As the author of this detailed, closely reasoned and beautifully written study reminds us, "Rather than sexual practice, this book is a study primarily of sexual discourse. I am concerned here, in other words, less with the sorts of sexual acts that people engaged in, than with how they wrote and spoke about these acts and the meaning that they attached to them."
His premise is that desire, sexual or not, is by no means a constant or a given. Rather, it is shaped in crucial ways by the manner in which it is thought and spoken about.
To indicate what these are in reference to Japan, he maps the unfolding of three paradigms of male-male sexuality (which he calls disciplinary, "civilized" and sexological), across three realms of knowledge (popular, legal and medical) over three chronological eras (Edo, Meiji, Taisho-Showa). Though he is quite aware that historical discourse is never this neat, he also believes that "even if all maps are approximations, we could not set forth on our journeys without them."
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