Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi

by Amy Sueyoshi

In September 1897 Yone Noguchi (1875-1947) contemplated crafting a poem to his new love, western writer Charles Warren Stoddard. Recently arrived in California, Noguchi was in awe of the established writer and the two had struck up a passionate correspondence. Still, he viewed their relationship as doomed--not by the scandal of their same-sex affections, but their introverted dispositions and differences in background. In a poem dedicated to his "dearest Charlie," Noguchi wrote: "Thou and I, O Charles, sit alone like two shy stars, east and west!" While confessing his love to Stoddard, Noguchi had a child (future sculptor Isamu Noguchi) with his editor, Leonie Gilmour; became engaged to Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes; and upon his return to Japan married Matsu Takeda--all within a span of seven years. According to author Amy Sueyoshi, Noguchi was not a dedicated polyamorist: He deliberately deceived the three women, to whom he either pretended or promised marriage while already married. She argues further that Noguchi's intimacies point to little-known realities of race and sexuality in turn-of-the-century America and illuminate how Asian immigrants negotiated America's literary and arts community.

As Noguchi maneuvered through cultural and linguistic differences, his affairs additionally assert how Japanese in America could forge romantic fulfillment during a period historians describe as one of extreme sexual deprivation and discrimination for Asians, particularly in California. Moreover, Noguchi's relationships reveal how individuals who engaged in seemingly defiant behavior could exist peaceably within prevailing moral mandates. His unexpected intimacies in fact relied upon existing social hierarchies of race, sexuality, gender, and nation that dictated appropriate and inappropriate behavior. In fact, Noguchi, Stoddard, Gilmour, and Armes at various points contributed to the ideological forces that compelled their intimate lives. Through the romantic life of Yone Noguchi, Queer Compulsions narrates how even the queerest of intimacies can more provocatively serve as a reflection of rather than a revolt from existing social inequality. In unveiling Noguchi's interracial and same-sex affairs, it attests to the complex interaction between lived sexualities and socio-legal mores as it traces how one man negotiated affection across cultural, linguistic, and moral divides to find fulfillment in unconventional yet acceptable ways.

Queer Compulsions will be a welcome contribution to Asian American, gender, and sexuality studies and the literature on male and female romantic friendships. It will also forge a provocative link between these disciplines and Asian studies.

246 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Jee Koh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through the study of the correspondence between Yone and his lovers, Amy Sueyoshi persuaded me that his most passionate and most sustained feelings were for the older white writer Charles Warren Stoddard. His love for Ethel Armes was full of ups and downs, and starts and stops, until she ended their engagement finally when she learnt that Yone was "married" to Léonie Gilmour and had a son (the sculptor Isamu Noguchi) with her. Ethel herself had passionate feelings for other women. As for Léonie, she realized from early on that Noguchi did not love her and so took the difficult independent path of raising Isamu by herself. Yone's marriage in Japan to his domestic servant Matsu Takeda was a matter of convenience, as the poet turned himself into a strictly heterosexual and stridently nationalistic writer. Throughout the study, Sueyoshi showed sensitivity to the ways in which race, nation, and sexuality (as the sub-title promises) affects an immigrant hungry for love and literary fame. She underlines, in a clear-eyed manner, how same-sex desire is not necessarily revolutionary even when it is in revolt against social norms and moral mandates.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really interesting dive into Yone Noguchi, but I’m not really sure what to do with this information (ie how to theorize or make connections with it).

[Karen]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFWT8...

[Naomi Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times a little dense, but very interesting, a lot I will be thinking about and notes I made that I'm going to be looking over.