JenniferRobertson_PoliticsofAndrogyny-1.pdf

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The Politics of Androgyny in Japan: Sexuality and Subversion in the Theater and Beyond
Author(s): Jennifer Robertson
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Aug., 1992), pp. 419-442
Published by: on behalf of the Wiley American Anthropological Association
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the politics of androgyny in Japan: sexuality and
subversion in the theater and beyond

JENNIFER ROBERTSON-University of Michigan

“Androgyny,” as I employ the term here, refers not to a physiological condition (that is, an
intersexed body) but to a “surface politics of the body” (Butler 1990:136). Androgyny involves
the scrambling of gender markers-clothes, gestures, speech patterns, and so on-in a way that
both undermines the stability of a sex-gender system premised on a male-female dichotomy
and retains that dichotomy by either juxtaposing or blending its elements. My emphasis on the
constructed and performative aspects of gender, and on its distinction from sex, is more than
just a theoretical premise or literary exercise; these aspects are outstandingly evident in the two
theaters-Kabuki, an all-male theater, and the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female theater-
which are the main sites of my investigation into the politics of androgyny in Japan. Because
so much has been written on the Kabuki theater and so little on the Takarazuka Revue, and
because I am interested here in a female-embodied androgyny, I will devote most of my atten-
tion to the Revue-its actors, audience, and critics-and particularly to its early history.

I begin by summarizing the spectrum of English and Japanese terms for and usages of andro-
gyny and, in this connection, review the differences between sex, gender, and sexuality. I then
move on to my main project, which, after an introduction to the Takarazuka Revue, is to ex-
plore some of the ways in which androgyny has been deployed to both support and subvert
dominant representations of women and men in Japan. Over the past three centuries the refer-
ent of androgyny has changed from male to female. Androgyny has been evoked in variously
sited discourses to camouflage “unconventional” sexual practices, creating the illusion of an
asexual-in effect, a disembodied-identity. Androgyny has also been used to describe Tak-
arazuka actors who perform both “female” and “male” gender roles without being constrained
by either.

How is a dominant gender ideology constructed, reproduced, resisted, and even subverted,
sometimes simultaneously, by females and males whose private and professional lives con-
found tidy, universalistic schemata, whether of literary or of theoretical origin? Real people tend
to be messy, inconsistent, hypocritical, and mostly opaque when the relations between sex,
gender, and sexuality are at issue. Thus, I examine debates and differences among the Revue’s

The gendered body is constructed and performative. Androgyny involves the
scrambling of gender markers (clothes, gestures, speech patterns) in a “surface pol-
itics of the body.” I explore the politics of androgyny in Japan as they have been
embodied and enacted by same-sex theater actors and expressed in Japanese so-
ciety at large. The referent of androgyny, or the body of the androgyne, has
changed over the past 300 years from male to female. Since the early 20th century,
androgyny has been deployed in both dominant and marginal discourses to cam-
ouflage “unconventional” female sexual choices and practices by creating the il-
lusion of an asexual identity. It has also been evoked in reference to females who
“do” both “female” and “male” gender without being constrained by either. [an-
drogyny, gender, sexuality, theater, girls and women, Japan]

I IIII IIIII II IIIIIIIIIIII

the politics of androgyny 419

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directors, performers, and fans, the mass media, and the state1 about the significance and sym-
bolism of the Takarazuka Revue. Moreover, the stereotype of the Japanese as a homogeneous
people has had the extended effect of whitewashing a colorful variety of gender identities and
sexual practices. It is my general impression that more often than not the differing experiences
of female and male members of Japanese society have been insufficiently problematized and
have been confused with dominant, naturalized gender ideals (for example, housewife and
workaholic) and the behavior of fictive characters. This article should help to dismantle some
of the more tenacious stereotypes of Japanese women and men and to provoke discussion on
the complicated relations between sex, gender, and sexuality in Japan and elsewhere.

