From Gay to Gei: The Onnagata and the Creation of Kabuki's Female Characters

Leiter, Samuel L.

doi:10.1353/cdr.1999.0015

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…Katherine Mezur's radical work handles the former, seeking the key to onnagata's performance of female-likeness in a concrete part of their bodies, male genitalia Katherine Mezur (2005). In contrast, Samuel Leiter examines various women characters, by first situating them in a sociocultural and historical context specific to them Samuel Leiter (2002a). This paper pays attention to both actors' and characters' gender, as well as both actual bodies-if not genitalia-and a sociocultural and historical context, both premodern and modern.…”

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confidence: 99%

Masculinized femininity of women characters on the Kabuki stage: Female Onnagata's “cross-gender” performance in the “all-male” theatre

Isaka

2023

Journal of Material Culture

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This article explores four-century-old “all-male” kabuki theatre of Japan as the site of logics, mechanisms, and operations of onnagata's gender performance. The term onnagata signifies actors performing women's roles in kabuki, and since the first two and a half centuries of kabuki history overlapped with the time when women were legally expelled from performance activities, male onnagata mostly developed and established the artistry and traditions of onnagata acting. Women resumed kabuki performance when it was still illegal, but that did not cancel this fact. The present article studies kabuki in this historical context in order to investigate how dynamically genders are taking shape on the kabuki stage and off. To that end, this paper uses “cultivation” (a training methodology called shugyô) as a key point of investigation, while paying special attention to female onnagata as a main subject of examination. Cultivation is the training methodology of weight that has long been used and systematized in many circles engaged in activities established in premodern times, such as Buddhism, martial arts, and performing arts, and constitutes a blanket regime for these wide-ranging areas. Cultivation is to obtain and internalize second nature to the extent that it could function as if it were natural, the process of which takes place through two stages: (1) repetitive, long-lasting, personal, and somatic training in, e.g., posture, movements, and the like, and (2) internalization of said technique as second nature. That this cultivation process is congruous with the concept of performativity in contemporary critical theory suggests that an analysis of how female kabuki actors go through cultivation in order to internalize kabuki body grammar, including gender related code can contribute not only to kabuki studies but also to gender studies.

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Masculinized femininity of women characters on the Kabuki stage: Female Onnagata's “cross-gender” performance in the “all-male” theatre

Isaka

2023

Journal of Material Culture

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“I’ll Create My Own Precedents”: Female Rakugo Performers on Tokyo’s Yose Stages

Stark

2023

Gender in Japanese Popular Culture

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Rakugo is a Japanese stage art originating in the seventeenth century, and was initially popular with the lower classes. For the majority of its history, rakugo stories have been performed by men for (mostly) male audiences. The misogynistic and/or male-centered characters of the stories are not the only obstacle female performers are faced with; they also have to confront the male-centered community and audience expectations. With few senior female master-performers, there is a lack of role models and younger female performers have to find strategies regarding their portfolio, voice production, stage appearance and modification of stories. This chapter looks at the history of female performers and explores the current state on Tokyo’s rakugo stage also providing a valuable analysis of one of the few Japanese stage arts which allows women to perform on its main stages.

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Onna Mono : The “Female Presence” on the Stage of the All-Male Traditional Japanese Theatre

Gabrovska¹

2015

atj

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As is well known, traditional Japanese theatre has been customarily a male domain, with women physically absent for the most part. The representative classical genres: nō, kyōgen , kabuki, and bunraku are performed only by men. The aim of this article is to look for and map a trajectory of the “female presence” on this predominantly all-male public stage, by exploring a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked: female versions of the popular all-male performing arts since medieval times, including reworking stories of the most prominent masculine heroes in kabuki. It could be argued that this practice did have a lasting presence in Japanese popular culture well into the twentieth century. I have come to denote this type of female-centered performances within the androcentric traditional Japanese theatre discourse as onna mono (おんなもの “female things”)—an expression that I would like to propose here as a general term inclusive of all related art forms.

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From Gay to Gei: The Onnagata and the Creation of Kabuki's Female Characters

Cited by 4 publications

References 6 publications

Masculinized femininity of women characters on the Kabuki stage: Female Onnagata's “cross-gender” performance in the “all-male” theatre

Masculinized femininity of women characters on the Kabuki stage: Female Onnagata's “cross-gender” performance in the “all-male” theatre

“I’ll Create My Own Precedents”: Female Rakugo Performers on Tokyo’s Yose Stages

Onna Mono : The “Female Presence” on the Stage of the All-Male Traditional Japanese Theatre

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