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Japan is well-known for media-driven booms of popularity in food, sports, fashion and even scholarly theory. Through processes of commodification which depend on discourses of “innovation” and market “novelty,” booms, however, mask histories of consumption, transnational connections and intergenerational links. In this talk, Prof. Maree examines the “LGBT boom” which occurred in the run up to the (postponed) 2020 Olympic Games and asks: What does it mean, then, when social justice movements manifest as “booms”? And, how can we understand this in the context of “legacy building”?

Claire Maree, PhD, is Professor in Japanese at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. Key themes of Claire Maree’s current research are the reproduction, negotiation, and contestation of identities in and through language, as well as sexual citizenship. Claire’s third monograph, queerqueen: Linguistic Excess in Japanese Media (2020, Oxford University Press) examines the editing and writing of queer excess into Japanese popular culture through mediatization of queerqueen styles. Claire is co-editor with Kaori Okano on Discourse, Gender and Shifting Identities in Japan: The Longitudinal Study of Kobe Women’s Ethnographic Interviews 1989–2019, Phase One (Routledge, 2018).

This lecture is made possible with the generous support of the U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant.

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