words and usages

Since the mid-1 980s the English loanword andorojenii (androgyny) has appeared frequently
in the Japanese mass media and elsewhere in reference to clothing fashions, including “cross-

dressing,” an expression most often used in reference to men’s clothing adapted by and for
women (Asahi Shinbun, 3 December 1984; Asano 1989; Yagi 1989). Since andorojenii is a

transliteration, the term is often simultaneously defined in Japanese as either ryosei (both sexes/

genders) or chusei (between sexes/genders).2 In English, following ancient Greek usage, “an-

drogyny” literally means “male-female,” although what the word signifies and represents is far
from literal. Heilbrun, for example, presents androgyny-which she defines as the realization
of man in woman and woman in man-as an ideal, nonpolarized way of being necessary for
the survival of human society (1982 [1964]:xx). Rich, on the other hand, argues that the very
structure of the word androgyny “replicates the sexual dichotomy and the priority of andros

(male) over gyne (female)” (1976:76-77).
Japanese scholars have taken similar theoretical and political positions. Asano, for example,

adopts Jung’s quasi-biological theory of androgyny3 in exploring the idea of androgyny as it has
been expressed in Japanese popular religious texts (1989). She bemoans the progressive loss of
“traditional” androgyny (qua “the harmony of ‘male’ and ‘female’ qualities”) over the course
of Japan’s modernization but observes a revival of androgyny (qua “cross-dressing”) in the

present (1989:201-202). Similarly, Akiyama evokes Jung’s theory of the “inherent androgyny”
of all people to debunk the notion of “sexual perversion” (seit6saku), insisting that the sexual
choices available to women and men are as varied as the combinations of feminine and mas-
culine tendencies they embody (Akiyama 1990; see also Ifukube 1932). And Kurahashi Yukiko

suggests the corporeality of Jung’s “animus,” or “male archetypical essence,” in her neologism
for “a female who wants to be a man”: penisuto, or “penist” (cited in Hyuga 1971:26). Yagi,
on the other hand, like Rich, dismisses androgyny as an idea (and ideal) that suppresses wom-
en’s sexual difference in the name of equality (1989).

Medical-anatomical and psychological-descriptions and interpretations of androgyny
were especially plentiful in early 20th-century Japan. The works of Euro-American sexolo-

gists-Freud, Jung, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Carpenter, Hirschfeld-were exported directly to Japan,
where they were studied, translated, adapted, and augmented by Japanese sexologists (Hana-
fusa 1930; Ifukube 1932; Osaka Mainichi, 31 January 1935; Ozumi 1931; Yasuda 1935). Phys-
iological androgyny, or an intersexed body, was of special interest at that time to scholars of
forensic medicine, who addressed the phenomenon in terms of conscription, patrilineality (spe-
cifically family name and inheritance), political service, and civil rights, all of which were con-

tingent upon the establishment of a person’s body as male-sexed (for example, Takada 1926

[1917]:285-291).
A brief discussion of the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality is called for at this

juncture. Regardless of their popular conflation, the three are different. “Sex,” as I use it here,
refers to the physical body distinguished by either female or male genitalia-or, in the case of

420 american ethnologist

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intersexed persons, both, to varying degrees-and their usual capabilities, such as menstrua-

tion, seminal ejaculation, and orgasm. (Thus, when I use the term “female body,” I am referring
to a female-sexed body.) “Gender” refers to sociocultural and historical conventions of de-

portment, costume, gesture, and so on, attributed and ascribed to female- and male-sexed bod-
ies. “Sexuality” may overlap with sex and gender, but refers to a domain of desire and erotic

pleasure more complex and varied than the hegemonic construction of reproductive hetero-

sexuality would have it (see Kessler and McKenna 1985 [1978]:1-12; Vance 1985:9).
Sex, gender, and sexuality may be related, but they are not the same thing; the pattern of

their articulation is negotiable and negotiated constantly. Although the three may be popularly
perceived as irreducibly joined, their alignment remains a situational and not a permanently
fixed condition. In the words of Butler-whose recent book problematizes the “Western” belief
in the vertical alignment of sex, gender, and sexuality (namely, female-feminine-heterosex-
ual)-“man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman
and feminine a male body as easily as a female one” (Butler 1990:6).

