-minded queer theory. As Ni-chōme volleyballers swing between discretion and disclosure by fashioning language(/gender), such tactical performance of onē - kotoba lubricates an aesthetically pro-silence erotic play in tension with Japan’s – retrospectively and arguably – family-oriented, if not homophobic, sociocultural orientation resistant to “out-and-proud” activism. By adopting an ethnographic approach anchored in performance studies, I address onē - kotoba not in media but one real, perhaps unexpected, context of use. This gayly effeminate speech style remains firmly entrenched in Japanese media-representations of gay male characters despite its alleged rejection by actual gay men as well as its problematic characterization as being disrespectful to women. This ethnographic writing animates the communal role of language through onē - kotoba (queen’s language) among Ni-chōme volleyballers (amateur volleyball-loving gay men in Tokyo).