A Queer Ecopoet? An Analysis of “Chitô” [“Tito”] by Japanese Poet Hiromi Ito

Abstract

The concept of nature has been characterized by a number of dichotomies such asouter nature/inner nature and the natural environment/body. Generally speaking, Japanese environmental criticism has so far ignored the right side of such dualisms—inner nature and body. This paper focuses on these suppressed dimensions through an examination of a Hiromi Ito’s queer ecopoem “Chitô [Tito],” from the co-authored book Noro to Saniwa [Noro and Saniwa]. Igive attention to sexuality, especially queerness, in inner nature and body. The paper positions Hiromi Ito as a queer ecopoet because, in “Chitô,” she problematizes the boundary between heterosexuality and homosexuality by implicitly questioning the ‘naturalness’ of pervasive heterosexuality, shows her uninhibitedly retained erotic significance of pre-Oedipal anality in heradult sexual explorations as well as a self-contained onanist utopia in her ‘one-woman’ SM relationship, and treats the men in the poem as being mere dismembered bodies and objectifiedsexual organs; moreover, her queerness finds another significant embodiment in her refusal to letherself fall prey to the pitfalls of fixed sexual identity or sexuality. In this sense, this paper sheds lighton the forgotten dimensions of the outer nature/inner nature and the natural environment/bodydichotomies in “Chitô”: inner nature and body.