Romantic love between men and women in the Heian and Kamakura eras is foregrounded both in poetic and prose texts, and both in texts depicting fictional relationships and those ostensibly recording historical one. Yet a considerable part of social life for both men and women in real life and in its realistic depiction was lived in single-sex social environments where the dynamics of same-gender relationships were key. Given the salience of these social practices and their associated discourses, they and the literary works in which they figure would seem naturally responsive to examination by the techniques of theories of homosociality developed in the last decades of the twentieth century and on into our own for a variety of literary contexts.
This panel will address same-gender and same-sex social and romantic relationships of the mid to late Heian era and the early and mid Kamakura era, ranging over prose fictional, poetic, literary critical, and autobiographical texts in the light of this theoretical methodology. The works include both those of male and of female narratorship or authorship, and several are complicated by elaborate crossdressing and/or fantastic plots. The texts subjected to this analysis will also include both long and short court fiction, metafiction, poetic fragments, and poetic diaries, tracing a trajectory for these preoccupations which seem to have maintained their considerable importance throughout the periods in question and across a wide range of genres.