Gender-Bending Roles in Japanese Theater: Cross-Gender Performance in Kabuki and Takarazuka A Master’s Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the School of Humanities for the Degree of Master’s in Music Studies (Arts and Culture) Department of Musicology by Jessie M. Bodell Amsterdam, The Netherlands June 2018 Supervisor: Barbara Titus Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that, let's recognize that the word gender has scores of meaning built into it. It's an amalgamation of bodies, identities, and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations, and behaviors, some of which develop organically, and others which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of saying that gender is any one single thing, let's start describing it as a holistic experience. ―S. Bear Bergman and Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation i Contents Introduction....................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Kabuki..........................................................................................................................8 Chapter 2: Takarazuka................................................................................................................18 Chapter 3: Kata............................................................................................................................30 The Voice.......................................................................................................................................36 Chapter 4: Women on the Stage.................................................................................................44 Chapter 5: Admirers and Aficionados.......................................................................................52 Conclusion....................................................................................................................................57 1 Introduction A transgender person is someone who identifies with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth. The opposite, cisgender, refers to someone who does identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. This assigning is conducted by the attending physician or midwife at the time of a child’s birth, and the decision is based on primary sex characteristics (i.e. genitalia) of the child. The relationship between assigned gender (read: sex) and gender identity becomes even more complicated when one considers that “the number of sexes has never been two, as developmental geneticist Anne Fausto-Sterling calls our attention to intersexuality by using the phrase ‘five sexes.’”1 Neither sex nor gender is a true binary system. There are people who don’t identify within the gender binary, and some terms to describe them are gender non-conforming, or non-binary. Usually non-binary people also consider themselves transgender, but not necessarily. We can see gender non-conforming and transgender characters in U.S.-American musical theater, for example in productions such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Yentl, and Kinky Boots just to name a few. But gender bending roles have a long history, one as old as theater itself, and one that extends far beyond the musical theater repertoire of the United States. This history is expansive, beautiful, and may be surprising to some. The combination of transphobia (more specifically, transmisogyny), and xenophobia have resulted in a general disregard of third gender identities in many different cultures around the world. Despite the discrimination and abuse that transgender people have experienced (and continue to experience), their histories are still preserved throughout various cultures. Tara 1 Maki Isaka Morinaga, Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 12. 2 Prince-Hughes writes that in the United States, there are many Native American cultures with “two-spirit traditions [that] have allowed individuals to express alternative gender inclinations by adopting the work, behavior, and dress of the other sex.”2 Carol E. Robertson writes that the Hawai’ian māhū, third gender persons, “embody an ancient Polynesian principle of spiritual duality and integration. The outer presentation of the māhū is usually female, even when the person is biologically male.”3 Samoan fa’afafine also embody this principle, and “have traditionally been valued for their ability to carry out tasks of both genders.”4 Additionally, there are the Bugis people of South Sulawesi Indonesia, who acknowledge five different genders. Susan Bolyard Millar points out that “it is inappropriate to think of the Bugis in terms of Western constructions of gender that assume that sexual stratification is inevitable.”5 The aforementioned genders are but a few examples, and are far from an exhaustive list. In Europe, gender constructions have not always been so rigidly defined. This is evidenced not only by the social acceptance of the uniquely androgynous castrati, but by the European “premodern ideologies up through the seventeenth century,” in which “male and female are understood as inversions of one another...hence, a single-sex model emerged where women and men were two versions of the same whole.”6 The binary between men and women existed, but everyone shared one sex. According to Thomas Laqueur, “the modern question, about the ‘real’ sex of a person, made no sense in this period, not because the two sexes were 2 Tara Prince-Hughes, “‘A Curious Double Insight’: ‘The Well of Loneliness’ and Native American Alternative Gender Traditions,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 53, no. 2 (1999): 32. 3 Carol E. Robertson, “The Māhū of Hawai'i,” Feminist Studies 15, no. 2 (1989): 313. 4 Sue Farran, “Transsexuals, Fa'afafine, Fakaleiti and Marriage Law in the Pacific: Considerations for the Future,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 113, no. 2 (2004): 120. 5 Susan Bolyard Millar, “On Interpreting Gender in Bugis Society,” American Ethnologist 10, no. 3 (1983): 477. 6 Naomi Adele André,Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 45. 3 mixed but because there was only one to pick from.”7 He goes on to say, “in this world, the body with its one elastic sex was far freer to express theatrical gender and the anxieties thereby produced than it would be when it came to be regarded as the foundation of gender.”8 The eighteenth century marked a drastic change in how European people conceptualized gender in relation to biological sex—in fact the very notion of two sexes was created. Prior to this notion, “theatrical gender” was able to be performed without the interference of “anxiety” produced by the idea that gender was dictated by the body (i.e. biological sex). Fluidity of gender expression was a very real possibility up through the seventeenth century in Europe, on or off the stage. Also of note is that not all non-cisgender people associate with the label of transgender. Binary systems lead to polarization, and should be avoided—it eliminates opportunity for exploration, is reductive, and has the potential to erase identities that fall outside its bounds. This is true both as a general macrocosm, but can also be applied to the exploration of gender expression. In the essay, “Against Gender, Against Society,” nila nokizaru writes: The cis/trans binary also furthers centralization and colonialism, assimilating and categorizing all identities outside of itself. Like all forms of representation, the cis/trans binary as an all-encompassing set of categories is both flattening and inadequate. There are genders that are not cis but do not place themselves under the trans umbrella. Despite this, anyone who isn’t cis is assumed to be trans, and vice versa. An LGBTQ avant garde moves to assimilate all “unusual” genders, and even the lack of gender, into trans-ness. This leaves no room for anyone to fall outside of these categories. This often plays out in a colonial manner, rendering non-western genders legible to and manageable by western LGBTQ narratives of gender and sexuality.9 Just as it’s important to be critical of the binary systems of sex and gender, one should avoid reinforcing the idea of a binary between cisgender and transgender individuals. Additionally, the concept of a non-binary gender identity is a modern and Western idea. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 nila nokizaru, “Against Gender, Against Society,” LIES Volume II, A Journal of Materialist Feminism (2015): 5. 4 (Throughout this paper, the word Western will be used as synonymous to “eurogenic,” or originating in Europe). The genders mentioned above are not aligned with the predominant transgender narratives one can find in, for example, the modern day United States. They are not considered transgender women, or transgender men (i.e. women or men), agender (having no gender), or non-binary. Instead, these people have a separate third gender (or fourth, or fifth, etc., depending on the culture in question). Using the term non-binary, or even gender non- conforming for these indigenous genders erases the roles and functions that they have fulfilled in society (both historically and presently), and is unnecessary as they have their own associated terminology. People with these genders share a combination of characteristics and roles that could be considered both male and female. This can be compared to the onnagata and castrati, and the ways in which they