Intersex Figures in Modern Japanese Literature and Art

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Intersex Figures in Modern Japanese Literature and Art

by Leslie Winston

University of Michigan Press, 2025

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-07776-2

Paper: 978-0-472-05776-4

eISBN: 978-0-472-90535-5 (OA)

About the Book

Intersex Figures in Modern Japanese Literature and Art explores the history of intersex or futanari figures in modern Japanese literature and culture to examine the provocative discourses that defied a sexual regime as the modern nation-state of Japan advanced its national and imperial designs. As sexologists and medical practitioners continued reinforcing categories of “male” and “female,” “normal” and “pathological,” intersex literary figures garnered attention because the perceived subject was expected to be male or female—any variation was unintelligible. Many of the same century-old tropes and societal attitudes of needing to “cure” intersex persist. At the same time the 1991 novel Ringu by Suzuki Kōji testifies to a denial of futanari subjectivity, while the 1998 Japanese horror film (Ringu) and its 2002 American remake (The Ring) erase intersex all together.

Winston interrogates how the trope of the futanari is deployed for pragmatic or aesthetic purposes, thereby complicating the trajectory of the dominant sexological ideology of the time. Winston reads the figurative futanari in the works of Shimizu Shikin, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Takabatake Kashō, and reveals how the artists’ different approaches to the futanari served their agendas and expressed views that challenged the dominant discourse on intersex.

About the Author

Leslie Winston is Adjunct Professor at California State University, San Bernardino.

Reviews

“Bold and original, Leslie Winston's Intersex Figures in Modern Japanese Literature and Art offers a groundbreaking interdisciplinary investigation into how intersex bodies (futanari) were mobilized to subvert dominant sexual epistemologies and challenge the cultural logics of modern Japan.”— Jim Reichert, Stanford University

“Even without the constraints of Abrahamic monotheisms, Japanese socio-cultural conventions past and present share similar patriarchal features and hew to the heteronormative. That said, in Japan, the relationship of sex, gender, and sexuality(ies) remains fluid and their boundaries blurred as Winston demonstrates in exploring multiple applications of ‘intersex tropes’ in fiction and art. Writers’ and artists’ lives too traversed a spectrum of genders and sexualities.”— Jennifer Robertson, University of Michigan

“A pioneering survey of the representations of intersexuality in modern Japanese literature, visual arts, and popular culture. Explicating the tensions embedded in the figure of the futanari, Winston shows us how the intersex figure has been used to both subvert and reinforce dominant gender binaries—often doing both in the same moment.”— Michael K. Bourdaghs, University of Chicago