Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Gary P. Leupp - Male Colors: The Construction of H...
WARNING: Sexually explicit discussion.
Leupp provides a judicious and readable analytical description of nanshoku (the Tao, i.e., way, of boylove) during the Pax Tokugawa (1603-1868). The first quarter of the text discusses earlier traditions—Chinese, Korean, Japanese Buddhist monastic, and samurai age-stratified homosexualities—that continued to be idealized on Tokugawa stages and pages. Anal receptivity was celebrated—not only as an honorable duty, but as a legitimate source of physical pleasure for the receptor as well as for the (older) insertor. Relationships were ideally exclusive, often formally contracted (sometimes in writing), and lasted until the boy grew up.
With the unification of Japan after centuries of civil war, the samurai caste’s function ceased to exist, and merchants became increasingly rich and powerful. As elsewhere (China and England at roughly the same time), military socialization faded (even as a rationalization), and increasingly effeminate male youths were sought on an increasingly cash basis. Instead of a spiritual duty or admiration for the military or spiritual prowess of an admired adult in a long-term relationship, payment became the recognized motivation for youths to rent their bodies to patrons. Androgyny gave way to effeminacy, and kabuki actors who specialized in women’s parts were especially prized concubines and prostitutes in the urban, highly commercialized “floating world.” There were also theatrical companies touring the countryside and peddlers whose bodies were available for rent, so that male prostitution was not exclusively an urban phenomenon What seems oddly lacking in contrast to pre-modern European cities is cruising. Desublimation (in a Confucian as much as a Freudian sense) appears to have been very effectively confined to commercial venues.
In the synchronic analysis that constitutes the second half of the book, Leupp contends that “active” and “passive” roles were completely dichotomized, that occupancy of those roles was determined by age, not by relative social status, that the sex involved was exclusively anal, that bisexuality was normative, and that men were expected to outgrow interest in penetrating boys’ anuses. The last two of these facets seem to contradict each other, and I have listed the others in order of decreasing convincingness. Thus, although the age differences might be slight, or even in some instances nominal, I know of no instances of role-switching (versatility) in representations of Tokugawa Japanese homosexuality. Members even of the Tokugawa family took the sexually receptive (wakashu) role in relations with older males of lesser social status.
While I think that to establish a “taboo” requires positive evidence, it is true that there are no representations of males performing oral sex with other males. That pederastic interests were “frowned upon even in men approaching thirty” (p. 148) may have been so, but his evidence is unconvincing. The literary evidence that nanshoku and joshoku (the way of women) were compatible (rather than successive) for particular individuals is extraordinarily weak. Leupp also seems to me to oversell the claim that anal receptivity was completely unstigmatized, and I find the explanation for the male-male oral sex taboo (that there had to be something that was exclusively heterosexual) an amusing example of functionalist desperation. A sort of demographic determinism (specifically, the “lack of women” argument) is also suspect.
Having dwelled on what I find unconvincing, I must reiterate that this book is a formidable piece of scholarship (with a hundred pages of apparatus), fascinating to read and to examine (with 32 well-chosen illustrations), and generally convincing. It documents constructions of male homosexuality that are quite different from the contemporary egalitarian/”gay” one, and also from the pathologized first “modern” homosexuality of late-19th-century European and American medical discourse (which was about a gender-anomalous “invert”).
While showing beyond any reasonable doubt that male homosexuality may be structured in ways other than it currently is, it also proves that there were conceptions (models even) of desires roles and of a “way” of being before forensic-psychiatric discourse of late-19th-century Europe supposedly created the first consciousness of a kind defined by same-sex eros. Tokugawa and earlier Japanese nanshoku clearly was not constructed by any medical discourse. Refreshingly, Leupp’s constructionism is far more social than Michel Foucault’s many dogmatic followers (discourse creationists), and much more alert to intra-cultural diversity.
The writing is academic, but relatively readable. Paul Schalow's The Great Mirror of Male Love, a translation of stories of male-male love by Saikaku Ihara is more accessible, and Gregory Pfugelder's new Cartographies of Desire heavier going.
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