Among Japanese feminists and scholars influenced by feminist theory, sex and gender and

sexuality have been distinguished in principle since about 1970 (Yuri 1985). In Japanese, lin-

guistic distinctions between sex and gender are created by suffixes. Generally speaking, sei is
used to denote sex-and seisei to denote sexuality (literally, the sex of sex)-as in josei for
female and dansei for male. Since the dan in dansei can refer both to male sex and to “male”

gender, the suffix sei, with its allusions to fundamental parts (for example, genitalia), is neces-

sary in to specifically denote sex. Gender is denoted by the suffix rashii, with its allusion
to appearance or likeness (Fukutomi 1985; Kojien 1978a, 1978b). A “female”-gendered per-
son is onnarashii, a “male”-gendered person, otokorashii.4 The emphasis here is on a person’s
proximity to a gender stereotype. When attention is to be drawn to an individual’s resemblance
to a particular female or male, the term often used is joseiteki (like a/that female) or danseiteki
(like a/that male). That an individual resembles a particular female or male in the first place is

precisely because both parties approximate a more generic gender stereotype. The difference
between onnarashii or otokorashii and joseiteki or danseiteki is significant, although the two
terms are often used interchangeably in popular parlance. Further complicating matters is the
use of the terms onna and otoko to refer to both sex and gender, the distinction being evident

only in the context used.
Two of the most frequently encountered Japanese terms referring to androgyny are rybsei

and chOsei, which were coined in the early 20th century when they first appeared in journal
and newspaper articles on homosexuality and “abnormal sexual desire” (Kabeshima, Hida,
and Yonekawa 1984:185). Ryosei was and is most generally used to refer either to someone
with both female and male genitalia or to someone with both feminine and masculine char-
acteristics. Consequently, ryosei has been used to refer to intersexed bodies (see Hyuga 1971;
Komine and Minami 1985:57, 296-301) as well as to persons who behave as if they were at
once masculine and feminine. The latter combine and embody the stereotyped and otherwise
polarized and mutually exclusive characteristics attributed to females and males (see Akiyama
1990; Asano 1989; Ifukube 1932; Komine and Minami 1985:57).

ChOsei, on the other hand, has been used to mean “neutral” or “in between,” and thus nei-
ther woman nor man. Whereas ry6sei emphasizes the juxtaposition or blending of either sex
or gender differences, chOsei emphasizes erasure or nullification of differences. A person
whose body is intersexed usually is raised or passes as one or the other sex/gender (see Sawada
1921; Komine and Minami 1985:296-301). A “neutral” body, on the other hand, is one whose
surface appearance (costume, hairstyle, intonations, speech patterns, gestures, movements, de-
portment, and so on) confounds the conventional alignment of sex with gender and scrambles
received gender markers. The normalizing principle at work here posits that, say, masculinity
is a “natural” attribute of male-sexed bodies. However, “masculinity” is not a product of na-
ture-that is, some sort of agentless creation-but a sociohistorical representation of male-

the politics of androgyny 421

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sexed bodies, a representation that is subject to manipulation and change. Gender, in other

words, names an unstable “amalgam of signifiers” (Pacteau 1986:80). Despite the workings of
this normalizing principle, it remains the case that in Japan, as attested in part by Kabuki and

Takarazuka, neither femininity nor masculinity has been deemed the exclusive province of
either female or male bodies.

