Queer female networks in Japan's visual culture

This dissertation interrogates the formation of queer female networks through film, magazines, and literary fiction. Queer presents a method of connecting the unexpected alliances among these varied texts, at whose nodal points stand Hara Setsuko and her films, the figure of the schoolgirl, and the cultural trope of friendship. I argue that girls' culture in early twentieth century Japan invented and practiced a new type of relationality, and continues to inform our contemporary queer lives.;Chapter one examines the sexual and racial underpinnings of Japanese nationalism figured in the body of the film actress, Hara Setsuko. Through Hara's star persona, I examine the ways in which sexual and racial purity were fantasized through her body during the prewar and interwar periods.;Chapter two analyzes the visual and narrative trope of "friendship" as a site of erotic alliance among women from the 1920s to the 1950s. The emotional texture and intensity of female friendship will be examined here as a specific historical and cultural experience, central to the lives of adolescent girls.;Chapter three explores the textual manifestation of queerness through Hara's postwar films. I begin by examining the continuity and discontinuity of queer implications in girls' culture from prewar to postwar Japan in The Green Mountains (1949), moving on to the Noriko trilogy (1949-53) in which Hara's queerness is evoked as a joke. To rethink queer spectatorship as "implicational spectatorship," I engage with a critique of historicism and temporal heterogeneity.;Chapter four considers the oral pleasure of eating and gossip, which mediate the formation of intimate space and time among women in Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Repast (1951) and Lily Festival (2000). The links between pleasure, desire, and subjectivity are explored in these oral acts through which the spectator also comes to bear an affective relationship with the text.;Chapter five maps the historical development and the overlapping of queer film culture and queer theory in Japan. Tracing the role of film in the formation of queer culture and theory, the chapter ends with an examination of queer and mainstream films through the girls' film genre.