Representing Queerness in Japanese Media Cultures, 2010-2024

Since the early 2010s, Japan has been amidst a large growth in societal, political, scholarly
and media discourse surrounding sexual and gender minorities known as the LGBT Boom,
leading to a significant growth in media depictions of queer lives. The LGBT Boom is
however not the first of its kind, rather it is the latest in a series of booms in interest in
queerness in the media, politics and society since the 1990s. This thesis discusses the
period between 2010-2024 to explore how queerness has been defined amidst the LGBT
Boom and what this reveals about the cultural flows that shape its representation and role
in the Japanese media. To do this, I deploy a modified version of the Circuit of Culture
model proposed by a group of scholars including Stuart Hall in 1997. In the modified
version of the model used in this thesis, cultural meanings are formed of the interactions
between five key processes: signification, association, regulation, consumption and
production. Each chapter of this thesis focuses on one of these processes by drawing on
a different area of the media and how it connects to queer representation. To examine
each of these areas I take a mixed methods approach that draws on both quantitative and
qualitative data, including a 3,028-person survey; a large social media corpus; media
texts; and in-person fieldwork. From my analysis, I identify four key elements to the
definition of queerness in the Japanese media: ambiguity, a balance between multiple
readings, fandom norms and contents. This thesis argues that queerness is, far from a
subcultural preference or linked to certain niche genres, a core part of the Japanese media
sphere and the cultural flows that define it.