From the twins Osugi and Peeco to longstanding icon Miwa Akihiro, Claire Maree traces the figure of the Japanese queerqueen, showing how a diversity of gender identifications, sexual orientations, and discursive styles are commodified and packaged together to form this character. Representations of gay men's speech have changed in tandem with gender norms, increasingly crossing over into popular media via the body of the "authentic" gay male up to and including the current "LGBT boom" in Japan. In this context, queerqueen demonstrates how commercial practices of recording, transcribing, and editing spoken interactions and use of on-screen text encode queerqueen speech as inherently excessive and in need of containment. Tackling questions of authenticity, self-censorship, and the restrictions of heteronormativity within this perception of queer excess, Maree shows how queerqueen styles reproduce stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and desire that are essential to the business of mainstream entertainment.

IntroductionQueerqueens: An IntroductionChapter OneBooms: Recycling the Visual and Sonic Image of the Queerqueen FigureChapter TwoExcess in Print: (Re)tracing Conversational DialoguesChapter ThreeQueen-personality talk: Writing queens on the Small ScreenChapter FourLinguistic Chaos: Hybrid Animation and the QueerqueenChapter FiveBeeping Deluxe: Staging Self-censorship and the Limits of ExcessChapter SixHeave-ho: Radical RecontextualizationChapter SevenCyclical Movements or Writing Excess