| This dissertation is a study of how Japanese Brazilian migrants negotiate their ethnic, religious, and gender identities in Japan. Japanese Brazilians individuals who have migrated as factory workers were interviewed. As an interdisciplinary research, it is located at the intersections of religious studies, queer theory, ethnic studies, queer liberation theology, and (post)colonial studies. The project examines the underlying phenomenon of how identity takes its manifold forms in diasporal individuals through their interaction at the Roman Catholic Church in Japan.;The research demonstrates that Japanese Brazilians manage multiple levels of hybridity in order to negotiate their display identities in several contexts. Migrants fluidly re-construct their identities in a complex negotiation that entitles their ethnic background, gender, culture, and religious experiences. Individual's identities are constructed, deconstructed and re-constructed by these dynamics as they change their positions in time and space, through migration from one racially politicized and sexualized context (Brazil) to another (Japan). This is defined as multiple spheres of hybridity, understanding it as a dynamic process that continuously modifies the many situations individuals face in their lives, resulting in an identity that is constantly fluid and ever negotiated. The new emerging identities constitute a new space that empowers migrants to interact in Japanese society. Far from considering Japanese Brazilians as a universe of transnational migrants whose cultural texture is Japanese and Brazilian, thus, unsuitable to either culture; hybridity is taking as a space of positive negotiation and agency.;After situating the larger context of Japanese religious, cultural, and racial politics, this dissertation looks at the level of everyday exchanges between Japanese Brazilians and Japanese nationals within the eight Roman Catholic parishes. It investigates how ancestry, cultural capital, social stratifications and racial formations influence both dynamics of power and negotiations of gender, ethnic and religious identities amidst Japanese Brazilian migrants. It concludes that the different ways in which Japanese Brazilian migrants construct their identities within the Roman Catholic Church in Japan parallel racial, religious, and gender identity formation processes in broader Japanese society. Japanese Brazilians negotiate identity constraints already present in Japanese society with those inherited by their socialization process in Brazil. |
