More than a makeover: Discourses of masculinity, hyposexuality, and marriage in Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!

Abstract

This article examines Anglo-American portrayals of sexual inactivity in Japan, a media narrative that has been critically overlooked, yet offers much insight into how the regulation of sexuality and masculinity is tied to global power relations and nationalist ideologies. Global fascination with the rise of sexual inactivity in Japan has mostly been confined to news media; however, the topic has also begun to appear in popular media texts such as Netflix's makeover show Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!, presenting a valuable opportunity to expand our understanding of this narrative and the questions it raises about sexual normativity. Drawing from a comparative textual analysis, I argue that while both news coverage and Queer Eye consistently frame Japan as a site of dysfunctional sexuality and masculinity, differences in aesthetic, narrative, and industrial conventions lead these texts to create divergent common-sense understandings about sex, masculinity and Japaneseness that formulate their Orientalist narrative.