During the early Edo (or Tokugawa) period (1603-1868), androgyny was embodied by the

onnagata, the Kabuki theater actor specializing in girls’ and women’s roles. From the 1910s to
the present, generally speaking, androgyny has been embodied by the otokoyaku, the Takar-
azuka Revue actor specializing in boys’ and men’s roles. Watanabe attributes the disappear-
ance of male-embodied androgyny to the “de-eroticisation of the male body” resulting from
the modernization of political and social institutions toward the end of the 19th century, when
the xenophobic Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown by imperialists and a new civil code
was drawn up on the Prussian model (Watanabe and Iwata 1989 [1987]:130). Further contex-

tualizing Watanabe’s hypothesis, I propose that the “de-eroticisation of the male body” par-
alleled the emergence at this time of a “woman problem,” part of which involved contradictory
and contested images of and roles for Japanese women. Significantly, the Takarazuka Revue,
founded in 1913, was among the modern theaters marking the return of females to a major
public stage after they were banned from the Kabuki theater by the Shogunate in 1629.5 More-

over, in the early 20th century-as to a significant extent today-the Takarazuka Revue was
the focus of heated debates about the construction and performance of gender. A brief intro-
duction to the Takarazuka Revue and its actors follows.

the Takarazuka Revue

The all-female Takarazuka Revue (Takarazuka Kagekidan) was founded in the hot springs
resort of Takarazuka by Kobayashi Ichizo (1873-1957), the Hankyu railroad-and-department
store tycoon.6 Today, with two huge theaters in Takarazuka and Tokyo and regularly scheduled

regional and international tours, not to mention television and radio broadcasts, the Revue re-
mains one of the most widely recognized and watched of the so-called theaters for the masses

(taishu engeki) that were created in the early 20th century (see Robertson 1991 b). Takarazuka

productions range from Japanese historical dramas, such as the Tale of Genji, to Western mus-

icals, such as Oklahoma. The widespread popularity and social impact of the Revue are evident
in the literally hundreds of articles that have been published in a wide range of print media
since its founding. In fact, this article was inspired in part by the many early articles linking the
establishment of the Takarazuka Revue to the problematic emergence of “androgynous” fe-
males and the diagnosis in women of a newly coined affliction, “abnormal sexual desire” (hen-
tai seiyoku).

The Revue’s actors are called “Takarasiennes” (takarajiennu), after Parisiennes, in recogni-
tion of the original influence of the French revue. They include otokoyaku, the “male” gender
specialists, and musumeyaku, the “female” gender specialists. Upon their successful applica-
tion to the Takarazuka Music Academy, founded in 1919 as a part of the Revue complex, the
student actors are assigned (what I call) their “secondary” genders. Unlike “primary” gender,
which is assigned at birth on the basis of an infant’s genitalia, secondary gender is based on
both physical (but not genital) and sociopsychological criteria: height, physique, facial shape,
voice, personality, and, to a certain extent, personal preference. Secondary gender attributes
or markers are premised on contrastive gender stereotypes themselves; for example, men are

supposed to be taller than women; to have a more rectangular face, thicker eyebrows, a higher-
bridged nose, darker skin, straighter shoulders, narrower hips, and a lower voice than women;
and to exude charisma (kosei), which is disparaged in women. The assignment of gender in-
volves the selection and cosmetic exaggeration of purported (nongenital) physical differences

422 american ethnologist

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between females and males, and it reinforces socially prescribed behavioral differences be-
tween women and men. Ironically, in the Takarazuka Revue, gender(ed) differences that are

popularly perceived as inherent in female and male bodies are embodied by females alone.
The femininity embodied and enacted by the musumeyaku serves as a foil for the masculinity

of the otokoyaku.7 Much of the training of the Revue actors involves learning a vocabulary of
gendered gestures, movements, intonations, speech patterns, and the like. An otokoyaku, for

example, must stride forthrightly across the stage, her arms held stiffly away from her body, her

fingers curled around her thumbs. In contrast, a musumeyaku pivots her forearms from the el-
bows, which are kept pinned against her side, constraining her freedom of movement and con-

sequently making her appear more “feminine.” In keeping with the patriarchal values inform-

ing the Takarazuka Revue, musumeyaku have represented the fictional Woman with little if

any connection to the actual experiences of females. The otokoyaku, however, have been ac-

tively encouraged to study the behavior and actions of men offstage (as well as in films) in
to more effectively idealize men on stage, be they samurai or cowboys. Personal or contrary
motivations and desires aside, both musumeyaku and otokoyaku are the products of a mas-
culinist imagination in their official stage roles.

