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

Abstract

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.