This dissertation examines the competing visions of sexuality and the body in early modern Japan (1600-1868). Through analysis of illustrated pornographic books, comicbooks, portraiture, and multivolume comicbooks, I show that queer bodies and sexualities disordered normative visions of society and can reveal the inherent heterogeneity in early modern visual culture. In Chapter One I focus on one of the first woodblock print artists of the “floating world,” Hishikawa Moronobu (1618-1694). Through analysis of three illustrated pornographic books published in the late 1600s, I argue that the diversity of sexualities seen in these books exposes the polyvalency of sexuality at the beginning of the early modern period. Chapter Two considers two comicbooks, or kibyōshi, by the leading author and illustrator Santō Kyōden (1761-1816). After situating these comicbooks against norms of sexual and textual reproduction propagated by Neo-Confucian writers and government officials, I demonstrate how Kyōden’s use of queer sexual reproductions mocks and twists Neo-Confucian notions of proper sexual reproduction and appropriate manners of producing woodblock printed books. Chapter Three analyzes how extraordinary and crippled bodies shaped methods of representation. First, I examine Watanabe Kazan’s (1793-1841) portrait of the “giant” Ōzora Buzaemon (1802-?) and a kibyōshi by Santō Kyōden that depicts “cripples” in a sideshow. I claim that the portrait of Buzaemon resists legibility and that the “cripples” in Kyōden’s comicbook enact a visual rhetoric of exposing social truth. Chapter Four looks at woodblock printed depictions of foreigners in the 1860s and 1870s by Hashimoto Gyokuransai (1807-1879) and Kanagaki Robun (1829-1894). I argue that up until the 1870s, foreigners were often marked as abnormal through association with strange visualities, such as one-point vanishing perspective. Ultimately, however, Robun stripped foreign bodies of their disorderly visuality through adapting foreignness to the normative visual regimes of the modern Japanese nation-state. Straddling the fields of visual culture studies, queer theory, and Japanese area studies, I show how centering queer bodies and sexualities can reveal the disordered and jagged nature of early modern visual culture.