Gender and Body Construction in Edo Period Kabuki

Abstract

There was a famous kashagata named Sugi Kuhê.Tôjûrô, when he had turned twenty, went to Kuhê and told him he wanted to study how to act.Kuhê replied, "Since I am a kashagata, I have done much imitating of women.You are a , 3 so you must imitate men.When one considers present-day tachiyaku actors, there do not seem to be many men among them.Nevertheless they are not onnagata and there is no reason at all for their lack of masculinity.You go and study how to imitate men!" Tôjûrô said that he followed this advice and learned something of the actorʼs art.Shortly after the above conversation took place, Kuhê was praised as a master actor unlikely to be equalled in the Three Cities.4 This study offers a general view on the processes and mechanisms of gender and body construction in kabuki theatre during the early modern period: a topic not thoroughly explored yet.The paper consists of three parts.The first one poses the main research questions and delineates the theoretical framework of the present discussion.The second part argues that kabuki was a main site for production of gender in premodern Japan and roughly defines three periods in this process: formative, mature and modern.5 The third part outlines the specifics of gender construction in Edo period kabuki, which, as the Edo urban popular culture per se, had two sides: traditional and carnivalesque.This article is largely theoretical.Its aim is to contend that kabuki is essential for understanding gender construction in premodern Japan and to develop an approach to analysis of kabuki from the perspective of contemporary gender, body and performance theories.The topic of gender construction in kabuki itself is vast and could not be exhausted in a single paper.This is just the first step of a more detailed study of the ideas Core Ethics Vol. 5 (2009) general picture of gender construction in Japanʼs changing society?First, briefly outlined are the contemporary conceptualisations of the body, power, gender, and performance that provide the theoretical approach to the present discussion.It is based on the modern understandings of the body not as a purely biological form but as a pre-eminently socio-cultural construct 7 and of power relations in society not as a visibly repressive process but as subtle pervasive mechanisms of both discipline and resistance, which are manifested most concretely at the level of the body.8 It is grounded as well on a perception of theatre not as a "mirror of reality" for that implies "passivity and non-involvement," 9 but as a representation underlain by power structures, an active ideological force for production of cultural meanings, especially in terms of gender.Like the body, the categories of gender, sex and eroticism are not seen as innate but as constructs formed to support or subvert the structure of the dominant cultural ideology.Modern theories no longer regard the body as natural and ahistorical, a raw material to be further polished by culture and civilised but rather as "a political, social, and cultural object par excellence," interwoven with systems of meanings and representations, "bound up in the order of desire, signification, and power." 10Emphasised is the symbolic significance of the body, its importance in metaphorical discourse, its use as a medium of both social control and resistance.Foucault has been the most influential with his conceptualisations of the body as a primary site of contestation in a series of political, sexual, economic and intellectual struggles, as a surface for the operation of different forms of power.In his understanding, on which this paper is grounded, power is not a possession of individuals nor does it demonstrate itself only under the oppressor/oppressed model.Rather, power presents a dynamic network of subtle, elusive forms of control, normalisation, and of resistance as part of everyday practices or cultural representation.Foucault linked the notions of body, power, knowledge and sexuality, exploring the way in which bodies "are arbitrarily or violently constructed in order to legitimate regimes of domination," 11 and also to destabilise them, as I seek to explore critically in the present discussion of gender and body construction in kabuki.

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