Scandalous equivocation: a note on the politics of queer self‐naming

Abstract

This paper discusses the political and theoretical implications of the various performances of queer self‐naming (or the refusal of which) in the face of the ongoing backlash against unconventional or non‐normative genders and sexualities. It argues that, instead of a hasty call for the discarding of identity terms or naïve recourse to them, we could keep (re)using the signs without endorsing their normative meanings and line of demarcation. Through analysing some of the feminist counter‐discourses against the backlash, arguments for indigenous Japanese queerness, and a performance by a Japanese lesbian artist, Ito Tari, it shows that the queer gesture of equivocally assuming the scandalous ‘name’ may be one of the few effective survival strategies for those who have already been scandalously (mis)named.