conceptualizing androgyny

There seems to have been no formal concept of androgyny prior to Yoshizawa Ayame’s de-

velopment of a theory and method for the Kabuki onnagata, or “female” gender specialist, in
the early Edo period. Ayame himself (historical figures are often referred to by the given name)
was a Kabuki onnagata, and his theory was a twist on the Buddhist concept of henshin, bodily
transformation or metamorphosis. Hen is the term for change, in both a transitive and an in-
transitive sense. Shin (also pronounced mi) is the term for body in the most comprehensive
sense: that is, a physical, mental, social, historical, and spiritual entity (Gunji 1988; Hattori
1975:31-35; Ichikawa 1985:38-47; Imao 1982:29). The term henshin originally referred to
the process whereby deities assumed a human form in to better promulgate Buddhist
teachings among the masses of sentient beings.

Related to henshin is the process of henjo nanshi (also tennyo jonan), whereby a female body
is transformed, or metamorphoses, into a male body. Since female bodies are regarded in or-
thodox Buddhist doctrine as not only polluted but also marks of a lower form of existence,
enlightenment is not possible for them unless they manage to metamorphose into male bodies.
The effect is not the creation of an androgyne, but a female’s total transformation into “the
opposite” sex-in short, rebirth as a male over the course of several generations. It is clear that
the orthodox Buddhist concept of henshin refers to physical bodies (including genitalia) and
not only to embodied markers of gender.8 However, the term henjo nanshi was also used pop-
ularly during the Edo period in reference to intersexed bodies. For example, a peasant woman
was deemed to be suffering from henjo nanshi sho (the henjo nanshi syndrome) when, at the
age of 27, she developed “male genitalia” (Tomioka 1938:104).

Henshin is also central to the Kabuki theater and refers specifically to the received process
by which an onnagata becomes Woman, as opposed to impersonating a given woman. Ay-
ame’s theory resembles the Buddhist concept of henshin with the exception that gender (and
not sex) is involved in an onnagata’s transformation from a man to Woman. Ayame conceived
of the onnagata not as “a male acting in a role in which he becomes a ‘woman’,”9 but rather
as “a male who is a ‘woman’ acting a role.”10 In other words, the transformation is not part of
a particular role but precedes it.

Ayame insisted that an onnagata embody femininity in his daily life.11 Simply impersonating
a given woman was neither adequate nor appropriate. To clinch his point, Ayame insisted that
the construction of Woman not be left up to the idiosyncratic notions of a particular actor.

the politics of androgyny 423

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Instead, he introduced categories of Woman, each with predetermined characteristics. The role
of a “chaste woman” (teijo), for example, was to be based on Onna Daigaku (Greater Learning
for Females [1672]), an influential primer on femininity written by a leading (male) Confucian
scholar (cf. Imao 1982:147-153). Given the Kabuki theater’s ambivalent reception by the To-

kugawa Shogunate, coupled with the low, outsider status of actors during the Edo period, the
construction and performance of femininity on the basis of Onna Daigaku quite likely added a
modicum of legitimacy to the urban theater.12

Ayame eschewed what he called the prevailing “androgynous” figure of the onnagata, de-

scribing it as futanarihira-literally, “double-bodied” (Imao 1982:145-146; Maeda 1973:750,
867, 884; Takada 1926 [1917]:287).13 An androgynous onnagata blurred the boundaries be-
tween sex and gender, male and female, femininity and masculinity (Imao 1982:145-147).
Ayame’s apparent objective in formulating a theory and method for the onnagata was to make
distinct both those boundaries and the bounded, all the while recognizing that sex and gender
were not “naturally” aligned in any one body.

