t best this leads to far too many people asking the average lesbian minding their own business: ‘But, how do you even have sex?’ At worst, it snowballs into misconceptions of the longevity of queer, gender, and even racial and disability emancipation movements throughout history.
This article is chiefly an examination of an ivory-white porcelain from Ding kiln in Quyang produced for mass domestic use during the Jin dynasty (1115-1234 CE).[1] This porcelain shows a pair of male Mandarin ducks which, this article contends, could be read as a trace of queer aesthetics.
The construction of modern sexuality emphasises the sameness of biological gender between sexual object and sexual subject, which did not operate in Japan as it could not accommodate these existing gender constructions. The intense connection of the Nikkō Tōshōgu to the Tokugawa meant that it was intrinsically connected to a time that was becoming increasingly demonised as deviant.
