Queer Nations and Trans-lations: A review of Akiko Shimizu, "'Imported' Feminism and 'Indigenous' Queerness: From Backlash to Transphobic Feminism in Transnational Japanese Context." Lecture and Seminar, University of California, Berkeley, 27-28 Jan. 2020

What does it mean to be trans in Japan, or in Japanese? How does it correspond with transness in North America or in English? Terms and identities travel and are translated, existing not in a relationship of one-to-one correspondence, but rather in an association with one another. To be gei or toransujendā in Japanese is not the same as to be "gay" or "transgender" in English; although the Japanese terms are loanwords from English, the meanings, identities, and practices that are organized under these terms are not exactly the same. This difference is central to Akiko Shimizu's work in both English and Japanese. In a 2007 article, she discusses the double bind of "Japanese queers," whose ability to identify themselves as members of a group is always influenced by the prominence of anglophone discourses of identity politics and rights-bearing minority subjects and by an awareness of the language around these concepts as imported from English. In asking themselves how they identify, Shimizu says, "In the case of 'Japanese queers', the questions will be: are we Japanese, are we Japanese-speakers, or are we more like the members of 'the global queer community', if it actually exists? Or perhaps, are we all of the above? Or none of them?" (503).

Shimizu, a scholar in the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo, has long been interested in the problem of queer translations, both as a figure (the travelling of conceptual categories from different groups, expressed in different ways and in different registers) and as a practice (the translation of books, papers, lectures, articles, and tweets into Japanese, and also from Japanese into other languages). She is a translator of works by Sara Ahmed and Judith Butler into Japanese, and she has written about the various complex processes of identification, terminology, and naming of queerness and sexuality in Japanese. In addition, with her students, Shimizu organizes an annual public lecture series on queer studies.

Shimizu's lecture and seminar at UC Berkeley in January 2020 received a warm reception from attendees. Her careful attention to the details of power and translation represents an important moment in Japanese trans and queer studies, and this importance was remarked on by those listening to the lecture and participating in the seminar. Describing her lecture as "a story" characterized by its "tedious repetitions," Shimizu traced a genealogy of debates over gender, sexuality, and transness in Japan in the 21^st century. She explained how the backlash against so-called "gender ideology" in Japan at the turn of the millennium led to the marriage equality debates of the 2010s and then to the wave of online transphobia that is happening today. Shimizu emphasized the role of translation in this system, which she claims is characterized by problems both "distinctly local and inherently transnational." The idea of Japan as an actor in a network of discourse is not new, in itself, but Shimizu's characterization of Japanese transphobia as both "distinctly local and inherently transnational" focuses on the movements of power between different languages and nations and dismisses any culturally essentialist explanation for the peculiarities of Japanese feminism(s). Her comment draws our attention to the texture of Japanese transphobia and Japanese feminism: their idiosyncrasies and histories. Paying attention to this texture yields interesting points of comparison: accounting for why transphobic feminism is so much more common in Britain than in the US, for example, Sophie Lewis notes the historical aspects of this failure of intersectionality. In a 2019 article in the New York Times, she links the prevalence of transphobic rhetoric in British feminism to its lack of engagement with the Black and indigenous feminisms that gave mainstream white American feminism the "pummeling" it sorely required, allowing American feminism to begin to take on a more intersectional position. Similarly, in Japan, Shimizu's work shows us that mainstream Japanese feminism is ill-equipped to address transphobia due to the historical failures of...