Wednesday, April 12, 2023
5:00 P.M. in Ustler Hall Auditorium
This talk explores the star system that emerged in the context of early modern Kabuki theater, focusing in particular on Kabuki female-role actors, or Onnagata. I propose a revision of established critical discourse about these actors, in which their acting and identities have been framed as an almost perfect instantiation of the performativity of gender. Focusing both on the Kabuki theater itself and on it discursive figuration in lavishly illustrated woodblock media, I suggest that the theater manipulated the viewer into regarding actors in ways that generated new bodily knowledge, and often rendered the actors’ real-life gender and sex irrelevant. Commercial printing created, for instance, “afterimages” of female-role actors that circulated posthumously in their absence, and formed bodies that could only be understood in the context of a historical genealogy of other female-role actors. As part of this process, Kabuki theater and the print culture that grew up around it generated distinct “stage genders” that played an important role in shaping and embodying ideas of body, sex and sexuality, and desire in early modern Japan.