Week 7 Discussion questions (turn in on Thursday)

1) Do onnagata make clear the distinction between gender and biological sex? That is, do onnagata reinforce the idea that gender roles are the natural outcome of one's biological sex? Or do onnagata blur that distinction? Why?

2) Why might onnagata be considered ideally feminine according to the Shingaku ideal of "female-likeness"? Why do you suppose it was thought in the Edo period (and is repeated even today) that only a man could portray the true essence/ideal of femininity?

3) Do onnagata reinforce/support normative gender roles (i.e. ideal femininity) for women? Or do they subvert normative gender roles for women? Or both? Why?

Support your points using the Edo period onnagata Yoshizawa Ayame's "Actors Analects," Bernstein's article (which reviews the difference between gender and biological sex) and Robertson's article (which discusses the Edo period development of Neo-Confucian gender stereotypes for women). See the study questions for these readings for helpful terminology. To help you along, I've provided two important quotations from the last two articles.

To review: Here is Bernstein's explanation of the difference between gender and biological sex (p. 2):

Gender, unlike sex, is not a biological given, but is, in the words of Evelyn Fox Keller, "a socially constructed and culturally transmitted organizer of our inner and outer worlds." Whereas sex roles refer merely to the fixed range of capabilities of female and male genitalia, gender roles are sociohistorical conventions of deportment arbitrarily attributed to females or males. "Women" and "men" are culturally created categories. Our goal is to understand continuity and change in Japanese ideals of femininity, in the processes by which women were trained to approximate those ideals, and in the ways that their actual roles diverged from these ideals.

Here is Robertson's take on onnagata (p. 106):

The paragon of female-likeness in Tokugawa society remained the Kabuki onnagata: male actors who modeled gender constructs developed by male intellectuals. In effect, women's hypothetical achievement of "female" gender was tantamount to their impersonation of female-like males, who, in turn, were not impersonating particular females but rather enacting an idealized version (and vision) of female-likeness. Bakufu [Shogunate] ideology did not and could not accommodate women's control over the consrtuction and representation of "female" gender.