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French Journal of Japanese Studies, 2 | 2013 Male? Female? Gender Confusion in Classical Poetry (Waka) 2 Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies English Selection 2 | 2013 Language and Literature Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka) Michel Vieillard-Baron Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/cjs/270 DOI : 10.4000/cjs.270 ISSN : 2268-1744 Éditeur INALCO Référence électronique Michel Vieillard-Baron, « Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka) », Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies [En ligne], 2 | 2013, mis en ligne le 28 juin 2013, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cjs/270 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cjs.270 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021. Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka) 1 Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka) Michel Vieillard-Baron NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR Original release: Michel Vieillard-Baron, « Homme ? Femme ? La confusion des genres (gender) dans la poésie classique (waka) », Cipango — Cahiers d’études japonaises, no 14, 2007, p. 7-44. 1 The Man’yōshū 万葉集, the oldest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry (completed in around 759), includes the following poem (book 4, no. 499): Momohe ni mo He could come Kishikanukamo to one hundred times or more, Omohekamo so I think! Kimi ga tsukai no Your messenger, never Miredo akazaramu will I tire of seeing him 2 This poem concludes a series of four pieces attributed to Kakinomoto no Hitomaro 柿本 人麻呂 (?-710): the first three lament the poet’s sadness at being separated from his wife; the fourth (quoted above) adopts the point of view of the wife impatiently awaiting news of her husband. An annotated edition of this anthology published in 1971 stated that: “This poem was no doubt composed by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro’s wife”.1 However, a more recent edition2 acknowledged that the poem was in fact written by the great poet himself, undoubtedly making it one of the oldest examples of a “transvestite poem”, in other words a poem that intentionally adopts the point of view of a person of the opposite sex, a mode of composition which, as we shall see, enjoyed a certain success in the poetic tradition of classical Japan. As the above example illustrates, a “gender confusion” sometimes arises in the mind of the reader – or Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 2 | 2013 Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka) 2 commentator – who, sensing a discrepancy between the author’s sex and the poem’s gender, hesitates, wavers, and no longer knows to whom attribute authorship. 3 The aim of this paper is to raise the thorny issue of sexual identification in literature. This issue can be approached from various angles. One could ask, for example, “Is there a difference between literature written by men and that written by women?” Or, “Why is it that we can now use the term ‘women’s literature’, yet no one would think to speak of ‘men’s literature’?”3 Or even, “What constitutes the ‘feminine’ and, by contrast, the ‘masculine’ in literature?” Clearly this is a complex issue with multiple ramifications. In order to examine the subject in a concrete – and if possible effective – manner, the exact scope of the study and method used must be specified. Rather than adopting the usual method of analysing works written by women in order to identify invariable features supposedly peculiar to women’s writing, I preferred a comparative approach. Accordingly, my aim is to analyse works (poems) written by women from a man’s perspective, and poems written by men from a woman’s perspective; only those poems with clearly identified authors will be used, which immediately excludes all anonymous works. I will begin by examining these poems to ascertain if gender identification is possible in waka and if so, at what level. I will strive to define the internal (vocabulary, situation described) and external (authorship, notes indicating the context of composition) elements involved in identifying the gender of a poem. 4 The subject of this paper is therefore the waka 和歌 or “Japanese poem”, also known as a tanka 短歌 or “short poem”, a quintain containing 31 syllables, the writing of which was both the most commonplace and the most prestigious activity in classical Japan. Every kind of event, the sending of a love letter or a letter of condolence for example, entailed the writing of waka; similarly, various occasions – some of them extremely formal – attached great importance to the writing and presentation of these poems. Accordingly, waka were composed to grace the panels of folding screens, and poetry contests, or utaawase 歌合, were commissioned by high-ranking individuals. 5 It is important at this point to define the historical scope of my research: waka, a genre of poem that continues to be composed today, can be found as far back as one goes in the history of Japanese literature (the oldest extant works date from the early eighth century but there is evidence of poems from the seventh). Within the waka’s over one- thousand-year-old history, I will focus on a four-century period spanning the beginning of the tenth century to the end of the thirteenth. This period, which includes the Heian era (794-1192), was a golden age for waka composition: eight anthologies were compiled on imperial order, including the two most prestigious collections, the Kokin Wakashū 古 今和歌集, or Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems (completed in around 905), and the Shinkokin Wakashū 新古今和歌集, or New Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems (officially completed in 1205). Before proceeding to the heart of the subject, I should explain that the second objective of this paper is to respond to the application of theories developed within gender studies (translated into French as “gender identity research” [recherches sur les identités sexuelles], “gender research” [étude sur le genre] or “research on expressions of gender” [étude(s) des expressions du genre])4 to the field of classical Japanese literature. Gender studies grew out of the feminist movements of the 1960s, but they only became established in the United States in the 1990s, thanks in particular to the work of the philosopher Judith Butler, considered to be the movement’s main theorist.5 While “essentialist” feminists argue that the differences between men and women are derived from their very essence, and accordingly that there is no need to Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 2 | 2013 Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka) 3 distinguish sex from gender, for “constructionist” feminists – who include gender studies advocates – gender and biological sex are two different things:6 biological sex is innate, whereas gender is a purely social construct, the result of a person’s upbringing and cultural environment.7 To quote Françoise Héritier, “gender is something assigned to the mind, then reproduced socially and culturally […], it relies on conceptual and symbolic constructs that, while extremely archaic, still exist.”8 6 Although the theorisation of “constructionism” is relatively recent, its conception dates back much further; it appears in embryonic form in the works of Simone de Beauvoir9 and apparently owes much to French feminists (in particular Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig and Hélène Cixous), as well as to the philosopher Michel Foucault10 (oddly, despite its importance, the work of anthropologist Françoise Héritier is barely taken into account).11 Judith Butler considers gender to be “performative”, in other words constituted through a sustained set of acts which she describes as “repetition” and “ritual”;12 it is also normative – it constitutes a norm – and is dependent on power. For this philosopher, it is about understanding (and denouncing) the norms that define us (heteronormativity, for example) in order to reformulate domination in terms of power. 7 Having taken root in the United States in every discipline of the humanities and social sciences (history, philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, anthropology and literature, for example), gender studies has naturally entered the field of Japanese studies and, in my case, research on classical literature. The impression I get through my reading is that the authors (male and female) – with a few rare exceptions – confuse “gender” and “biological sex”, and adopt an essentialist feminist perspective all the while claiming to represent gender studies. Consequently, a caricatured and distorted view of the classical Japanese world is often presented (women are like this and men like that), and the interpretive frameworks applied to texts do not always do them justice. In Japan, the gender approach has been applied – tentatively – to the field of classical literature since around 1995; although borrowings from these theories remain limited and in the minority, the results are generally more convincing – despite the eternal confusion between gender and biological sex – because researchers are writing for a specialist readership who, on the whole, know their literature (and history) reasonably well. Approximations are therefore rarer, though not entirely absent. 8 A review of some historical facts is required in order to understand the issues at stake in this paper. Firstly, it is important to understand that literary production (and poetry composition in particular) during the period in question was strictly limited to the world of the imperial court; only aristocrats and those with links to the court read and produced literature. In the tenth and eleventh centuries aristocrats and officials, along with their families, servants and monks (in other words, all those likely to read literature) numbered at most a few tens of thousands out of Japan’s seven to eight million inhabitants.13 Out of these tens of thousands of people, only a tiny minority – no doubt scarcely more than a few dozen individuals in each generation, men and women combined – were capable of writing literary prose.
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