An onnagata, then, according to Ayame, was not an androgyne but an embodiment of pa-
triarchally inscribed, state-regulated “female” gender. He/she was unequivocally Woman, a
model for females offstage to emulate and for males offstage to proposition. Apparently, during
Ayame’s time there was even “tacit approval” for the onnagata “to bathe at the public baths
reserved for women” (Watanabe and Iwata 1989 [1987]:86). From Ayame’s point of view, the

process of henshin, or transformation, precluded a blending of the two genders. However, be-
cause an onnagata was a male-sexed body enacting a type of femininity and thus disturbing
the conventional alignment of sex, gender, and sexuality, Watanabe regards the Kabuki actor
as an androgyne (Watanabe and Iwata 1989 [1987]:74-135). For Ayame, “female” gender
superseded and even negated a male body, and thus the onnagata, having become Woman,
could bathe with females at public bathhouses; in Watanabe’s view, the “female” gender and
male body of the Kabuki actor formed a dialectic. According to Watanabe, the androgyny of
the onnagata was achieved by style (coiffure and clothing) in addition to (homo)sexual prac-
tices, specifically the taking of a “passive” feminine role.

With the Meiji Restoration of 186814 and the modernizing (or westernizing) state’s insistence
on short hair and Western clothing for men, the “feminine beauty” hitherto ascribed to and
achieved by male bodies was transferred to female bodies (Watanabe and Iwata 1989
[1987:1 30-133). Watanabe describes the effect of the Meiji state’s gender regulations in terms
of an “anti-androgyne complex,” according to which males were prevented from having any
qualities in common with females (Watanabe and Iwata 1989 [1987]:127); that is, they were

prevented, by convention, from embodying and performing femininity outside the Kabuki thea-
ter. The establishment of the Takarazuka Revue, in contrast, sanctioned the embodiment and

performance of masculinity by females. However, henshin was not a process officially pre-
scribed for Takarazuka otokoyaku. Kobayashi, the Revue’s founder, was no Ayame, and he was
keen on limiting an otokoyaku’s appropriation of “male” gender to the Takarazuka stage.
Along with many early 20th-century sexologists, he believed that a masculine female outside
the context of the Revue was something abnormal and perverted.

Kobayashi proclaimed that “the [Takarazuka] otokoyaku is not male but is more suave, more

affectionate, more courageous, more charming, more handsome, and more fascinating than a
real male” (Kobayashi 1960:38). But, although her body served as the main vehicle for the

representation and enactment of masculinity, an otokoyaku, according to Kobayashi, was not
to become unequivocally Man, much less a model for males offstage to emulate. Whereas the

g[klata in onnagata means model or archetype, the yaku in otokoyaku connotes the servicea-

bility and dutifulness of a role-player: “The Takarazuka otokoyaku affects a ‘male’ guise, while
the [Kabuki] onnagata … is completely transformed into a ‘female.’ As the term otokoyaku
attests, the female who plays a man is but performing a duty” (Nozaka Akiyuki, cited in Tanabe
and Sasaki 1983:130). Thus, Revue directors refer to the actor’s achievement of “male” gender

424 american ethnologist

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not in terms of transformation or metamorphosis (henshin) but in terms of “putting something
on the body” (mi ni tsukeru)-in this case, markers of masculinity.

Kobayashi viewed the theater as one of the most powerful means of influence. He envisioned
the Takarazuka Revue as the cornerstone of the “state theater” movement in the 1930s and
1940s, a movement whose agenda included the portrayal of state-regulated gender roles-par-
ticularly that of the “good wife, wise mother”-and an emphasis on the patriarchal, conjugal
household (Robertson 1991b). Therefore, it would not do to enhance the exemplariness and
semiotic authority of the otokoyaku by stipulating that she also be a man in her daily life.

female sexualities

I now turn to a review of the …